In the Maps of Meaning lecture series, Jordan Peterson draws from many
disciplines like religion, mythology, philosophy, biology, psychology, anthropology,
sociology, political theory, art, and history to make the case that human
brains have evolved to create meaning and tell stories; to structure everything
we experience by myths and archetypes—or universal and important stories told
over and over again.
What he challenges is the idea
that humans are blank slates onto which facts present themselves and that we create
value, meaning, and narratives from them after the fact. Peterson makes the
case that value, meaning, and framing life in archetypes arise from the way our
brain is evolved and how its neuroprocessing works. For instance, the ability
to speak a language is preloaded in the brain. When the baby is born, it
babbles phonics heard in every language. The potential for language is already
there. The baby then zeroes in on the language of its environment and mimics
that. Just as the brain is preloaded with the potential for development of
language, it is preloaded to create meaning and narrative. As data arrives,
your brain is already sorting and categorizing and discriminating what is
meaningful to it and its goals, and doing this subconsciously without your
conscious permission because that’s what it is evolved to do. You can only
notice that you experience reality the way your brain has arranged it for you.
Peterson spends time in these
lectures going over a few Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Jewish, Christian,
Hindu, and Buddhist myths and stories to make the case that they all have
similar or universal archetypes in them, or important takeaways for wisdom. The
same archetypes can be found in Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, The Lion
King, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars.
While Peterson believes he is
deriving such complex wisdom from these stories and comparing them for their
common archetypes, it seems to me that he’s reading all of that complexity into
these stories and creating patterns of similarity rather by ignoring their
stand-alone context. His long and infamous lecture series on reading the Bible
through an archetypal lens depends on the same procedure. Just how many
archetypes are there? No one knows. They can be multiplied endlessly.
Joseph Campbell, one of the most influential
and popular mythologists in the past century was famous for scouring the world’s
myths and religions for universal themes and seeing them as one, despite differences
in details. His concept of the hero with a thousand faces says there is a
single hero archetype played out in a thousand different specific heroes in a
thousand different stories: usually that the hero is confronted with tragedy
and evil and is then pulled into a quest where he can never go back, but must go
into the unknown, face great danger, and return with something valuable and
share it with humanity.
Critics of Campbell believe he is doing a disservice to specific,
individual myths developed in different times, places, and cultures to speak to
different needs and situations by trying to make them seem more universal than
they really. Peterson is aware that he is doing the same as Campbell and sees
the Bible both as a collection of stories written by specific people in
specific times and places, therefore full of contradictions when collected as a
whole, and as a collection of stories edited over time to reference and draw
from one another and over again to create unified themes as a whole. It’s just
a matter of which of these you intend to focus on in your analysis.
So does Peterson succeed in proving
his thesis that certain archetypes arise over and over again in myths and
stories because they are universal and birthed from the structure of our brain?
I don’t know. It’s an interesting hypothesis that people far better informed
than I am in these areas have criticized.
So is all lost if this project
fails? No. There is much to learn from archetypes and universal truths, even if
the specific myths and stories Peterson used to make his case don’t always map
onto these archetypes comfortably. There is plenty of wisdom in these lectures,
much of which is derived from psychology and his years of clinical practice as
a therapist.
Yes, these lectures contain the
expected jabs at Marxism, socialism, postmodernism, and the state of universities
being social justice indoctrination centers that curtail free speech for
ideology. But there are also jabs at Hitler, Nazis, totalitarianism, and online
men’s communities that think poorly of women. Hardly what you would expect from
an alt-right Nazi who fuels men to be misogynists as his critics are fond of
saying.
What I got from these lectures has
little to do with his thesis, but more with practical advice on dealing with
how to rebuild your life once tragedy and chaos has disillusioned, disoriented,
and destroyed you, and how to avoid becoming bitter, resentful, and wanting to
die, encouraging listeners to get in touch with what’s meaningful to them, pay attention
to their values, rise from the ashes, take responsibility, stand up straight, face
the world, and create order from chaos. He encourages listeners to risk believing
that life is good and that what they do is worth it despite the evil and chaos
in them and all around them, and that what they do matters. No matter how bleak
it looks, the potential to live a deep, rich, meaningful life is always in
front of you. I’m thankful for that kind of encouragement.
[I did not watch this lecture. These notes are slightly modified from another person's blog.]
Peterson starts the final lecture by reminding us
of the essential problem that he has laid out in the beginning of his lectures—that
of belief systems. What constitutes belief systems and why are people willing
to engage in conflict to maintain and expand them?
Belief systems orient us in the world and matter
psychologically. Some are superior and others inferior.
Science describes objective reality but has no bearing on
our subjective reality. We cannot derive an ought from an is. There are too
many pathways you can derive from scientific truths. You have no way of knowing
which scientific truth should be most relevant without invoking your subjective
interpretation. That is the postmodernist problem: there are too many facts to
be able to coherently determine values. If there was an inquiry into values,
assuming they are divorced from science, what would it look like?
Jung suggested that we inhabit archetypal myths.
Neuroscientific ideas echo a similar idea to that. Kant suggested that we use
an a priori structure when interacting with the world. Piaget described the
constraints we have in the social world, and that’s what limits the infinite
number of possible interpretations of how we ought to behave. Our constraints
are both biological and sociological. These ideas lay the foundations to the
answer to the postmodern conundrum.
To know if one solution matches the problem of how to orient
yourself in the world, you should test it. In other words, it must be
functional. Maslow outlined our basic needs for survival. These needs differ in
degree but are universal.
Piaget concluded that the set of games that are played
voluntarily outcompete the set of games that are played by force. In other
words, regardless of what the game is, the fact of whether it was voluntary or
not is the most important factor to consider. This is a good argument against
tyranny. And the same idea is used in chimp hierarchies where tyrants often
lose to other chimps who collude against them. The idea that our identity is a
blank slate then, is unwarranted. We have numerous in-built constraints.
The stories of mythology have to be both memorable and
useful. The main objection to deriving meaning from stories is that there are
too many interpretations (same as the criticism against deriving moral values
from science). But the answer to that is that the meaning from stories are
derived from multiple levels of analysis outside of stories – they are derived
neurologically, psychologically, and socially.
When you fail at achieving a goal, such as getting another
person to be attracted to you, you may feel like your entire belief structure
is jeopardized. And while it’s not the best course of action to think so
extremely, it’s not irrational. If your system of values and actions fail to
produce your intended outcomes, it’s not irrational to assume that there is
something wrong with the system, or that you need a new one.
The existential landscape consists of order and chaos.
Explored territory and unexplored territory. That’s what the structure of
stories is like. It also defines your relationships with your friends. They
slowly reveal new parts of themselves to you. You don’t want to be friends or
in a relationship with someone who is too predictable (order) or too chaotic.
When you encounter an anomaly, you use the same neurological
circuit that detects predators. That’s the dragon of chaos or the snake in the
garden. But the dragon symbol is deeper, it hoards treasure. Despite its
capacity to kill you, it offers you the possibility of something valuable in
return.
“The thing you don’t know about is the greatest gift. Error
is an infinite source of information.”
When someone you are talking to says something you don’t
agree with, or that surprises you, that’s when you learn new things. If you’re
constantly in a state of order, you don’t learn anything. But it’s not always
easy to recover from too much chaos.
If a problem is small, but noticeable, don’t ignore it. If
you’re in a relationship, you need to first notice that there is a problem that
is manifesting itself across multiple situations. Then you need to confront the
person and you need to then ignore their tears. Then you’ll be able to discuss
the problem. Most people don’t do that. You need to be tough to be willing to
go through multiple layers of challenges before reaching a solution. But if you
don’t, the problems accrue until they becomes too large.
“If you continue to be a slave, you will continue to give
rise to tyrants.” Solzhenitsyn said that a society falls apart because of the
accumulation of small mistakes. If you allow yourself to be taken advantage of,
you will be taken advantage of. And you will simultaneously encourage that
person to take advantage of other people. The counter to that is to be
articulate enough to formulate arguments and brave enough to stand up for them.
Naivety will never protect you from tyranny.
A wealthy man complains to Christ about his troubles, and
Christ’s answer was for him to leave his wealth behind and follow him. Some
people interpret this as a critique of wealth, but it’s actually a critique of
attachment.
A main impediment to enlightenment is attachment. This doesn’t
mean you should have no wants, but that it is necessary to be willing to give
up what you value most to evolve. And that’s a very difficult to do. This point
is made in The Brothers Karamazov.
Christ makes a return to the world, but the inquisitor tells
Christ (while imprisoned) that the burden he put his people through was too
much, that they had built a society where his teachings were watered down so
that more people are able to live by them. Christ then kisses the inquisitor on
the lips, and the inquisitor runs away terrified, leaving the cell door open
for Christ. The story is remarkable and could be interpreted as an attack on
the Catholic Church for refusing to acknowledge Christ’s arrival and letting go
of control. But what makes the story even more remarkable is that the
inquisitor left the door open. Dostoevsky managed to give a balanced critique
of the Catholic Church at one of its darkest periods.
To transform into a better individual, you burn off your
previous identity. Not being willing to do that will hinder how well you adjust
to life’s demands.
The first thing you should do is orient yourself in the
world. In the game of Quidditch in Harry Potter, there are games within games.
The most important game involves the snitch—a winged ball. The round chaos
contains the initial material the world is made of. It’s made of mercury, which
is interpreted as the subconscious manifesting itself in
your waking life. If Harry catches the snitch, he wins the entire
game.
Too much conflict and too little conflict are both bad for
relationships. If you tell someone they are a bad person and list all the
reasons for why you think that’s the case, you will probably not go very far.
But avoiding conflict completely will place you in stasis. The question becomes
how to operate somewhere in between those two extremes.
“Meaning is what manifests itself when you’ve oriented
yourself properly and when you’ve optimized the flow of information between you
and chaos.” In other words, you want to be moving in the right direction and in
a state of flow where things are neither too challenging nor too easy.
Meaning is the perception of being in the right place.
However, it can be pathologized. That’s why there’s a call to virtue in most
religions. If you warp and twist the inputs and blind yourself to reality, you
will not be able to orient yourself properly. You must maintain a pristine,
honest relationship with the world. There is no certainty in life. But this is
the best path forward. It is to try to get your act together, to avoid
cynicism, and to pursue something that is meaningful to you.
The goals you set must strike a balance between order and
chaos. You should do things that are slightly out of reach but still realistic
to pursue. You should aim to be an entity that is self-correcting, that is
constantly solving problems and developing ways to solve problems more
effectively.
Accepting something means taking responsibility for it. You
cannot feel responsible for something you do not accept.
“A little knowledge of death will destroy you. The only way
to overcome death is the complete voluntary acceptance of it.”
Meaning can be a gage to help you know if you’re on the
right track or not. If you live a life where you are constantly overwhelmed
with challenges, your life will have a lot responsibility and meaning, but such
a lifestyle is unsustainable in the long run. You will eventually burn out. And
of course, if you have no responsibility, your life has no meaning.
The ideal is to experience just enough chaos (challenges) to
be able to experience self-renewal and growth, while simultaneously having the
opportunity to recover. Take on as much as you can handle while living a life
you can sustain for 30 years into the future. Having that mindset is a lot better
for you than the alternatives.
You don’t find meaning by asking someone to tell you how
well it will work out for you. It’s your destiny to find that out. You need to
act as if Being is good even though there are good reasons to think it’s not. Assuming
that Being is good is a leap faith. But to play this game you must be all in.
And the great thing about life is that you’re already all in.
“Why not pick the best thing possible that you can do? Why
not do that? Maybe you can justify your wretched existence to yourself that
way. I think you could. That’s what it looks like! People find such meaning in
the responsibility they adopt, it stops making them ask questions about what
life is for.”
[I did not watch this lecture. These notes are slightly modified from someone else's blog]
Peterson starts the lecture by summarizing his
views against postmodernism, and why sacrifice is the right path forward.
Instead of having a belief system and then trying to get the world to subscribe
to it by demanding rights it is wiser and more useful to carry the burden of
personal responsibility on your own. GPS is an intelligent system that is not
dogmatic. It readjusts and recalibrates. Similarly, you will be forced to
reassess your views about the world. The ideal is not having the best belief
system, it is the ability to adapt your belief systems to new information. The
idea of sacrifice is key. If you want to be adaptable, you have to be willing
to sacrifice your previous judgments about the world.
In the story of Adam and Eve, the snake represents an
archetypal limit. The snake not only is a predator, but is symbolic of all
things that are predators. It represents the essence of evil. But evil doesn’t
just exist externally, it exists within you. And coming to terms with your
shadow is the cure to naivety.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he
thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil
People are afraid of confronting the monster within, but
they should try to do so voluntarily. The alternative is that the shadow takes
you down an evil route involuntarily (School shooting). The solution to post
traumatic stress is in gaining a more sophisticated philosophy of evil. The
Egyptian myth: Confront Seth, lose an eye, and reunite with Osiris. Integrate your
shadow. Predators choose naïve victims who are unaware of the shadow in
themselves and in others. Without a sophisticated philosophy of evil, you will
have no way to defend yourself against predation. You should learn about
malevolence and become dangerous. Those are the two defenses against
malevolence.
When you overprotect your children, you turn them into easy
prey. They will eventually face chaos and tragedy and realize that protection
from authority is no longer sufficient.
Exposure to what you are afraid of leads you to learn that
you are tougher than you think. Men who are afraid of their father’s judgment
in their 30s and 40s should come to terms with the limitations of the knowledge
of their fathers. The all-knower doesn’t exist, you must cultivate a stronger
self.
The only way to get tough is through exposure to
malevolence, danger, and fear. Become self-reliant; no more dependence on
authority for answers. One bad solution to chaos that people often resort to is
grasping on to old forms of order and tyranny.
In psychotherapy, it’s a mistake to try to solve other
people’s problems. Instead, you should let them become a better solver of
problems. That’s the Oedipal problem—not allowing the child to become stronger
by overprotecting them.
The permanent problem that exists is the inevitable death of
your perceptual scheme. The only solution is to have an adaptive perceptual
scheme. Be willing and capable of altering your world view whenever required.
The story of Cain and Abel happens after original paradise
has collapsed. Adam and Eve are outside history, but Cain and Abel is
considered inside history. The hostile brothers is an archetypical motif.
Cain’s philosophy is “To hell with it.” Abel’s philosophy is “Make things
better.”
Archetype is something you cannot push beyond. Christ’s
death is an archetypal limit because the worst possible malevolence was
inflicted on the best possible person.
Cain and Abel also represent an archetypical limit in the
same way. Cain (the most evil) destroys Abel (the most good). Cain destroys his
own ideal (who he aims to become).
Cain is a farmer while Abel is a shepherd. Shepherds had to
be very tough to survive. The older brother (Cain) was destined to inherit more
possessions and you might think he is lucky. But Cain is not favored by God.
Wealth can be a problem, even today. Children who are raised
in wealthy conditions are deprived of privation. And the only way to become
more mature is through necessity. Parents find it difficult to say no to their
children when they have money, but they are not doing their children any favors
psychologically. The children find that what they want is devalued while their
desires grow. That’s not helpful. Children need to hit the right limitations. Having
no limits imposed them endows them with a worldview that is different from how
the world really works.
The idea of sacrifice was central to the story of Cain and
Abel. The understanding was that the only way to benefit in the future would be
to sacrifice something valuable in the present. The story doesn’t make it
obvious that Cain didn’t sacrifice enough, but it subtly hints at that idea. In
life, whenever you find something has been causing you suffering, the best
thing to do would be to drop it. In other words, sacrificing what’s valuable to
you.
When primitive societies ceremonially sacrifice each other
and animals for the gods, don’t dismiss them as stupid. Sacrificing someone
often kept other kinds of aggression at bay and stabilized society, and it’s
important to remember that we evolved from primates. To be able to develop a
sophisticated and counterintuitive notion of sacrifice was no easy feat. It
took thousands of years of trial and error to understand its value, and
eventually those who understood it had a survivalist advantage over those who
didn’t.
“If people impede your development, you should sacrifice
your relationship with them.”
The idea of inequality can be seen through Cain. He thinks
he is making all the right sacrifices, and yet he achieves nothing while his
brother Abel—seemingly making the same sacrifices—gets whatever he wants. And
worse, he’s a good guy and everyone likes him. In today’s world, it is tempting
to think that it’s inequality that fuels violence and suffering, but it’s more
likely that anger at inequality is the culprit. The more violent areas are not
those that have the lowest living standards but the ones that have the most inequality.
Is the right course of action to rebel against the system, or to make the right
sacrifices?
Cain’s choice was to brood in resentment and murder his
ideal. He rebelled against the social contract and against the logos. And when
he confronts God about it before murdering Abel, God tells him that it’s his
fault. Not only that, but he tells him that he intentionally invited an evil
cat into his house and allowed it to interlock with him and have evil offspring.
His blindness to malevolence got him to this point and there is no one to blame
but himself. After Cain kills Abel, God questions him about what he had done.
There is a parallel here to Raskolnikov in Crime
and Punishment. Raskolnikov before and after killing the old woman are
different people.
It’s simple to assume that Hitler wanted to win, but it’s
clear that he did not have good intentions. He could have not demolished people
(Jews and gypsies) and could have used them for labor. But his proclivity for
revenge mirrors that of Cain and it is more likely that he wanted destruction
than the victory he promised and preached.
The theory of nations going to war for natural resources is
an oversimplified understanding. It is more likely that motivations for war are
deeper and more psychologically vindictive and malevolent. People have managed
to survive peacefully with very little.
The Bible contains many self-contradictions, but that’s only
one level of analysis. You don’t have to take it literally to derive value from
it. The sequence of events in it, however, is not random.
The descendants of Cain go on to build institutions. But the
flood eventually comes. Recall the murder of Absu, which results in the
destruction of the cultural structure. Similarly, Cain is rejecting the
cultural structure. Tiamat is God of salt water is paralleled by the idea of
the flood in the Bible.
Eliade stipulates that whatever you build will eventually
decay if you leave it alone. A similar motif exists in the story of Osiris. You
have a moral contract with the things that you own to preserve them. That’s
what you do with a car or any project you start.
Another example is the New
Orleans flood. They are a corrupt state that built a
dam that could last 100 years, when the Dutch created one that could last
10,000 years. Entropy is inevitable, but willful blindness accelerates the
process of destruction. You can blame nature (the mother) but insufficient
order from within (the father) is more often the problem.
The story of Noah and the story of Cain are preludes to the
story of the Messiah. The way to withstand chaos according to these stories is
to identify with the state (culture), and to have the power to transform, to
walk forthrightly and honestly alongside God.
Noah makes the proper sacrifices with the coming of the
flood because he was prepared. After the passing of the flood, creation is
reborn. God tells Noah that he won’t smite all of humanity again and then lays
out some rules.
The Tower
of Babel comes after the
flood. As the group of human beings try to build a tower that reaches to the
sky and challenge God’s dominion, which angers God, the people start to
fractionate. This is a universal feature of groups.
The ideal is to have a group large enough so that you can be
protected, but small enough so that you are relevant to it. In the story of the
Tower, the group becomes too large—like what has been happening to the EU. The
people in the story no longer spoke the same language and dispersed to
different far away areas.
The Tower story is placed right after the Flood story. The
Flood story contains nihilistic chaos while the Tower story contains the
totalitarian temptation to build hyper structures to replace the transcendent.
The result is decay. The prophets have warned of the temptation to refuse to be
subservient to a higher ideal. It’s what also results in the deterioration of
the larger groups in the story.
In the Q&A, Peterson was asked why most of his viewers
and subscribers of the Self-Authoring program are mostly men. He replied that
it’s not because of his political stances. His viewership was mostly male (85%)
even before the political issues arose. It boils down to two things:
agreeableness and responsibility. On the extremes, men and women are very
different even though they’re similar on average. Men on average are
disagreeable and women are agreeable. Men often refuse to take orders and
prefer to do nothing with their time instead. When Peterson spoke to his
audiences, he noticed that “men’s eyes lit up” when he talked about
responsibility. Men are starving for that message today. To them, there is
nothing but responsibility. Self-authoring helps them find a goal that they
want to accomplish.
Non-western ethnic minorities, and generally groups that
weren’t doing so well and had an ambivalent relationship with education, have
seen the most marked improvement after going through the self-authoring
process.
Lifting a load, as useless as you are, is your first step to
redemption. The charm of Homer Simpson exists in his courageous and admirable
quest to take care of his family despite his shortcomings and incompetence. The
key is choice. “People will carry a heavy load if they get to pick up the
goddamn load.”
Peterson started this class partially hoping to explain why
people defend their belief systems and why they are found valuable. Belief
systems regulate people’s emotions by helping them orient themselves in the
world so that what they do matches what they want in the social environment
where they are successful. People defend their beliefs systems because they are
used to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world
with everyone around them.
What happens when two groups of people have different
beliefs systems? You can give yours up for theirs, you can fight, or you can
assimilate. Could you deconstruct your beliefs to find essential principles or
guidelines to find similarities despite their differences? Can we find viable
principles in them?
Communism and capitalism are ideologies pitted against each
other. Are their differences meaningful to debate or as postmodernists say,
they are both just power games and debate is meaningless?
Universities are now making it mandatory to take classes in
equity, which is equality of outcome, teaching that wherever there isn’t
equality the system is corrupt and must be destroyed. But we can endlessly
multiply categories of people in society and their inequalities so the notion
is futile. The only way to have total equality is if everyone has nothing. Why
are these ideas returning with such force when history shows the bloody carnage
that resulted in trying to implement these ideas?
Are there principles that Western civilization is based on
that are more than mere opinion? Nietzsche said if you take the core principles
out of society the whole system shakes and crumbles. When we kill God or
transcendent values, what’s left? Dostoyevski was working on this at the same time
in Crime and Punishment. A character
in that book wants to solve multiple problems by killing someone, believing the
only thing holding him back is arbitrary moral convention. He commits the crime
and hell breaks loose. Dostoyevsky is investigating the idea that with no God
or transcendent or higher values anything goes.
Peterson is frustrated with Sam Harris and radical atheists
who believe that we can abandon the transcendent and be purely rational. Naked
self-interest is completely rational. Harming others to get what I want is
completely rational. Where is the pathway from the rational to an egalitarian
virtue? Why the hell not every man for himself? It’s a fairly coherent
philosophy that can be implemented in the world with a great level of success.
The ethics Harris and Dawkins take for granted as rational come from a long
history of mythology. You don’t get to wipe that out and assume that the ethics
it delivers are just rationally axiomatic.
You don’t have to argue for the existence of God. You can
say God is our ethics personified. The point is, western civilization bases its
ethics on God. What’s at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value? How
can we address this without appealing to metaphysics? We can say God can be
anything. What—if anything—is our culture predicated on?
Out of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky came Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
who wrote The Gulag Archipelago and
documented the horrors and atrocities that resulted from trying to implement
state-based equality. Why don’t students learn about this in college when
taught left wing politics? The system didn’t work because it was predicated on
the wrong values. Whatever we’re doing in the West works despite its flaws.
Solzhenitsyn advised that Russia return to Orthodox
Christianity, making him a reactionary in the eyes of his critics. If people
don’t return to transcendent values they are vulnerable to pathological
ideologies and the murderous impulses that come with them.
Nietzsche said we had to create out own values, becoming
supermen, to replace God, which was a bad idea. If you are the giver of values,
you inflate yourself into a demigod and announce the values you thrust forth.
What’s to keep you humble? Hitler didn’t create himself or Nazi Germany, it was
co-created with the Germans. He became the mouthpiece of their darkest desires
and they fueled each other.
Jung studied Nietzsche in great detail and saw the flaws in
the idea that we must create our own values. Jung and Freud paid attention to
dreams and their language and that there is great significance to them. They
were informative. Freud wrote The
Interpretation of Dreams and saw them as wish fulfillments and that the
primary motivation of human beings are sexual. Jung wrote Symbols of Transformation about the fantasies of an American
schizophrenic woman and relating them to mythology.
Myths are birthed from dreams, which a mode of information
presentation. They both share a narrative structure and are narrative-like.
They are movies that play in your head, like daydreams, involuntarily. Dreams,
like thoughts, think and dream in you. What are they, what are they thinking,
and why?
Freud thought dreams were sneaky and cryptic because they
want to tell you what your conscious mind doesn’t want to hear, tied up in the
idea of repression. Jung disagreed, believing dreams are being is clear as
possible, it’s just the best they can do. They are the birthplace of thought
the same way artists are the birthplace of culture. Your mind is groping
outward to try to comprehend what it has not yet comprehend by trying to
mapping it to image. It’s incoherent because it’s not a full-fledged thought.
It’s potential that could be clarified and brought into reality.
From where to thoughts come to pop into our head, the void? The
gold Buddha sitting in the image of the lotus is an image of the lotus bursting
up from the bottom into fruition. Maybe these ideas have roots. There seems to
be a necessary pattern in morality that is intrinsic and manifested in culture
and isn’t just arbitrary or learned. The dialogue between culture and nature
that tries to make the proper articulation of that spring forward in each
individual. Your nature strives so you can manifest yourself properly in the
world and culture is meant to aid you in that.
Piaget had some interesting ideas, hoping to reconcile
science and religion. He was interested in the spontaneous morality the
developed in children as they played together. What is central to all of them?
What’s the ideal?
The dominance hierarchy is in your biology. You become
healthier and experience wellbeing at every level physically, emotionally, and
psychologically when doing the right thing, and we put the right thing at the
top. It’s anything but arbitrary opinion.
When you look at the night sky, you project gods into the
cosmos and populate the unknown with deities from your imagination. When you
remove them from the cosmos, do they go away? No, they back to your
imagination. The corpses of your gods live in your imagination, so where do you
go to revivify them? Your imagination. What’s down there? Just mess and
catastrophe, or is it patterned? Order in the form of archetypes exist down
there—structure looking for things to fill it with.
We are predisposed to language. We babble all possible
phonics as babies and can potentially speak any language until we absorb a
language from our culture and fill those babblings with words. Similarly, we
are predisposed to thinking in archetypes and fill this with data.
A fundamental question of existence is why keep struggling?
If you cut off one head on a hydra and more keep coming in endless struggle and
suffering, why go on? Is life really worth living? Why not just kill yourself
and end the game? People who have become truly malevolent answer that life is
worth destroying. It’s not irrational to work for the destruction of being. It
might be the most rational thing you can come up with depending on your
presuppositions.
Jung sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas in the
imagination. They are representations of patterns of adaptive behavior that
have evolved collectively. We determine morals and ethics together by figuring
them out over history.
There is nothing more noble than encountering the unknown
and articulating what you find. This will make you practically successful.
You’ll be admired by men, selected by women, and practically successful in
life. Your ideals are trying to manifest themselves and make themselves known
to you, which is what religious education is for. We’ve lost that.
The hero goes out into chaos and makes order, then when
order becomes too rigid and oppressive you bring it to chaos and restructure it
to improve it.
Joseph Campbell is a mediator between Jung and general
culture, but all of his ideas come from Jung.
The story of the Buddha is almost a perfect parallel
structurally to the story of Adam and Eve. Are we imposing structure on the
story or are there archetypes that underlie them that we simply notice?
The Bible was authored by multiple people over long periods
of time and organized later into a collective story out of which the sense
arises. It evolved from bottom up. We acted first and made sense of it later.
Information is encoded in action and we don’t know why that’s the case. The
best you can do is dream yourself up and bring it into articulated existence.
Most of the time you don’t even know what you’re up to and have little control,
so good luck trying to control someone else.
The reason the Bible has so many contradictions is because
dreams have so many contradictions. Too much coherence loses the unarticulated
richness in the premature attempt at coherence. Waking thought sacrifices
completeness for coherence and dream thought sacrifices coherence for
completeness. Precise thought excludes too much (left hemisphere, linguistically
mediated, sequential, logical) and imprecise thought is not sufficiently
coherent (right hemisphere, imagistic, emotion based) so we do both. The right
hemisphere wants a picture of everything so it’s not precise, so the left
articulates for precision and clear action but loses richness. The Bible is
half dream and half articulated thought which has the advantages and
disadvantages of both. We have to face everything thougt we don’t understand
anything completely. We need the interplay of dream and articulation.
A healthy family functions in which all the individuals
thrive and the family is strong. The individual benefits along with the group
and keeps bringing one another up. That’s the goal of a healthy society. You
try to maintain what is stable because it falls apart easily. An orchestra is
comprised of individuals doing their part to create a harmonious symphony and
everything comes into coherence. All levels of being are stacked coherently.
Everyone is having a good time. It’s a glimpse of paradise.
The first stories of Genesis are unidentifiably ancient. God
only knows how old they are. Oral traditions can last centuries. They are
repeated and acted out. There is a place in history past which we cannot look.
Everything pops up about 5,000 years go and everything before that is lost.
Where is the meaning in a literary work? It’s the words in
relation to the sentences in relation to the paragraphs in relation to the
chapters in relation to the book in relation to culture in which the book is
produced.
The Bible endlessly cross-references itself and tries to
connect everything to everything to create coherence. You can pull out meanings
at one level of analysis that you can’t at another. You can focus on a
particular story or see how it’s used in coherence with the bigger story which
changes the meaning.
To believe the Biblical stories and ask if they are true is
to ask whether or not you agree with the moral of the story or the archetype as
a valid representation of reality, not whether or not God actually exists or
whether or not the Bible makes sense scientifically or whether or not the
events and people in it are actually historical.
In Genesis, to be naked and not ashamed is to lack self
awareness that you have made yourself vulnerable and unprotected. Things were
pretty good when we weren’t self-conscious and didn’t know we were naked. Clothing
is a barrier of protection between you and the world. Knowing good and evil is
to be aware of threat and to learn to be malevolent.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are unconscious beings in a safe
space and a serpent comes in to open their eyes and reveal suffering and death.
Paradise comes to an end, they are expelled,
and there are gates that keep them out. In the story of Buddha, he is raised in
a protected city that only contains what is healthy and good and all things
that cause suffering are kept from him. He is curious and wants to explore,
just like Eve wonders why she can’t eat the fruit. They look beyond the
confines of their safe space and look for trouble. You don’t want timid,
sheltered, and coddled kids nor do we want antisocial kids breaking all the
rules, we want a balance. We aren’t content with paradise or utopia because we
are built to keep exploring the unknown and asking what’s next. We destroy
paradise for challenge and adventure. Buddha encounters evil and suffering,
becomes anxious, and spends months in PTSD. The world collapsed, he knew good
and evil, and couldn’t return to paradise. You can’t return to childhood, so
you go backwards by committing suicide—destroying your painful
self-consciousness and making it all go away. What’s the way forward? Are you
destroyed and that’s it? Or do you generate order out of chaos?
If these stories are archaic superstitions written by ignorant
people in the past, why do they make so much sense?
Jung popularized and differentiated the idea of archetypes.
They didn’t originate with him, but come from Plato’s ideals. Jung and Freud
believed in sub-personalities that can be thought of as transcendent entities,
like gods. Jung never clearly defined archetypes. It’s a complicated idea that
can be thought of as biological, sociological, and something the individual
partakes in. Sometimes he says they are few, sometimes infinite. It depends on
how wide your lens is. You have a hero archetype, but you can have an infinite
number of particular heroes in stories that fit the archetype.
Stories or narratives incorporate underlying archetypal
themes because they matter to us, hook us, and motivate us.
What kind of therapy works best? Well any kind of ordered
structure is better than chaos, so potentially all of them. You can’t just
challenge religious dogma and leave people in chaos, you have to provide some
kind order, which comes from ritual, routine, etc.
No matter what you do for a living, your soul longs for
deeper meaning. Your identity is contextualized in something bigger. Philosophy
is nested in archetypes which give order and meaning. To be left in chaos is to
be left in anxiety, pain, and lacking motivation. We need deeper meaning to order
and make sense of our lives.
Political narratives can become ideologies because of their
one-sided nature. They capitalize on one side of the narrative, but don’t tell
the whole story. All stories must contain the positive and negative. Life is
complex. For instance, society is both tyrannical and liberating. Capitalism
produces both good and bad results. Male aggressiveness can be both positive and
negative. Various political and economic philosophies contain both good and
bad.
Reality consists of you, your interpretive structure, and
the world of phenomena. Every story has these elements.
How do you know that the stories and archetypes you tell
aren’t just imposed post hoc stories? Because you can map archetypical
structures to brain biology and neuroprocessing in the brain. They arise in us
across culture. They are deeper than post hoc frames. They come before
information and frame it, not after.
We tell stories with deeper meanings than we can know. How?
Because we act out and live out meaning by imitating, even if we don’t know
what we’re doing. We live bottom up. We don’t think and articulate first, we act
first, then wonder and reflect on why we want what we want and do what we do. You
have an epiphany after years of behaving a certain way and not knowing why you
do so. Animals are the same. They do, but don’t philosophize and articulate. Acting
is deeper than thinking.
When you watch a play, you partake in it through imitation
or live vicariously through the characters, then you get coffee, talk about it,
and try to articulate it. You find themes that matter. An archetype is what’s
common across stories, so we can watch one hundred movies and find what they
have in common.
Freud talked about the id, ego, and superego. The id is the
natural force within you, the ego is you as an individual, and the superego
controls, oppresses, and civilizes you, and can also be a complete tyrant.
What you confront in life is not the material word, but
potential. We are not determined by a material substrate. Though it’s never a
good idea to base an argument on quantum mechanics, the quantum realm suggests
that being is a field of potential from which forms emerge. Consciousness plays
a key determining role in that, though we don’t know exactly how.
Your name is a category, but you are a paradoxical category.
A person can lack homogeny enough that you can’t plot a way forward with him.
There are too many things pulling both you and him apart. Complex categories like
people are both A and B at the same time.
A dictionary of symbols won’t do. They change according to
context. When the context is sky and earth, sky is masculine and earth is
feminine. When the context is earth and water, earth is masculine and water is
feminine. The unknown/great mother is chaos, and nature. The known/great father
is order and society.
How do you learn? You know nothing, you build a center, and
you explore the unknown from there. When the caregiver is changed, what is familiar
(family) is gone and the child becomes disoriented, anxious, and unsafe. He
smiles at a stranger, then hides, then repeats and plays a game, then loosens
up and explores if he feels safe enough, then retreats to mom for a hug of
reassurance. When life is too much, he runs back for comfort. A child explores
then comes back and attaches to a mother’s leg. At some point, he moves on providing
his own security and no longer needs his parents for that. He becomes an adult.
Sacrifice is painful because you learn something new and
have to give up previous frames and data you got all wrong and no longer need.
You abandon all you know and have to remap and retool yourself, other people,
and the world around you. When you explore something new, a part of you is demolished.
This is why some people don’t enjoy talking to people who have ideas different to
theirs. They become challenged, which is uncomfortable, and might even lead to disillusionment,
where you have to retreat to the underworld. Continual small updates make you
stronger because you practice the process of letting go and transforming. Be a
master of that, not of guarding your territory. You want to keep tearing down
your walls, expanding, and rebuilding. What we don’t know benefits us, so don’t
be afraid of it. Welcome it, grow, and develop.
Your relationship is going well, then something comes up.
From where? Up from inside of you. It will manifest. Trouble is always brewing
in relationships, which is what keeps them alive. Having nothing but positive interactions
with your partner is a dead relationship. You don’t want bliss from your
partner, but periods of peace punctuated by a good fight. A real relationship
is a wrestling match that causes you to grow. A narcissistic person wants a
partner who delivers only what they want from them, and they will mistreat them
beyond belief. A person with no spine who is ever-compatible and agreeable is
not real, so can’t be engaged, encountered, and respected. Tension in
relationships is healthy.
Jonah doesn’t want to deliver a negative message to Nineveh, so he runs and a
storm comes. Betray your destiny and see how long it takes before you are
drowning in a storm. What’s calling you to be your best is exactly the thing
that’s pushing you forward to manifest yourself most fully in the world. Run
from that and everything starts to rock. Those on the boat think the storm
resulted because someone did something wrong. Drawing a storm because you did
something wrong is a worthwhile metaphor. Sometimes one person in your company
is sinking you and you need to throw him overboard or ask him voluntarily to
leave to save the company. Jonah is thrown overboard and finds himself in the
belly of the whale, in the underworld, where his whole world has fallen apart. He
decides to follow his destiny after all. Out of the belly of the fish comes the
illuminated human being. If you fall apart and put yourself back together,
something better results. Jonah is “born” from the whale anew, from the chaos
of the eternal feminine.
There is an image of Venus in the sky, the goddess of love, emanating
rays of light down upon the kneeling knights beholding her. Men use the image
of female perfection to motivate themselves. In Tom Sawyer, he’s 12 years old
and is struck by Becky, the new girl across the street, and hops on the fence
and performs for her. He is kneeling before the image of the feminine, which
motivates him. It’s the chivalry story—trying to make himself worthy. You
should encourage this in your partner.
The feminine represents novelty—both promise and threat.
Women don’t understand how paralyzing they are for men. Men are terrified of
women because they don’t want to be rejected. They don’t see the individual
woman, but the judgmental ideal, feeling rejected by all women. They have to
sacrifice their relationship with the ideal woman for the real woman. Get over
your fear of rejection by encountering it continually. Go out and ask women for
phone numbers and realize that rejection from women isn’t as catastrophic as you
imagined.
If you turn out the lights and sit in the dark, your
imagination immediately conjures predatory creatures and monsters coming from
all sides. In new environments, cats pause, slink in a crouch, sniff, then with
trepidation explore. They run to safety when they smell danger. They might not
know exactly what’s out there, but they know it will hurt them. This is the monster—the
conglomerate of all predatory animals imagined together that can hurt you. It’s
a useful category that has functional utility.
Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction. She is immersed in
fire and skulls—she is the fire that consumes. She has insect-like arms. She’s
given birth to a person whose intestines she’s eating. This is Mother Nature.
It gives birth to you and consumes you. If you make sacrifices to her, she
benefits you. In the face of horror and death, you make sacrifices so you
transform the terrible destructive element of nature into that thing that continually
offers you what you need.
Dianna is multi-breasted. She nurtures and protects—the source
of fertility and sustenance and all things good. She is the positive feminine
in nature, Kali is the negative.
You can’t negotiate with God or Mother Nature to rid your
life of evil and suffering, but you can get your life together as best you can
and reduce unbearable suffering.
The MGTOW movement—Men Going Their Own Way—have had enough of women. They
have been hurt by women so advise to never marry, fall in love, have deep
connection, or share your space or resources with women. They have made their
negative experience with some women representative of all women. If women keep
rejecting you, the trouble is not with them, but with you. They are telling you
what’s wrong with you. Listen to them. Similarly, among feminists, all men are
thought to be evil and masculinity toxic. To say you want nothing to do with
women makes you a pathetic weasel.
[Leaders of the Red Pill men’s community on YouTube often
say they agree with Jordan Peterson on everything but his relationship advice. They
advise that men should never be in a relationship with a woman they have to
contend with; she should always submit and trust a man’s leadership. And men
should never be chivalrous, perform, impress, or “simp.” Bowing down to a woman
because she’s beautiful and pedestalizing her is making her of greater value
than you, and this turns women off. Men should be confident and the prize. Women
should be trying to win him because he is a high quality alpha male. The man
who puts the woman above him is a beta simp. She will look down on him.]
There is an image of Mary holding her baby and crushing the
reptile under her feet. She’s coming out of a portal that transcends time and
space. It’s the place from which all forms emerge. Layers of harmonious
patterns make up being, so there are musical instruments in the painting, a
symphony of potential.
Images of Isis with Horus
on her lap are precursors to the Christian iconography of Mary and Jesus, but
both represent the same eternal archetype of valuing life and protecting it
from danger.
In Peteron’s experience working with women—mainly
conscientious, conservative, hard working, intelligent, dutiful, and agreeable
women—they want to please, do what they’re told, and be obedient. This means
they outperform men in grades at school. Men are rebellious and not as
agreeable, which might hold them back. Women succeed in high school and college
and are great at moving up their high stress, high pressure jobs, making over $250,000
a year and working 70 hours a week with no time for anything else. These women
marry men who make as much as they do or more, so end up leaving their careers
to work 9-5 jobs to manage their lives and families. Why aren’t there more
women in positions of power? People in positions of power and responsibility
never stop, never rest, and handle endless stress. They are obsessed with work
and are disagreeable, so want to lead people and don’t care if they hurt
feelings. They are incredibly competitive, and their personal relationships
suffer because of this. Some women are built for this, but most realize they
aren’t. They want families, so drop out of their careers for a more balanced
life in their 30s. Women are never more miserable than when they realize they want
kids but didn’t have them for the sake of their career.
Most people don’t have careers, they have jobs, and a job is
getting paid to do something you wouldn’t do otherwise. A career isn’t an
idealized enjoyable life, it’s high stress and hard work. Why are telling women
to idealize a fulfilling career and to see motherhood as an unfulfilling jail?
It’s appalling.
The positive mother gives birth to the hero. Hercules is
wearing a lion skin and has a bow and arrow and a club covered with eyes. He is
armed, accurate, and able to pay attention. He is protected, given
encouragement, and can take on the world head on.
The great mother and father are born from chaos. Male and
female are fundamentally differentiated into two sexes that interact creatively
to bring new life into being.
There is an image of God the Father with the sun behind him.
He is sitting behind a walled city. The sun fights its battle with darkness at
night and rises victorious in the morning. It provides life and light and sends
the darkness away. This is why we have solar gods, victorious in the sky. The
city is a confined space, and inside is a dominance hierarchy. It represents
order.
If you are socialized well, you become God the Father,
embodying the central spirit of that culture. You are the embodiment of civilization
and the force that transforms it and moves it forward. That’s what university
is supposed to be for, but now it creates politically obsessed idiots.
What kind of relationship do you have with your real father?
Without him, it’s demoralizing and hard to be confident in the world. If your
father rejects you, it’s as if the spirit of civilization rejects you and
leaves you outside the city walls. It’s very difficult to recover from this. The
father can also be a tyrannical and crushing force instead of an encouraging
one. If you’re my son, I should always be imposing the highest standards of
behavior on you and judge you with the intent of improving you. But the father
might have his own pathologies—being jealous of your achievements or competing
with you for your mom’s attention.
The image of father as wise king has been lost to a massive
degree in modern universities because he represents the patriarchy to be torn
down. Rather than being grateful to all of the structure he builds despite his
imperfections, he is completely torn down and made obsolete.
The overprotective mother holds the child and says she won’t
let anything happen to him, when instead of coddling and smothering him, she
should be sending him out into the world and saying she’s there for him if he
needs her. The father also wants to get you into the world and light a fire
under your ass to do better in the world and succeed.
We have more rights and privileges and protections than ever
in history. How about we focus on responsibility? That’s where life has
meaning. The more responsibility you agree to bear voluntarily there more meaning
and fulfillment enters your life. It’s tough, but you’re doing something difficult
and heroic. It’s a good and necessary message. We have to be more than we are
or we aren’t going to survive.
Captain Hook is a pirate. He’s captain of the high seas,
willing to break the rules, a romantic figure of adventure. The dragon of chaos
is after him. It already took his hand. Peter Pan stays Pan—pan means everything—and
refuses to grow up and become someone, because why be an adult when you become
jaded, scared, tyrannical, and chased by the dragon like Captain Hook? That’s
the negative father.
The father supports the son who voluntarily takes
responsibility and embraces sacrifice, foraging into the chaotic world. This is
noble and to be looked up to. This is the top of the dominance hierarchy. We
admire courageous and strong people who act appropriately in a helpful,
compassionate, wise, tough manner despite being beset with all the problems of
mortality that beset everyone else.
Images of Hitler’s propaganda are shown. He’s the knight of
nationalism. He is God the Father, but represents the state, or hyper-nationalism,
which is tyranny. He has an eagle above him, which eats flesh, not a dove. He
has a boot stomping on snakes. He can now round up the enemies he deems to be snakes.
Everything outside of Arian purity was disgusting and meant to be burned. These
images have archetypal power. Presented is uniformity of the state, all in lockstep,
rigid, homogenous, and without diversity or individualism, which you need in
case you’re on the wrong path and on your way to marching off a cliff. Stalin
used similar propaganda to present himself as a God archetype.
Communism was a fully articulated philosophy that could be
attacked philosophically, but fascism wasn’t, so depended on ritual, symbolism,
light, fire, highly charged emotional rallies, pageantry, organized and orderly
displays, lights shining miles into the sky as Hitler spoke, long before rock
music used them, and personal charisma that allowed him to play the mob like an
orchestra, leading to millions of deaths.
What does it mean to be a good person? It’s bravely going
into the world, creating order from chaos, sharing what you’ve found, being a
good husband and father, and keeping order. This is winning at all of the dominance
hierarchies.
What are the constants of experience? Evolutionary biologists
and evolutionary psychologists have an Afro-centric view of evolution. This is
the idea that the primary forces that shaped evolution are based on a specific
time and environment—the millions of years we and our ancestors spent in Africa—that we are no longer adapted to. Peterson
disagrees with this, stating that there are universal fundamentals in humanity that
are not limited to a certain time and place.
Are abstractions more real or as real as what they
represent? This is a debate among ontologists. Numbers are abstractions, but
they work so well to represent reality that they have an essential reality of
their own.
The dragon of chaos is the category of potential.
Consciousness extracts out the reality that we inhabit. More than material
reality, Heidegger wanted to understand being itself, which includes
non-material realities.
The individual is explored territory nested in unexplored
territory, society nested in nature, order nested in chaos. The universal is
comprised of the individual, culture, and nature. Myth says we are more than
nature and nurture. We are conscious. The development of you as an individual
across time and space is experienced by you as a conscious observer. Every
story is a representation of that.
Knowing that there is positive and negative in everything
keeps you from binary utopian ideology. You must be aware of malevolence, evil,
and danger so you aren’t shocked and won’t collapse when it finds you. Every
entity we encounter is complex and internally paradoxical. No one and nothing
is all good or completely safe.
The category of that which is beyond our understanding is
represented by the predator or dragon hoarding the treasure. We need to know
what we don’t know in order to contend with it. We need to go into the unknown
and into darkness where something is there to destroy us, but there is also something
there that we absolutely need.
You get people figured out and put them in a box and marry
them and hope they stay in a box, but people are so complicated and are
continually jumping outside the box. Your relationship needs constant negotiation
and reconceptualization. You never exhaust the person or the world with your
perceptions. You are ever-engaging something new.
Existentialists talk about alienation—being alienated from
your created products. Ford builds a factory and thinks he’s making an assembly
line and cars, but he started a revolution of mass manufacturing and the car
changed the climate and atmosphere, built cities, changed rural life, promoted individualism,
and had political and economic implications. More than a machine, the car is
the embodiment of the ideology that you as an individual can purchase something
you can freely move around in. You make something and have no control over what
you made and the consequences are unleashed on the world. The snakes and hydras
released multiply their heads constantly and you can’t keep track of them. The
same is true of you and other people. There are always snakes in everything. There
is always chaos to contend with.
Human women are highly selective of the men they mate with. Human
males are subject to vicious selection pressures. Nature is that which selects,
which is why it is represented as feminine.
How do we determine that something is real? We have to
measure it from different methods and see if they converge. The universal
archetypes in stories manifest themselves in the evolutionarily space, neurological
space, and conceptual space, so are based on solid, stable ground.
Alexander Luria is perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist
who ever lived. He was interested in trying to outline the overarching picture
of brain function and structure. Peterson goes over brain structure and how it
causes of us to perceive ourselves and reality around us and shapes what we
experience and how we communicate it.
We are not blank slates that encounter stark facts, we
actively engage with and process information. We are always interpreting data in
relation to ourselves. Data comes in and we filter and bias it immediately. We
are never passive observers.
The Hebrew slaves go from tyranny to catastrophe, and in the
desert squabble and fight amongst themselves, wanting the good old days of
tyranny again. Moses becomes a full time judge, mediating conflicts for months
on end. When you invest an expert amount of time working on problems, you map
patterns and find solutions. This is why your dreams can give you information
you didn’t know you had. That Moses went up a mountain and got commands from
God is a metaphor.
Movies focus on faces because facial expressions tell us
what people are up to. People with plastic surgery appear lifeless and register
as zombies. We are uncomfortable being unable to read their subtle facial cues.
Dreams aren’t random. They are hard to understand, but they aren’t
random. Dreams, fantasies, and myths stretch you into the absolute unknown.
We confront the unknown, make something of it, then model
and talk about how we did it. The mythological hero is at the top of all
dominance hierarchies because he does this. When you win the treasure from the
dragon, you are above all dominance hierarchies. This is not fiction, it’s meta-truth.
Negative emotional energy causes you to freeze. You stop.
You hope the predator doesn’t see you. In danger, you hunch over and protect
your neck or you get the hell out of there. Positive emotion makes you
impulsive. Mania is an example of this. Full blown mania leads you all over the
place. You don’t sleep for a week, you end up in debt and alienate all of your
friends, and you die or crash into depression. When you are inappropriately
happy and impulsive you will run right into the ground. Your goal is not to be
happy. That’s impossible. You need a balance between positive and negative
emotions to navigate the world.
Different tribal ideas are mined for unifying ideas and edited
and unified into one motivating story, like Genesis using surrounding myths in
its creation story. The Mesopotamian story of Marduk also emerges from many
competing tribal stories.
In this story, there are two primary deities: Apsu and
Tiamat. Tiamat is female and Apsu is male. They are locked in eternal embrace—yin
and yang. The elder gods kill Apsu and make their home on his corpse. This is
the same as Nietzsche’s death of God and trying to live on his corpse. The
postmodernists do the same—they criticize, undermine, and destroy culture and
live on the corpse of the values it developed over time. When you kill order,
chaos comes back. Tiamat wakes up and decides to wipe the elder gods out. She
creates 13 different chimeric monsters to lead an army and elects one as head
monster, Kinu, an early representation of Satan. They try to confront chaos
successfully, but keep failing. They produce Marduk who can speak magic words.
He has eyes all the way around his head. He can speak and see. He asks to be
voted king of the gods who can decide destiny before agreeing to fight. They
agree and he goes out to combat Tiamat with a net and a sword. He overcomes
Kinu, cuts him into pieces, and makes human beings out of his blood. This means
we have evil in our blood, the same motif used in the Christian idea of
original sin.
You think, you see, you confront chaos, you defeat it, and
you bring order from it. This is what puts Marduk atop all dominance
hierarchies. This is why he should be king.
Tiamat wasn’t happy that the gods were making a lot of noise
and being obnoxious. The moral here is that if we muck about too much, nature
will take her revenge, perhaps with global warming.
Adam and Eve wake up and know they are naked and can do good
and evil. If you realize you are naked, vulnerable, upright, and exposed, you
want to cover up and protect yourself because others know you are vulnerable
and can plan malevolence against you.
At the Babylonian New Year ceremony, the old man dies, the
new man is born, and New Year’s Eve is a time of chaos and partying. The
emperor bows before the priest who slaps him, asks him how he failed in the
past year, and how he intends to do better. This is much like our New Year’s
resolutions.
Suffering, death, and mortality are the price to pay for
being. To voluntarily accept suffering is the key to transcending it, not
running from and avoiding it.
In Exodus, Moses leads the Israelites out of the desert and
in chaos they worship other gods, so God sends them poisonous snakes to bite
them. God tells them to make a bronze snake, put it on a poll, and everyone who
looks at it won’t be bitten anymore. Christ on the cross is the same. Look at
and transcend suffering. Face it.
There is a magical element to that, but it mirrors psychotherapeutic
truth. Jung’s active imagination is used to confront dangers in your
imagination and see what happens. In therapy, you don’t tell clients what to
think and lead them, you let them figure it out themselves. But they need
support. People are really disadvantaged when they don’t have the confidence of
their father and have a disruptive relationship with their mother.
The bedrock of Western civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian
idea, developed from Egypt,
that everyone has a soul and is valuable—the sovereignty of the individual. Enlightenment
thinking is not a set of rational ideas developed 400 years ago, but goes way
deeper.
You assemble your identity out of stories. There are
patterns across stories. An archetype is what’s common across stories—a metastory.
The most fundamental story is the story about how stories
change themselves. Stories have to be modified to be relevant in different
times and places. This is seen in Piaget’s stage theory—the child sees the
world differently as it moves through different stages, becoming more complex,
but keeping the advantages of the previous structures. Knowledge accumulates and
progress occurs.
The world manifests primarily as things to ignore. You learn
what’s not relevant. You concentrate on things that move you along your way toward
your goals and on obstacles. Obstacles might require a small detour or might
blow apart your frame altogether.
Scoring a goal or getting a date with someone you’re
attracted to gives you an incentive-reward blast that moves you along on your
path. Getting good grades tells you you’re a more competent person than you
thought. If you fail, you can make an adjustment, or you might think you’re a
failure as a person.
Someone who is naive, dependent, over-sheltered, coddled, and
not prepared for the real world might leave home and attend college where they
encounter radical violence or malevolence. They get attacked or raped,
resulting in PTSD and are cast into chaos where they are terrified, angry,
vengeful, paralyzed, and depressed simultaneously. Left in this state long
enough, permanent brain changes occur that leave them in a state of chaos and despair
permanently and that’s that. The hope is to walk them through recontextualizing
the trauma by minimizing its damage and making the world feel safe again.
We try to stay off paths where anomalies can occur to block
us from reaching our goals. An obstacle emerges, your movement forward is
blocked, and a mystery presents itself. Something emerges that shouldn’t be. It’s
the chaos latent beneath everything. What does this implication mean? This is
the Jaws story: The danger rises from
below to pull you down, disrupting your vacation paradise; a shark, dragon,
invader, barbarian, or something foreign suddenly manifests itself, which
causes trauma.
Now you don’t know where you are. What’s relevant when you
don’t know where you are? Everything.
Chaos can emerge from anywhere, so everything feels unsafe and you become
stressed, anxious, hypervigilant and uncomfortable. This is the hell
schizophrenics undergo, because everything is in play. How can we deal with
everything when we can hardly deal with anything? It’s overwhelming.
Most people in therapy aren’t mentally ill, but are overwhelmed
by multiple catastrophes at once, making them anxious and depressed. We don’t
go to a therapist until we have exhausted everything we know to do. There, we
attempt to mitigate the catastrophe so it doesn’t bring us and everyone around
us to hell.
The abstract predator is the thing that lurks in the unknown
to devour us. It also offers us possibility. It’s beneficial to confront the
unknown. We are information foragers. We go into the terrifying unknown to find
things of value, like squirrels going out and gathering nuts. We went out to
find trees with edible fruit and mapped where they were, food being the thing
of value.
Most anomalies leave us ambivalent. We interpreted them by
our values and goals. Presume that they are minor events and don’t catastrophize.
If you don’t get a hug and kiss at the door by your mate when you come home
from work, don’t assume the worst. Constrain the occurrence.
Whether you experience the anomaly as positive or negative
depends on your frame of reference. Give an animal an electric shock and reward
it with food and it learns to enjoy electric shocks. We don’t like bitter
things, but we can train ourselves to eat olives and drink coffee and enjoy
that. Place negative things in a positive context and you can in many cases
turn pain into pleasure.
What happens when you catasrophize rather than constrain the
anomaly and make minor improvements to become more competent? You burn dinner
and say, “If I can’t cook a good meal, I’m a bad parent, a bad spouse, and a
bad person.” Your serotonin levels are shot and you are in chronic depression.
You cling to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, and it’s dangerous down there.
Every little thing becomes the end of the world and puts you in meltdown. You
become chronically negative: “I was late for work, my boss is going to fire me,
then my wife is going to hate me and leave me.”
Many prone to depression have a hard time defending
themselves. They underestimate their own competence and overestimate that of
others. They are shocked in therapy to learn that the level of misery that
characterizes their existence is common to everyone. Their suffering is not
unique to them. The idea that everyone else is happy and that what they are
going through is unfair to them simply isn’t true.
You write a paper, get a bad grade, and say the class was
stupid anyway and drop it, or you study more next time or make that class a priority
and improve. If you drop the class, the problem is gone, but now you have other
problems. Can you replace it? Is that the best way to deal with micro problems?
“I might as well drop out of university and go hang myself” is the same line of
thinking in the long run.
You get a bad grade and curse the professor. He becomes the evil
predator and you become evil prey. Curse words are short, archaic words like
grunts monkeys use to warn against snakes in the grass or predators in the sky,
using a part of the brain disinhibited by Tourette’s syndrome. It comes from a
place of primal anger. You might have to sacrifice something in response to
your poor grades: quit your part-time job, hire a tutor, or drop the class and
wait longer to graduate.
The underworld is partly a place of chaos, where you are
taken to hell, and you might realize you can’t get out. A conscientious person
believes something bad happened to them because they did something wrong, then goes
to work improving themselves and correcting the error. You might realize you’ve
done nothing wrong—like being competent but laid off still because the company
is losing money. You have no control over random events like this. There is
relief in concluding that it’s your fault because it puts you in control. When you
know that you were brought to your knees by the absolute and uncaring forces of
nature and society, it’s random and scary. But it’s good to know that things
aren’t your fault and not tear yourself apart for what you have no control over.
The classic story is this: The character is on his way, then
something happens to him that throws him into chaos, turns his life upside
down, and puts him in years of struggle. You’re home happy and the predator
invades your world. That’s the Garden of Eden. Even God can’t keep you safe
from snakes entering your paradise. Your life is disrupted.
A winged serpent with legs and talons in mythology is a combination
of predatory animals. It’s a representation of the predator.
In the Garden of Eden exists Adam and Eve. It’s a walled
garden that is watered, an amalgam of nature and civilization. It’s ruled over
by a father figure, God, who represents the spirit of civilization. Predators
lurk in the garden. They are mortal enemies that wake you up. Where does it
come from? One snake means there is a liar of snakes, so we should follow it
and destroy the lair, not just one snake. A higher order snake is represented
as people “out there,” so we build a wall to protect us from all the evil
outside, but there are malevolent people within the walls that also present a
danger, and finally the evil within us. There are snakes everywhere with which
to be contended. You can survive the predator today, but it’s back tomorrow, so
is given a stable personality in the metaphor of Satan.
Explored territory is where you strive to be, maintain, and
expand. That is order. The environment and your place in it make sense. In The Lion King Musafa tells Simba that
his kingdom is everything that the light touches and warns him not to go into
the dark areas where the elephant grave yard is. That’s the shadow; the unknown.
When upended inside, the geographic landscape can be the
same, but everything relevant has been changed. The same place can be changed over
time. You can have an election and the landscape changes in the same geographic
area when the presidency changes hands.
Relativism is wrong. There is progress in the moral order. But
is there only progression and no ultimate order? Ultimate order is the phoenix
who lives, ages, and burns in fire, then a new phoenix emerges. The self remains
intact across multiple transformations. Christ is a symbol of the self because
he represents the endless dying and resurrecting of the psyche. Allow the
process of transformation in you to occur. Where are you, and where could you
be? You take yourself apart, burn away what you don’t need, and come back new.
In the Harry Potter series, the snake, the Basilisk, who
dwells underneath Hogwarts freezes you when you are caught in its gaze. Harry
Potter goes down through a toilet to meet the Basilisk, who has his virgin
girlfriend Ginny held captive. Harry is in touch with evil, so is aware of the
shadow and has integrated it. He goes down to the Basilisk through the toilet—the
Jungian idea that what you need the most is found exactly where you don’t want
to look.
Harry gets bit and is going to die until the phoenix cries
into his wounds and saves him. The lesson is to let things go and die and come
back to life. The phoenix is the pet of main wizard Dumbledore, who represents
God the Father. Harry Potter is not merely borrowing from Christianity, but both
are pooling from the same universal symbols and archetypes. Millions of copies of
Harry Potter have sold because they resonate deeply with something universal in
us.
The chaotic domain is the place from which order emerges. It’s
a place where anything can happen. In trauma, huge parts of people are killed
and they never recover. A naïve person who encounters a psychopath can be taken
apart, destroyed, and never return. Peterson sees this in his clinical practice
all the time. People can withstand tragedy, but rarely malevolence, where
someone is out to harm them. Some malevolent people will put themselves in harm’s
way to harm others, like those who shoot up schools and suicide bombers. They
want to demonstrate that life means absolutely nothing to them. This is very
unsettling, because what can we do about this?
Order is represented as the Father, the masculine, and the patriarchy.
Chaos is represented as the Mother, the feminine, and the matriarchy. The universal
comprises of the individual, culture, and nature. There is the positive
individual and the negative individual, the hero and the adversary, the tyrant and
the wise king, the destructive element of nature and the creative element of
nature. These categories do a great job at representing how the world manifests
itself to us in domains that are permanent. There is always a conscious
observer who is ambivalent about the nature of the world. There is always a
social structure that is half-tyrannical and half-order-producing at the same
time. There is always nature that gives rise to everything and that destroys it
at the same time. These themes are permanent and universal.
Mythological representations are hyper-real. “Real” means it
works now and works forever, and it applies now and applies everywhere. There
is always an observer, a framework of interpretation, and that which is being
observed. There is always the individual, the social order (dominance
hierarchy) and that which exists outside of that. There is always the knower,
the known, and the unknown.
Why is the hero always a man and not a woman? Peterson read A
Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships
by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, which
revealed that men searching out sexually provocative images drove the development
of the internet. Men searched out images while women searched out literary porn—harlequin
romances which have become explicit and hardcore. A plot analysis of typical
female sexual fantasy is this: An innocent woman encounters a male monster
(vampire, werewolf, millionaire, pirate, and surgeon are the top five) and
eventually tames him. There is a desire for aggression, being dominated, and losing
control in that. This is why Fifty Shades
of Grey also sold millions of copies. It resonated with women’s sexual
fantasies. The woman seduces and eventually tames the man. She doesn’t want a
nice guy. Who wants someone already tame? Why would you be happy with someone
who is tame? When danger comes, you want him to have the capacity to be
violent. By taming him, she brings order to chaos, making her a heroine. This
is the Beauty and the Beast story.
Outside of the known is latent information waiting to be found
and incorporated into the known. The eternal existence of the absolute unknown
is found in the concept of zero—the category of all things that have not yet
been mastered. It’s the eternal gold hoarding dragon. You have to go into the
unknown and face chaos to get it. You are a shape-transforming wizard,
ever-mastering continually. This is what women chase in their pornographic
fantasies—non-socially conforming men willing to risk and break the rules.
Harry Potter is touched by evil and is always daring to break the rules to
progress to new levels.
The winged reptile is both spirit and matter, a thing of the
earth and of the sky. Matter is the world and what matters in it, and the sky
is psyche or spirit, the origin of that being chaos and the unknown. Your
contact with the unknown informs you and changes you, and you reconstitute
yourself after having integrated it. You build both yourself and the world
around you from what you derive from the unknown.
This is the story that the ancient Egyptians predicated
their society on. It’s based on four essential gods at the top of the dominance
hierarchies. They are ideals embodied. They compete for dominance in our
imaginations. When diverse tribal people gather together, they throw their gods
into a ring and they fight across time until someone emerges as a victor—monotheism
resulting from polytheism. The dominant gods that emerge in different times and
places have similarities, so we select for something universal in them.
There is Osiris the old king. His brother is Seth, or Set, a
precursor to Satan. Isis is the queen of the
underworld and goddess of chaos. Horus is represented as a falcon and an eye. Osiris
established the Egyptian state. He is old and willfully blind, representing archaic
culture. Culture is a construction of the dead. His brother Seth wants to rule
the kingdom, but is malevolent. Every bureaucracy is in danger of willful
blindness, stagnation, and malevolence. This is why fortune 500 companies die
in thirty years—they stagnate and lose vision. We have elections to stop the
dead from staying in control for too long.
Seth chops up Osiris and distributes his body parts across Egypt so he can’t
come back together. Order is destroyed and chaos emerges—Isis,
Osiris’s wife. Order comes from chaos, so she tries to put Osirus back
together. She finds his phallus and impregnates herself. She gives birth to
Horus in the underworld, who is alienated from his fundamental culture. He
becomes a messiah figure. He fights Seth, trying to win the kingdom back. In
this battle, Seth tears out one of Horus’s eyes, but Horus wins and banishes
Seth outside the kingdom. He cannot be destroyed. Malevolence always awaits us.
Rather than popping his eye back into his own head and ruling alone, Seth takes
his eye, goes down to the underword, and gives it to the emaciated spirit of
Osiris. He gives the dead spirit of his tradition vision and they rise
together, ruling jointly. Who should lead? The one with vision, awake to malevolence
and chaos, and who embodies and reanimates tradition. This is why there is a
golden eye atop every pyramid. The golden eye represents vision, paying
attention, keeping your eyes open. Watch. Be aware.
