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.
Seth chops up Osiris and distributes his body parts across
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