Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

I just finished reading Maps of Meaning for the 4th time, and only now do I feel comfortable posting a review for this remarkable and staggering book. Maps of Meaning is the most meaningful and interesting book that I have ever read. It's a very hard book to read in many ways, intellectually and emotionally, but it is absolutely worth it. MoM is also the most practically useful "self-help" book I have ever come across, and I have found it deeply transformative in my personal life in many ways. I can't recommend it enough, and I think this book should be taught in every school. I have spent much of the last decade trying to answer a question: "What are stories/narratives made out of?". This question has driven much of my private reading, and I have read a lot of books about the structure of narratives, from Aristotle to Joseph Campbell to Robert McKee and many others. But Jordan Peterson is on another level when it comes to answering this question. MoM is the most high-fidelity articulation of the structure and architecture of narratives that I have ever come across. Peterson lays out an extremely detailed framework for understanding narrative structure, and grounds this framework in the latest psychology and neuroscience research. MoM was enormously helpful for me to understand the structure of narratives and stories. So if you are interested at all in storytelling/narratives/marketing, you will truly love this book and find it practically very useful. Deeper than answering my questions about stories though, Peterson articulates a rational framework for understanding our relationship with the transcendant/divine. I have read the complete works of Carl Jung and have found his rational framework for understanding the transcendant (The "Collective Unconscious", Shadow, Anima, Animus, Self etc) very interesting and helpful. But Peterson's framework for rationally understanding the transcendant/divine (Unknown, Known, Knower, Precosmogonic Chaos) seems to go deeper than Jung, and is grounded more in the latest neuroscientific research. Our modern scientific minds are in desperate need of a rational framework for understanding our relationship with the irrational transcendant, and Peterson has done an extremely admirable job of solving this problem. So if you are interested in the works of Jung, or are trying to find a rational way to understand your relationship with the transcendant, this is the book for you. One area of MoM that I found very helpful in the context of Jung's work is the final chapters of MoM about Alchemy. I have read Jung's work on alchemy, and although I found it deeply interesting and engaging, it was very hard for me to get at what he was talking about. Peterson's chapter on Alchemy is a fantastic introduction to Jung's alchemy work, and goes deeper than Jung in some key ways. Peterson does an incredible job mapping the heroic pattern of action to the process the alchemist's projected into their attempts to transform base metals into gold. I have always been stunned by Jung's work in alchemy, but it wasn't until I read Maps of Meaning that I really started to understand it. So if you are interested in Jung and Alchemy, I'm sure you will find this book deeply interesting and helpful. Peterson's conclusion in MoM is a fascinating and deep idea that I am still trying to wrap my head around: "the divinity of interest". Peterson lays out an argument that our sense of meaning/interest is guided by the transcendant divine, and that the proper path to heroic action is to follow your sense of meaning/interest to its end. He also lays out the adversarial patterns of action, how they reject meaning/interest, and how this shirking of responsibility and rejection of meaning (through the lie) is the core act of evil. Peterson showed me that my sense of meaning/interest is divine, and that following my sense of meaning to its end is how I can interface with the divine in my own personal life. Since reading MoM my life has certainly become more meaningful, and following my sense of meaning has quite radically transformed my life direction. Finding this deeper sense of meaning has come through accepting deeper responsibility though, so I have also had an increase in conscious suffering during this time. But as Peterson lays out in MoM, if you accept the burden of responsibility and accept your deepest suffering, you will find the meaning within that will allow you to transcend that suffering. Peterson's conclusion to Maps of Meaning, the "divinity of interest", is a staggering idea that I am barely able to wrap my head around, but after acting this idea out in my life, I can see that it is deeply important. So if you are looking for meaning in your life, and trying to understand the relationship between meaning and your own Good/Evil actions, this book should be a great guide for you. It's difficult to write a comprehensive review for such a foundational and groundbreaking book. I personally think that Maps of Meaning is one the most important scientific/philosophical/religious works of the 20th/21st centuries, and perhaps human history. Peterson has provided us with a high-fidelity framework for understanding how we humans behave, and more importantly, how we can behave heroically in the face of the ever-present Unknown. It's going to take another 30-50 years before people truly start to truly understand the value of Peterson's great work, and I daresay that this book will have a huge impact on the future of humanity. Bravo, Jordan Peterson. God bless you for creating such a useful masterpiece. I will continue to read Maps of Meaning every year, and I'm looking forward to reading it a 5th time and a 6th time and many more times to come. Like I said above, Maps of Meaning is the most meaningful and important book that I have ever read. I don't think I have ever read a book 4 times before. It's a very tough read to get through, but it's worth it. If you are curious about stories/narratives, or if you are a fan of Jung and psychology, or if you are simply trying to figure out how to live your life meaningfully, I highly recommend Maps of Meaning, and I hope it is as meaningful for you as it is for me.

First off, this is a weighty book. Literally. The shipping weight is over two pounds and it is outsized in its physical dimensions as well as in its weight. Wildish guess: there are approximately 450 words per page, some in very small type. Including the notes (which are filled with commentary and not just references), you are looking at a basic 'text' of over 500 pages, approximately the equivalent of 3-4 moderately-sized books. For me it has been a nearly two-week read. The title tells you that this is an ambitious book. The simpler the title the larger the ideas and aspirations. Its points are many but Peterson is a careful and orderly thinker who repeats his points and explores them in detail. Some might argue that the book is repetitious and could be cut by 1/3-1/2. The problem is that the material is complex and the repetition aids the reader considerably. One of the points of the book is to rehabilitate Jung (though JP is far more respectful of Freud than my literary colleagues would now be). The latter would think of this as a 'myth/ritual' book, with long quotes from individuals such as Northrop Frye and Mircea Eliade. The argument (put very simply) is that men and women have understood the world via action and myth and while myth represents a different form of knowledge it should not be seen as we now generally see it—subordinate to empirical knowledge. It is a stage of discovery and articulation of meaning but we continue to do it today, in part because of the relationship between the charting of myths and the structure of the human brain. JP acknowledges that the latter point is among the most difficult to make, particularly since our knowledge of the brain is of such recent vintage and is still underway at a broad, deep and fast clip. I would have liked to have seen more attention given to this part of his argument. I will let him summarize in hjs own words: "The moral presumptions of a society emerge first in procedural form, as a consequence of individual exploratory activity, which is the process that generates novel behavioral patterns. These behavioral patterns are then hierarchically structured as a consequence of quasi-Darwinian competition, in accordance with the constraints noted previously . . . . The episodic memory systems map procedure, and outcome thereof, and thereby come to contain similar paradigmatic structure—imagistically, and then more purely semantically. Over time, the unknown, nature, thereby comes to be represented mythically . . . " (p. 378). As you can see, part of his task here is to clarify the meaning of the 'collective unconscious', a sticking point for many who do not know their Jung at JP's level. The rhetoric of the book is somewhat 'different'. There are long quotes from thinkers JP admires, e.g., Jung, Eliade and Frye but also Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. Readers who have seen the extended youtube interaction between JP and Camille Paglia will be aware of the profound influence on both—Erich Neumann—who is also quoted at length. (At one point JP even includes a long letter written to his own father, which explores complex issues and ends with JP thanking his father for doing his income taxes for him.) In other words, the rhetoric is not straightforward empirical/rational/logical but includes long pauses with extended quotes that stimulate reflection. The purpose of the book is basically to determine how we have come to know, to represent, to understand and to value. Its materials are literary, philosophic, psychological and religious (for starters). It is a very learned book and it is not written for a popular audience. Those who enjoyed 12 RULES FOR LIFE may find this a very challenging read and one that is quite different from JP's more popular presentations. It is, however, essential, in understanding how JP 'came to be' and 'where he is coming from'. This is an important, challenging book.

Jordan Peterson has said that territoriality and the tendency to defend our territory are so deeply embedded in us that they’re like the control center for our whole brain. This is what belief systems graft themselves onto; human morality and territoriality are inherently interwoven in a complex, non-linear way. Our territoriality is experienced and expressed in an emotionally-charged narrative form; we live and tell affectively-gripping stories about ourselves and our territories as a way of orienting towards the world. Building on the work of countless others, Dr. Peterson has creatively detailed the ways we neurophysiologically and neuropsychologically orient in the world, and forcefully articulated how our orienting reflexes and the domains we inhabit are experienced and represented in dramatic narratives of exploration and encounter. As social primates, many of the experiential domains we inhabit are other people and complex interconnected groups of people; because of this, the archetypal tendencies for human experience and personality to be structured in certain ways are inherently interwoven with the representations of our orienting reflexes and experiential domains that have organically emerged across historical space and time in every different artistic, mythic, religious, and cultural context. In other words, because the territory we live in and explore is mostly made up of other people, and because the structure of human existence is subject to certain patterning influences, these patterning influences always play a central role in how we represent the meaning of any territory — the implications it has for our action and behavior — as we live in and explore it through narrative. Our perception simultaneously opens onto and is embedded in the world. The ways we represent territory are anchored in and motivated by our lived embodiment, our bodily being in the world. Embodied personhood — with all its diversity and unity, with all its possibilities and necessities — is our point of view upon the world, not just contingently, but essentially, as we move through and map it. Dr. Peterson writes: “We may construct models of “objective reality”, and it is no doubt useful to do so. We must model meanings, however, in order to survive. Our most fundamental maps of meaning — maps which have a narrative structure — portray the motivational value of our current state, conceived of in contrast to a hypothetical ideal, accompanied by plans of action, which are our pragmatic notions about how to get what we want. Description of these three elements — current state, ideal future state, and means of active mediation — constitute the necessary and sufficient preconditions for the weaving of the most simple narrative, which is a means for describing the valence of a given environment, in reference to a temporally and spatially bounded set of action patterns. We know how to act in some places, and not in others. The plans we put into action sometimes work, and sometimes do not work. The experiential domains we inhabit — our “environments”, so to speak — are therefore permanently characterized by the fact of the predictable and controllable, in juxtaposition with the unpredictable and uncontrollable. The universe is composed of “order” and “chaos” — at least from the metaphorical perspective. Oddly enough, however, it is to this “metaphorical” universe that our nervous system appears to have adapted. Human beings (and other animals far down the phylogenetic chain) are characterized by an innate response to what they cannot predict, do not want, and cannot understand — to the strange category of all events that have not yet been categorized. The notion that we respond in an “instinctively patterned” manner to the appearance of the unknown has profound implications.” In the totality of his work Dr. Peterson has given us a uniquely inspired model of the field of forms and forces in which we explore and encounter, a uniquely inspired model of the spaces and times of possibility, necessity, action, conflict and value that constitute our world. He’s given us something like a generalized field neuropsychology, outlining how we use our orienting reflexes to move through and map the structures and situations of the experiential domains we inhabit; he’s outlined how the elementary interactivity of the associated magnitudes, directions, functions, and deforming and transforming forces of our motivated orienting movements, and the relationships of those movements with our experiential domains, is personified and represented in the narratives of current state, ideal future state, and means of active mediation, that are a basic unit of our raw lived experience. Tremendous.

I picked up this book after reading 12 Rules for Life, The Power or Now by Eckhart Tolle, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl and several other books about mindfulness and ADHD after the foundation of my existence vanished below my feet (and my recent diagnosis of ADHD at the age of 27). I lost my love life, my promising 6 figure income in corporate America/IT, spending my birthday in solitude due to COVID-19 lockdowns, several business partners stealing from me, and my side businesses collapsing in the wake of this pandemic all within a 3 week period. Needless to say that I was at the lowest I had ever been and the only thing I could think of to deliver any type of relief was suicide. Here we are Jan of 2021 and I have a higher paying job at a place that I absolutely love, I’m physically in shape, more mindful of others and have adopted many great habits. Most importantly, I’m no longer trying to survive, but I’m actually living life. This is one of Dr. Peterson’s greatest works. While I do find it unnecessarily wordy which may render it hard to follow at times- if you can get past this then the words that have been thoughtfully chosen and orchestrated into meaningful and thought provoking perspectives do indeed help to provide structure to the sometimes chaotic psyche. Dr. Peterson bravely approaches the task of extracting meaning from nearly every human thought, action and consequential reaction to external stimuli. For this I applaud him. If you’re able to follow along with his teachings then you’ll undoubtedly be able to create a plan of sorts to render life more meaningful and perhaps bearable no matter where you stand in terms of psychological balance or imbalance. If you’re a practicing psychotherapist and haven’t heard about the works of Dr. Peterson or attempted to read his works then I personally can’t take you serious. This is a must read for anyone that’s serious about helping themselves or helping others navigate this increasingly difficult society that we live in. I don’t care what you personally think of the author, you have to give this or his other works a solid chance. Dr. Peterson- thank you for taking the personal responsibility for helping to propel mankind forward in a positive direction by extracting meaning from the chaos that surrounds us all. I feel like I personally know you and am forever indebted to you.

A learned and interesting writer.

The synthesis of psychology, religion/mythology, and history at the core of Maps of Meaning is a fascinating one. It is also, I would argue, an important one that deserves to be discussed in much greater detail by many more thinkers. In that regard, this book is a treasure and it's well worth the intellectual effort required to grapple with its subject matter. On the other hand, unlike Peterson's other (more recent) book, the prose is needlessly opaque and doesn't lend itself to easy understanding. On the positive side, I think Peterson's interdisciplinary approach is useful in the extreme and sheds some much needed light not only on psychology (a field near and dear to my own heart) but philosophy (in the original sense of the word) in general. It's a far-reaching book that covers a wide variety of topics, and it's to be expected that not all of its arguments will be easily comprehended by any particular reader. Personally, I'm less well-versed in theology, so I struggled more to understand those arguments than the psychological ones. Fair enough. The getting and processing of new knowledge is nowhere guaranteed to be an easy process, and I'm willing to work for it. The trouble is, the author doesn't really help the process along very well. The prose is extraordinarily dense, points are often repeated, and important nuances are sometimes obscured by tangential musings on mythology. In a phrase, the book simply feels overwritten and in need of a good editor. Some reviewers have complained that the book contains some errors of fact. They're not wrong, though their criticisms go too far. While there are minor errors in the book--notably, as several reviewers have complained, Godel's incompleteness theorems are somewhat misstated (though I also think those reviews read Peterson's text uncharitably; I consider his fault here more a lack of rigor than a lack of mathematical/philosophical understanding, though the reference was brief enough that I can't be certain)--these mistakes are relatively rare, and inconsequential enough that they don't affect the author's thesis. For instance, the reference to Godel's theorems consists of just one line. That said, yes: there are some errors of fact in the book, and there are opinions with which I disagree. This is not, however, a fatal flaw. in what is otherwise an interesting, if difficult, book. Flaws notwithstanding, I still recommend it. The quality of the ideas alone merit our attention. But don't expect a casual read. Rather, expect to spend considerable time reading (occasionally re-reading), pausing for reflection, and then returning to read some more.

Sent it to my brother in Prison. He and the other inmates are spellbound by the contents of the book. Two other inmates have ordered it while my brother finishes it. Update December 2018: My brother recently finished this book for the second time. He told me that it changed how he sees the world overall. That it helped him understand why he did what he did. And how he could change for the better. That he is capable of the evilest of evils. But also that he is capable of the best of the good... My brother and I lost our father suddenly in 2016. He had a terrible time with it as he could not attend my Father's funeral service as he was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence. I had a hard time myself. But I made it a point to be the strongest and most reliable person at my fathers funeral. I felt like I had no other choice, I was the oldest and legally had to take care of a lot. Then Jordan Peterson came on the scene. You know, that famous JRE episode in 2016. It validated so much for me. Why I was having a hard time at university (SJWs). And how I conducted myself with my father's death. Then I looked up this book and immediately sent it to my brother. To my surprise, he read it within a few months. When he called to tell me about it, I was not only impressed with how much he grasped, but also how he saw himself in everyone; how he saw everyone in himself; it surprised me how much of an intellectual education he gained as well as a spiritual one. I am proud to say that he has been on an upward spiral. My brother's positive changes can't all be blamed on Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning, but it certainly is high up on the hierarchy of things that motivated him to change. Now he is the chaplain's assistant, he mentors and leads groups for men in prison, he has lost a significant amount of weight through his cross-fit regimen, and he finds meaning in some of the most mundane tasks. In fact, yesterday he called and said he had to clean toilets. The worse job in prison. But he decided to be the best toilet cleaner he could possibly be. Interestingly, he felt peace. He found meaning doing that. So what's the conclusion? Well, time will tell. But I will say this, I just paid to higher him a parole attorney. It is possible after serving 4 years in prison that he might get out in 2019. If he can find peace, meaning, and perspective in prison then I believe he will do great things out in the real world. If you read this Dr. Jordan Peterson I want to thank you for the influence you have had on life of my brother and myself. I finally have my brother back. April 2020 Update: Y'all, my brother Dane got parole! The Texas Parole Division granted him parole and now he is coming to live with me. Thank you, Jordan Peterson for teaching me how to have a more meaningful life. Not only do I have an apartment for my cat, fish, and various plants; but also for my brother who is coming home.

The fascist submits to a national identity for his meaning; the nihilist simply denies the existence of meaning altogether. Both are avoiding taking responsibility; responsibility for creating meaning for today. Peterson argues that by taking responsibility for creating meaning we can each live better lives; and by living better lives we can make the world a better place. So where do we start? Peterson thinks the best source today is in the mythologies of what he calls the “hero”. The hero is the individual that finds within herself the maturity to acknowledge personal dysfunction and the strength to turn toward the unknown for answers. And in turning toward the unknown discover the possibility to transform herself into a model of a better tomorrow. To effortfully tame the chaos of the unknown into a new and meaningful known and return home with this flower of knowledge. The “hero” is the “knower”. Peterson arrives at this by exploring the neuroscience of “knowing” and reflecting on the various hero myths of the “knower”. Peterson additionally explores two important insights: 1) humans as individuals acquire abilities long before they have any abstract conception of those abilities, and 2) historically, the human understanding (and cultural transmittal and enhancement) of human abilities has progressed from raw imitation, through myth, to science. But science, fortunately and unfortunately, strives to produce meaning-free knowledge by design. Myth, on the other hand, is fully meaning-laden. It is for these and other reasons that Peterson thinks that the old myths of the hero are our current best guide for taking responsibility, creating meaning, and living better lives. This is buttressed by his final (and most important?) insight: that there may be more to myth than is abstractly apprehensible to human conception; that, like a child, even though we as a species have acquired the "ability of myth” we have yet to develop an abstract conception of this ability. We have yet to develop an abstract conception of the human ability to transmit and enhance individual human abilities – especially those individual human abilities to face the unknown, create meaning, and live a good life. And until (if ever) we as a species do attain such an abstract conception – such a theory of meaning – we ignore the old myths of the hero, the transformer of the terrifying unknown into the meaningful known, and what they have to tell us at our own peril.