57 pages • 1-hour read
Maps of Meaning
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Themes
Confronting the Existence of Evil
The problem of evil, especially large-scale, group evil, is a central preoccupation of Maps of Meaning. In fact, the existential despair that evil’s existence causes is what prompted Peterson to begin writing the book. The book specifically examines the evil acts associated with 20th-century totalitarian regimes. In addition, it touches on the excesses of communist China and other socialist regimes. Given this context, understanding the similarities between the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is useful. In both events, the tyrant government assumed omniscience or the stance that their knowledge system was absolute. When a knowledge system becomes all powerful, anyone opposing it becomes a threat, as happened with the dissidents of the Communist Party in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. In Soviet Russia, officers sent political dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn—whom authorities arrested in 1945 because of his private letters to a friend criticizing Stalin’s role in World War II—to camps where they were made to labor for more than 14 hours in a day in cold, filthy conditions. Under Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party’s stance of omniscience included the dream of return to an idealized past, within which Jews, communists, homosexuals, and other minorities had no place. The assumption of omniscience also involves the creation of a monstrous other, a bogeyman, as happened in Nazi Germany: Jews were the monstrous other, in the category of “subhuman,” in Nazi terminology, and the Nazis therefore assigned them to be exterminated. In both cases, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the rise of group evil accompanied an increasingly intolerant and arrogant belief system.
Interestingly, the book theorizes that even nihilists and decadents, who don’t believe in any ideology or faith, and some liberals—those who believe that their knowledge system is absolute—fall on the same spectrum as fascists. In all these cases, the assumption of omniscience and the lack of humility becomes the locus for evil. Early in the book, Peterson expresses his disillusionment with not just socialism but all ideology that might abdicate personal responsibility: “Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion” (xiii).
Thus, though the problem of evil plays out on a global scale, the book traces its origin in the individual. Evil proliferates when the individual resists change, engages with “the lie” that they know everything, and refuses to grow and transform. When society produces many such individuals, deep spiritual malaise seizes it, which makes the job of tyrants all the easier. For example, the Nazi party was propelled not just by Hitler but also by its foot-soldiers: the gestapo, the SS, the everyday Germans who ignored the evil around them, the camp guards, and even the kapos or the prisoners whom the guards forced to torture their fellow inmates. Therefore, to prevent such horror from striking again, individuals must resume responsibility for resisting the evil within and strengthening their moral fiber.
Furthermore, the book forces the individual to acknowledge that evil is an aspect of human existence. Only when individuals understand that they too are capable of evil like anyone else can they actively fight it. Finally, the book attempts to analyze the existence of God in the face of evil. Auschwitz (the Holocaust) and Hiroshima (the atomic bomb) forced humans to question God’s existence. The central question is that if God is omnipotent and good, how can God allow ghastly evil to occur? The book agrees that this is an “unanswerable question.” Nevertheless, it suggests that believing humans must try to answer it to make sense of things. For Peterson, the answer lies tentatively in the hypothesis that suffering exists because in its absence spiritual growth could not occur; grief exists because in its absence joy would not exist. The author also suggests reserving the “answer to the question of God’s nature, his responsibility for the presence of evil in creation, until we have solved the problem of our own” (453).
The Importance of Stories and Play
Humans understand the world as narrative. This is why the book often clubs together narrative forms such as “ritual, drama, literature, and myth” (93)—and, by extension, belief systems. Because the world engenders never-ending implicit and explicit information, the human brain makes sense of it as stories and beliefs. In fact, Peterson argues that the brain is hard-wired to create stories: “We use stories to regulate our emotions and govern our behavior. They provide the present we inhabit with a determinate point of reference—the desired future” (210). For instance, the story of a desired future helps one act toward that future in the present. The point of the story is not the desired future but the process one undergoes in working toward it. Though empirical thinking is extremely important, it errs when it devalues stories as mere fiction or empty belief.
The book supports the importance of stories by delving into developmental psychology. As the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) shows, a child begins to evolve a consciousness first by imitating the parents and other adults and then by creative play, which by nature involves making up new and imaginary narratives. Thus, the ability of creative play is a “higher order, or more abstract form of imitation” (74). Peterson extrapolates Piaget’s model onto cultures: “As parents are to children, cultures are to adults” (75). Thus, individuals first mimic culture by engaging in ritual and then evolve beyond this ritual, refashioning it as stories in their image. This process of story-making is extremely sophisticated and complex, as the process of imitation (the first step of story-making) accommodates not just behaviors but even the process that generates them: “This means we can learn not only skill, but meta-skill (can learn to mimic the pattern of behavior that generates new skills). It is the encapsulation of meta-skill in a story that makes that story great” (76). A story that encapsulates meta-skill forms a true myth. This is why the book insists on not dismissing myths as superstition or primitive protoscience. The symbols and allegories of myth code for behavior patterns. Studying these patterns can help people make sense of their own psychology and, more importantly, transformational possibility.
Applying the Lessons of Myths and Dreams
Once one understands the symbolic meaning of myths, how does one apply it usefully to everyday life? Can a knowledge of myths help one manage the stress of work, interpersonal relationships, and daily uncertainty? Peterson engages with these questions directly by drawing on his own experiences as well as trying to create a working model for applying the lessons of myths to the present. The most important lessons that myths may impart relate to the dual nature of behavior and experience, the reality of evil, and the ability to transform. If individuals act with the knowledge of duality, they will shun extreme ideological positions and act more in line with their individual life goal. If individuals confront the reality of evil, they will watch out for evil in themselves and change their behavior to eliminate it. If individuals think that they have the ability to transform, they will not hesitate from making necessary changes when important, such as changing jobs to avoid work in which they have no interest. In time, this will develop adaptability, and adaptive individuals will prepare themselves to deal better with larger, unexpected, and threatening changes. The book suggests that approaching myths from this angle can be extremely useful.
Although psychologists have divided views on dreams, Peterson takes the Jungian line that dreams use images from the collective unconscious, the storehouse of shared memory, myth, and archetypes. (Freud considered dreams manifestations of the individual’s unconscious and repressed memories and desires. Other psychologists posit that dreams help the brain process the day’s thoughts and memories.) Peterson’s position is that dreams can extrapolate larger psychic forces controlling the individual, which often mirror universal concerns. For instance, in the middle of existential despair, the young author’s nightmares included flesh-eating dogs that looked like “Anubis,” the Egyptian god. The dogs parallel the Jungian archetype of the wolf, which eats the king or matter in its current state as a first step in the transformation of that matter. Thus, the dogs in Peterson’s dreams are archetypes of a painful but necessary transformation. Another dream that he describes, from years later, sees him trapped in a chandelier hanging off the roof of a dark, domed cathedral. Much as he tries to escape the chandelier and the cathedral, he keeps lapsing back into the same terrifying space. Only long after this dream does he understand it: The cathedral, an enclosed and sacred Jungian space, its beams representing the cross, is a sign that the author must reapproach the Christian belief system he left behind.
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