Maps of Meaning SUMMARY by Jordan Peterson (1999)

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief is a 1999 book by Canadian clinical psychologist and psychology professor Jordan Peterson. The book describes a comprehensive theory for how people construct meaning, in a way that is compatible with the modern scientific understanding of how the brain functions. It examines the "structure of systems of belief and the role those systems play in the regulation of emotion", using "multiple academic fields to show that connecting myths and beliefs with science is essential to fully understand how people make meaning".

📚 Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson: https://amzn.to/31JhmGe

Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself? From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos comes a provocative hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated. A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.

I started writing Maps of Meaning in 1985. I was very upset by the processes of the cold war – by the superhuman energy of the arms race, by the terrible ideologically-motivated battle taking place on the world stage. Other aspects of political and social behavior and conception appeared equally mysterious and distressing to me. I could not understand what forces drove the Nazis, the Stalinists, or the Khmer Rouge. I could not make sense of the human propensity for belief-inspired violence. I had frightening, re-occurring nightmares about the possible destruction of the world. I decided, in consequence, that I would devote myself to the alleviation of my ignorance. I have attempted to do so, ever since – while finishing my doctorate at McGill University, while serving as a faculty member at Harvard and the University of Toronto.

I had no idea where my search would lead me. I came over the course of a decade and a half to understand the meanings of many things that had been entirely hidden from me – things that I had cast away, stupidly, as of little worth. I came to realize that ideologies had a narrative structure – that they were stories, in a word – and that the emotional stability of individuals depended upon the integrity of their stories. I came to realize that stories had a religious substructure (or, to put it another way, that well-constructed stories had a nature so compelling that they gathered religious behaviors and attitudes around them, as a matter of course). I understood, finally, that the world that stories describe is not the objective world, but the world of value – and that it is in this world that we live, first and foremost.

This all may appear as something far removed from the original problem, but that is true only in appearance. I have learned what it is that makes the tyrant, and how attractive it can be to participate in that process. I have come to understand what it is that our stories protect us from, and why we will do anything to maintain their stability. I now realize how it can be that our religious mythologies are true, and why that truth places a virtually intolerable burden of responsibility on the individual. I know now why rejection of such responsibility ensures that the unknown will manifest a demonic face, and why those who shrink from their potential seek revenge wherever they can find it. I learned what I wanted to know – at least enough so that my nightmares disappeared.

It is my hope that the transmission of this knowledge will help those who receive it withstand the forces of ideological possession, and that this will in consequence aid in some small way the establishment of a long and conscious peace.
00:00 Intro
00:45 Preface: Decent into Hell
01:50 Chapter 1. Maps of Experience
03:53 Chapter 2. Maps of Meaning
08:08 Chapter 2.1. Introduction: Normal and Revolutionary Life
10:04 Chapter 2.2. Neuropsychological Function
11:21 Chapter 2.3: Mythological Representation
17:13 Chapter 3. Apprenticeship & Enculturation
19:40 Chapter 4. The Appearance of Anomaly
25:00 Chapter 4.1. Introduction: The Paradigmatic Structure of the Known
26:46 Chapter 4.2. Particular Forms of Anomaly
28:43 Chapter 4.3. The Rise of Self-Reference, and the Permanent Contamination of Anomaly with Death
32:44 Chapter 5. The Hostile Brothers
35:57 Chapter 5.1. Introduction: The Hero & the Adversary
38:01 Chapter 5.2. The Adversary
40:13 Chapter 5.3. Heroic Adaptation
46:19 Chapter 5.4. Conclusion: The Divinity of Interest

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Видео Maps of Meaning SUMMARY by Jordan Peterson (1999) канала C. M. Bradley