Jordan Peterson on Maps of Meaning, and the task of understanding the source of our values

Jordan Peterson on Maps of Meaning, and the task of understanding the source of our values

My book is Maps of Meaning. There’s been four variants of that book written by four different people:

• Eric Neumann wrote the Origins and History of Consciousness
• Jung wrote Symbols of Transformation
• Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces

The daunting task before us is to understand the source of our values explicitly, and then to have an intelligent, broad-scale intense public discussion about the ranking of those values. People are captivated by that discussion. That’s partly why they’re watching my lectures, and so we have to sort that out because otherwise it’ll just manifest itself in this ideological fractionalization, demonization and increased polarization; and increased conspiratorial thinking. So many people I know, very intelligent people, extremely capable people, have fallen prey to conspiratorial thinking. It’s a real psychic plague, and I believe it’s caused by the same issue again. It’s this conceptual collapse of the sacred into the profane, and it’s the major challenge facing our civilization as far as I’m concerned. It’s much more of a crisis than the climate. If we solve this other problem, we’ll solve that problem. If we don’t solve this other problem we’ll just make it worse, way worse in ways we can hardly imagine. I see this is also making it impossible for us to take almost any intelligent environmental action because everything becomes so hyper-moral instantly, that you can’t have a reasonable discussion.

Jordan Peterson on The Importance Of Pursuing Your Goals

Jordan Peterson on The Importance Of Pursuing Your Goals:

We know enough about psychology now to know that almost all of the positive emotion that you’re going to experience in your life, and positive emotion is analgesic, it actually quells pain, so it’s not just positive, it also gets rid of the negative which is a big plus. Almost all the positive emotion that you’re going to feel, you’re going to feel in relationship to a goal, because you feel positive emotion as you approach a goal. So if you want to feel positive emotion then you need a goal, and then you might think, if you want to maximize that positive emotion, which is enthusiasm, and also what pulls you out into the world as well as feeling good, then you need the best possible goal. That’s going to engage the largest segments of your being, like if your goal’s too narrow then a bunch of you isn’t going to be on board for it. You know if the goal is well developed and multifaceted, then all of you can partake in that. Even your negative elements, even your anger and your fear can get on board with that. So you need a goal that’s worthy. You’ve got to think you could. You need a goal that justifies the tragedy and malevolence of life.

Maybe you think there’s no goal that can do that. Well, there are still better and worse goals. So I’m not convinced that there are no goals that can do that. I think that’s an open question. You’d never know that until you pursued the proper goal long enough to find out who you would be as a consequence of pursuing it. That’s also your destiny or your existential voyage. It’s also not something that anyone else can do for you. Someone can say “get your act together for Christ’s sake.” That’ll make the world unfold best for you. But there’s no way you can know that without doing it. So, and unless you think you’ve done a particularly stellar job of that, then you have no reason to doubt its potential validity. Jung had this idea that you had a potential future self, which would be in potential everything that you could be. That it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things. The things that you’re interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development.