2015 Maps of Meaning 07b: Mythology: Chaos / Part 2 (Jordan Peterson)

What it takes so long to talk about that dragon thing? Man, took me a huge, it took me a long long time to figure out how to separate that out from the other archetypes. You know, it was alright, alright. So I'm going to bang through a bunch of images here.

And so that's an alchemical illustration, it's really cool this thing, it's weird. So you can see the—okay, so you can think about this as a map of psychological development, or you can think about this as a representation of how potential reveals itself in actuality. It sort of works from the bottom up.

So the first thing you see there is that container. And if you notice, the dragon is emitting sperm into this thing that's like an egg. So, and then this egg thing has wings, and that's the round chaos I was talking about before. It's the container of the—you can think about it, you can think about it as the container of what matters.

And one of the ways of really thinking about, of organizing your framework so that this way of understanding can work for you is to start thinking about the world as being made out of what matters. And then you come into contact with that now and then. When you come into contact with something that matters—now, Heidegger had an idea like this by the way. Heidegger was very interested in—he thought Western philosophy had gone off its tracks in some sense with Socrates, which I think is unfair.

I think what happened is that Western philosophy developed immensely in one direction and left some other directions not very developed. So I don't think it's fair to say that Socrates derailed us, but he helped us blow up and really a lot in wonder. But Heidegger said, look, knots about for a while, it's too rational, it's too limited, and it misses the central issue. For Heidegger, the central issue is what is being?

Now, you might have heard about David Chalmers. You—anybody ever heard of David Chalmers? Okay, so David Chalmers got famous because he made this question about consciousness. He said there's the hard problem and the easy problem of consciousness. The hard problem is why we are conscious. Because his notion—which I think is, I don't know what to make of it really, I've never been that fond of it—is that we could just as easily be totally deterministic zombies, machines with no consciousness whatsoever.

It's like—or we can't figure out why we couldn't be like that. You know, we could build a robot hypothetically that did everything that we did that wasn't conscious. Now maybe we couldn't, but maybe we could. So then what is consciousness and why is it? I think that question is formulated improperly because I think the hard question is way harder than Chalmers' hard question, because the question of being is a harder question.

And the question of being is why is there anything at all, and what is it that is? And I don't think that's distinguishable from the hard question because, in some sense, there isn't anything without consciousness—or that's one way of looking at things. Now, so that's the container of what matters, and then out of that, that's very—that's as generalized and abstract as you can possibly get.

It's what's similar across every instance of what matters. Now, Heidegger also thought that our basic orientation to the world was one of care because he was trying to qualify our experience—what is our experience like? Or he would say, what is human being like? And one of the things he said is, well, it seems to involve care.

We care about things or we don't care about them. But care is central to what it means to be human. And so the contact between those—that set of ideas—and this is that one of the aspects of being is that it matters now. Sometimes it doesn't matter at all—that's what it appears to be. But it looks like we're still concerned about what matters.

We're very hurt when nothing matters anymore, right? And I would say part of what happens when nothing matters anymore is we're completely blinded by our map. The map is blinding us completely to the possibilities of being. We spiral downward as a consequence of that.

So what's happening here is that what matters itself first manifests itself in this horrific dragon-like form because it's so—because what you don't understand and what's anomalous to you is it's certainly capable of devouring you, but it's paradoxical. And this is why these archetypes are also so complex because logical people always say everything is either one thing, it's not itself and the opposite of itself at the same time.

But—and that's a prerequisite for the world that you can apprehend logically, but the problem with that is it's wrong. Lots of things are what they are and what—and the opposite of what they are at the same time. Human beings are like that. Like you can hate someone and love them at the same time, no problem.

And they could be a hateable and a lovable object at exactly the same time. And life can be wonderful and tragic and cruel at the same time. It's like, so the archetypes are actually partly there so to help us represent entities or experiences or classes of experience that don't have a logical framework. We can't separate the bloody things out!

They always confront us as a unit. And so the dragon figure, the predatory reptile, is like that because you might say without the predatory reptile there's no gold. And then you might ask, well, is the reptile worth the gold? It's like, well, maybe the gold is worth more than the reptile.

I mean that's basically what human beings are betting on. You know, we're betting that if we confront the unknown and we gather the treasure for gathered the information as a consequence, that will help us beat the dragon. There's—the gold is bet is more than the dragon. Better be, you know?

But we're betting on that. And that is not terror management, that's a whole different idea. It's a whole different idea—it's not a delusion or an illusion, it's a bet. And part of the bet—this is a Kierkegaardian's idea—you don't know that's true, but you could live as if it's true.

And Kierkegaard would say if you live as if it's true, then it might become true. But you'll never know unless you try to live as if it's true, and that's the act of faith from a Kierkegaardian perspective. You have to a priori decide that that will work, and then you have to follow it, and you have to be willing to see where it leads.

Now, I talked about this in one of my other classes. I think I finally got it right in some ways. This is something we're thinking about because I think this is a critical choice that people make.

So here's two ways to use language: like let's say I'm going to pick up a girl in a bar. Alright? So I have a goal in mind, and the goal is sort of—the girl is irrelevant to the goal, insofar as she could be another girl. So it's a psychopathic goal in some ways because, really, really, because the individual doesn't matter.

I'm serious about that. It's an—so what I'm gonna do say, if I'm a pickup artist, I follow these pickup artists online because I'm so curious about their use of psychology and all they ever do is come up with—it's like a whole horde of men talking about how to deceive and manipulate women. It's extraordinarily interesting and extremely psychopathic.

And also it's very, very, very, very, very unsophisticated and unskilled because what the guys are— they’re lumps basically. And what they're trying to do is to acquire the veneer of sophistication, and that's psychopathic. So anyways, that's my little spiel on pickup artists but they're very interesting.

So what they're doing is teaching their followers instrumental language. And so if you want to sleep with a girl, here's how to do it. Here's how to manipulate her. You don’t—they have a bunch of tricks, like wear an expensive watch and dress up.

And also, don't just dress up—dress up rich, roughly speaking—but also add something peculiar to your wardrobe, like something that really stands out as somewhat odd. They call that peacocking so that the girl can see that not only are you rich and successful, but you've got that little bit of individuality that sets you apart from all the other rich and successful guys, you know?

And so that's like a no-Cyrus-Horus combination, basically, but it's all because the guys aren’t like that. So, it's so-so. And then they have all these little routines they use that are verbal routines and they have these guys they go to the bar with to help them with their little routines, and it's like—it's completely—what are they doing?

They're using language instrumentally. They have a goal in mind, which is their goal, and they know that what the goal is and they know that the goal is right insofar as they're pursuing the goal. And then they're willing to say anything to obtain that goal.

Now you think, well, I think that's the instrumental use of language. What do you do if you're not using instrumental language? That's interesting. What you do is you try to communicate about the situation and your response to the situation, whatever it is, as clearly and accurately and articulately as you possibly can, all the time, and see what happens.

That's a whole different thing because the proposition there is to the degree that you're transforming your experience into reality, into articulated reality, the things that will follow from that will be the best things that can possibly be, even if you don't know what they are.

So there's an openness in that approach—it's like I'm gonna conduct my relationship with person X in the most truthful possible manner, and I'm gonna see what happens. And then I'm also going to assume that whatever happens is the best thing that could have happened because, like, how the hell do you know if it's the best thing that could have happened? Maybe the person's all offended and irritated.

I've seen this with my clients a lot, especially with the agreeable ones, because they're all bent out of shape with resentment because they're not saying something. You know? And you know—and because they're not saying something, they're getting shepherded into some situation they don't want to be in.

Like maybe they have to go live with someone they don't want to live with and they don't want to express themselves because that'll hurt someone's feelings. It's like—so we talk about that in a bunch and we figure out how you could say what you actually think. And usually what happens is they say it, they get in a whole bunch of trouble, and then two days later the problem goes away.

So they're afraid to say what they— they're actually using silence instrumentally, basically, because their idea is I don't want to fight with you. Well, so how do I not fight with you? I don't say anything that will upset you. It's like, well, upset you win, exactly!

You know, if you're an intimate partner with someone and you see them doing something stupid repeatedly that is going to lead them into a pit in like a month or two months or a year or five years, you don't get to say, well, I'm not gonna fight with you just because that'll be trouble because sooner or later they're gonna fall in a pit and that's gonna be trouble too.

So you're not doing them any damn favors. You're just forestalling the catastrophe into the future. It's not helpful. Where instead you could say, well, here's how it looks to me and this is— you know, how it looks. It looks to me like this is where this is going, and you probably don't want to go there.

And even if you do, I'm not going to aid and abet it. And then they're going to get all upset and they're gonna tell you that you're interfering and that you're mean and that you're cruel and that you can only see the bad in things and if you wished and all that, and they're gonna get really angry and stomp out.

And if you can withstand that, then they're gonna cry and tell you you're, you know, a son of a— and mean and that they never want to talk to you again. And then they'll go home and think about it, and a week later they'll come back and say, I never want to see you again, probably not.

Or they'll say, geez, you know, I thought about that and what you said made sense and I'm gonna do—I'm gonna try to do something about it. So, but you have to decide to begin with whether or not you—whether or not you're willing to risk the consequences of the truth.

And that doesn't mean you get to use the truth as a weapon. I mean that's not truthful. You can use the truth as a weapon. You know, if you see someone who's perhaps not as attractive as could be, you could say, you're rather ugly. You know, which in some senses is the truth—it's a—a statement about—but it's not the truth at all because for it to be the truth, it has to be embedded.

What it really has to be is embedded in the Osiris-Horus pyramid. You know, what the utterance has to serve, the entire function of that integrated unit. It has to serve tradition, it has to serve enlightenment, it has to serve vision, and if it isn't doing any of those things, it's not the truth even if it's the truth in this local tiny slice.

You know, I just told you the truth. It's like, no, you didn't—you took a little fragment of what could be interpreted to be the truth and you turned it into a bat and then you hit me with the bat and then you defended yourself by a false argument that's claiming that when you use the truth in a local manner like that you're actually moral.

That's right, that's not true—it's incredibly deceptive. Because you know the best way to deceive someone is to sort of tell them the truth. And then you—not only are you innocent because you've told the truth, they're even more guilty because they're too weak to handle the truth.

So man, you can really wallop someone with that. So anyways, that's the container of what matters and it first manifests itself in this potentially horrific form. And so then the question is, well, are you willing to confront that? And in what way are you willing to confront it?

And then out of that arises, at the very top, that's illumination. You know, it's maybe the night first—I think that's a crescent moon, although I might be wrong about that. I think it's a crescent moon. What arises out of that is the contents of the unconsciousness and then finally illumination, you know?

So it's like Horus are rising from the depths. It's a story of transformation—the transformation of what matters into illumination. That's what that means. So this is Jonah, and what happened to Jonah roughly speaking is that God told him he was supposed to go somewhere, and he didn't want to go there.

And so he got on a boat and then there was a big storm, and none of the sailors knew why the storm came up. And Jonah finally said, well it's probably my fault because God told me to go do something and I didn't want to do it. And so God sent this storm.

So they take Jonah and they throw him off the boat, you know? And he's okay with that because it's his fault, and then the waters calm and then this big whale comes up and swallows him, and then it spits him out on the ground three days later, roughly speaking.

So what's the idea there? Well, it's a complicated one. The first idea is that if you're called, you better listen. That's the first idea. And you know people—modern people never believe that they're called to do anything, but that's because they're not very bright and they don't pay any attention.

And you know perfectly well that you're called to do things because now and then you know that you should have said something. You know it, like sometimes you don't know, should have you said something, should have you not said something? You don't know, so fine, you're not culpable.

But lots of times you bloody well know that you should have done something or you should have said something or you shouldn't have done something or you shouldn't have said something, and you went ahead and did it anyways. Well, part of the moral of this story is beware of doing such things.

You know, if you don't listen, something will come up from the depths and swallow you. And if you're lucky, it'll spit you back up three days later, but it's not necessary that it will. It might just swallow you and that will be the end of that, you know?

And I've seen people who are tangled up in such trouble, they don't have enough life left to fix it. And it's usually the consequence of—well, I've tried to calculate it. I think it's possible to make a hundred bad decisions a day, maybe more, but certainly a hundred, you know?

And those hundred just bad decisions are usually sins of omission—they're usually things that you know you should do and then you just don't. So they're things you should explore and you don't, they're things that you should say that you don't, they're obligations that you should undertake and you don't.

So it's passive avoidance in some sense, it's willful blindness, just like the kind of willful blindness that doomed Osiris. So it's not active repression, it's just failure to engage when you know you should. Okay, you do that a hundred times in a day, and it's like 700 in a week and it's 3,000 in a month, roughly speaking, and it's 36,000 in a year.

And then you do that for 10 years, that's 360,000. So then you have 360,000 things lying around you that you have to fix, and the problem is while you would even fix one of those things when they popped up? And so that's how I am appears, right?

There's little monsters, they pop up and you could whack them with a hammer like whack-a-mole, no problem, if you wanted to. But if you don't do that for three hundred and sixty thousand decisions, then they all aggregate into this looming chaos monster, and the probability that that thing's gonna eat you is—or that you're gonna live in its belly because that's where you end up—it’s a very bad idea.

And it’s often the case that people just don’t have enough time and energy left or willpower or character by that time because they're destroying their own character. They're—they've had it. You cannot help them, you cannot fix it, they're done. They can't be rescued from hell.

Oh, that's easy. It's like—remember I told you about those experiments with the married couples? The ones that are gonna get divorced? They walk into the little bed-and-breakfast, and it's hi dear with a kind of no, no, I smile. It's like that's a predatory smile. It's like I kind of like you, but these are really teeth and they're for eating.

You know, really, it's not pleasant. And so they're interacting with each other, both of them are really nice, but they're not nice at all, they're carnivorous, right to the damn core.

And so on the surface, it's all roses and sunshine and like a little inch below, it's all like their—like you could see their unconscious. You’d see two people with their hands around each other’s throat, and their body knows that because up goes the cortisol, up goes the heartrate, they're sweating away. You know, that's the belly of the beast, that's what that is.

And your body, it's smart, it knows where you are or you're—you know, you can ignore it, which you do. You know, it's like oh, this isn't too bad. It's like yeah it is, it's really bad. It's really, really, really bad. And you do that long enough, it's like good luck for you, you know?

You've polluted your psyche and your surroundings to such a degree that you can't fix it. And it gets worse than that because if you stay there long enough, you won't even want to fix it. You'll be so angry at yourself or the other person that you're going to try as hard as you can to do everything you possibly can to make it as bad as you possibly can.

And since you have virtually an unlimited imagination for evil, it can get really bad. So—and you get into a self-sustaining spiral at some point, that's a—that's a hellish descent. And the reason that hell is bottomless is because no matter how bad it is, there's some damn devious, nasty, horrible little thing that you can do that you will do that will make it worse.

So you know, people who think that hell isn't real, they're just not paying any attention at all, it's plenty real. So there's some other representations of Jonah—luckily he got back up. Same idea, that wouldn't be in such a spectacularly successful movie if it wasn't archetypal to the core, and it just relates an archetypal tale.

So it's brave man against horrific beast from the depths—Greeks. So those are the Greeks going after the Hydra, and you see the circle at the bottom of the Hydra there, that's like a symbol of infinity. And so what are the Greeks doing? They're tackling infinity. Well, that is what the Greeks did. That's why we still remember those.

It's like those characters, they were tough people. Then there was something about them that was truly remarkable. You know, there was only 25,000 people in Athens, so I don't know what was up with them, but they certainly got this part right. I guess maybe what was up with them is that's how they thought of themselves, you know?

It's like they're not running away. You know, you could make a pretty strong case that if a seven-headed snake with infinite lengths came rolling towards you, it's like time to head for the hills, right? Not like stand there with your bronze axe, sure.

But it wasn't conscious, it was mimicry—which is how you do it. Do you know, you don't go to a movie, like go Iron Man, because Iron Man's mythological to the core, especially the Avengers movie. It had a brilliant mythological theme and you don't go there and watch Iron Man and then come out and say, well, let's decode Iron Man into his—you know, behavioral microelements and incorporate those.

You don't do that. You're gripped by it. You're gripped by it and the transmission of information is at a level that's below articulation, it's imagistic. So maybe it's modifying the structure of the contents of your right hemisphere. Oh, God only knows, it's embodied.

You know, that's why—you know what happens? You take a kid out to see a Superman movie and then you bring them home? What do they want to do? They want to put on a little Superman cape and wander around being Superman, you know?

And that's the level at which the information is being transmitted. So that—well what's Superman like? Well, we'll play that out to the degree that you can play it out, then the Superman element, insofar as you could mimic it, now becomes part of your behavioral repertoire.

So did they know what they were doing? It depends on what you mean by know. Could they fully articulate what they were doing? No. But neither can we. So that's what they knew. Like they weren’t taking something they knew in an articulated form and saying, let’s represent it as a Hydra and a hero. It's completely the other way around.

It's like we don't know what the hell we're doing, but it seems sort of like a guy with a bronze axe attacking a snake. It's like what kind of snake? Well, it's an infinite snake with many heads, you know? And that would have been a work of imagination, maybe, maybe conscious imagination, you know?

Because those are artistic productions definitely, but they're products of fantasy. So this chaos monster, dragon, breaks itself into two things—that's the initial differentiation. So it breaks itself into the great father and the great mother.

So that's the emergence. So it's the great mother in some sense emerges first, and the great father second, although you can't really say that. Like the way the myths work is that three things emerge at the same time: the great mother, so that's kind of the unknown as you confront it, and the great father, which is you as a reader, and then the hero, which is you as an active agent.

You might say one of those precedes the other, but that isn't how it works and in the myths—it just says no, no, what soon as things split, that's what they split into. There has to be something, there has to be the interpretation of something, and there has to be the interpreter.

Those are the fundamental elements of being, and so it's an—it's an idea. The fundamental elements of being are there's a pool of information, there's a reader of the information, so that would be Horus-Iris roughly speaking, and then there's a reader.

And so think about what happens when you're reading a book. You know, you might say, well where is the book? And you say, well here's the book—it's this little chunk of wood fiber. It's like well no, that's what your visual system deludes you into thinking when you're using it—that's not the book at all.

The book contains patterns, it contains representations of behavioral patterns, and the way that you interpret those behavioral patterns is by using the reader that's in your head, which is really that structure, that hierarchical structure that I talked about because if you didn't have that in your damn head, you couldn't understand the book.

Because the only thing that—like if you and I are talking and we're communicating, there's a log we have to agree on before we can even say anything about which we might disagree. So if I'm writing a book for you people as the readers, what I have to do is assume a bunch of things that you know because then I don't have to say those things because it would take an infinite amount of time to say everything that I need to say.

So I have to assume that there's a trillion things I don't have to say because I already know that you know them. And so then I can play at the fringes with those things. So for example, I can lay out a story about my character becoming angry and I don't have to tell you, you know, well we could tell he's angry because his brow is furrowed and you know he's starting to sweat and there's a bad taste in his mouth.

And if you're angry, that's how you feel. And because you already know all that, so I don't have to bother with that. I can just say, you know, what—you just set up the situation and poof, you know what anger means, you know what sorrow means, you know what love means, etc., etc.

So that's why the reader has to be there. And the thing to read—sorry, the structure, the interpreter has to be there and the thing that's doing the interpretation and the thing that's being interpreted have to all come out at the same time—poof! And that's the hero, the great mother, and the great father.

So that's how they pop out. Now let me show you some cool things—there they are. Now students sent me the one on the left, that's an ancient Chinese representation, and then that one's Greek. It's so cool—look at that! You have the dragon in the background, the snake with the knot in its tail, that's ancient Greek that, and that's—it's Chinese.

It's a very old Chinese representation, and out of the snake pops the divine parents. Well why is that? Well it's partly because that one of the primary things that emerges out of undifferentiated reality for human beings is the male and the female, the father and the mother.

I mean that's the first things you come into contact with, roughly speaking, when you emerge out of the void. And that's archetypal—we know who a father is and we know who a mother is. It's like that's the differentiation of the genders.

What time is it? Yeah, okay, okay. Well let's leave it there, that's good. Now we've gotten into the great mother and the great father, and I'm going to show you their symbolic representation and their positive. Because one of the things that happens is you get the great mother and the great father pop up, and the next thing is that they differentiate again.

And they differentiate into positive mother and negative mother, and positive father and negative father. And then, at the same time, the product of those two things, which is the hero, that also emerges and it differentiates into the hero and the adversary.

And so then you have—you have enough at that point, you have enough tiff’s at differentiation at that point in terms of representation that you can basically encapsulate the whole world. And so that's at the base of our conceptual structures.