I think I was able to process perhaps 20% of this book. I don’t know what to think about this book. There’s so much mythic laden language that I’m never entirely clear on the message for most of it. ( )

Peterson has some quite profound insights into how our cultural, moral, religious and spiritual beliefs evolved as projections of intrapsychic phenomena reflected in mythological archetypes that continue to shape our behaviour and motivate our search for meaning. ( )

"We act appropriately before we understand how we act – just as children learn to behave before they can describe the reasons for their behaviour. It is only through the observation of our actions, accumulated and distilled over centuries, that we come to understand our own motivations, and the patterns of behaviour that characterize our cultures…" (pg. 179)

At a time when the attacks on Jordan B. Peterson have moved from the 'literally Hitler' line – unproductive after being taken to a farcical extreme by Ari Feldman of The Forward – to the slur of 'pseudo-intellectual', it is worth reminding ourselves of precisely why Dr. Peterson has the tools and the conviction to tackle these attacks in the first place. Third-rate journalists and 'academics' of 'race and gender studies' have been embarrassing themselves ever since the Bill C-16 stuff in 2016, because they are hastily and emotionally launching themselves at a precise and composed man who knows exactly what he is fighting for. He thinks carefully about what he says, and what he says is the result of long, honest, rigorous academic inquiry into the psychology of ideology, myth and individuality (and plenty more besides). And he synthesized this composure into Maps of Meaning back in 1999, long before they were recycling their clickbait and race-card hucksterism.

Written seventeen years before Peterson reached wider YouTube fame, and then bestseller success with 12 Rules for Life – itself an incredible book – Maps of Meaning is very much an academic work. It explains, with greater comprehensiveness, the philosophy behind the ideas he has unpacked for a more general audience in recent years. I am reluctant to try and summarize this – firstly, because Peterson is someone who is regularly misquoted, and secondly, because it a deceptively complex philosophy – but here goes…

I have found that a good way of approaching it is to think of the 'yin-yang' symbol in Taoism (which Peterson also sometimes uses as a conceptualization). One side – let's say the white – of the yin-yang is 'order' – the things that we know so far – and the other side, the black, is 'chaos', the unknown. Both have their good and bad points – 'order' can mean security and stability but it can also mean stultification and tyranny, and 'chaos' can mean danger and turmoil but it can also mean opportunity and productive change. Peterson delves into this with a comprehensive unpacking of the Great Mother (feminine chaos, both good and bad) and the Great Father (masculine order, both good and bad) in the book. The correct path through this order/chaos world is to aspire to the role of the Divine Son, the Revolutionary Hero, who accepts the value and danger of both order and chaos and charts a way through ('the Tao' literally means 'the way'), making the unknown known and thereby revitalizing his culture. "Ideally, this character tends toward harmonious balance between tradition and adaptation, and the needs of self and other. It is the constant attempt to accurately represent such character that constitutes the 'aim' of the stories of humanity." (pg. 384). This is why Peterson is so keen on the sovereignty of the individual, and why he can sometimes become political in order to defend Western civilization, which has accepted and internalized this idea of the sovereign individual to a greater extent than any other.

To serve as evidence for all this, Peterson draws extensively on myth, using Jungian ideas and astute analysis of narrative to show how most stories fit this philosophy – certainly the ones which resonate and which can become cornerstones of a culture (e.g. the story of Christ). The fact that so many stories have such fundamental similarities regardless of their cultural origin suggests there is some underlying human urge which is finding metaphorical representation through their telling. "Behaviour is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion – and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings." (pg. 78). That is as concise a description of human development as you could ever find.

It is a genuinely stirring book to read, as it explains just about everything. The entirety of human thought – in broad sweeps – fits with Peterson's thesis. Peterson's fame blossomed in the aftermath of the anti-political correctness stuff of 2016 because he speaks excellently about "why we think what we think" (pg. 251), and Maps of Meaning is the comprehensive explanation of this. It serves as an antidote to ideological 'possession' of the sort seen in the Nazi-Soviet century (one of Peterson's stated aims in his introduction) and encourages you to both come to peace with your past and to be unafraid of your future, whilst seeking to maintain your individuality in the present. It is an astonishingly complete philosophy and, as Peterson has emphasized in his 12 Rules for Life talks, it is one that has no downside for the world. It does no harm to others, if approached honestly, and does only good for yourself. It explains the underpinnings of the world – at least as deep as we can go – so that you can come to peace with it. It does not shirk from explaining how hard it is – life is suffering, as he often says, and everyone has a capacity for great evil – but this only serves to sober you up and encourage you to face the world as it really is, not as you would want it to be. When you read Maps of Meaning, gears come into sync in your mind that you did not even realize were there.

Maps of Meaning is a long and weighty read, though it is not as impenetrable as it first looks, once those hidden gears begin to turn. It is an academic work, so it requires evidence and explanation rather than merely assertion (which would be enough for most of us), and consequently Peterson has to use five sentences where, for most of us, one would do. Peterson's central thesis is both a simple and a complex idea that requires a lot of groundwork from the author and a lot of hard mental labour from the reader before it begins to take hold. It is a hard idea to summarize, and you can see why it often manifests itself obliquely in stories rather than explicit theory. That Peterson has managed to do so shows how great an achievement this book really is. It is an academic masterpiece.

Peterson has done such a good job of explaining the structure of his philosophy in his interviews and public lectures – and in 12 Rules for Life – that Maps of Meaning won't be impenetrable. If you've been immersing yourself in his wealth of content, you might summit this. But make no mistake: this is Boss Level Peterson. Pseudo-intellectual? No. You can't land a glove on him here. Rather, there is lazy and fearful pseudo-journalism and a culture that has lost faith in itself. I hope Jordan Peterson is heartened that, outside the media slurs and mud-slinging, so many people are engaging with his message. That so many people are finishing his books, finishing his videos, and leaving his lecture halls with a new and better outlook on the world – one in which they look into its darkness and do not blink. ( )

Outstanding. One of the most influential books I've read in my work. ( )

Review here.