Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief 1st Edition
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is not a book to be abstracted and summarized. Rather it should be read at leisure...and employed as a stimulus and reference to expand one's own maps of meaning. I plan to return to Peterson's musings and mapping many times over the next few years." -- Am J Psychiatry
"...a brilliant enlargement of our understanding of human motivation...a beautiful work." -- Sheldon H. White, Harvard University
"...unique...a brilliant new synthesis of the meaning of mythologies and our human need to relate in story form the deep structure of our experiences." -- Keith Oatley, University of Toronto
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From the Back Cover
About the Author
Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and Professor at the University of Toronto and was formerly at Harvard University. He has published numerous articles on drug abuse, alcoholism and aggression.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Individuals whose life is without meaning hate themselves, for their weakness, and hate life, for making them weak. This hatred manifests itself in absolute identification with destructive power, in its mythological, historical and biological manifestations; manifests itself in the desire for the absolute extinction of existence. Such identification leads man to poison whatever he touches, to generate unnecessary misery in the face of inevitable suffering, to turn his fellows against themselves, to intermingle earth with hell - merely to attain vengeance upon God and his creation.
The human purpose, if such a thing can be considered, is to pursue meaning - to extend the domain of light, of consciousness - in spite of limitation. A meaningful event exists on the boundary between order and chaos. The pursuit of meaning exposes the individual to the unknown in gradual fashion, allowing him to develop strength and adaptive ability in proportion to the seriousness of his pursuit. It is during contact with the unknown that human power grows, individually and then historically. Meaning is the subjective experience associated with that contact, in sufficient proportion. The great religious myths state that continued pursuit of meaning, adopted voluntarily and without self-deception, will lead the individual to discover his identity with God. This "revealed identity" will make him capable of withstanding the tragedy of life. Abandonment of meaning, by contrast, reduces man to his mortal weaknesses. This makes him hate life, and work towards its elimination.
Meaning is the most profound manifestation of instinct. Man is a creature attracted by the unknown; a creature adapted for its conquest. The subjective sense of meaning is the instinct governing rate of contact with the unknown. Too much exposure turns change to chaos; too little promotes stagnation and degeneration. The appropriate balance produces a powerful individual, confident in the ability to withstand life, ever more able to deal with nature and society, ever closer to the heroic ideal. Each individual, constitutionally unique, finds meaning in different pursuits, if he has the courage to maintain his difference. Manifestation of individual diversity, transformed into knowledge that can be transferred socially, changes the face of history itself, and moves each generation of man farther into the unknown.
Social and biological conditions define the boundaries of individual existence. The unfailing pursuit of interest provides the subjective means by which these conditions can be met, and their boundaries transcended. Meaning is the instinct that makes life possible. When it is abandoned, individuality loses its redeeming power. The great lie is that meaning does not exist, or that it is not important. When meaning is denied, hatred for life and the wish for its destruction inevitably rules:
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
Product details
- Publisher : Routledge; 1st edition (March 24, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 564 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0415922224
- ISBN-13 : 978-0415922227
- Item Weight : 2 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 1.28 x 8.8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #12,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Behaviorism Psychology
- #7 in Behavioral Psychology (Books)
- #21 in Psychotherapy
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.
From 1993 to 1997, Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department. During his time at Harvard, he studied aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse, and supervised a number of unconventional thesis proposals. Afterwards, he returned to Canada and took up a post as a professor at the University of Toronto.
In 1999, Routledge published Peterson's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. The book, which took Peterson 13 years to complete, describes a comprehensive theory for how we construct meaning, represented by the mythical process of the exploratory hero, and provides an interpretation of religious and mythical models of reality presented in a way that is compatible with modern scientific understanding of how the brain works. It synthesizes ideas drawn from narratives in mythology, religion, literature and philosophy, as well as research from neuropsychology, in "the classic, old-fashioned tradition of social science."
Peterson's primary goal was to examine why individuals, not simply groups, engage in social conflict, and to model the path individuals take that results in atrocities like the Gulag, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Rwandan genocide. Peterson considers himself a pragmatist, and uses science and neuropsychology to examine and learn from the belief systems of the past and vice versa, but his theory is primarily phenomenological. In the book, he explores the origins of evil, and also posits that an analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality.
Harvey Shepard, writing in the Religion column of the Montreal Gazette, stated: "To me, the book reflects its author's profound moral sense and vast erudition in areas ranging from clinical psychology to scripture and a good deal of personal soul searching. ... Peterson's vision is both fully informed by current scientific and pragmatic methods, and in important ways deeply conservative and traditional."
In 2004, a 13-part TV series based on his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief aired on TVOntario. He has also appeared on that network on shows such as Big Ideas, and as a frequent guest and essayist on The Agenda with Steve Paikin since 2008.
In 2013, Peterson began recording his lectures ("Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief") and uploading them to YouTube. His YouTube channel has gathered more than 600,000 subscribers and his videos have received more than 35 million views as of January 2018. He has also appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, The Gavin McInnes Show, Steven Crowder's Louder with Crowder, Dave Rubin's The Rubin Report, Stefan Molyneux's Freedomain Radio, h3h3Productions's H3 Podcast, Sam Harris's Waking Up podcast, Gad Saad's The Saad Truth series and other online shows. In December 2016, Peterson started his own podcast, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, which has 37 episodes as of January 10, 2018, including academic guests such as Camille Paglia, Martin Daly, and James W. Pennebaker, while on his channel he has also interviewed Stephen Hicks, Richard J. Haier, and Jonathan Haidt among others. In January 2017, he hired a production team to film his psychology lectures at the University of Toronto.
Peterson with his colleagues Robert O. Pihl, Daniel Higgins, and Michaela Schippers produced a writing therapy program with series of online writing exercises, titled the Self Authoring Suite. It includes the Past Authoring Program, a guided autobiography; two Present Authoring Programs, which allow the participant to analyze their personality faults and virtues in terms of the Big Five personality model; and the Future Authoring Program, which guides participants through the process of planning their desired futures. The latter program was used with McGill University undergraduates on academic probation to improve their grades, as well since 2011 at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. The Self Authoring Programs were developed partially from research by James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin and Gary Latham at the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto. Pennebaker demonstrated that writing about traumatic or uncertain events and situations improved mental and physical health, while Latham demonstrated that personal planning exercises help make people more productive. According to Peterson, more than 10,000 students have used the program as of January 2017, with drop-out rates decreasing by 25% and GPAs rising by 20%.
In May 2017 he started new project, titled "The psychological significance of the Biblical stories", a series of live theatre lectures in which he analyzes archetypal narratives in Genesis as patterns of behaviour vital for both personal, social and cultural stability.
His upcoming book "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" will be released on January 23rd, 2018. It was released in the UK on January 16th. Dr. Peterson is currently on tour throughout North America, Europe and Australia.
Customer reviews
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2019
Top reviews from the United States
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So, I’m going to take a stab at briefly reducing some of the overarching themes found in the book for someone thinking about picking it up. Although, don’t expect the book to be reduced; it’s quite technical in parts.
The world can and should be viewed as a place made up of experiences or tools, rather than simply objects, which is how we’ve been trained to do as post-Enlightenment human beings. That’s the primary difference between a person in 2017 CE and a person in 2017 BCE. It’s not intelligence; it’s a matter of viewpoint.
Thus, if you asked an ancient Sumerian to describe a coffee cup, he’d probably say something like: “It looks like a nice place to store my liquid.” If you asked a man today, he might say: “Well it’s a small object made out of glass with a handle on it.”
Maybe you’re thinking so what: What difference does that difference in mindset make? Actually I think it’s central to Peterson’s views. A modern atheist, for example, may say, “look there’s a coffee cup; I can see it; I can touch it; I can break it; therefore it’s real! I can’t see God and I can’t touch God, therefore there is no God.” Peterson argues that of course modern people often come to that conclusion. We’ve been trained to think differently than the people who wrote the Bible, for example.
But they didn’t see the world as a place that was made out of objects. They were interested in handing down collective wisdom and experiences to the next generation. Stories like Genesis, for example, which find earlier versions of itself being told by Zoroastrianists, may have been handed down via the oral tradition for tens of thousands of years before that. Our ancestors were handing down a psychologically correct blueprint for how to live. Why is it psychologically correct? Well, look around you. Is there evil in the world? He cites the logic of Solzhenitsyn and Jung to answer that question with an emphatic yes!
For example, Jung said “…inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other.”
The shadow Jung refers to represents the capability of man to do malevolence. Jung is telling us that if we understand our capacity to do evil, we have a real shot at harnessing our capacity to do good.
So there’s good and there’s evil, neither of which can be quantified or measured by science. But if we live in a scientific world and there is no way to measure or quantify evil, then does that mean nothing is good, and thus, nothing is evil?
This leads me back to Peterson’s idea that mythology found in the collective unconscious and handed down via religious stories is psychologically correct and since it has formed the basis for western civilization for two millennia now, pulling the rug of Judeo-Christian ideas out from underneath our feet has been/will be disastrous for our future.
It’s very difficult to reduce the concepts into something reasonably small, because there’s so much more, and I butchered half of what I did write. But at least this may give you an idea of what to expect in the book. Big thanks to Peterson for putting his lecture videos up on Youtube. I recommend watching those as a companion to the book.
Also, there is a brand new abridged version of the book available through PDF, released for free today, and it’s only about 15,000 words. That’s about the equivalent to a 75 page paperback book. For a lot of people, that’s going to be much preferable to his 500+ page unabridged version.
Dr. Peterson is actually giving away the full book on his website at Jordanbpeterson.com. (edit: I first wrote this review back in July of 2017, so I'm not certain these last two statements are still true)
Check it out.
Update December 2018:
My brother recently finished this book for the second time. He told me that it changed how he sees the world overall. That it helped him understand why he did what he did. And how he could change for the better. That he is capable of the evilest of evils. But also that he is capable of the best of the good...
My brother and I lost our father suddenly in 2016. He had a terrible time with it as he could not attend my Father's funeral service as he was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence. I had a hard time myself. But I made it a point to be the strongest and most reliable person at my fathers funeral. I felt like I had no other choice, I was the oldest and legally had to take care of a lot. Then Jordan Peterson came on the scene. You know, that famous JRE episode in 2016. It validated so much for me. Why I was having a hard time at university (SJWs). And how I conducted myself with my father's death. Then I looked up this book and immediately sent it to my brother. To my surprise, he read it within a few months. When he called to tell me about it, I was not only impressed with how much he grasped, but also how he saw himself in everyone; how he saw everyone in himself; it surprised me how much of an intellectual education he gained as well as a spiritual one.
I am proud to say that he has been on an upward spiral. My brother's positive changes can't all be blamed on Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning, but it certainly is high up on the hierarchy of things that motivated him to change. Now he is the chaplain's assistant, he mentors and leads groups for men in prison, he has lost a significant amount of weight through his cross-fit regimen, and he finds meaning in some of the most mundane tasks. In fact, yesterday he called and said he had to clean toilets. The worse job in prison. But he decided to be the best toilet cleaner he could possibly be. Interestingly, he felt peace. He found meaning doing that.
So what's the conclusion? Well, time will tell. But I will say this, I just paid to higher him a parole attorney. It is possible after serving 4 years in prison that he might get out in 2019. If he can find peace, meaning, and perspective in prison then I believe he will do great things out in the real world.
If you read this Dr. Jordan Peterson I want to thank you for the influence you have had on life of my brother and myself. I finally have my brother back.
April 2020 Update:
Y'all, my brother Dane got parole! The Texas Parole Division granted him parole and now he is coming to live with me. Thank you, Jordan Peterson for teaching me how to have a more meaningful life. Not only do I have an apartment for my cat, fish, and various plants; but also for my brother who is coming home.
However, if you are well read in its primary sources, you will know that Peterson is not, or is but does not understand them, or is but is misrepresenting them in farcically distorted ways to give the impression that this book’s final revelation—that which has been kept secret from the foundation of the world—is a masterful synthesis of the entire Western intellectual tradition.
It would be better understood as a symptom of megalomania.
I see a reviewer who understands the work of Kurt Godel, an element of which Peterson interpolates into his argument, also concludes that Peterson is playing fast and loose with his sources.
That reviewer writes: “If the text so egregiously misrepresented Godel's Incompleteness theorem, what else had it oversimplified, misrepresented, or gotten plain wrong? And how much of its dense rhetoric was simply fancy word play to hide vacuous arguments?”
Perhaps this is an early work of Peterson and in writing it he came to understand things which he communicated later in less transparently specious ways.
Top reviews from other countries
Essentially he is encouraging the reader to discover what is meaningful to them as individuals. This point is getting lost on people with rigid and flawed ideologies.
This book is complex and is the culmination of many years of deep, rational thought.







