Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief is a book published in 1999 by the Canadian clinical psychologist and professor Jordan Peterson. In it he proposes a theory of how people construct meaning, one meant to be compatible with the modern scientific understanding of how the brain works. Peterson spent more than thirteen years writing it, with the stated aim of explaining the meaning of history. His starting point was a Christian upbringing that ceased to satisfy him: the answers he received to his questions about the literal truth of the Biblical stories struck him as inadequate, and he drifted away from church. After a period of interest in socialism and political science, and a spell of depression, he found inspiration in the ideas of Carl Jung and turned to psychology. He began drafting the text in the mid-1980s and used it in his teaching as an assistant professor at Harvard. In 1998 he accepted an offer from the University of Toronto. The book draws on Jung's archetypal ideas about the collective unconscious and on evolutionary psychology, and its bibliography ranges from Dante to Wittgenstein, including Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Laozi.

The book's central aim is to examine why individuals and groups take part in social conflict, and what reasoning and motivation sustain the belief systems that, in extreme cases, have led to the Gulag, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Peterson suggests that an analysis of the world's religious ideas might help describe an essential morality and, ultimately, build a universal system of morality. His model rests on a tension between chaos, associated with the unknown such as nature, and order, associated with explored and mapped territory such as culture. Humans, through abstract thought, also create abstract territories: belief systems that regulate our emotions. A threat to an important belief triggers emotional reactions that can lead to pathological attempts to face internal chaos. Mediating between the two forces is logos, consciousness, and heroic figures are those who develop culture and society as intermediaries. The book includes elaborate geometric diagrams meant to illustrate how the mind works.

Its reception was scarce and divided. Sheldon H. White of Harvard praised it as a brilliant enlargement of our understanding of human motivation, while other critics pointed to its density, its repetitions and passages that are hard or impossible to interpret. In 2018 Paul Thagard judged it defective as a work of anthropology, psychology, philosophy and politics, and Nathan J. Robinson called it an elaborate, unprovable and unintelligible theory. With the 2018 audiobook and the 2004 television series, the work reached a wider audience than in its early years.