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object:1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS
book class:Maps of Meaning
author class:Jordan Peterson
subject class:Psychology
class:chapter


PREFACE: DESCENSUS AD INFEROS
Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is
culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave
rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything
anything to defend ourselves against that return.

... the very fact that a general problem has gripped and assimilated the whole of a person is a guarantee
that the speaker has really experienced it, and perhaps gained something from his sufferings. He will then
reflect the problem for us in his personal life and thereby show us a truth. 1

I was raised under the protective auspices, so to speak, of the Christian Church. This does not mean that my
family was explicitly religious. I attended conservative Protestant services during childhood with my
mother, but she was not a dogmatic or authoritarian believer, and we never discussed religious issues at
home. My father appeared essentially agnostic, at least in the traditional sense. He refused to even set foot
in a church, except during weddings and funerals. Nonetheless, the historical remnants of Christian
morality permeated our household, conditioning our expectations and interpersonal responses, in the most
intimate of manners. When I grew up, after all, most people still attended church; furthermore, all the rules
and expectations that made up middle-class society were Judeo-Christian in nature. Even the increasing
number of those who could not tolerate formal ritual and belief still implicitly accepted still acted out
the rules that made up the Christian game.
When I was twelve or so my mother enrolled me in confirmation classes, which served as introduction
to adult membership in the Church. I did not like attending. I did not like the attitude of my overtly
religious classmates (who were few in number), and did not desire their lack of social standing. I did not
like the school-like atmosphere of the confirmation classes. More importantly, however, I could not
swallow what I was being taught. I asked the minister, at one point, how he reconciled the story of Genesis
with the creation theories of modern science. He had not undertaken such a reconciliation; furthermore, he
seemed more convinced, in his heart, of the evolutionary viewpoint. I was looking for an excuse to leave,
anyway and that was the last straw. Religion was for the ignorant, weak and superstitious. I stopped
attending church, and joined the modern world.
Although I had grown up in a Christian environment and had a successful and happy childhood, in
at least partial consequence I was more than willing to throw aside the structure that had fostered me. No
one really opposed my rebellious efforts, either, in church or at home in part because those who were
deeply religious (or who might have wanted to be) had no intellectually acceptable counter-arguments at
their disposal. After all, many of the basic tenets of Christian belief were incomprehensible, if not clearly
absurd. The virgin birth was an impossibility; likewise, the notion that someone could rise from the dead.
Did my act of rebellion precipitate a familial or a social crisis? No. My actions were so predictable, in a
sense, that they upset no one, with the exception of my mother (and even she was soon resigned to the
inevitable). The other members of the church my community had become absolutely habituated to the
increasingly-frequent act of defection, and did not even notice.
Did my act of rebellion upset me, personally? Only in a manner I was not able to perceive, until many
years later. I developed a premature concern with large-scale political and social issues, at about the same
time I quit attending church. Why were some countries, some people, rich, happy and successful, while
others were doomed to misery? Why were the forces of NATO and the Soviet Union continually at each
others throats? How was it possible for people to act the way the Nazis had, during World War Two?
Underlying these specific considerations was a broader, but at the time ill-conceptualized question: how did
evil particularly group-fostered evil come to play its role in the world?
I abandoned the traditions that supported me, at about the same time I left childhood. This meant that I
had no broader socially constructed philosophy at hand, to aid my understanding, as I became aware of
the existential problems that accompany maturity. The final consequences of that lack took years to become

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fully manifest. In the meantime, however, my nascent concern with questions of moral justice found
immediate resolution. I started working as a volunteer for a mildly socialist political party, and adopted the
party line.
Economic injustice was at the root of all evil, as far as I was concerned. Such injustice could be
rectified, as a consequence of the re-arrangement of social organizations. I could play a part in that
admirable revolution, carrying out my ideological beliefs. Doubt vanished; my role was clear. Looking
back, I am amazed at how stereotypical my actions reactions really were. I could not rationally accept
the premises of religion not as I understood them. I turned, in consequence, to dreams of political utopia,
and personal power. The same ideological trap caught millions of others, in recent centuries caught and
killed millions.
When I was seventeen I left the town I grew up in. I moved nearby and attended a small college, which
offered the first two years of undergraduate education. I involved myself there in university politics
which were more-or-less left wing at that time and was elected to the college board of governors. The
board was composed of politically and ideologically conservative people: lawyers, doctors, and
businessmen. They were all well (or at least practically) educated, pragmatic, confident, outspoken; they
had all accomplished something worthwhile and difficult. I could not help but admire them, even though I
did not share their political stance. I found the fact of my admiration unsettling.
I had attended several left-wing party congresses, as a student politician and active party-worker. I
hoped to emulate the socialist leaders. The left wing had a long and honorable history in Canada, and
attracted some truly competent and caring people. However, I could not generate much respect for the
numerous low-level party activists I encountered at these meetings. They seemed to live to complain: had
no career, frequently; no family, no completed education nothing but ideology. They were peevish,
irritable, and little, in every sense of the word. I was faced, in consequence, with the mirror image of the
problem I encountered on the college board: I could not admire many of the individuals who believed the
same things I did. This additional complication furthered my existential confusion.
My college roommate, an insightful cynic, expressed skepticism regarding my ideological beliefs. He
told me that the world could not be completely encapsulated within the boundaries of socialist philosophy. I
had more or less come to this conclusion on my own, but had not admitted so much in words. Soon
afterward, however, I read George Orwells Road to Wigan Pier. This book finally undermined me not
only my socialist ideology, but my faith in ideological stances themselves. In the famous essay concluding
that book (written for and much to the dismay of the British Left Book Club) Orwell described the great
flaw of socialism, and the reason for its frequent failure to attract and maintain democratic power (at least
in Britain). Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich.2
His idea struck home instantly. Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure.
Many of the party activists I had encountered were using the ideals of social justice, to rationalize their
pursuit of personal revenge.
Whose fault was it, that I was poor or uneducated and unadmired? Obviously the fault of the rich,
well-schooled and respected. How convenient, then, that the demands of revenge and abstract justice
dovetailed! It was only right to obtain recompense from those more fortunate than me.
Of course, my socialist colleagues and I werent out to hurt anyone quite the reverse. We were out to
improve things but we were going to start with other people. I came to see the temptation in this logic, the
obvious flaw, the danger but could also see that it did not exclusively characterize socialism. Anyone who
was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such
a position were too great to be resisted.
It was not socialist ideology that posed the problem, then but ideology, as such. Ideology divided the
world up simplistically into those who thought and acted properly, and those who did not. Ideology enabled
the believer to hide from his own unpleasant and inadmissible fantasies and wishes. Such realizations upset
my beliefs (even my faith in beliefs), and the plans I had formulated, as a consequence of these beliefs. I
could no longer tell who was good and who was bad, so to speak I no longer knew who to support, or
who to fight. This state of affairs proved very troublesome, pragmatically as well as philosophically. I
wanted to become a corporate lawyer had written the Law School Admissions Test, had taken two years
of appropriate preliminary courses. I wanted to learn the ways of my enemies, and embark on a political

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career. This plan disintegrated. The world obviously did not need another lawyer, and I no longer believed
that I knew enough to masquerade as a leader.
I became simultaneously disenchanted with the study of political science, my original undergraduate
major. I had adopted that discipline so I could learn more about the structure of human beliefs (and for the
practical, career-oriented reasons described previously). It remained very interesting to me when I was at
junior college, where I was introduced to the history of political philosophy. When I moved to the main
campus at the University of Alberta, however, my interest disappeared.. I was taught that people were
motivated by rational forces; that human beliefs and actions were determined by economic pressures. This
did not seem sufficient explanation. I could not believe (and still do not) that commodities natural
resources, for example had intrinsic and self-evident value. In the absence of such value, the worth of
things had to be socially or culturally (or even individually) determined. This act of determination appeared
to me moral appeared to me to be a consequence of the moral philosophy adopted by the society, culture
or person in question. What people valued, economically, merely reflected what they believed to be
important. This meant that real motivation had to lie in the domain of value, of morality. The political
scientists I studied with did not see this, or did not think it was relevant.
My religious convictions, ill-formed to begin with, disappeared when I was very young. My confidence
in socialism (that is, in political utopia) vanished when I realized that the world was not merely a place of
economics. My faith in ideology departed, when I began to see that ideological identification itself posed a
profound and mysterious problem. I could not accept the theoretical explanations my chosen field of study
had to offer, and no longer had any practical reasons to continue in my original direction. I finished my
three-year bachelors degree, and left university. All my beliefs which had lent order to the chaos of my
existence, at least temporarily had proved illusory; I could no longer see the sense in things. I was cast
adrift; I did not know what to do, or what to think.
But what of others? Was there evidence anywhere that the problems I now faced had been solved, by
anyone, in any acceptable manner? The customary behavior and attitudes of my friends and family
members offered no solution. The people I knew well were no more resolutely goal-directed or satisfied
than I was. Their beliefs and modes of being seemed merely to disguise frequent doubt and profound
disquietude. More disturbingly, on the more general plane, something truly insane was taking place. The
great societies of the world were feverishly constructing a nuclear machine, with unimaginably destructive
capabilities. Someone or something was making terrible plans. Why? Theoretically normal and welladapted people were going about their business prosaically, as if nothing were the matter. Why werent
they disturbed? Werent they paying attention? Wasnt I?
My concern with the general social and political insanity and evil of the world sublimated by
temporary infatuation with utopian socialism and political machination returned with a vengeance. The
mysterious fact of the cold war increasingly occupied the forefront of my consciousness. How could things
have come to such a point?
History is just a madhouse
its turned over all the stones
and its very careful reading
leaves you little thats unknown
I couldnt understand the nuclear race: what could possibly be worth risking annihilation not merely of
the present, but of the past and the future? What could possibly justify the threat of total destruction?
Bereft of solutions, I had at least been granted the gift of a problem.
I returned to university and began to study psychology. I visited a maximum security prison on the
outskirts of Edmonton, under the supervision of an eccentric adjunct professor at the University of Alberta.
His primary job was the psychological care of convicts. The prison was full of murderers, rapists, and
armed robbers. I ended up in the gym, near the weight room, on my first reconnaissance. I was wearing a
long wool cape, circa 1890, which I had bought in Portugal, and a pair of tall leather boots. The
psychologist who was accompanying me disappeared, unexpectedly, and left me alone. Soon I was
surrounded by shoddy men, some of whom were extremely large and tough-looking. One in particular
stands out in my memory. He was exceptionally muscular, and tattooed over his bare chest. He had a

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vicious scar running down the middle of his body, from his collarbone to his midsection. Maybe he had
survived open-heart surgery. Or maybe it was an ax wound. The injury would have killed a lesser man,
anyway someone like me.
Some of the prisoners, who werent dressed particularly well, offered to trade their clothes for mine.
This did not strike me as a great bargain, but I wasnt sure how to refuse. Fate rescued me, in the form of a
short, skinny, bearded man. He came up to me said that the psychologist had sent him and asked me to
accompany him. He was only one person, and many others (much larger) currently surrounded me and my
cape. So I took him at his word. He led me outside the gym doors, and out into the prison yard, talking
quietly but reasonably about something innocuous (I dont recall what) all the while. I kept glancing back
hopefully at the open doors behind us as we got further and further away. Finally my supervisor appeared,
and motioned me back. We left the bearded prisoner, and went to a private office. The psychologist told me
that the harmless-appearing little man who had escorted me out of the gym had murdered two policemen, in
cold blood, after he had forced them to dig their own graves. One of the policemen had little children, and
had begged for his life, on their behalf, while he was digging at least according to the murderers own
testimony.
This really shocked me.
I had read about this sort of event, of course but it had never been made real for me. I had never met
someone even tangentially affected by something like this; had certainly not encountered anyone who had
actually done something so terrible. How could the man I had talked to who was so apparently normal
(and so seemingly inconsequential) have done such an awful thing?
Some of the courses I was attending at this time were taught in large lecture theaters, where the students
were seated in descending rows, row after row. In one of these courses Introduction to Clinical
Psychology, appropriately enough I experienced a recurrent compulsion. I would take my seat behind
some unwitting individual and listen to the professor speak. At some point during the lecture, I would
unfailingly feel the urge to stab the point of my pen into the neck of the person in front of me. This impulse
was not overwhelming luckily but it was powerful enough to disturb me. What sort of terrible person
would have an impulse like that? Not me. I had never been aggressive. I had been smaller and younger than
my classmates, for most of my life.
I went back to the prison, a month or so after my first visit. During my absence, two prisoners had
attacked a third, a suspected informer. They held or tied him down and pulverized one of his legs with a
lead pipe. I was taken aback, once again, but this time I tried something different. I tried to imagine, really
imagine, what I would have to be like to do such a thing. I concentrated on this task for days and days and
experienced a frightening revelation. The truly appalling aspect of such atrocity did not lie in its
impossibility or remoteness, as I had naively assumed, but in its ease. I was not much different from the
violent prisoners not qualitatively different. I could do what they could do (although I hadnt).
This discovery truly upset me. I was not who I thought I was. Surprisingly, however, the desire to stab
someone with my pen disappeared. In retrospect, I would say that the behavioral urge had manifested itself
in explicit knowledge had been translated from emotion and image to concrete realization and had no
further reason to exist. The impulse had only occurred, because of the question I was attempting to
answer: how can men do terrible things to one another? I meant other men, of course bad men but I
had still asked the question. There was no reason for me to assume that I would receive a predictable or
personally meaningless answer.
At the same time, something odd was happening to my ability to converse. I had always enjoyed
engaging in arguments, regardless of topic. I regarded them as a sort of game (not that this is in any way
unique). Suddenly, however, I couldnt talk more accurately, I couldnt stand listening to myself talk. I
started to hear a voice inside my head, commenting on my opinions. Every time I said something, it said
something something critical. The voice employed a standard refrain, delivered in a somewhat bored and
matter-of-fact tone:
You dont believe that.
That isnt true.
You dont believe that.
That isnt true.

10


The voice applied such comments to almost every phrase I spoke.
I couldnt understand what to make of this. I knew the source of the commentary was part of me I
wasnt schizophrenic but this knowledge only increased my confusion. Which part, precisely, was me
the talking part, or the criticizing part? If it was the talking part, then what was the criticizing part? If it
was the criticizing part well, then: how could virtually everything I said be untrue? In my ignorance and
confusion, I decided to experiment. I tried only to say things that my internal reviewer would pass
unchallenged. This meant that I really had to listen to what I was saying, that I spoke much less often, and
that I would frequently stop, midway through a sentence, feel embarrassed, and reformulate my thoughts. I
soon noticed that I felt much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the voice did
not object to. This came as a definite relief. My experiment had been a success; I was the criticizing part.
Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts werent real,
werent true or, at least, werent mine.
All the things I believed were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous.
They werent my things, however I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having
understood them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them presumed that I could adopt them, as if
they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of
arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily
true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.
I read something by Carl Jung, at about this point, that helped me understand what I was experiencing. It
was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that feigned individuality.3 Adoption of such
a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us and those around us to believe that we were au thentic.
Jung said:
When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is
at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche.
Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what
a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a
certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only
a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he.
The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname.4
Despite my verbal facility, I was not real. I found this painful to admit.
I began to dream absolutely unbearable dreams. My dream life, up to this point, had been relatively
uneventful, as far as I can remember; furthermore, I have never had a particularly good visual imagination.
Nonetheless, my dreams became so horrible and so emotionally gripping that I was often afraid to go to
sleep. I dreamt dreams vivid as reality. I could not escape from them or ignore them. They centered, in
general, around a single theme: that of nuclear war, and total devastation around the worst evils that I, or
something in me, could imagine:
My parents lived in a standard ranch style house, in a middle-class neighborhood, in a small town in
northern Alberta. I was sitting in the darkened basement of this house, in the family room, watching TV,
with my cousin Diane, who was in truth in waking life the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A
newscaster suddenly interrupted the program. The television picture and sound distorted, and static
filled the screen. My cousin stood up and went behind the TV to check the electrical cord. She touched
it, and started convulsing and frothing at the mouth, frozen upright by intense current.
A brilliant flash of light from a small window flooded the basement. I rushed upstairs. There was
nothing left of the ground floor of the house. It had been completely and cleanly sheared away, leaving
only the floor, which now served the basement as a roof. Red and orange flames filled the sky, from
horizon to horizon. Nothing was left as far as I could see, except skeletal black ruins sticking up here
and there: no houses, no trees, no signs of other human beings or of any life whatsoever. The entire
town and everything that surrounded it on the flat prairie had been completely obliterated.
It started to rain mud, heavily. The mud blotted out everything, and left the earth brown, wet, flat and
dull, and the sky leaden, even grey. A few distraught and shell-shocked people started to gather

11


together. They were carrying unlabelled and dented cans of food, which contained nothing but mush and
vegetables. They stood in the mud looking exhausted and disheveled. Some dogs emerged, out from
under the basement stairs, where they had inexplicably taken residence. They were standing upright, on
their hind legs. They were thin, like greyhounds, and had pointed noses. They looked like creatures of
ritual like Anubis, from the Egyptian tombs. They were carrying plates in front of them, which
contained pieces of seared meat. They wanted to trade the meat for the cans. I took a plate. In the center
of it was a circular slab of flesh four inches in diameter and one inch thick, foully cooked, oily, with a
marrow bone in the center of it. Where did it come from?
I had a terrible thought. I rushed downstairs to my cousin. The dogs had butchered her, and were
offering the meat to the survivors of the disaster. I woke up with my heart pounding.
I dreamed apocalyptic dreams of this intensity two or three times a week for a year or more, while I
attended university classes and worked as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on in my mind.
Something I had no familiarity with was happening, however. I was being affected, simultaneously, by
events on two planes. On the first plane were the normal, predictable, everyday occurrences that I shared
with everybody else. On the second plane, however (unique to me, or so I thought) existed dreadful images
and unbearably intense emotional states. This idiosyncratic, subjective world which everyone normally
treated as illusory seemed to me at that time to lie somehow behind the world everyone knew and
regarded as real. But what did real mean? The closer I looked, the less comprehensible things became.
Where was the real? What was at the bottom of it all? I did not feel I could live without knowing.
My interest in the cold war transformed itself into a true obsession. I thought about the suicidal and
murderous preparation of that war every minute of every day, from the moment I woke up until the second
I went to bed. How could such a state of affairs come about? Who was responsible?
I dreamed that I was running through a mall parking lot, trying to escape from something. I was
running through the parked cars, opening one door, crawling across the front seat, opening the other,
moving to the next. The doors on one car suddenly slammed shut. I was in the passenger seat. The car
started to move by itself. A voice said harshly, there is no way out of here. I was on a journey, going
somewhere I did not want to go. I was not the driver.
I became very depressed and anxious. I had vaguely suicidal thoughts, but mostly wished that everything
would just go away. I wanted to lay down on my couch, and sink into it, literally, until only my nose was
showing like the snorkel of a diver above the surface of the water. I found my awareness of things
unbearable.
I came home late one night from a college drinking party, self-disgusted and angry. I took a canvas
board and some paints. I sketched a harsh, crude picture of a crucified Christ glaring and demonic with
a cobra wrapped around his naked waist, like a belt. The picture disturbed me struck me, despite my
agnosticism, as sacrilegious. I did not know what it meant, however, or why I had painted it. Where in the
world had it come from?5 I hadnt paid any attention to religious ideas for years. I hid the painting under
some old clothes in my closet and sat cross-legged on the floor. I put my head down. It became obvious to
me at that moment that I had not developed any real understanding of myself or of others. Everything I had
once believed about the nature of society and myself had proved false, the world had apparently gone
insane, and something strange and frightening was happening in my head. James Joyce said, History is a
nightmare from which I am trying to awake.6 For me, history literally was a nightmare. I wanted above all
else at that moment to wake up, and make my terrible dreams go away.
I have been trying ever since then to make sense of the human capacity, my capacity, for evil
particularly for those evils associated with belief. I started by trying to make sense of my dreams. I couldnt
ignore them, after all. Perhaps they were trying to tell me something? I had nothing to lose by admitting the
possibility. I read Freuds Interpretation of Dreams, and found it useful. Freud at least took the topic
seriously but I could not regard my nightmares as wish-fulfillments. Furthermore, they seemed more
religious than sexual in nature. I knew, vaguely, that Jung had developed specialized knowledge of myth
and religion, so I started through his writings. His thinking was granted little credence by the academics I
knew but they werent particularly concerned with dreams. I couldnt help being concerned by mine.

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They were so intense I thought they might derange me. (What was the alternative? To believe that the
terrors and pains they caused me were not real? Nothing is more real than terror and pain.)
Much of the time I could not understand what Jung was getting at. He was making a point I could not
grasp; speaking a language I did not comprehend. Now and then, however, his statements struck home. He
offered this observation, for example:
It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume
grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not
immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.7
The second part of that statement certainly seemed applicable to me, although the first (the archetypal
contents of the collective unconscious) remained mysterious and obscure. Still, this was promising. Jung
at least recognized that the things that were happening to me could happen. Furthermore, he offered some
hints as to their cause. So I kept reading. I soon came across the following hypothesis. Here was a potential
solution to the problems I was facing or at least the description of a place to look for such a solution:
The psychological elucidation of [dream and fantasy] images, which cannot be passed over in silence
or blindly ignored, leads logically into the depths of religious phenomenology. The history of religion in
its widest sense (including therefore mythology, folklore, and primitive psychology) is a treasure-house
of archetypal forms from which the doctor can draw helpful parallels and enlightening comparisons for
the purpose of calming and clarifying a consciousness that is all at sea. It is absolutely necessary to
supply these fantastic images that rise up so strange and threatening before the minds eye with some
kind of context so as to make them more intelligible. Experience has shown that the best way to do this
is by means of comparative mythological material.8
It has in fact been the study of comparative mythological material that made my horrible dreams
disappear. The cure wrought by this study, however, was purchased at the price of complete and often
painful transformation: what I believe about the world, now and how I act, in consequence is so much
at variance with what I believed when I was younger that I might as well be a completely different person.
I discovered that beliefs make the world, in a very real way that beliefs are the world, in a more than
metaphysical sense. This discovery has not turned me into a moral relativist, however: quite the contrary.
I have become convinced that the world-that-is-belief is orderly: that there are universal moral absolutes
(although these are structured such that a diverse range of human opinion remains both possible and
beneficial). I believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes in ignorance or in willful
opposition are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.
I learned that the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems can be rendered explicitly
comprehensible, even to the skeptical rational thinker and that, so rendered, can be experienced as
fascinating, profound and necessary. I learned why people wage war why the desire to maintain, protect
and expand the domain of belief motivates even the most incomprehensible acts of group-fostered
oppression and cruelty and what might be done to ameliorate this tendency, despite its universality. I
learned, finally, that the terrible aspect of life might actually be a necessary precondition for the existence
of life and that it is possible to regard that precondition, in consequence, as comprehensible and
acceptable. I hope that I can bring those who read this book to the same conclusions, without demanding
any unreasonable suspension of critical judgment excepting that necessary to initially encounter and
consider the arguments I present. These can be summarized as follows:
The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the
world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however
myth, literature, and drama portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation
have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective
domains. The domain of the former is the objective world what is, from the perspective of
intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is the world of value what is and what should be,
from the perspective of emotion and action.

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The world as forum for action is composed, essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to
manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory the
Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things.
Second is explored territory the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral
wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory the Divine Son, the
archetypal individual, creative exploratory Word and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this world
of divine characters, much as the objective world. The fact of this adaptation implies that the
environment is in reality a forum for action, as well as a place of things.
Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear
as a consequence of ritual imitation of the Great Father as a consequence of the adoption of group
identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When
identification with the group is made absolute, however when everything has to be controlled, when the
unknown is no longer allowed to exist the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no
longer manifest itself. This restriction of adaptive capacity dramatically increases the probability of
social aggression and chaos.
Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to identification with the devil, the mythological counterpart
and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a
consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is
totalitarian assumption of omniscience is adoption of Gods place by reason is something that
inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops
because creative exploration impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown constitutes
the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its
acceptable meaning.
Identification with the devil amplifies the dangers inherent in group identification, which tends of its
own accord towards pathological stultification. Loyalty to personal interest subjective meaning can
serve as an antidote to the overwhelming temptation constantly posed by the possibility of denying
anomaly. Personal interest subjective meaning reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored
territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and
societal adaptation.
Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero the savior who
upholds his association with the creative Word in the face of death, and in spite of group pressure to
conform. Identification with the hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the
unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and
maintains the group.
Similar summaries precede each chapter and subchapter. Read as a unit, they comprise a complete but
compressed picture of the book. These should be read first, after this preface. In this manner, the whole
of the argument I am offering might come quickly to aid comprehension of the parts.

14



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