1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING

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object:1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING
book class:Maps of Meaning
author class:Jordan Peterson
subject class:Psychology
class:chapter

CHAPTER 1: MAPS OF EXPERIENCE: OBJECT AND MEANING
The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things.
The former manner of interpretation more primordial, and less clearly understood finds its
expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature, and mythology. The world as forum for
action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a
consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or at a higher level of analysis implication
for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action.
The latter manner of interpretation the world as place of things finds its formal expression in the
methods and theories of science. Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensuallyvalidatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely-determined things as tools (once
the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative
processes).
No complete world-picture can be generated, without use of both modes of construal. The fact that one
mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains
insufficiently discriminated. Adherents of the mythological world-view tend to regard the statements of
their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical fact, even though such statements were generally
formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific
perspective who assume that it is, or might become, complete forget that an impassable gulf currently
divides what is from what should be.
We need to know four things:
what there is,
what to do about what there is,
that there is a difference between knowing what there is, and knowing what to do about what there is
and what that difference is.
To explore something, to discover what it is that means most importantly to discover its significance
for motor output, within a particular social context, and only more particularly, to determine its precise
objective sensory or material nature. This is knowledge, in the most basic of senses and often constitutes
sufficient knowledge.
Imagine that a baby girl, toddling around in the course of her initial tentative investigations, reaches up
onto a counter-top to touch a fragile and expensive glass sculpture. She observes its color, sees its shine,
feels that it is smooth and cold and heavy to the touch. Suddenly her mother interferes, grasps her hand,
tells her not to ever touch that object. The child has just learned a number of specifically consequential
things about the sculpture has identified its sensory properties, certainly. More importantly, however, she
has determined that approached in the wrong manner, the sculpture is dangerous (at least in the presence of
mother); has discovered as well that the sculpture is regarded more highly, in its present unaltered
configuration, than the exploratory tendency at least (once again) by mother. The baby girl has
simultaneously encountered an object, from the empirical perspective, and its socioculturally-determined
status. The empirical object might be regarded as those sensory properties intrinsic to the object. The
status of the object, by contrast, consists of its meaning consists of its implication for behavior.
Everything a child encounters has this dual nature, experienced by the child as part of a unified totality.
Everything is something, and means something and the distinction between essence and significance is
not necessarily drawn.
The significance of something specified in actuality as a consequence of exploratory activity
undertaken in its vicinity tends naturally to become assimilated to the object itself. The object, after all,
is the proximal cause or the stimulus that gives rise to action conducted in its presence. For people
operating naturally, like the child, what something signifies is more or less inextricably part of the thing,

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part of its magic. The magic is of course due to apprehension of the specific cultural and intrapsychic
significance of the thing, and not to its objectively determinable sensory qualities. Everyone understands
the child who says, for example, I saw a scary man; the childs description is immediate and concrete,
even though he or she has attri buted to the object of perception qualities that are in fact context-dependent
and subjective. It is difficult, after all, to realize the subjective nature of fear, and not to feel threat as part of
the real world.
The automatic attri bution of meaning to things or the failure to distinguish between them initially
is a characteristic of narrative, of myth, not of scientific thought. Narrative accurately captures the nature
of raw experience. Things are scary, people are irritating, events are promising, food is satisfying at least
in terms of our basic experience. The modern mind, which regards itself as having transcending the domain
of the magical, is nonetheless still endlessly capable of irrational (read motivated) reactions. We fall
under the spell of experience whenever we attri bute our frustration, aggression, devotion or lust to the
person or situation that exists as the proximal cause of such agitation. We are not yet objective, even in
our most clear-headed moments (and thank God for that). We become immediately immersed in a motion
picture or a novel, and willingly suspend disbelief. We become impressed or terrified, despite ourselves, in
the presence of a sufficiently powerful cultural figurehead (an intellectual idol, a sports superstar, a movie
actor, a political leader, the pope, a famous beauty, even our superior at work) in the presence, that is, of
anyone who sufficiently embodies the oft-implicit values and ideals that protect us from disorder and lead
us on. Like the medieval individual, we do not even need the person to generate such affect. The icon will
suffice. We pay vast sums of money for articles of clothing worn or personal items used or created by the
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famous and infamous of our time.
The natural, pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning which
is essentially implication for action and not with objective nature. The formal object, as conceptualized
by modern scientifically-oriented consciousness, might appear to those still possessed by the mythic
imagination if they could see it at all as an irrelevant shell: as all that was left after everything
intrinsically intriguing had been stripped away. For the pre-experimentalist, the thing is mostly truly the
significance of its sensory properties, as they are experienced in subjective experience in affect, or
emotion. And, in truth in real life to know what something is still means to know two things about it:
the first is its motivational relevance; the second is the specific nature of its sensory qualities. The two
forms of knowing are not identical; furthermore, experience and registration of the former necessarily
precedes development of the latter. Something must have emotional impact before it will attract enough
attention to be explored and mapped in accordance with its sensory properties. Those sensory properties
of prime import to the experimentalist or empiricist are meaningful only insofar as they serve as cues for
determining specific affective relevance or behavioral significance. We need to know what things are not
to know what they are but to keep track of what they mean to understand what they signify for our
behavior.
It has taken centuries of firm discipline and intellectual training, religious, proto-scientific, and
scientific, to produce a mind capable of concentrating on phenomena that are not yet or are no longer
immediately intrinsically [instinctively (?)] gripping to produce a mind that paradoxically regards real as
something separable from relevant. Alternatively, it might be suggested that all the myth has not yet
vanished from science, devoted as it is to human progress, and that it is this nontrivial remainder that
enables the scientist to retain undimmed enthusiasm, while he endlessly studies his fruitflies.
How, precisely, did people think, not so very long ago, before they were experimentalists? What were
things, before they were objective things? These are very difficult questions. The things that existed prior
to the development of experimental science do not appear valid either as things, or as the meaning of
things, to the modern mind. The question of the nature of the substance of sol the sun (to take a single
example) occupied the minds of those who practiced the pre-experimental science of alchemy for many
hundreds of years. We would no longer presume even that the sun has a uniform substance, unique to it,
and would certainly take exception to the properties attri buted to this hypothetical element by the medieval
alchemist, if we allowed its existence. Carl Jung, who spent much of the latter part of his life studying
medieval thought patterns, characterized sol:

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... the sun signifies first of all gold, whose [alchemical] sign it shares. But just as the philosophical
gold is not the common gold, so the sun is neither just the metallic gold nor the heavenly orb.
Sometimes the sun is an active substance hidden in the gold and is extracted [alchemically] as the
tinctura rubea (red tincture). Sometimes, as the heavenly body, it is the possessor of magically effective
and transformative rays. As gold and a heavenly body it contains an active sulphur of a red colour, hot
and dry. Because of this red sulphur the alchemical sun, like the corresponding gold, is red. As every
alchemist knew, gold owes its red color to the admixture of Cu (copper), which he interpreted as Kypris
(the Cyprian, Venus), mentioned in Greek alchemy as the transformative substance. Redness, heat, and
dryness are the classical qualities of the Egyptian Set (Greek Typhon), the evil principle which, like the
alchemical sulphur, is closely connected with the devil. And just as Typhon has his kingdom in the
forbidden sea, so the sun, as sol centralis, has its sea, its crude perceptible water, and as sol coelestis
its subtle imperceptible water. This sea water (aqua pontica) is extracted from sun and moon....
The active sun-substance also has favourable effects. As the so-called balsam it drips from the sun
and produces lemons, oranges, wine, and, in the mineral kingdom, gold.10
We can barely understand such a description, contaminated as it is in its entirety by imaginative and
mythological associations, peculiar to the medieval mind. It is precisely this fantastical contamination,
however, that renders the alchemical description worth examining not from the perspective of the history
of science, concerned with the examination of outdated objective ideas, but from the perspective of
psychology, focused on the interpretation of subjective frames of reference.
In it [the Indian Ocean, in this example] are images of heaven and earth, of summer, autumn, winter,
and spring, male and female. If thou callest this spiritual, what thou doest is probable; if corporeal, thou
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sayest the truth; if heavenly, thou liest not; if earthly, thou hast well spoken. The alchemist could not
separate his subjective ideas about the nature of things that is, his hypotheses from the things
themselves. His hypotheses, in turn products of his imagination were derived from the unquestioned
and unrecognized explanatory presuppositions that made up his culture. The medieval man lived, for
example, in a universe that was moral where everything, even ores and metals, strived above all for
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perfection. Things, for the alchemical mind, were therefore characterized in large part by their moral
nature by their impact on what we would describe as affect, emotion, or motivation; were therefore
characterized by their relevance or value (which is impact on affect). Description of this relevance took
narrative form, mythic form as in the example drawn from Jung, where the sulphuric aspect of the suns
substance is attri buted negative, demonic characteristics. It was the great feat of science to strip affect from
perception, so to speak, and to allow for the description of experiences purely in terms of their consensually
apprehensible features. However, it is the case that the affects generated by experiences are real, as well.
The alchemists, whose conceptualizations intermingled affect with sense, dealt with affect as a matter of
course (although they did not know it not explicitly). We have removed the affect from the thing, and
can therefore brilliantly manipulate the thing. We are still victims, however, of the uncomprehended
emotions generated by we would say, in the presence of the thing. We have lost the mythic universe of
the pre-experimental mind, or have at least ceased to further its development. That loss has left our
increased technological power ever more dangerously at the mercy of our still unconscious systems of
valuation.
Prior to the time of Descartes, Bacon and Newton, man lived in an animated, spiritual world, saturated
with meaning, imbued with moral purpose. The nature of this purpose was revealed in the stories people
told each other stories about the structure of the cosmos, and the place of man. But now we think
empirically (at least we think we think empirically), and the spirits that once inhabited the universe have
vanished. The forces released by the advent of the experiment have wreaked havoc within the mythic
world. Jung states:
How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and
at rest in the center of the universe, encircled by the course of a sun that solicitously bestowed its
warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for
eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves

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in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer
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seems real to us, even in our dreams. Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds.
Even if the medieval individual was not in all cases tenderly and completely enraptured by his religious
beliefs (he was a great believer in Hell, for example), he was certainly not plagued by the plethora of
rational doubts and moral uncertainties that beset his modern counterpart. Religion for the pre-experimental
mind was not so much a matter of faith as a matter of fact which means that the prevailing religious
viewpoint was not merely one compelling theory among many.
The capacity to maintain explicit belief in religious fact, however, has been severely undermined in
the last few centuries first in the West, and then everywhere else. A succession of great scientists and
iconoclasts has demonstrated that the universe does not revolve around man, that our notion of separate
status from and superiority to the animal has no empirical basis, and that there is no God in heaven (nor
even a heaven, as far as the eye can see). In consequence, we no longer believe our own stories no longer
even believe that those stories served us well in the past. The objects of revolutionary scientific discovery
Galileos mountains on the lunar orb; Keplers elliptical planetary orbits manifested themselves in
apparent violation of mythic order, predicated as it was on the presumption of heavenly perfection. The
new phenomena produced by the procedures of experimentalists could not be, could not exist, from the
perspective defined by tradition. Furthermore and more importantly the new theories that arose to make
sense of empirical reality posed a severe threat to the integrity of traditional models of reality, which had
provided the world with determinate meaning. The mythological cosmos had man at its midpoint; the
objective universe was heliocentric, at first, and less than that later. Modern man no longer occupies center
stage. The world is, in consequence, a completely different place.
The mythological perspective has been overthrown by the empirical; or so it appears. This should mean
that the morality predicated upon such myth should have disappeared, as well, as belief in comfortable
illusion vanished. Friedrich Nietzsche made this point clearly, more than a hundred years ago:
When one gives up Christian belief [for example] one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian
morality.... Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one
breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one
has nothing of any consequence left in ones hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know,
cannot know what is good for him and what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian
morality is a command: its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticize; it
possesses truth only if God is truth it stands or falls with the belief in God. If [modern Westerners]
really do believe they know, of their own accord, intuitively, what is good and evil; if they
consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely
the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth
of this ascendancy: so that the origin of [modern] morality has been forgotten, so that the highly
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conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer felt.
If the presuppositions of a theory have been invalidated, argues Nietzsche, then the theory has been
invalidated. But the theory survives. The fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition
continue to govern every aspect of the actual individual behavior and basic values of the typical Westerner
even if he is atheistic and well-educated; even if his abstract notions and utterances appear iconoclastic.
He neither kills, nor steals (or, if he does, he hides his actions, even from his own awareness), and he tends,
in theory, to treat his neighbour as himself. The principles that govern his society (and, increasingly, all
others15) remain predicated on mythic notions of individual value intrinsic right and responsibility
despite scientific evidence of causality and determinism in human motivation. Finally, in his mind even
when sporadically criminal the victim of a crime still cries out to heaven for justice, and the conscious
lawbreaker still deserves punishment for his or her actions.
Our systems of post-experimental thought and our systems of motivation and action therefore co-exist in
paradoxical union. One is up-to-date the other, archaic. One is scientific the other, traditional, even
superstitious. We have become atheistic in our description, but remain evidently religious that is, moral
in our disposition. What we accept as true, and how we act, are no longer commensurate. We carry on, as if

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our experience has meaning as if our activities have transcendent value but we are unable to justify this
belief intellectually. We have become trapped by our own capacity for abstraction: it provides us with
accurate descriptive information, but serves to undermine our belief in the utility and meaning of existence.
This problem has frequently been regarded as tragic (it seems to me, at least, ridiculous) and has been
thoroughly explored, in existential philosophy and literature. Nietzsche described this modern condition as
the (inevitable and necessary) consequence of the death of God:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market
place, and cried incessantly, I seek God! I seek God! As many of those who do not believe in God
were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.
Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he
afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. Whither is God he cried. I
shall tell you. We have killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this?
How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What
did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we
moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continuously? Backward, sideward, forward, in
all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we
not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all
the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the
grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of Gods decomposition? Gods too
decompose.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all
murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned
has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean
ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness
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of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?
We find ourselves in an absurd and unfortunate situation when our thoughts turn, involuntarily, to
consideration of our situation. It seems impossible to believe that life is intrinsically, religiously
meaningful. We continue to act and think as if, however as if nothing fundamental has really changed.
That does not change the fact that our integrity has vanished.
The great forces of empiricism and rationality and the great technique of the experiment have killed
myth, and it cannot be resurrected or so it seems. We still act out the precepts of our forebears, however,
although we can no longer justify our actions. Our behavior is shaped (at least in the ideal) by the same
mythic rules thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet that guided our ancestors, for the thousands of
years they lived, without benefit of formal empirical thought. This means that those rules are so powerful
so necessary, at least that they maintain their existence (and flourish, and expand their domain) even in
the presence of explicit theories that undermine their validity. That is a mystery and here is another:
How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have developed and flourished,
initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense? (If a culture survives, and grows, does that not indicate in
some profound way that the ideas it is based upon are valid? If myths are mere superstitious proto-theories,
why did they work? Why were they remembered? Our great rationalist ideologies, after all fascist, say, or
communist demonstrated their essential uselessness within the space of mere generations, despite their
intellectually compelling nature. Traditional societies, predicated on religious notions, have survived
essentially unchanged, in some cases, for tens of thousands of years. How can this longevity be
understood?) Is it actually sensible to argue that persistently successful traditions are based on ideas that are
simply wrong, regardless of their utility?
Is it not more likely that we just do not know how it could be that traditional notions are right, given
their appearance of extreme irrationality?
Is it not likely that this indicates modern philosophical ignorance, rather than ancestral philosophical
error?

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We have made the great mistake of assuming that the world of spirit described by those who preceded
us was the modern world of matter, primitively conceptualized. This is not true at least not in the
simple manner we generally believe. The cosmos described by mythology was not the same place known to
the practitioners of modern science but that does not mean it was not real. We have not yet found God
above, nor the Devil below, because we do not yet understand where above and below might be found.
We do not know what our ancestors were talking about. This is not surprising, because they did not
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know, either (and it didnt really matter that they did not know). Consider this archaic creation myth
from Sumer the birthplace of history:
So far, no cosmogonic text properly speaking has been discovered, but some allusions permit us to
reconstruct the decisive moments of creation, as the Sumerians conceived it. The goddess Nammu
(whose name is written with the pictograph representing the primordial sea) is presented as the mother
who gave birth to the Sky and the Earth and the ancestress who brought forth all the gods. The theme
of the primordial waters, imagined as a totality at once cosmic and divine, is quite frequent in archaic
cosmogonies. In this case too, the watery mass is identified with the original Mother, who, by
par thenogenesis, gave birth to the first couple, the Sky (An) and the Earth (Ki), incarnating the male and
female principles. This first couple was united, to the point of merging, in the hieros gamos [mystical
marriage]. From their union was born En-lil, the god of the atmosphere. Another fragment informs us
that the latter separated his parents.... The cosmogonic theme of the separation of sky and earth is also
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widely disseminated.
This myth is typical of archaic descriptions of reality. What does it mean to say that the Sumerians
believed that the world emerged from a primordial sea, which was the mother of all, and that the sky and
the earth were separated by the act of a deity? We do not know. Our abysmal ignorance in this regard has
not been matched, however, by a suitable caution. We appear to have made the presumption that stories
such as these myths were equivalent in function and intent (but were inferior methodologically) to
empirical or post-experimental description. It is this fundamentally absurd insistence that, above all, has
destabilized the effect of religious tradition upon the organization of modern human moral reasoning and
behavior. The world of the Sumerians was not objective reality, as we presently construe it. It was
simultaneously more and less more, in that this primitive world contained phenomena that we do not
consider part of reality, such as affect and meaning; less, in that the Sumerians could not describe (or
conceive of) many of those things the processes of science have revealed to us.
Myth is not primitive proto-science. It is a qualitatively different phenomenon. Science might be
considered description of the world with regards to those aspects that are consensually apprehensible or
specification of the most effective mode of reaching an end (given a defined end). Myth can be more
accurately regarded as description of the world as it signifies (for action). The mythic universe is a place
to act, not a place to perceive. Myth describes things in terms of their unique or shared affective valence,
their value, their motivational significance. The Sky (An) and the Earth (Ki) of the Sumerians are not the
sky and earth of modern man, therefore; they are the Great Father and Mother of all things [including the
thing En-lil, who is actually a process that in some sense gave rise to them].
We do not understand pre-experimental thinking, so we try to explain it in terms that we do understand
which means that we explain it away, define it as nonsense. After all, we think scientifically so we
believe and we think we know what that means (since scientific thinking can in principle be defined). We
are familiar with scientific thinking, and value it highly so we tend to presume that that is all there is to
thinking (that all other forms of thought are approximations, at best, to the ideal of scientific thought).
But this is not accurate. Thinking also and more fundamentally is specification of value is specification of
implication for behavior. This means that categorization, with regards to value determination (or even
perception) of what constitutes a single thing, or class of things is the act of grouping together according
to implication for behavior.
The Sumerian category of Sky (An), for example, is a domain of phenomena with similar implications
for behavioral output, or for affect; the same can be said for the category of Earth (Ki), and all other mythic
categories. The fact that the domain of the Sky has implications for action has motivational
significance makes it a deity (which is something that controls behavior, or at least that must be served).

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Comprehension of the fact that such a classification system actually has meaning necessitates learning to
think differently (necessitates, as well, learning to think about thinking differently).
The Sumerians were concerned, above all, with how to act (with the value of things). Their descriptions
of reality (to which we attri bute the qualities of proto-science) in fact comprised their summary of the
world as phenomena with meaning as place to act. They did not know this not explicitly any more
than we do. But it was still true.
The empirical endeavor is concerned with objective description of what is with determination of what
it is about a given phenomena that can be consensually validated and described. The objects of this process
may be those of the past, the present, or the future, and may be static or dynamic in nature: a good scientific
theory allows for prediction and control of becoming (of transformation) as well as being. However, the
affect that an encounter with an object generates is not a part of what that object is, from this
perspective, and therefore must be eliminated from further consideration (along with anything else
subjective) must be at least eliminated from definition as a real aspect of the object.
The painstaking empirical process of identification, communication and comparison has proved to be a
strikingly effective means for accurately specifying the nature of the relatively invariant features of the
collectively apprehensible world. Unfortunately, this useful methodology cannot be applied to
determination of value to consideration of what should be, to specification of the direction that things
should take (which means, to description of the future we should construct, as a consequence of our
actions). Such acts of valuation necessarily constitute moral decisions. We can use information generated in
consequence of the application of science to guide those decisions, but not to tell us if they are correct. We
lack a process of verification, in the moral domain, that is as powerful or as universally acceptable as the
experimental (empirical) method, in the realm of description. This absence does not allow us to sidestep the
problem. No functioning society or individual can avoid rendering moral judgment, regardless of what
might be said or imagined about the necessity of such judgment. Action presupposes valuation, or its
implicit or unconscious equivalent. To act is literally to manifest preference about one set of possibilities,
contrasted to an infinite set of alternatives. If we will live, we must act. Acting, we value. Lacking
omniscience, painfully, we must make decisions, in the absence of sufficient information. It is, traditionally
speaking, our knowledge of good and evil, our moral sensibility, that allows us this ability. It is our
mythological conventions, operating implicitly or explicitly, that guide our choices. But what are these
conventions? How are we to understand the fact of their existence? How are we to understand them?
It was Nietzsche, once again, who put his finger on the modern problem, central to issues of valence or
meaning: not, as before how to act, from within the confines of a particular culture, but whether to
believe that the question of how to act could even be reasonably asked, let alone answered:
Just because our moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately in arbitrary
extracts or in accidental epitomes for example, as the morality of their environment, their class, their
church, the spirit of their time, their climate and part of the world just because they were poorly
informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages they never laid eyes
on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities. In all
science of morals so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself;
what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here.19
This problem of morality is there anything moral, in any realistic general sense, and if so, how might it
be comprehended? is a question that has now attained paramount importance. We have the technological
power to do anything we want (certainly, anything destructive; potentially, anything creative); commingled
with that power, however, is an equally profound existential uncertainty, shallowness and confusion. Our
constant cross-cultural interchanges and our capacity for critical reasoning has undermined our faith in the
traditions of our forebears perhaps for good reason. However, the individual cannot live without belief
without action and valuation and science cannot provide that belief. We must nonetheless put our faith
into something. Are the myths we have turned to since the rise of science more sophisticated, less
dangerous, and more complete than those we rejected? The ideological structures that dominated social
relations in the twentieth century appear no less absurd, on the face of it, than the older belief systems they
supplanted; they lacked, in addition, any of the incomprehensible mystery that necessarily remains part of

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genuinely artistic and creative production. The fundamental propositions of fascism and communism were
rational, logical, statable, comprehensible and terribly wrong. No great ideological struggle presently
tears at the soul of the world, but it is difficult to believe that we have outgrown our gullibility. The rise of
the New Age movement in the West, for example as compensation for the decline of traditional
spirituality provides sufficient evidence for our continued ability to swallow a camel, while straining at a
gnat.
Could we do better? Is it possible to understand what might reasonably, even admirably, be believed,
after understanding that we must believe? Our vast power makes self-control (and, perhaps, selfcomprehension) a necessity so we have the motivation, at least in principle. Furthermore, the time is
auspicious. The third Christian millenium is dawning at the end of an era when we have demonstrated, to
the apparent satisfaction of everyone, that certain forms of social regulation just do not work even when
judged by their own criteria for success. We live in the aftermath of the great statist experiments of the
twentieth century, after all, conducted as Nietzsche prophecied:
In the doctrine of socialism there is hidden, rather badly, a will to negate life; the human beings or
races that think up such a doctrine must be bungled. Indeed, I should wish that a few great experiments
might prove that in a socialist society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots. The earth is large enough
and man still sufficiently unexhausted; hence such a practical instruction and demonstratio ad absurdum
would not strike me as undesirable, even if it were gained and paid for with a tremendous expenditure of
human lives.20
There appears to exist some natural or even dare it be said some absolute constraints on the manner
in which human beings may act as individuals and in society. Some moral presuppositions and theories are
wrong; human nature is not infinitely malleable.
It has become more or less evident that pure, abstract rationality, for example, ungrounded in tradition
the rationality which defined Soviet-style communism from inception to dissolution appears absolutely
unable to determine and make explicit just what it is that should guide individual and social behavior. Some
systems do not work, even though they make abstract sense (even more sense than alternative, currently
operative, incomprehensible, haphazardly evolved systems). Some patterns of interpersonal interaction
which constitute the state, insofar as it exists as a model for social behavior do not produce the ends they
are supposed to produce, can not sustain themselves over time, or even produce contrary ends, devouring
those who enact them and profess their value. Perhaps this is because planned, logical and intelligible
systems fail to make allowance for the irrational, transcendent, incomprehensible and often ridiculous
aspect of human character, as described by Dostoevsky:
Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities?
Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of
bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to
do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer
ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would
deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all
this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he
will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself as though that were so necessary that men
still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that
soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him
by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do
something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he
will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will
launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction
between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object - that is, convince
himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and
tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand

22

would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid
of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to
consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at
the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice
that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we dont know?21
We also presently possess in accessible and complete form the traditional wisdom of a large part of the
human race possess accurate description of the myths and rituals that contain and condition the implicit
and explicit values of almost everyone who has ever lived. These myths are centrally and properly
concerned with the nature of successful human existence. Careful comparative analysis of this great body
of religious philosophy might allow us to provisionally determine the nature of essential human motivation
and morality if we were willing to admit our ignorance, and take the risk. Accurate specification of
underlying mythological commonalities might comprise the first developmental stage in the conscious
evolution of a truly universal system of morality. The establishment of such a system, acceptable to
empirical and religious minds alike, could prove of incalculable aid in the reduction of intrapsychic, interindividual and intergroup conflict. The grounding of such a comparative analysis within a psychology (or
even a neuropsychology) informed by strict empirical research might offer us the possibility of a form of
convergent validation, and help us overcome the age-old problem of deriving the ought from the is; help us
see how what we must do might be inextricably associated with what it is that we are.
Proper analysis of mythology, of the type proposed here, is not mere discussion of historical events
enacted upon the world stage (as the traditionally religious might have it), and it is not mere investigation
of primitive belief (as the traditionally scientific might presume). It is, instead, the examination, analysis
and subsequent incorporation of an edifice of meaning, which contains within it hierarchical organization
of experiential valence. The mythic imagination is concerned with the world in the manner of the
phenomenologist, who seeks to discover the nature of subjective reality, instead of concerning himself with
description of the objective world. Myth, and the drama that is part of myth, provide answers in image to
the following question: how can the current state of experience be conceptualized in abstraction, with
regards to its meaning? [which means its (subjective, biologically-predicated, socially-constructed)
emotional relevance or motivational significance]. Meaning means implication for behavioral output;
logically, therefore, myth presents information relevant to the most fundamental of moral problems: what
should be? (what should be done?) The desirable future (the object of what should be) can only be
conceptualized in relationship to the present, which serves at least as a necessary point of contrast and
comparison. To get somewhere in the future presupposes being somewhere in the present; furthermore, the
desirability of the place travelled to depends on the valence of the place vacated. The question of what
should be? (what line should be travelled?) therefore has contained within it, so to speak, three
subqueries, which might be formulated as follows:
1) what is? what is the nature (meaning, the significance) of the current state of experience?
2) what should be? to what (desirable, valuable) end should that state be moving?
3) how should we therefore act? what is the nature of the specific processes by which the present state
might be transformed into that which is desired?
Active apprehension of the goal of behavior, conceptualized in relationship to the interpreted present,
serves to constrain or provide determinate framework for the evaluation of ongoing events, which emerge
as a consequence of current behavior. The goal is an imaginary state, consisting of a place of desirable
motivation or affect is a state that only exists in fantasy, as something (potentially) preferable to the
present. (Construction of the goal therefore means establishment of a theory about the ideal relative status
of motivational states about the good.) This imagined future constitutes a vision of perfection, so to
speak, generated in the light of all current knowledge (at least under optimal conditions), to which specific
and general aspects of ongoing experience are continually compared. This vision of perfection is the
promised land, mythologically speaking conceptualized as a spiritual domain (a psychological state), a
political utopia (a state, literally speaking), or both, simultaneously.
We answer the question what should be? by formulating an image of the desired future.

23

We cannot conceive of that future, except in relationship to the (interpreted) present and it is our
interpretation of the emotional acceptability of the present that comprises our answer to the question what
is? [what is the nature (meaning, the significance) of the current state of experience?].
We answer the question how then should we act? by determining the most efficient and self-consistent
strategy, all things considered, for bringing the preferred future into being.

What
SHOULD BE
ct
ct
ct
A
A
A
d
d
l
l
ou Shou hould
h
S
S
e
e
e
W
W
W
w
w
Ho How
Ho

What
IS
Figure 1: The Domain and Constituent Elements of the Known.
Our answers to these three fundamental questions modified and constructed in the course of our social
interactions constitutes our knowledge, insofar as it has any behavioral relevance; constitutes our
knowledge, from the mythological perspective. The structure of the mythic known what is, what should
be, and how to get from one to the other is presented in Figure 1: The Domain and Constituent
Elements of the Known.
The known is explored territory, a place of stability and familiarity is the city of God, as profanely
realized. It finds metaphorical embodiment in myths and narratives describing the community, the
kingdom, or the state. Such myths and narratives guide our ability to understand the particular, bounded
motivational significance of the present, experienced in relation to some identifiable desired future, and
allow us to construct and interpret appropriate patterns of action, from within the confines of that schema.
We all produce determinate models of what is, and what should be, and how to transform one into the
other. We produce these models by balancing our own desires, as they find expression in fantasy and
action, with with those of the others individual, families and communities that we habitually encounter.
How to act, constitutes the most essential aspect of the social contract; the domain of the known is,
therefore, the territory we inhabit with all those who share our implicit and explicit traditions and beliefs.

24

Myths describe the existence of this shared and determinate territory as a fixed aspect of existence
which it is, as the fact of culture is an unchanging aspect of the human environment.
Narratives of the known patriotic rituals, stories of ancestral heroes, myths and symbols of cultural
or racial identity describe established territory, weaving for us a web of meaning that, shared with others,
eliminates the necessity of dispute over meaning. All those who know the rules, and accept them, can play
the game without fighting over the rules of the game. This makes for peace, stability, and potential
prosperity a good game. The good, however, is the enemy of the better; a more compelling game might
always exist. Myth portrays what is known, and performs a function that if limited to that, might be
regarded as paramount in importance. But myth also presents information that is far more profound
almost unutterably so, once (I would argue) properly understood. We all produce models of what is, and
what should be, and how to transform one into the other. We change our behavior, when the consequences
of that behavior are not what we would like. But sometimes mere alteration in behavior is insufficient. We
must change not only what we do, but what we think is important. This means reconsideration of the nature
of the motivational significance of the present, and reconsideration of the ideal nature of the future. This is
a radical, even revolutionary transformation, and it is a very complex process in its realization but mythic
thinking has represented the nature of such change in great and remarkable detail.
The basic grammatical structure of transformational mythology, so to speak, appears most clearly
revealed in the form of the way (as in the American Way of Life). The great literary critic Northrop
Frye comments upon the idea of the way, as it manifests itself in literature and religious writing:
Following a narrative is closely connected with the central literary metaphor of the journey, where we
have a person making the journey and the road, path, or direction taken, the simplest word for this being
way. Journey is a word connected with jour and journee, and metaphorical journeys, deriving as they
mostly do from slower methods of getting around, usually have at their core the conception of the days
journey, the amount of space we can cover under the cycle of the sun. By a very easy extension of
metaphor we get the days cycle as a symbol for the whole of life. Thus in Housmans poem Reveille
(Up, lad: when the journeys over/ Therell be time enough to sleep) the awakening in the morning is
a metaphor of continuing the journey of life, a journey ending in death. The prototype for the image is
the Book of Ecclesiastes, which urges us to work while it is day, before the night comes when no man
can work....
The word way is a good example of the extent to which language is built up on a series of
metaphorical analogies. The most common meaning of way in English is a method or manner of
procedure, but method and manner imply some sequential repetition, and the repetition brings us to the
metaphorical kernel of a road or path.... In the Bible way normally translates the Hebrew derek and the
Greek hodos, and throughout the Bible there is a strong emphasis on the contrast between a straight way
that takes us to our destination and a divergent way that misleads or confuses. This metaphorical
contrast haunts the whole of Christian literature: we start reading Dantes Commedia, and the third line
speaks of a lost or erased way: Che la diritta via era smarita. Other religions have the same metaphor:
Buddhism speaks of what is usually called in English an eightfold path. In Chinese Taoism the Tao is
usually also rendered way by Arthur Waley and others, though I understand that the character
representing the word is formed of radicals meaning something like head-going. The sacred book of
Taoism, the Tao te Ching, begins by saying that the Tao that can be talked about is not the real Tao: in
other words we are being warned to beware of the traps in metaphorical language, or, in a common
Oriental phrase, of confusing the moon with the finger pointing at it. But as we read on we find that the
Tao can, after all, be to some extent characterized: the way is specifically the way of the valley, the
direction taken by humility, self-effacement, and the kind of relaxation, or non-action, that makes all
action effective.22
The way is the path of life, and its purpose.23 More accurately, the content of the way is the specific path
of life. The form of the way, its most fundamental aspect, is the apparently intrinsic or heritable possibility
of positing or of being guided by a central idea. This apparently intrinsic form finds its expression in the
tendency of each individual, generation after generation, to first ask and subsequently seek an answer to the
question what is the meaning of life?

25

The central notion of the way underlies manifestation of four more specific myths, or classes of myths,
and provides a more complete answer, in dramatic form, to the three questions posed previously [what is
the nature (meaning, the significance) of current being?, to what (desirable) end should that state be
moving? and, finally, what are the processes by which the present state might be transformed into that
which is desired?] The four classes include:
(1) Myths describing a current or pre-existent stable state (sometimes a paradise, sometimes a tyranny);
(2) Myths describing the emergence of something anomalous, unexpected, threatening and promising
into this initial state;
(3) Myths describing the dissolution of the pre-existent stable state into chaos, as a consequence of the
anomalous or unexpected occurrence;
(4) Myths describing the regeneration of stability [paradise regained (or, tyranny regenerated)], from the
chaotic mixture of dissolute previous experience and anomalous information.

What
SHOULD BE

What
SHOULD BE

t
ct
ct
Ac
ld A ould uld A
u
o
h
o
h
e S e Sh
eS
w W ow W ow W
o
H
H
H

t
ct
ct
Ac
ld A ould uld A
u
o
h
o
h
e S e Sh
eS
w W ow W ow W
o
H
H
H

What
IS

int
De egra
sce tion
An
o
nt
m
Inf
orm alou
ati s
on

Re

Dis

int
e
As gra
ce tio
nt n

What
IS

CHAOS:
The Unknown

Figure 2: The Metamythological Cycle of the Way
The meta-mythology of the way, so to speak, describes the manner in which specific ideas (myths)
about the present, the future, and the mode of transforming one into the other are initially constructed, and
then reconstructed, in their entirety, when that becomes necessary. The traditional Christian (and not just
Christian) notion that man has fallen from an original state of grace into his current morally degenerate
and emotionally unbearable condition accompanied by a desire for the return to Paradise constitutes a
single example of this meta-myth. Christian morality can therefore be reasonably regarded as the plan of
action whose aim is re-establishment, or establishment, or attainment (sometimes in the hereafter) of the

26

kingdom of God, the ideal future. The idea that man needs redemption and that re-establishment of a
long-lost Paradise might constitute such redemption appear as common themes of mythology, among
members of exceedingly diverse and long-separated human cultures.24 This commonality appears because
man, eternally self-conscious, suffers eternally from his existence, and constantly longs for respite.
Figure 2: The Metamythological Cycle of the Way schematically portrays the circle of the way,
which begins and ends at the same point with establishment of conditional, but determinate moral
knowledge (belief). Belief is disruptible, because finite which is to say that the infinite mystery
surrounding human understanding may break through into our provisional models of how to act, at any
time, at any point, and disrupt their structure. The manner in which we act as children, for example, may be
perfectly appropriate, for the conditions of childhood; the processes of maturation change the conditions of
existence, introducing anomaly where only certainty once stood, making necessary not only a change of
plans, but reconceptualization of where those plans might lead, and what or who they refer to, in the
present.
The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos which is to say, provides our
experience with determinate and predictable structure. The unknown, chaos from which we are protected
has a nature all of its own. That nature is experienced as affective valence, at first exposure, not as
objective property. If something unknown or unpredictable occurs, while we are carrying out our motivated
plans, we are first surprised. That surprise which is a combination of apprehension and curiosity
comprises our instinctive emotional response to the occurrence of something we did not desire. The
appearance of something unexpected is proof that we do not know how to act by definition, as it is the
production of what we want that we use as evidence for the integrity of our knowledge. If we are
somewhere we dont know how to act, we are (probably) in trouble we might learn something new, but
we are still in trouble. When we are in trouble, we get scared. When we are in the domain of the known, so
to speak, there is no reason for fear. Outside that domain, panic reigns. It is for this reason that we dislike
having our plans disrupted. So we cling to what we understand. This does not always work, however,
because what we understand about the present is not always necessarily sufficient to deal with the future.
This means that we have to be able to modify what we understand, even though to do so is to risk our own
undoing. The trick, of course, is to modify and yet to remain secure. This is not so simple. Too much
modification chaos. Too little modification stagnation (and then, when the future we are unprepared for
appears chaos).
Involuntary exposure to chaos means accidental encounter with the forces that undermine the known
world. The affective consequences of such encounter can be literally overwhelming. It is for this reason
that individuals are highly motivated to avoid sudden manifestations of the unknown for this reason
that individuals will go to almost any length to ensure that their protective cultural stories remain intact.

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