Table of Contents
My Notes For Maps Of Meaning 3 (2017) – Jordan Peterson
Maps of Meaning 3 – Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2)
My Maps of Meaning 3 notes include a summary of Affective Neuroscience and an parallel to the Oedipal Complex, as well as an interesting tangent to Dante’s Inferno.
Recap
Gepetto gets his wish from the blue fairy because he’s a good guy. The cricket is knighted by the blue fairy but the cricket is still incompetent.
There’s a Freudian element. The Superego is the manifestation of society since the father didn’t invent the rules (he’s a propagator).
You can choose to follow the rules or not (free will). And the Cricket (conscience) is not unerring.
Largest Set of Possible Games
You are psychologically adjusted to playing in a way to allow you to take part in the largest set of possible games – that’s different from only having socially constructed ideals – it’s deeper than that (your conscience can identify unfair behavior/ cheating). Frans de Waal found that the most powerful chimp was not the highest in the dominance hierarchy. You had to learn to coexist within a group to climb that hierarchy.
When two wolves fight – both puff up and try to look intimidating (sizing each other up) and try to get the other to back off. But a fight and a subsequent victory can leave you weak and vulnerable. Fighting isn’t always the default, and it isn’t always smart – it can be too costly. What happens is one of the wolves gives up and exposes their throat. The other wolf doesn’t kill the subordinate wolf because a dead wolf is useless to the pack. Low ranking members aren’t in a perfect position but at least protected (threatened is better than killed). This is similar to what lobsters do. See my summary of Rule 1 from Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life.
Affective Neuroscience
The author of Affective Neuroscience discovered play circuits in mammals.
A summary of his discoveries:
- Wrestling rats: The rats pin each other to determine who wins – like humans.
- Getting Fear Behind You: Put spring on the rat to measure how motivated it is. When there’s food down the corridor – they measure how hard the rat pulls and then when they release cat odor, the rat pulls much harder – that’s why the self-authoring program offers the rewards in addition to something that scares you. (anxiety chases you and approach systems push you forward). Otherwise, your fear will stop you from going forward. You need to get your fear behind you and be be afraid of not pursuing your goals. You don’t get to pick your best thing – you get to pick your poison (when you know that it’s really freeing) Sometimes there’s just risky solution 1 or 2 – BUT you get choose which one you want to face voluntarily – that’s a different psycho-physiological response.
- Motivation through Deprivation: You can see that the play-deprived juvenile rat will fight harder to play than a non-play deprived juvenile rat.
- Kids Need to Wrestle: Juvenile rats when they play: a rat that is 10 percent bigger will pin the smaller rat. But then the smaller, weaker rat will want to play next time. It creates the invitation. Kids love rough and tumble play, but it’s illegal in daycare. Kids need it because it teaches you the limits of both bodies, a dance of play, what hurts and what doesn’t. That’s what you do when you dance with someone.
- Unfair Play: If the bigger rat doesn’t let the little rat win at least 30 percent of the time, the little rat won’t ask the big rat to play anymore.
A threat creates a generalized stress response, but a challenge doesn’t.
A challenge activates your exploratory and seeking systems (dopaminergic systems are activated). If you can face something voluntarily, rather than having it chase you, it’s way better for you psycho-physiologically. That’s why it’s smarter to find the dragon in its lair instead of waiting for it to come and eat you.
The same way we test a rat’s motivation by prodding it and challenging it, we do the same thing with people. If there’s something you want, you need about five arguments about why you want it because the probability that the person who’s opposing you will have five arguments about why you shouldn’t have it is very low.
Don’t Do What You Don’t Want to Become
Things will pull you to do different things, and if your mind is sneaky – it’ll convince you to do something hard (not as hard as what you’re supposed to do) and that’ll make you feel better. And if those things win the internal argument – they get a dopamine kick and grow stronger. Anything you let win the internal argument grows – and anything you defeat shrinks.
Don’t do what you don’t want to become. The best you can do is build an inhibitory system, but that system can be disrupted by stress – and you go back to old habits.
Morality appears after repeated interactions. That’s what Piaget said about the emergence of morality. If you deprive rats from engaging in rough and tumble play – their prefrontal cortexes don’t develop properly. They become impulsive and restless. Then you fix them with Methylphenidate or Ritalin. Children are denied opportunity to engage in play (forced to sit in class for many hours) and then you suppress the play circuit with amphetamines. Not very smart.
Emergence of Morality
Piaget suggested that morality emerges before the ability to verbalize the rules. Kids learn to play the game before they can identify what the rules of the game are.
Morality is bottom-up, not top-down. Children can only partially articulate the rules of the game they’re playing; they act it out. And that’s how morality forms. It’s a pattern of behavior. The rules describe the pattern of behavior. And the pattern of behavior is mediated by the collective (who judge people who don’t fit into the pattern).
Jiminy (the cricket) tries to explain the moral rules to Pinnochio but the the cricket doesn’t know how, because he’s just a bug. He’s just not omniscient, so the best he can do is to come up with a propagandistic, semantic, verbal representation that’s internally contradictory. At this point, Jiminy Cricket is acting like a dull, tyrannical puppet.
“Yes, temptations, they’re the wrong things that seem right at the time but even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time or vice versa, understand? – no!”
Your representation doesn’t always match your pattern of behavior. You have knowledge in implicit form – and then someone says something – and those statements connect the dots and give you explicit knowledge. Or you get it through a movie or story.
Watch your dreams/fantasies – they’re problem identification mechanisms. They can keep you up (past, present, future). A way of thinking about it is you’re generating potential futures and running simulations of it with your avatar. And if the result is catastrophic – you don’t go down that path. That’s what happens in a movie – but a movie is much more thought out. A dream is fragmentary. The dream is willing to sacrifice coherence to play with category structures.
New Scene: It’s a New Day
Pinocchio is going out on his own – but has his conscience which represents nature and society. Gepetto is excited, not terrified, for Pinocchio.
Enter the Fox . He acts like he’s a knowledgeable gentleman, and then his second-rate sidekick who the fox doesn’t treat well – but helps keep the fox’s dominance hierarchy intact. The fox is really a fraud.
They’re walking down the street and the fox is bragging about a crooked thing he’s done – how he pulled the wool over someone’s eyes and he confuses that with wisdom and intelligence. if you’re preyed upon by a psychopath, which you will be to some degree at some point in your life. The psychopath, who will be narcissistic, will presume that you deserve to be taken advantage of because you’re naive and stupid, so it’s actually a good thing that he’s doing it. He’s doing you a favor. Watch Paul Bernardo to see a psychopath in action.
Stromboli is the puppet master, he’s behind the stage. An archetypal theme is what’s happening behind the scenes (Politics, people, etc..) that’s why your eyes have whites and gorillas don’t. Our ancestors who didn’t have whites were killed or did not mate. It’s a big deal for us to see the whites. That means we can know what people are up to and what their motivations are.
The fox sees a puppet with no strings. A semi-autonomous puppet is very valuable to Stromboli. The fox and his friend decide to take Pinocchio to him to get a reward. The metaphor here is that foxes look for kids who are defeated and unlikely to object. They look for the victim type. Better not teach your kids to be fearful of strangers – because then they’re sheltered and naive and unprotected from people who are dangerous.
The fox befriends the puppet – and they sing a song about being an actor. “An actor’s life for me”.
They sing to Pinocchio about the delights of unearned celebrity, so he doesn’t have to go and get an education and take the difficult route. He can take the easy way to dominance and success. If you’re cynical, you will think that the people at the top are just there by accident anyway, and it might as well be you.
But there’s a lot of naivety and lack of wisdom in that notion. Being an actor means that you can pretend to be something you’re not and that that’s the clever route for anyone wise who wants success. It’s the ultimate example of cynicism and it’s a nihilistic perspective as well. That’s how they entrap him.
They convince him that going to school will take a very long time, and that his talents could make him famous in no time. And what does the puppet know? After-all, he does have some talents. He is, after all, a semi-autonomous puppet, but he doesn’t exactly know how special that makes him, but the fox can obviously see something in him and he’s good at playing that naivety off – and then offering false promises.
The Oedipal complex
What Freud observed was that there were usually not very good boundaries in families The relationship between the husband and the wife was either strained or non-existent and the wife would often turn to the child to get what she isn’t getting from the husband.
Watch south park season 10 – episode 7.
A summary of the episode: Cartman’s mother tries to find a way to discipline him but can’t. She tries hiring a nanny from reality TV shows but her plan backfires. Eventually, she hires Cesar the dog whisperer. He successfully helps her transform her relationship with her child from friend to mother. And Cartman is better adjusted for it. He loses weight and becomes more studios. But when she tries to get closer to Cesar by inviting him to go out with her, he refuses and maintains a professional relationship. She’s visibly upset in that last scene – and instantly reverses all progress with her son. She entices him to go out with her instead by bribing him with things Cartman enjoys. And the pathology continues.
Jung observed that there was a conspiracy. The oedipal mother tries to entice the child by offering him the choice of doing nothing in return for never leaving.
Watch Crumb for a real example of the Oedipal Complex. Read my summary of Crumb.
The child either goes one of two ways. One way is to become hyper-masculine – where he fights the mother in every instance. Hence, why children raised by single mothers tend to be that way often. And the other is for the child to become overly attached to his mother, and refuse to accept the burden of his responsibilities.
Pinocchio is invited to get everything he wants without sacrifice. People are fascinated with that idea – that’s why they watch the X-Factor for example. Narcissism in its purest form is when a talent-less person gets angry when criticized.
See the Jungian Persona for context.
Being an actor is Pinocchio’s first temptation because of his first interaction with the social world. The temptation in the social world is to be what other people want you to be. But you shouldn’t be “subjugating your individuality to your peers”.
Psychological Models
The Freudian Model (Not the Right Model) says that you have aggression and bad habits and they need to be inhibited (that’s the inhibition model).
The Piagetian Model (The better Model) says that you have aggression, and it gets socialized. You play games – but don’t repress your drive to win. You don’t respond negatively if you lose either. You learn how to play a set of games that include the darker parts of you. That’s better than inhibition.
The Jungian Persona
Jung talked about the persona – which is made up of the character traits that are socially acceptable, and are things you take pride in (compassion, charity). But the other parts of you – your shadow – shouldn’t be ignored. Some of those shadow aspects are good and some are bad, but they should play a role in your development.
If you’re a very compassionate person, you’re going to sacrifice yourself for other people all the time but that’s not always good. It’s especially not good to be overly compassionate with adults because they’ll take advantage of you.
Don’t run away from conflict at all costs. Even compassion can be dangerous. To get through life, you need to get outside your persona and develop socially undesirable qualities.
If the bug is the person who opens the hero narrative and who can guide the transformations of time and who has the same initials as Jesus Christ and is knighted by nature herself, why is he such an idiot?
It’s because the cricket isn’t omniscient – even though he has the voice of “common sense.” This fits in with Freudian superego because the superego can be flawed. It can be too harsh or not properly developed. You see that with orderly people. Orderly people like willpower, they’re very judgmental, and they like things to be exactly where they’re supposed to be but they’re also very self-punitive.
Stromboli isn’t happy with the tangled mess, but the crowd loves it. The conscience is confused and angry at what’s going on. Stromboli has a face of false kindness and generosity. He’s a representation of a puppet celebrity. He lives for praise and admiration. He’s conceited and deceptive. He’s driven only to please the crowd.
The Inflated Ego
Getting praise from many people can get to your head. Hitler interacted with the crowd and he was angry and charismatic. He hasn’t properly defined his values and he’s not very articulate, but the crowd loved him. Hitler spent time in the trenches in World War 1 and lost all his friends. Then he was unemployed and his career as an artist didn’t work out. Then there was hyperinflation and there was a communist threat from the east. And the Germans had a terrible treaty they had to sign – no one in Germany was happy. Hitler talked to his audience, and some of what he said made the crowd wake up and listen, so he said more of those things. And he would stop saying the things that would fall flat. There was an unconscious dialectic between him and the crowd being mediated by consciousness.
Crowds got bigger. And more people agreed with him. If you get to a point where everyone is telling you that you’re the savior of their nation, at what point do you start to believe it? A typical person? A hundred people will do it. A million people? Forget about it…
Of course, Hitler was also consciously manipulating people and hired propagandists, but still bear the message. Hitler learned to appeal to crowd’s darkest fantasies. You don’t need approval when a million people are supporting you.
The Gulag Archipelago
The secret police kick down your door and force you to admit you did wrong. Why do they want your collaboration? They don’t want to allow you to exist outside the rules.
If you don’t know what the rule is, and you break it, it’s bad. But if you do know, it’s much worse (a Jungian idea).
Pinocchio lied to the blue fairy because on some level he knows that he did something wrong. When he lies – his nose grows to ridiculous lengths.
“One of the advantages to telling the truth is you don’t have to remember what you said”
Don’t lie to someone who’s paranoid. They’re hyper-vigilant because they feel everything is predatory. The thing with lying is that it’s a hydra. Pinocchio keeps lying but he gets a pass at first.
Rousseau’s idea was that children are perfect before they hit a certain age and society corrupts them. But Peterson’s idea is that that’s only half true. Children are also not good and society shapes and disciplines them.
Pinocchio learns: Don’t be an actor. Don’t lie.
Now we’re at the Red Lobster Inn and it’s a shadowy place, kind of cave-like, it’s an underground entrance to somewhere that’s not good. It’s a foggy night, and you can’t really see, so everything’s murky and gloomy inside. We see the coachman and the fox and the cat. The coachman is a bad guy – he’s that mask that we saw in the beginning. He’s the archetype of that mask that was judgmental about Pinocchio having a voice.
Dante’s Inferno
One of the primary impediments to enlightenment (in discovering your shadow) is that if you start looking at your motives for misbehaving, and I mean by that something very specific I don’t mean that you’re misbehaving by someone else’s standards, I mean: when you know by your own standards that you’re doing something that devious or malevolent or underhanded you know it, and you still do it, so it’s your own judgment you’re bringing to bear on yourself. If you look at why you’re doing that, the longer you look at it, the deeper a hole you dig.
This is the motif of Dante’s Inferno, fundamentally.
Dante’s led into hell by Virgil, who is an ancient philosopher, thinker (he was a poet) and hell has many levels. The outer level seems like normal life and inhabited by the ancient philosophers. They’re still in hell, because they weren’t Christian but it’s like a cheap motel version of hell instead of the full pit thing.
Dante goes deeper into hell until he gets right to the bottom of it. Satan himself is encased in ice at the bottom of hell surrounded by people who betray others. Dante’s notion was that worst of all possible violations of moral behavior was betrayal. They’re in the deepest levels hell, and this seems to be true.
If you uncover the real reason you betray someone, you need to go through many layers. But when you finally get to the bottom – you’ll find out something very ugly about yourself.
The fox and the cat are petty examples of criminality and evil and then there’s the coachman, and he’s the real thing. But he’s not really showing anybody who he is and then in one scene in the bar he lets his guard down, and he lets them see what he’s really like. You see his teeth and predatory eyes and the glee at the same time.
The fox and the cat are terrified. They’re not talented enough to be truly evil. But they don’t know how to be good. The fox doesn’t know how to get actively involved in evil. He tries to seduce people into falling for traps. That’s how he gains his edge, but he’s subservient to someone who truly is evil and masterfully crafts a plot.
If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.