Maps of Meaning I

I don’t consider myself to be an anxious person. On the Big 5 personality test I have quite a low score on neuroticism, which means I don’t have strong negative reactions and moods in the face of instability. That's all great and everything, but it doesn’t mean I experience zero stress or anxiety. In fact, in the last week a fresh perspective on my daily habits revealed that I may have more anxiety than I would have thought. The insight came from ruminating on Jordan Peterson’s seminal work, “Maps of Meaning: the Architecture of Belief”, in which he explores the psycho-analytical understanding of the world’s formalized religions and iconography. His 2nd chapter covers the di-polar nature of reality, that of the known and the unknown, and how we, as the knowers, have to navigate life with both territories in mind. By psychological definition, the unknown causes anxiety. Because we do not know what is in the territory of all that is unknown, it holds the potential to be threatening. Yet, in equal measure, it holds the potential to be promising. A certain amount of fear is reasonable in face of the potential of an unknown threat, but it must be balanced with a concomitant sense of optimism about the potential of promise. In other words, there is a zone of optimal expectation for something good to be found in the unknown while simultaneously being on guard against that which might harm us.

I wake up at 5am most days, and the general goal is to read and write and do interesting things to start my day. However, the reality is that I go through phases where instead of doing interesting things, I will passively watch interesting things. That would be, I watch YouTube videos on various topics that interest me. To go another level deeper into transparency, I’ll often play an incredibly stupid game called diep.io (everyone go play it, it’s fun) while listening to a podcast. This second rate start to my day is not one that I am trying to repeat, and so I’ll eventually phase it out and get back to reading and writing, which is what I am trying to repeat. I have higher expectations of myself than “wasting” my morning in this manner, and I judge myself against that standard. This introduces a level of anxiety as I think about the precious time I have on this goldilocks planet and the way I may be squandering it. But, for the first time, I’m seeing that the anxiety doesn’t arrive on the scene when I start judging my behavior. That only exacerbates it. It actually arrives before all that. It arrives in response to uncertainty.

We are on an island of light, surrounded by an immense and immeasurable sea of darkness. The more territory we conquer and reveal, the greater the boundary area of the unknown. The more you learn, the less you know. You get the idea. Putting things in this way obviously highlights the threat potential in the unknown. (There is another way of seeing it, and I’ll get to that later). For now, the point is that every time we grow and expand our capacities, we enter new and unknown territory, which entails the risk of bumping into something we weren’t expecting to find. I bought a house, yay, but now I get URGENT letters from my mortgage lender about Hazard Insurance and EXPIRING HOME WARRANTY, that are specifically designed to INDUCE ANXIETY. SOMETHING BAD COULD HAPPEN AT ANY MOMENT! This new endeavor of owning a home entails a litany of new responsibilities, some of which I could not have imagined. As Julia and I move forward through time, the unknown makes itself known, and we have to develop new knowledge in how to appropriately navigate the new territory. So, not only is there a measure of inherent uncertainty in voyaging into the new and unknown, but certain agencies (our lender) will make every effort to drum up the imagination that many truly horrible things exist in that unknown space. Insurance and warranties appeal to the desire to control the anxiety which precipitates from the unknown. It is hard to argue with that line of reasoning, because, by definition, we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Am I up to the challenge of maintaining the home that I’ve purchased? Do I have what it takes? What if I fail? Am I pursuing the things that really matter in life? Am I pursuing the things that matter to me? What if I pursue something that matters to me and find that it doesn’t matter to life, and I ruin everything? Do I need to make more money so that I can provide better for Bobbie and my future children? Is there something I should be doing that I’m not, and it’s going to bite me when I least expect it? Are there a whole set of habits and behaviors that I should have mastered long ago that would have set me up for success (whatever that is), but I didn’t master them, and now everything is going to slowly fall apart? Will everyone I love leave me?

All of those uncertainties cause some anxiety, filling the territory of the unknown with potential of threat. So, to balance out the potential Chaos of the unknown, I instinctively reach for behaviors that add more weight to the territory of Order. That is, the domain of behaviors that are habitual, known, routine. Perhaps I can block out the threats by engaging in familiar routines that have been proven to ameliorate negative experiences of the past. Coping mechanisms. Play a video game. Make coffee. Watch YouTube. Distract myself. Disengage from encountering the territory of the unknown, because I’ve convinced myself that it holds more threat than promise.

While I don’t specifically ask the above questions of myself on a daily basis, they all resonate with me. I recognize them, because I’ve met them before, and I haven’t really understood how to answer them. They represent a large territory of unknowns. More than that, the questions all presuppose that the unknown carries threat rather than promise. If I were an interviewer trying to trap myself in an interview, trying to force a certain response, I’d ask questions that have underlying assumptions about the topic discussed. Something like “How fast does the Sun orbit the earth?” or “Why do people dislike you so much?” These are the types of questions you shouldn’t answer, because to even begin to answer them is to validate the assumptions they entail. The best response to these types of questions is to say “You’re asking the wrong question.”

The litany of questions above are more subtle, because the assumptions they arise out of are ones that are not so easily identifiable. At least, the assumptions aren’t so easily countered when identified. They may even look sensible. They arise out of the same types of assumptions that make insurance and warranties appear so reasonable. They assume that the unknown carries threat, and you can’t really argue with it, because, maybe it does! You don’t know if the cities sewer line will back up, and the whole neighborhood’s sewage will come gushing backwards through your toilet and flood your house. It’s happened before. Do you want to risk that? Do you? If you pay me 150$ a month, I’ll take care of everything so you don’t have to worry about it.

Me: “So, you’ll make sure my house won’t flood?”

Insurance artist: “Oh, no, we’ll just cover some of the cost of everything that will be destroyed when it does happen."

Me: “What percentage of homes in this area does that happen to?”

Insurance artist: “Well, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it does happen sometimes. I had a friend who bought a new home out here in Phoenix, and the city utilities service somehow missed cleaning the sewer lines on their street, and then there was a flash flood, and, guess what, her whole basement got flooded by sewage that came back up her toilet!”

Me: “I’ll pass.”

Have you ever tried to argue an anxious person out of their anxiety? It is nearly impossible. The reason for this is that it’s instinctual to justify anxiety, and you can’t argue that the bad thing they fear won’t happen, because you don’t know that it won’t. Something horrible could happen. It could kill you. There may actually be a monster in the closet. You could get in a car accident. The plane may crash. You might get Covid. You may not have enough money. You may not be smart enough. The republicans might win the majority. The democrats might win the majority. We may elect the wrong President. The world, truly, could end. The unknown contains all these monsters, and much, much more. Trying to reason someone out of their specific fears is so difficult because our neuropsychological hardwiring is literally geared for threat response. Jordan Peterson summarizes this battle with the unknown, and our response to it, like this:

Appreciation of the nature of the unknown as a category developed as a consequence of our inherent response to what we did not expect, manifested as predictable patterns of affect and behavior: fear and curiosity, terror and hope, inhibition of ongoing activity and cautious exploration, “habituation” and generation of novel and situation-specific appropriate behavioral strategies. (Maps of Meaning, pp. 152).

You’ll notice, of course, that terror is only one potential response to the nature of the unknown. We could feel hope. Instead of fear, we could feel curiosity. The way the above quote is structured leads us to assume that, in general, there is a 50/50 chance that fear is the appropriate response to the unknown, and a 50/50 chance that hope is. But there is something else happening that needs to be unpackaged here.

Fear and hope are actually second level responses to the unknown. The first level, which gives rise to fear and hope, is belief. I believe something bad will happen, therefore I feel fear. I believe something good will happen, therefore I feel hope. The question isn’t primarily whether we should feel fear or hope, but what should we believe? Our feelings, anxiety or peace, fear or hope, will follow our beliefs. But beliefs are not so simply formed as to be understood as a mere response to environmental stimuli.

I’m cautious of diving too quickly into how beliefs are formed, because the waters here are murky. Belief doesn’t seem to be equivalent to knowledge, because I can believe something good will happen in the future, but can’t truly know whether that’s true. Furthermore, words are going to start bending, even breaking, under the weight of such massive concepts, so a whole article (or more) will need to be dedicated to exploring the minutiae of this topic.

For now, I want to wrap up this elongated prosaic meandering by delivering this concept. Let’s say it really is a 50/50 chance that the future and all of the unknowns about to emerge out of the shadows will be threatening and a 50/50 chance they’ll be promising. Would you rather spend the present in fear, expecting the worst, or enjoy the present with hope, prepared to be surprised by how wonderful life could be? if it really is just a 50/50 split, wouldn’t it make sense to live more days in hope than in fear? If the second option seems foolish, consider a lesson I learned from being amongst people in extreme poverty. It feels natural to assume that thankfulness is a byproduct of receiving something, of having good things. Happiness is the child of plenty, no? Well, no, it’s not. As many others have discovered, gratitude and happiness are states of being that can occur, even flourish, in the absence of even the barest necessities. In fact, they may be the very reasons why and how people survive deprivation of many kinds. Hope, gratitude, joy, peace. These qualities can be manifest in the harshest conditions, suggesting that they are not byproducts of circumstance. They are the qualities of spirit that I found when I was at my lowest point. They are the angels, as it were, that guided me out of the valley of the shadow of death.

But, I’m beginning to mix domains, here. Psychoanalytic philosophy and personal spiritual experience have a shared territory, to be sure, but they’re approaching the phenomenology of life from quite different perspectives. Stay tuned for my next post, Oct. 17th, to explore where else we might go.