Jordan Peterson is a controversial figure today, but his 1999 book is sometimes said to have revolutionized the psychology of religion. His goal when writing Maps of Meaning, he explains, was to see if there was anything solid at the foundations of western culture, to see if it had any merit over the communist ideology of the Soviet Union (which still seemed strong when he started writing). The resulting book draws on neuropsychological research to support a cybernetic view of our brains, which regulates various needs while monitoring experience for anomalous information. It also consults literary criticism, comparative religion, ancient traditions and the psychological literature, finding remarkable parallels. This video is admittedly low-effort, but aims to explain the resulting Maps of Meaning-model and deliver the gist of the book. If you would rather see more videos like this, made with less effort than work like the Cheat Sheet series, please let me know; I will take it into account. There are two things I wish I had made more clear in the recording. The first is the developmental pathways that he finds for the christian narrative, and how it is not that christianity is special - just that as far as he knows various traditions that have survived, he thinks it gets the most right. The second is that in consequence, Dr. Bret Weinstein's attempt at explaining Peterson's ideas as "metaphorical truth" is misleading, since it is first of all about testing procedures by noting if they lead to desirable outcomes. Procedures that pass this test for you lend legitimacy to the propositions on which you thought you were acting, until the procedures these propositions point towards no longer pass that test. Thus, it is procedural truth, and it underlies all of science. It is not an alternative to science. It *is* proto-science, which has not been followed through with sufficient rigor to get the accuracy and reliability we associate with science today. Only extremely exact practices such as moon-landings and building nanomachines require the precision to make us notice that, and the things we are usually concerned with, such as what food to eat, how to respond to strange things and how to be liked by other people, are much more pressing. That last point may warrant its own video, which was the video I previously intended to work on next, but it concerns the subtitle of the book - the "architecture of belief", or how our beliefs are structured, fall apart and depend on each other. If it appears true to us, we believe it, until it no longer does. Then the question is how much goes away with it, and this question is probably the most disputable part of the book as far as its central point goes.