Imagination’s Realm, Where the Spirit Thrives
The Uniting Power of Story: Understanding Stories Through Abstractions
The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s conversation with Angus Fletcher on how we understand stories through abstractions. You can listen to or watch the full podcast on DailyWire+.
Start time: 34:43
Dreams: The Abstract Representation of Patterns
Dreams are precognitive in some sense. This is how I think it works: We are watching people act all the time — all the time — in small groups, in large groups, as individuals, in fiction, all the time. So we have this vast knowledge of embodied action. Now, that is not propositionalized. It is imagistic. It is like the movie that runs in your head. It is like a dream, and we cannot propositionalize all that. That is partly what a great storyteller does, [a storyteller] takes a great set of images that reflect a compelling pattern of behavior and turn it into verbalized propositions.
Imagine you have these images of behavior, and in those images, there are patterns. But we do not know what the patterns are because they are extremely sophisticated, and we are not intelligent enough to fully understand them, which is only to say that human behavior, at the individual and the social level, supersedes our explicit grasp. No one would dispute that. That is why you have to learn about yourself, which is kind of a strange thing. You are you, but you do not know who you are. So, we have these patterns of behavior at hand. Then we abstract out images of those patterns of behavior, and that is, at least in part, the source of dreams. It is the abstract representation of the patterns — not of the actual behaviors themselves but of the commonalities — the commonalities between behaviors.
The Power of Fantasy Play and Religious Conceptions
You talked about the Greek gods as being super humans. So imagine this: There are patterns of behavior that strike us as admirable. Those are in our zone of proximal development; otherwise, we do not understand them. Our brain — and maybe this is a right hemisphere function — makes associations between these patterns of admirable behavior based on their emotional commonality. Then it abstracts out a pattern that constitutes that set of admirable behaviors. OK, that is a super stimulus that is a hero or, perhaps, someone who is successful at romance.
I will go back to childhood. I was struck when my children were young about their fantasy play. I was very interested in fantasy play as a psychological phenomenon. One of the things that is interesting about watching children pretend play is that we tend to say that what they are doing is imitating. So, say they are playing “father” when they play house. But they are not actually imitating because they never do exactly what they saw their father do. What they do is watch their father across multiple manifestations of father behavior, and they combine that with fathers in books and fathers in movies. They are pulling out a pattern of the father, and that is made out of all these representations of these behavioral patterns. Then the fantasy is trying to represent that abstractly in images to draw out the central spirit, and the spirit is the thing that is imitated. That is what drives the fantasy play.
I will jump one more place here. I also think that is the source of the abstraction of religious conceptions. Imagine that you extract out the Father as such. It is not characteristic of any one human being. It is that ideal spirit that transcends the individual that is immortal in some sense because it manifests itself in body after body throughout time. [Carl] Jung talked about this space where these transcendent spirits existed. This is something almost no one knows about his work. He called that the Pleroma, and the Pleroma was the space where abstracted figures of imagination exist above temporality and death. It is a very weird way of thinking about it. You can imagine there is this space that is composed of the collective imagination. In that collective imagination, there are beings, and those beings outlast all of us. I am not making a case that that place is material the same way that we think of materiality, but all the human nervous systems are constituent elements of that space, and those characters inhabit that. It does not matter if one person dies; the spirit continues. You can think about the spirit of evil that way. And you can think about our attempts to represent it.
The Role of Stories in Artificial Realities
Here is another interesting thought: My brother-in-law is a computer chip designer. He is one of the best computer chip designers in the world. I have had very interesting conversations with him about computation and artificial intelligence. To your point about the importance of stories, much of what drives the demand for higher and higher computational resources is the economic viability of producing artificial realities for fantasy simulation to play out scenarios like the eternal battle between good and evil. Those Marvel movies, the superhero movies, cost hundreds of millions of dollars; they are unbelievably technologically sophisticated. They gather huge audiences. That is part of the representation of that Pleroma.
To hear the rest of the discussion, continue by listening or watching this episode on DailyWire+.
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now listen to or watch his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
Straction, extracting the underlying patterns, and adopting them in our lives, we can find meaning and agency. In a divided world, stories have the potential to unite us and remind us of our shared humanity and experiences.
Ature of
experience, all the products of human culture, are generated within that weird space in some sense.
That is where you have to go — and I have been there, and a lot of people have been there — to experience
the collective storehouse of imagination.
Understanding Stories Through Abstraction
When we listen to stories, we are abstracting out patterns of behavior. A great
story allows us to abstract out the patterns of admirable behavior that we would adopt if we were playing the
role of [[the hero]], say. Not simply because the hero is strong and admirable, but also because of the abstract
pattern that the hero represents. That is a pattern that we take out of the story, and we carry that pattern forth
into our lives. That is what truly great stories do:
- They present us with a representation of admirable behavior.
- They allow us to extract out the abstract pattern that underlies that behavior.
- They motivate us to adopt that pattern in our own lives.
Stories give us a map of how to be successful in the world. They give us an
ideal abstract pattern of success, and then we can transform that into action in the world. Great stories can
give us meaning because they allow us to derive a meaningful pattern of behavior, and then we can practice
enacting that pattern. That is where agency comes from — the capacity to bring something about in individual
and social experience. That is the goal of human life, to be able to bring something noble into being — to bring
something righteous into being, something that confronts the way things are and makes them better.
The Power of Story to Unite
Finally, stories have the potential to unite us. Stories have an underlying abstract
structure that all human beings can resonate with. They operate at that fundamental level of abstraction that
is accessible to all. That is why they can transcend individual differences and bring people together. A truly
great story can resonate with everyone, regardless of their cultural or linguistic background, because it speaks
to those fundamental patterns and archetypes that are common to all human beings.
In a world that is increasingly divided and fragmented, stories have the power to
bridge the gaps between us. They have the power to remind us of our shared humanity, our shared desires, our
shared struggles. When we engage with stories, we tap into that deeper level of understanding and empathy,
and we realize that despite our surface-level differences, we are all connected by our common experiences,
our shared joys and sorrows.
So, let us embrace the uniting power of story. Let us recognize the abstract patterns
that stories offer us, and let us use those patterns to guide our actions and shape our lives. By understanding
stories through ab
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