Introduction
In this post, I am going to attempt to articulate a perspective that, over the last eight years, has matured from a tiny seed to a deeply rooted, life-changing, and still vigorously growing personal reality. I remember vividly the first faint tremor—the prelude to the quake that would upend a worldview, topple a vocation, and reshape the whole rhythm and orientation of my life: the day in January 2017 when Sam Harris, whose scientific-materialist-rationalist perspective was at that time influential on my thinking and my lived reality, hosted Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson on his popular podcast, Making Sense. In the ensuing years, I devoured all of Peterson’s university lectures, including multiple iterations of Personality and its Transformations1 and Maps of Meaning2, as well as Peterson’s difficult but world-altering book, Maps of Meaning3, and his groundbreaking lectures, The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories4. From there, the tree of my exploration branched rapidly and joyfully, to the work of John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Jonathan Pageau, Matthieu Pageau, and on, and on. I was initially motivated to write this to crystallize my own understanding, as it stands today. I have decided to share because it is blindingly evident that my journey is deeply resonant with that of countless others within the space of what is now widely known as the meaning crisis5.
Speaking on a recent podcast6, Jordan Hall, another one of the most consistently high signal voices in this space, succinctly sketched the backdrop: “We are facing a material reality that is ultimately a spiritual crisis because, for 500 years we’ve been sold a trade, trading spiritual reality for material abundance. That’s the trade that was made after the 30 years war, at the emergence of liberalism. That trade is breaking down, and we’re finding that we have neither. And, to respond, it’s not going to be: let us continue to endeavor to pump up on the material side, but rather, can we migrate to the spiritual? Can we actually rebuild from that location? Because that’s the center; that’s the place from which abundance flows; that’s the place from which living water flows; that’s the place from which community comes.”
For 500 years we have been systematically flattening hierarchies, decontextualizing persons, mechanizing causes, dissecting creatures, deconstructing texts, intervening in complex systems, manufacturing our own meaning, and disenchanting the world. Ours has variously been dubbed the time of the meaning crisis, the metacrisis, the omnicrisis, the eco crisis, the mental health crisis, the chronic disease epidemic, the everything bubble, the Fourth Turning7 and the age of The Machine8.
This, I propose, is the tectonic backdrop of the deep divisions, upheavals and tensions that have come to saturate just about all domains of contemporary life. The monumental shift from a pre-Renaissance ontology rooted in the question, what is the world like, and what are the implications for how I ought to act in it towards my highest purpose?, to a post-Enlightenment ontology rooted in the question, what is the world made of, and what are the implications for how I might best manipulate it toward my own ends?
I propose that this five-hundred year left-hemisphere dominated9 detour in human history has run its course, terminating in the decontextualized, atomized individual, frantically pursuing disruptive innovation and growth for its own sake, and struggling to invent meaning and identity from scratch, all while unconsciously sawing off the ontological branch on which he sits. The sacred hierarchy of value is pervasively assaulted, and at every turn we see the promotion of maximal idiosyncrasy, intersectionality, and the embrace of base instincts, urges and immutable characteristics as the locus of personal identity. Virtue-signalling has displaced virtue, the decontextualized individual has displaced the sovereign person, society has displaced community, identity has displaced personhood, simulated thinking10 has displaced thinking, the state and the market have displaced the sacred commons, and fiat currency has displaced money. It is clear that humanity is at a critical nexus, with simultaneous potential for tremendous positive transformation and catastrophic collapse. We have an adaptive valley to cross.
My purpose here is to articulate the ground from which each of us individually, and ultimately our whole culture, might regenerate the sacred commons as we cross that adaptive valley to a renewed world—one grounded in intimate communion and human scale community, in which the good, the true, and the beautiful are once again understood to be inseparable and indispensable.
I beg the reader’s grace and generosity as I stretch for words to articulate a reality still shimmering at the edge of my consciousness.
An implicit hierarchy of value, and the capacity to recognize and orient to it, are inherent in the ground of reality
Value is inherent in the ground of reality. This axiom is evidenced by goal-directed behavior—motivated patterns of action in service of movement from one state to another—observable at every level of the natural world. The motivation to expend energy to move from one state to another implies that the goal state must be preferable to, hence more valuable than, the current state. Such motivated patterns of action depend on a capacity to attend and to determine relevance. It is axiomatic that the capacity to adaptively direct attention in a combinatorially explosive world reveals the existence of an underlying hierarchy of attention-worthiness or value. University of Toronto cognitive scientist John Vervaeke refers to the faculty that permits us to perceive and orient to the implicit hierarchy of value as relevance realization.
As Vervaeke articulates, the sheer scale of the combinatorial explosion presented by even the simplest daily scenarios means that calculating and rank ordering every possible combination of facts and objects to determine relevance is categorically beyond the scope of human cognitive capacity. Instead, awash in a near infinite sea of facts and objects—and an unfathomable number of potential combinations thereof—we generate a salience landscape that effortlessly foregrounds and backgrounds phenomena for adaptive action.
Additionally, as has been dramatically demonstrated by Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts University, the simplest life forms, and even the smallest subcomponents of biological systems, exhibit patterns of action characterized by an unmistakable telos directed toward identifiable ends, along with some capacity to intelligently route around obstacles in continued pursuit of their telos. In some sense, the faculty of relevance realization appears to go all the way down.
A pre-existing hierarchy of value, along with the capacity to perceive and orient to it, is therefore implicit in the very ground of reality. Any attempt to deny the existence of such an underlying hierarchy of value, or the capacity to perceive it, founders on the performative contradiction of the denier attending, determining relevance, and acting, by necessity. This is simply the nature of the world in which we find ourselves, whether or not we wish to acknowledge it.
The emergent, bottom-up nature of the hierarchy of value in nature
This is a deeply Darwinian reality, in that it reflects the natural (environmental), sexual and social/cultural selection pressures that have conditioned life for over 3 billion years. These pressures represent a set of constraints that separate viable modes of being from nonviable modes of being—life from death, in the final analysis. Everything that is alive today has an unbroken line of ancestors, each of whom successfully contended with all three of these selection pressures, representing a tiny subset of everything that has ever lived (the vast majority, by contrast, failed to run at least one of these gauntlets). Therefore, the hierarchy of value is not a subjective, relativistic choice on the part of the individual. Instead, relative value in the hierarchy of value is equivalent to the degree to which something favors life over death over the longest timespan.
This quality of value ladenness manifests in experience through warring subpersonalities or “small-g gods”—basic needs and instincts, emotions, drives, and urges—that demand immediate gratification, often without regard for longer term consequences, e.g., fight/flight/freeze, hunger, libido, anger, fear, aggression, etc.
In the non-human natural world, these “small-g gods” are decisive, producing hierarchies of value that are inherently rivalrous and high time preference, something that also characterizes young and/or immature humans. Because animals, and young/immature humans, cannot conceive of or orient themselves toward an abstract apex in the hierarchy of value—toward “big-G God”—they lack the capacity to subjugate and integrate their “small-g gods” in a manner that would allow them to transcend their natures. They are in effect trapped in a largely deterministic, bottom-up reality.
The human capacity to generate a sacred hierarchy of value & the emergence of religion
From a mature human perspective, endowed with the capacity to conceptualize and orient towards such an abstracted apex (“big-G God”), the hierarchy of value has been rendered a sacred hierarchy of value, with the power to subjugate, integrate and regulate all of the “small-g gods” to their appropriate places within the hierarchy of value, in service to that which is highest. Human beings therefore have a unique capacity to substantially reorient their bottom-up Darwinian nature into one governed instead by a telos that flows downward from a highly sophisticated highest governing principle. In fact, human maturation is synonymous with this process: the increasing subjugation and integration of “small-g gods” into a coherent and increasingly sovereign person, by orienting toward an ever higher highest governing principle.
Unlike the rivalrous, high time preference hierarchies of the natural world, this reoriented sacred hierarchy of value is, at its apex, non-rivalrous, capable of integrating all that is made subservient to it, and eternal in its time preference. It may be defined as that which discloses meaning and promotes and enhances flourishing—of the human person, the family, and every subsequent concentric circle of community, humanity, and the interconnected natural world—today, tomorrow and on toward eternity. The human capacity to collectively generate and establish at scale such shared sacred hierarchies of value, governed by a highest governing principle with immense power to bind and produce highly adaptive and resilient civilizations, is what gave birth to the universal human practice of religion.
The ultimate objectivity of the sacred hierarchy of value & the resulting need for salvation
This grounding in the eternal perspective renders the sacred hierarchy of value, in the limit, also an objective hierarchy of value. Just as increasing distance magnifies the archer’s faults, to the point of tolerating none, so too does living toward eternity distill viable patterns of thought and action, to the point of singularity. Objectivity does not here imply that there is one single path to be followed equally by all people, but rather that every person—unique in themselves and their circumstances—who seriously orients toward eternity while navigating the dynamically changing world, will find that their viable paths effectively collapse toward a singular, necessarily unattainable platonic ideal. Eternal aim reveals an objective “straight line” against which the inevitably “crooked line” of every finite, embodied life is laid bare. I propose it is the apprehension of this yawning delta, between the flawed finite and the eternal ideal, that gives rise to the deep human need for salvation. It is no surprise that both the New Testament Greek (ἁμαρτία, hamartía) and Old Testament Hebrew ( חֵטְא ḥēt’) words for sin have their roots in archery references to “missing the mark” and thereby missing the true goal (telos) of human action aligned with God. The highest point on the sacred hierarchy of value is therefore synonymous with God—is God, even—the difference in practice is purely semantic. We find that an implicit monotheism lies at the root of reality.
The bottom-up emergence and accretion of the sacred hierarchy of value into Maps of Meaning
The nature and order of the sacred hierarchy of value emerged from embodied patterns of action, and accreted over vast spans of time into premodern wisdom traditions or maps of meaning. This accretion occurred over countless generations of observation, imitation, iteration and cultural transmission. The resulting mythological and symbolic systems of value address the question, what is the world like, and what are the implications for how I ought to act in it? , by distilling the sacred hierarchy of value to its essence and orienting toward its apex.
This age-old human foundation in a vertical ontology, with a purposeful upward orientation toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, stands in stark contrast to the horizontal ontology of linear and mechanical causality in a value-neutral arena—rooted in the question, what is the world made of, and what are the implications for how I might best manipulate it toward my own ends?—that began to take root during the Renaissance, and accelerated through the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, right up to the present day.
The older and more fundamental human reality manifests phenomenologically as agent in a value-laden arena grounded in an implicit hierarchy of value. This reality is characterized by four primary mythological/symbolic elements: nature (which in symbolic representation includes both the natural environment and female-mediated sexual selection), culture, the known and the unknown. The agent, aligned more or less properly with the implicit hierarchy of value, interacts with and mediates between these constituent elements, discerning better from worse, and plotting his course accordingly. This navigational process depends completely on relevance realization, the capacity to perceive and use the value-ladeness of the ground of reality to parse and act on—in a highly context-appropriate manner—the tiny subset of the relevant from the near-infinite set of the irrelevant.
Meaning is disclosed through proper participation in the sacred hierarchy of value
In the short term, the phenomenological experience of meaning consists of encountering nature, culture, the known and the unknown, successfully calibrating one’s attention, determining relevance, plotting a course, and then making progress from worse toward better in the value-laden arena. This moment-to-moment or day-to-day experience of meaning is synonymous with being optimally situated at the dynamic boundary between order and chaos, the known and the unknown—what might be described as the “flow state” or one’s zone of proximal development.
However, meaning in life—that which endures beyond the immediacy of experience—is not achieved merely by chaining together a succession of these transient states of felt meaningfulness. The short-term sense of meaning can, in fact, be profoundly misleading. What may at first seem to signal a promising path toward fulfillment, all too often dissolves into futility and despair in the fullness of time. The experience of such meaninglessness, despair, or nihilism signals a misalignment between attention, relevance realization, and action, and the sacred hierarchy of value. Such misalignment can arise through idolatry—elevating a “small-g god” or an inadequate principle to the highest place—or through rebellion against the very existence of a hierarchy of value. The attempt to manufacture one’s own meaning, or to deny meaning altogether, thus produces the very desolation it seeks to avoid. The inevitable difficulty and gravity of life is such that it is unlikely to be borne with grace, unless it is adequately buttressed by voluntary self-sacrifice of sufficient magnitude, in service of a sufficiently high governing principle. Or, to recapitulate an archery metaphor, the arrow of one’s life is unlikely to achieve optimal flight if it is aimed at too proximate a target. Entire lifetimes are routinely consumed in this manner: in pursuit of short-term signifiers of meaning, often dubbed happiness, only to end in emptiness.
Experiences of meaning, or lack thereof, might be understood as biochemical navigational signals mediated by neurotransmitters, that provide continual feedback about the quality of one’s relevance realization—in essence, alignment with the good, the true, and the beautiful is rewarded, and deviation punished with psychological distress, emptiness and despair. The experience of pain—whether physical or psychological—is a key corrective. Here it is crucial to distinguish between hormetic and non-hormetic pain. Hormetic pain is the necessary suffering that accompanies growth—such as the bodily strain of exercise or the psychic dissolution that precedes positive transformation. Non-hormetic pain, by contrast, reflects sustained misalignment with the sacred order, a failure to orient properly toward the good, or, in some cases, illness—often itself the consequence of such deeper misalignment.
Durable meaning—the kind that orients an entire life toward eternity—is not self-manufactured. It is disclosed through proper participation: optimally mediating the dynamic boundary between order and chaos, while aiming steadfastly toward the highest conceivable good. Each of us is ultimately faced with three alternatives: 1. Attempt to side-step self-sacrifice, or grudgingly self-sacrifice, and discover that we have been sacrificed anyway by the inevitable passage of time, likely stewing in our own resentment; 2. Willfully self-sacrifice, and become self-righteous and pharisaic; or 3. Subordinate ourselves to the highest principle, and gracefully self-sacrifice in the spirit, “not My will, but Yours, be done.” The robustness and durability of meaning in life ultimately rests on the degree to which that life was lived as a voluntary self-sacrifice in service of that which is highest. Meaning, therefore, is not a product of the will; it is a revelation that unfolds in proportion to life lived in alignment with what is most real and most high.
Whether we recognize it or not, each of us is living out a continual cycle of attention, relevance realization and action that is either spiraling upward toward greater participation in the sacred order, or spiraling downward into chaos and dissolution. Nothing is more vital in a human life than discerning and embodying the upward trajectory of this dynamic—for in doing so, meaning is not created, but revealed.
The optimal mode of being: embodiment of the mediating principle oriented toward the highest governing principle
There is no distinction between sustained human flourishing, the experience of deepest meaning, and being in optimal relationship with this deep reality. Due to the fact that the natural environment continually changes, this optimal relationship can be neither a static state—a condition of rigid and ossified order—nor an infinitely flexible state—a condition devoid of the distinctions, categories and identities necessary for the disclosure of meaning and for social coordination. The optimal and most meaningful relationship between human agent and value-laden arena is characterized by continual interplay between continuity/stability and adaptation/exploration via the attention ⇨ relevance realization ⇨ action cycle, in which the agent is oriented toward the apex in the hierarchy of value.
The optimal mode of being consists of ever more perfect embodiment of the mediating principle rooted in unwavering orientation toward the highest governing principle. This mode is characterized by a cyclical process of continual individual and cultural death and revivification, encoded mythologically in countless iterations over thousands of years11, culminating in the interpenetration of the symbolic and the historical in the person, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, whose voluntary death, subjection to the underworld, and ultimate defeat of death in the resurrection finally and completely bridges the yawning delta between the flawed finite and the eternal ideal mentioned earlier. To restate the optimal mode in explicitly Christian terms, the optimal mode of being is nothing more or less than ever more perfect imitation and embodiment of Jesus, rooted in unwavering orientation toward God the Father.
Conclusion
As I suggested in my opening, I believe that we—individually and collectively—have an adaptive valley to cross, and that none of the dominant modes are adequate to the task. There is no political victory that can secure the future, and no ideology that has all of the answers. It is time to dig deep into our ancient human inheritance, embody the spirit of the hero, the shaman, the prophet, the Christ, and set out on a transformative adventure. It is time for every one of us who is picking up the signal I have tried to amplify here to look up and ensure that—in every domain of our lives—we are truly oriented toward the apex of the sacred hierarchy of value, properly subordinating all that ought to be subordinate, and fully embodying the mediating principle. All of this must be done in action—in real, lived virtue. It is time to weave a new vertical ontology that integrates the ancient sacred hierarchy of value with the best aspects of the post-Enlightenment, while shedding its worst excesses and fatal misapprehensions. Perhaps together we may just be able to sidestep the monstrous march toward AI driven centralization, algorithmic manipulation and siloing, message and mind control, fifth-generation warfare (5GW), state and corporate gigantism, state and corporate surveillance, and social engineering, characterized by CBDCs, digital IDs, social credit scores, and UBI. Let us band together, fall into deep relationship with one another and nature—into deepest human reality—and renew the sacred commons.
- Personality and its Transformations, lectures by Jordan B. Peterson ↩︎
- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, lectures by Jordan B. Peterson ↩︎
- Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning; An Architecture of Belief (1999) ↩︎
- The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, lectures by Jordan B. Peterson ↩︎
- The term The Meaning Crisis originated with University of Toronto cognitive scientist, John Vervaeke, who erupted into the public consciousness with his epic 50 episode YouTube lecture series, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis
↩︎ - Beauty is an Act of War, Grey Hamilton & Jordan Hall ↩︎
- The Fourth Turning, William Strauss & Neil Howe (1997) ↩︎
- Refer to the work of Paul Kingsnorth, including Against The Machine; On the Unmaking of Humanity ↩︎
- Refer to the work of Iain McGilchrist, including The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021) for a deep treatment of this claim ↩︎
- On Thinking and Simulated Thinking, Jordan Hall (2018) ↩︎
- Relevant mythological echoes include, 1. The self-immolation and regeneration of the phoenix; 2. The rescue of the father (ossified culture), by the son (the agent of regeneration), from the belly of the beast (the simultaneously destructive and promising aspect of nature); 3. The hero’s (the agent of regeneration) voluntary confrontation with, and defeat of, the dragon (the simultaneously destructive and promising aspect of nature), followed by his return with a great treasure (the revivification of the culture, the Great Father); 4. The shamanic journey (voluntarily undertaken by the agent of regeneration) to the extremes of human experience (the belly of the beast, nature), followed by his return with transformative and revivifying insight and wisdom (the revivification of the culture, the Great Father). ↩︎
Deliberative Dad 