The Land of Meaning Explorer is a website with animated diagrams that use the same visual metaphors as Land of Meaning to represent the ideas in Jordan Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning.

The purpose is to make it easier for people to understand our motivations for acting the way we do, hoping it will allow us to become more balanced. It is not intended to be a replacement for the book Maps of Meaning. JBP carefully goes through the evidence from psychology, literature and neuroscience that backs up his statements in the book, and you won’t find that aspect of the book in here. That is why I included the page number for each of the quotes and I encourage you to read the reasoning behind them, so you can build your own informed opinion.

If you had to take with you only one thing from this website, I recommend you choose section 5.2.1 The Adversary in Action: Voluntary Degradation of the Map of Meaning. That section describes the pathology behind the ideological possession that divides the world into extreme right and extreme left. If we could recognize and avoid those behaviours within ourselves, I’m convinced the world would be a better place. The rest of the site, however, provides the background to fully understand that section.

Land of Meaning is an interactive map that represents several elements from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lectures about mythology, religion and psychology.

In his first book, Maps of Meaning, Peterson frequently uses metaphors with physical objects or sceneries (decisions as paths, culture as a protective wall, the unknown as a sea, etc.) when describing abstract concepts. This got me thinking if it would be possible to create a world where these different elements coexisted. The result was a map illustration and accompanying website that describes what each area represents, how different myths and popular stories could be represented as a trail along this imaginary land, and how different political ideologies see the world as a specific area of the map.