Peterson’s primary goal was to examine why individuals, not simply groups, engage in social conflict, and to model the path individuals take that results in atrocities like the Gulag, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Rwandan genocide. Peterson considers himself a pragmatist, and uses science and neuropsychology to examine and learn from the belief systems of the past and vice versa, but his theory is primarily phenomenological. In the book, he explores the origins of evil, and also posits that an analysis of the world’s religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality…
“In our era, the past is vanishing like smoke. The ancestors and gods and spirits who speak through dreams were once welcomed into the circle of community; were among its essential members. But who now will listen to them? The cultures that honored them are dying, their very languages becoming extinct. The thread of received wisdom that has sustained us is stretched thin to breaking. Shorn of memory, we no longer recognize as part of life’s fabric those who have come before us. The voices of the myriad beings, visible and invisible, who surround us grow faint, though they are still talking in our sleep . . . Our dreams are a continuum, revealing, if we care to look, that we do not exist alone, but in a skein of relationship with all that has been, all that is, and all that shall be.”
