Maps of Meaning

The problem of evil, especially large-scale, group evil, is a central preoccupation of Maps of Meaning. In fact, the existential despair that evil’s existence causes is what prompted Peterson to begin writing the book. The book specifically examines the evil acts associated with 20th-century totalitarian regimes. In addition, it touches on the excesses of communist China and other socialist regimes. Given this context, understanding the similarities between the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is useful. In both events, the tyrant government assumed omniscience or the stance that their knowledge system was absolute. When a knowledge system becomes all powerful, anyone opposing it becomes a threat, as happened with the dissidents of the Communist Party in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. In Soviet Russia, officers sent political dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn—whom authorities arrested in 1945 because of his private letters to a friend criticizing Stalin’s role in World War II—to camps where they were made to labor for more than 14 hours in a day in cold, filthy conditions. Under Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party’s stance of omniscience included the dream of return to an idealized past, within which Jews, communists, homosexuals, and other minorities had no place.