Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

discovered that beliefs make the world, in a very real way—that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense. This discovery has not turned me into a moral relativist, however: quite the contrary. I have become convinced that the world-that-is-belief is orderly; that there are universal moral absolutes (although these are structured such that a diverse range of human opinion remains both possible and beneficial). I believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes—in ignorance or in willful opposition—are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.

I read something by Carl Jung, at about this time, that helped me understand what I was experiencing. It was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that “feigned individuality.”3 Adoption of such a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us—and those around us—to believe that we were authentic. Jung said:

When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche. Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he. The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname.4

I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.

I was cast adrift; I did not know what to do or what to think.

. All my beliefs—which had lent order to the chaos of my existence,

.

My religious convictions, ill-formed to begin with, disappeared when I was very young.

I became simultaneously disenchanted with the study of political science, my erstwhile major.

others was to be regarded with suspicion

their pursuit of personal revenge.

Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure