What Words Do – Literal Meaning vs Manifest Meaning

 “Actions speak louder than words,” the saying goes. And it is quite clearly true. If someone says “I love you,” and another person gives you a gift that shows they have been paying attention to your likes and interests, the second person’s intention comes across much more strongly. But there is a deeper level to the phrase “actions speak louder than words:” words are a kind of action.

In our culture, we think of words as a tool for communicating ideas based on the words’ literal definitions. If I say, “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” it is natural to assume I am communicating the physical structure of light, and that is the end of the story. But if we are in a group of people talking about cultivating an inner light to share with the world, and I say “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” then the group would give me dirty looks. This might frighten me, and I would say, “What? It’s true.” This would drive a wedge between me and the rest of the group, and they might ask me to leave.

Here is what just happened. If we look at the literal meanings of the words, “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” and, “What? It’s true,” we find a true story. Light is physically an electromagnetic wave, and it is indeed true. But the actions of these words, what I call their manifest meaning, is to say “I do not buy into your spiritual metaphor and neither should you,” and then, “You shouldn’t be upset, because I am not trying to get you to change your beliefs.” In the realm of actions, these true phrases are, in fact, deceitful.

If you think about it, we never say anything simply because it is true. There is always a reason behind what we say. I have never mentioned before that there is a large parasol in the yard outside my window, even though it is true. This is because I have never had a reason to bring it up. Even now the reason I am telling you about it is not because it is true (although it is), but because it illustrates the point of this blog post. The reason we say words is not because of their literal meaning, but because what we say and when and how we say it is an action.

In order to understand other people, we must not only look at the literal meanings of the words they say, but at the actions they are performing by saying them. If we get too caught up in the literal meanings of the words, we get confused and do not understand. This is true not only for others, but for ourselves as well. In the above example, the person who says “Light is an electromagnetic wave” does not understand their own actions, because they are fixated on the literal meanings of their words. The exchange is not about physics, it’s about personal growth and its effects on others.

So we see that for words to be true, they must not only be literally true, but manifestly true. Yet I would go even further and say manifest truth is more important than literal truth. There are times when what someone needs to hear is not what is true, but something motivational. For instance, if someone is going through a hard time, we can tell them, “Hang on, everything will be okay soon,” even if there is no sign of when things will be okay. Maybe it’s literally true, and maybe it’s not, we don’t know. But the manifest truth, “You don’t have to suffer as much if you think positively,” is. However, straight-up telling someone “You don’t have to suffer as much if you think positively” is not nearly as motivating, and for some people it has its own manifest meaning, “You are to blame for making yourself suffer.” This is obviously not the message we want to get across, so instead we say, “Hang on, everything will be okay soon.” Everybody knows this statement’s literal truth is uncertain, but it is still sometimes the right thing to say; its manifest meaning is true.

Knowledge is power, and with power comes responsibility. The positive value of recognizing words as actions is immense. It can help us understand and make peace with one another, especially regarding sensitive topics. But there are those who use manifest meaning to manipulate others for their own gain, and understanding the idea of manifest meaning helps us guard against their influence. In politics, manifest meaning is prioritized over literal meaning, no matter what party, no matter what country. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the current United States President, Donald Trump.

It is no secret that Trump spouts nonsense all the time. There’s no point beating around the bush; he does not care about literal truth, and everyone can see it as plainly as the Emperor’s New Clothes. Some people point to the nonsense he says and call him an idiot. But this interpretation is wrong, as evidenced by this one damning fact: Trump got elected President of the United states. You don’t bumble your way into that position. Trump’s ejaculations of the mouth may be nonsense when taken literally, but it all has the same manifest meaning: “Life is a status game, and I’m the winner.” If we interpret his words under this lens, it all clicks into place.

You may be wondering, what is the manifest meaning of this blog post? That, my dear reader, is the question you should ask anytime you read a text. In this case, it can be summed up in this simple idea: words are not just words, they are actions. They have effects and consequences, sometimes independent from their literal meanings. If we want to understand others and navigate through the maze of human communication, we must internalize this and practice speaking and interpreting in terms of manifest meaning rather than getting caught up in the endless, needless tangles of literal meanings. When we do, we will discover life to be so much clearer than it appeared before.

Our Damaging Narratives of Suffering and Purpose

Life comes with many struggles. One of the most powerful methods of coping with struggles we can do nothing about is to tell ourselves a narrative: that this struggle, and the suffering it causes, gives our lives meaning in a way that we may not understand, but is precious and we would not want to live without. This narrative can be powerful enough to keep us hopeful and grateful, even in circumstances which by all logic should drive us to despair.

But there is a danger to it; when a narrative gives us purpose, we tend to cling to it, even when the circumstances that give birth to it no longer apply. When we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, everyone had to contribute to the survival of the tribe. This was a struggle against nature, an unchangeable fact of the human condition. By working together as a community, we survived, and that gave us purpose. And so the narrative that the struggle to survive is what gives us purpose was born.

However, over the course of history, things have changed. Industry has made food, comforts, and luxuries abundant. Many people struggle much less than ever before. We are coming closer to—and some would argue we have already arrived at—a place where it would be possible to construct an economy so that people do not need to struggle for survival.

Yet many of us still cling to the narrative that without a struggle for survival, there can be no purpose in life. This is, of course, false. When we are not struggling for survival there are plenty of things we can do that give us purpose, like training ourselves in athletic activities, pursuing scientific research, contemplating philosophy, traveling the world, creating art, competing in games, and striving to further improve the world. Being free from the struggle for survival gives us new opportunities for fulfillment and purpose, albeit of a different flavor from the struggle, but without the downsides of the suffering the struggle imposes upon us.

And that is where the problem lies. We could be so much, and have such fulfilling lives by eliminating the struggle for survival. But the narrative that there would be no purpose to life if the struggle did not exist holds us back. People who cling to this narrative not only don’t help, but sometimes they actively sabotage those who work to mitigate the struggle, by spreading the narrative with their voices, or by voting for those who would impose the struggle upon us.

It is one thing when life is hard because there is no other choice. But if we feel that the struggle is unnecessary and is being imposed upon us by others, all purpose that would have been found in it vanishes.

Another narrative we tell ourselves of the meaning in suffering regards the inevitability of death. For our entire history, death by old age has been one of the most significant limitations of the human condition. We have many myths of the fruitlessness of chasing immortality, and have come to terms with it by telling ourselves that without the ticking clock in our lives, we would not be able to enjoy the time we have, because we would never be motivated to do anything.

However, with modern science, we may soon have the ability to reverse aging . . . if the right research gets funded. And something which has always been with us, the briefness of life, may no longer be an unchangeable fact of existence. And thus, the narrative that death gives life meaning, which once gave us solace and helped us accept the inevitable, turns on us and holds us back from reaching for a greater existence.

There are legitimate concerns regarding anti-aging research, such as how would we feed everyone, and worries about exacerbating inequality by creating a new class of rich immortals while everyone else is stuck working for subsistence. But the narrative that the briefness of life is an essential ingredient for meaning in life is not one of them.

In this era of increasing technology and understanding, we must not cling to narratives of purpose in suffering. When there is nothing we can do about it, these narratives can help us cope and find meaning in life. However, we must set aside a corner of our minds for the knowledge that we are empowered to find meaning despite our suffering, not because of it. Then, if it becomes possible to eliminate that suffering, through technology or the economy, we will not be held back from working toward it by narratives of acceptance that we no longer need.

Challenge and Hard Fun

See also:
Work and Purpose

There is no question that life is about more than happiness and easy fun. Eating, drinking, and being merry can get stale really fast. The go-to antidote to this mediocrity is applying ourselves to work. We put our effort into things we might not want to do, and when we are done, we sit back and enjoy the benefits of a job well done, and sometimes a paycheck to boot. But work is not the only way to add purpose to one’s life, and it is often not the most effective way either.

Preparing for a marathon is no walk in the park. Athletes build up discipline, sticking to special diets and pushing themselves to run farther and farther. Then, they join thousands of others in a 26-mile run through the city. Why do millions of people do this every year? It’s not because of the prize money. Rather, it’s because of the challenge, of forming discipline and building oneself up, and the satisfaction of knowing for the rest of your life that you did it. Marathon running and all that goes into preparing for it is an example of what I call hard fun. Other examples of hard fun include things like exercising, learning a language, building relationships, playing games, solving puzzles, contemplating mysteries, creating art, tending a garden, and practicing skills.

Like work, hard fun is hard. But unlike work, which comes from places of necessity and circumstance, hard fun is motivated from within. It is rewarding enough that we make ourselves do it just because of the enrichment it brings to our lives. The key difference here is between external motivations and internal motivations. Work is something we have to do because forces outside ourselves make it necessary. Hard fun is something we push ourselves to do from within, because its intrinsic value to us is just that powerful.

Hard fun can bring as much meaning and purpose into a person’s life as hard work, and often more so. To understand why, we have to look at the reasons why work can be meaningful. It is not because we are forced to do it, nor because it isn’t fun, nor because of the pay. The meaning in work comes from overcoming various types of challenges, rewarding outcomes that are directly related to the activities of the work, and the bonds formed with others through shared efforts. These same things are just as meaningful when we don’t have outside forces nudging us to do them with carrots and sticks. We seek meaning in our lives, crave it with every fiber of our being, and thus push ourselves, challenging ourselves to learn, accomplish, and become better at things. This is the great power and beauty of hard fun, providing meaning and purpose to our lives without being pressured or forced into it.

Sometimes a person’s work is hard fun to them. Whether they came to realize it because outside pressures pushed them into it, or they knew it was what they wanted to do all along, they do their job from the heart, and the paycheck is just a bonus. When this happens, it is a very beautiful thing.

Why Success is Rare

Here in the USA, we are told a story. The story is that if we work hard and persevere, success will be ours. We are bombarded with stories of people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps into their dream lives. Sports players making it to the big league. Coal miners becoming rocket scientists. Homeless people becoming millionaire businessmen. These stories are inspiring, and make us feel that if we just work hard enough, we too can achieve the success we dream about.

Success means different things to different people. For this discussion, we will define it as is how well you are able to achieve whatever you set your life toward.

I, too, hope for success. It is my dream to one day walk into the Sci-fi and Fantasy aisle of a Barnes & Noble and see a book with my name on it. But when I think about the millions of people who write books, or at least want to write books, those shelves in the bookstore start to look very small.

This is an example of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. The Pareto principle is the observation that, for any measure of success, 80% of it is held by 20% of the people who seek it. This also applies for sub-sections of the distribution, meaning 64% of the success is held by 4% of the people (80% of the 80% is held by 20% of the 20%), and so on. Of course, this is only a general observation across large numbers of people in many different areas of life. Within small groups of people, the numbers may be different. But overall, it shows us that success is rare.

Like any statistical rule, the Pareto principle is not baked into reality, but shaped by a number of different factors. Part of it is because work also follows the Pareto principle; on average, 20% of workers do 80% of the work. But this is not the whole story, and it, too, needs to be explained. So let’s look at some of the reasons these 80/20 rules exist.

We are not born blank slates. Each of us has different personalities, interests, and talents, which affect what we can be good at, and how good we are at them. No amount of hard work is going to turn the average truck driver into a groundbreaking theoretical physicist, or the average biologist into a world-class basketball player. So part of the success equation comes from natural-born talents and interests.

Another thing to consider, and an unfortunate fact of our society, is that the playing field is not level. Many people are born too poor to practice and make use of their talents. Others are born into social minorities, groups of people for whom, by tragic accidents of history, the deck is stacked against. These are roadblocks against success.

We live in a dynamic economy. The opportunities that are available today will be gone tomorrow, taken by those who were in the right place at the right time. In order to find a niche, it helps to know people who can vouch for you and get your name out there. Connections and good marketing are essential for success.

From these four areas; effort, innate qualities, societal factors, and economic environment; we can begin to see the picture of success more clearly. If we were to put success into an equation, it would look something like this:

Success = hard work + passion + talent + social status + niche + connections

+ marketing​

Each of these things contributes toward one’s probability of success. If one of them is lacking, the others have to make up for it. The amount each part contributes is different for every endeavor.

What can we learn from this? Well, to me it says that we should not judge people for being unsuccessful. Our effort and choices only get us so far. Most people, even if they give life their all, are just going to be average. And if someone is not doing well in life, that does not necessarily mean it is their fault. It gives me an appreciation for the sports player who will never make it into the league. The writer who will never be published. The musician who posts online and gets only five downloads. The hard worker who will never run their own businesses. There is nothing wrong with these people. They are average. Normal. And they should be respected and allowed to live out their lives doing the things that are meaningful to them, even if the world around them does not view their contribution as important.

What is God?

I grew up in a Christian home in rural United States, believing, as most people in that culture do, in the existence of God the person. This person called God had his own subjective conscious viewpoint. He had the ability to cause anything to happen merely by willing it to be so, including both temporary suspension of the laws of physics, and the creation of the entire Universe. This God was thought to be real and literal. In other words, I believed in a physical God, also known as a “personal God” or “literal God.”

Back then, if you had asked me if I thought God was physical, I would have said no, God is spiritual. If you had asked me what I meant by that, I would have said physical reality is made of one type of substance, and spiritual reality is made of another type of substance. However, that is a false dichotomy. After all, the part of physical reality my present and past selves agree about is made of multiple types of substances. There are particles, fields, and space-time, and maybe a few things we do not know about yet. However, the reason we group them under the umbrella term, “physical” is because the way in which they exist is the same. The God I believed in was not made of space-time, particles, or fields, but he was thought to exist in the same way. That is why I call this kind of God a physical God.

I viewed God as the answer to questions like, “why does the Universe exist?” and, “why do we exist?” The Earth was the way it was because God made it that way, with human beings in mind. Everything that happened, everything I did, was measured against what God wanted, and how it fit into his grand plan. However, after about 20 years of living like this, I started seeing things that did not add up with this view. I learned how ideas of God and gods appeared in cultures and developed over time, and I saw how my God was the same as any other in this regard. I saw sick people get prayed over. Some of them were healed, and some were not. I had ideas pop into my head about the future. Some of them came true, and some did not. Eventually I came to realize that things can happen by chance, that if there are a million opportunities for things with a one-in-a-million probability to happen in a day, we should expect to see one-in-a-million things happen every day.

As we learn and grow, our mental pictures expand, filling in more of the jigsaw puzzle of knowledge. Sometimes we replace ideas with new ones, which may or may not be more correct, but other times we come to see a larger view of the picture, one which encompasses the views we had before. We come to see those views more clearly, why we held them, and how they fit or don’t fit with the rest of reality.

One fateful day, I was hit with the realization that the Universe and everything in it behaves as it would without a physical God. I looked up evidence for the existence of God, which came in two forms. The first was from science, but these were all either conspiracy theories, or of the form, “this seems like too much of a coincidence, therefore God is responsible.” For instance, I have heard the argument that since the conditions in the Universe make life extremely unlikely, God must have created the Earth for us. These arguments don't stand up to probability, nor do they meet their burden of proof. The second form of evidence for God was in philosophical arguments, like the Ontological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Cosmological Argument, and the Argument from Morality. However, all of these either have extraordinary claims in their premises without justification, such as “it is possible for a Maximally Great Being to exist,” or their conclusions do not follow from the premises. Ultimately, I had to admit that I could find no evidence that the physical God I had believed in for my entire life actually existed.

For a while, I felt bitter toward the culture I had been raised in and the people who had taught me what I perceived to be nothing but lies. I faced existential and epistemological crises. This period did not last long, but it was rough. It is no wonder people get defensive and afraid whenever someone says something that even hints at a conflict with their worldview.

This was a turning point in my life. From then on, I started studying all different fields of science and philosophy. I wanted to understand the world and humanity as broadly and in depth as possible. In my quest, I have come across many public intellectuals with deep and important things to say. Among them was the psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who introduced me to the concept of Jungian archetypes, the models of behavior built into the human unconscious that manifest in fictional characters.

With perfect timing, in one of those one-in-a-million events that I mentioned earlier, Jordan Peterson started a series of public lectures, which he posted to YouTube, about the significance of the Biblical stories from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Instead of taking them as literal historical events, like I had for my entire life, he treated them as a window into the depths of the human mind, as stories passed down for hundreds of generations, undergoing a kind of natural selection so that only the most meaningful and resonant parts remained, the rest lost to memory. Freed from the blinders of literalism, the Biblical stories exploded with meaning like I never imagined.

My thoughts turned back to consider once again the idea of God. Of course, a physical God was out of the question; the more I learned of science and philosophy, the more solidly that coffin was nailed shut. However, things I had heard believers say before, but had made no sense to me, started to come back. The idea that morality could not exist without a god. The idea that everyone worships something, whether they profess to or not. And for the first time in my life, it all started to make sense. God is not a person, not in the physical sense. God is an archetype.

Archetypes are the embodiments of human behavior patters. We see ourselves in fictional and mythological characters, and in forces of nature. This is where the gods of Ancient Greece and other pantheons come from. Capital-G God is the archetypal embodiment of all of the best qualities of human nature. This is why religious people take “God is good” as a truism, and why they say that without God, morality does not exist.

Atheists sometimes point to the things God does in the Bible which are obviously evil, and say, “God is not good.” But those instances are a product of the limitations of human knowledge at the time they were written. Archetypes are not made-up, they are discovered and studied. Since Biblical times, humanity has gone through revolutions of moral philosophy, so our understanding of the best of human nature, God, has matured. It is only natural that parts of the ancient views of God will appear barbaric to us. They were trying to understand, and, not having the philosophical knowledge of millennia to draw upon, got some of it wrong.

So why do most people insist on believing, and requiring others to believe, in a physical God rather than an archetypal God? Or from another perspective, what could drive me to speak such heresy? The answer lies in our psychology. We have a natural instinct to search for the meaning in facts, and to take that which is meaningful as factual. Only in the past few hundred years, since the dawn of science, have we begun to learn the difference.

Some would call me an atheist, because I believe there is no physical God. Others would call me a Christian, because I actively try to learn about and model my life around the best and fullest aspects of human nature, which God represents, and because I find value in the philosophy and culture that has come from the Christian tradition. I don’t care about the labels myself. It’s the honest search for truth that matters; after all, that’s in accordance with the nature of God.

The Separation of Fact and Meaning

Meaning and Purpose:
Jungian Archetypes
The Most Important Question
Fact and Meaning

One of the most natural questions to ask is, “What is the meaning of life?” Why are we here on this planet, existing as living beings with the abilities to have conscious experiences, learn about the Universe, and make choices about how to act in the world? What is the purpose of our existence? This question is near and dear to us because we are built to focus our lives around a purpose, and we have a primal craving for that purpose to be as worthwhile as possible.

When we speak of “meaning,” there are three possible definitions. The first has to do with communication. When one person wants to get an idea from their head to someone else’s, they use words or non-verbal signals, and we say that these signals carry meaning. I have imbued every sentence on this blog with this kind of meaning, with the hope that you will receive it when you read it. The second kind of meaning is the wake of physical signs that are left after an event or series of events. If you walk into a room and see balloons and streamers in disarray, tablecloths with stains, and paper plates with crumbs, it means there has just been a birthday party in this room, and no one has cleaned it up yet. This kind of meaning is what detectives look for at crime scenes, and what scientists look for in experiments and observatories.

The meaning we are interested in for this discussion is the third kind, the sense of meaning, which we get when we feel our choices and efforts are in line with a worthwhile purpose. At the center of our natures, what we humans want to do more than anything else is that which is meaningful. That’s why I sacrifice time that could have been spent playing video games to write blog posts and stories. Writing itself doesn’t give me much pleasure. In fact, coming up with the next words can be uncomfortable, or even painful if I really push myself. But when I get something finished and ready to present to the world, the sense of meaning it gives me is worth every moment that could have been spent on things that would have given me immediate gratification.

We humans have sought purpose and meaning from outside of ourselves for as long as we have been around. We have looked to the Earth, the Universe, and the metaphysical nature of Reality, in the hope that we can find some principle or message woven into the fabric of existence that will give us a purpose that is so noble that we will perpetually be driven toward it and our lives will be constantly awash in meaning. However, my thoughts on the matter have led me to conclude that when we do this, we are looking in the wrong place. Meaning of the third kind comes from acting in accordance to purposes that resonate with our own instinctual natures, and are not determined in any way by the facts of our environment or our world.

To support this claim, I argue that the sense of meaning is different from the first two kinds of meaning, both of which depend on external facts. First, we observe that simply acting as you are told does not necessarily give us a sense of meaning, whether the person we follow is a parent, a ruler, or even a God. You might say that if God writes our natures into us so that we find following his instructions to be meaningful, then the meaning of life is found in God’s commands, but this is not correct. Even in such a scenario, our sense of meaning still comes from our actions lining up with the purpose found within our nature, not from the content of God’s commands.

As for the second kind of meaning, following trails of evidence can teach us facts about the world, past events, or future possibilities, but we can always ask, “so what?” At the smallest level, the building block particles of reality behave somewhat like particles and somewhat like waves. So what? Gravity is the bending of space and time. So what? Dumping waste chemicals into rivers can kill fish and make people sick. So what? Facts by themselves don’t give us purpose, they only show us how effective our actions will be at furthering our purposes. Therefore our purpose-oriented sense of meaning cannot be the same as the second definition of “meaning.”

From this point on, when I use the word “meaning,” it is understood to be the third definition, the sense of meaning that comes from aligning one’s actions with one’s instinctually inspired purposes.

Some people say the Universe has no meaning. This is not correct; in fact, as they say, it is not even wrong. Meaning and fact are completely separate realms of existence, so trying to talk about the meaning of something that can only be described in factual terms is nonsense. Meaning exists within us, when the messages we hear resonate with us, giving us energy and driving us toward a noble purpose. This is what we mean when we talk about having a meaningful life.

The separation of fact and meaning leads to a very unfortunate dilemma regarding a very important word: truth. Most people take for granted that if something is true, it is both factual and meaningful. But we have just shown that fact and meaning are uncoupled, independent of one another, so there is no guarantee that what is factual will also be meaningful, or that what is meaningful will also be factual.

In the face of this dilemma, some people use “truth” to describe that which is factual, and not necessarily meaningful. Many scientists and science-enthusiasts hold this view. The problem with this is that “truth” has a feeling to it, a ring of purity. Truth is supposed to be a good thing, supposed to set you free. In a fact-only view of truth, there are many things that are true, but knowing them would only bring suffering.

Others use “truth” to mean that which is meaningful, and not necessarily factual. Professor Jordan Peterson, whom I look up to as a role model in many ways, is one of them. The problem with this view is that it can be used as an excuse to declare things to be true without much justification. When two people with sizable followings declare contradictory “truths” in this manner, it can create conflict, which, in the more extreme cases, can become violent.

Others simply refuse to separate fact and meaning. This leads to problems, because they prioritize intuition over evidence, and it can lead to rejecting important, well-supported facts, like that humans are influencing the Earth’s climate, and that we are part of the same tree of Evolution as all other living things on Earth. What these people fail to realize is that these facts do not dictate what our purpose should be, rather they inform us how best to live in accordance with our purpose. In denying well-supported facts, they sabotage their own purpose, making it harder for them and those around them to live meaningfully.

Still others decide to throw out the word altogether, claiming there is no truth, which, as you may imagine, does not sit well with anyone who holds a different view. My own tongue strains with derision toward these people, so I will decline to comment further about this view today.

My own way of dealing with the fact-meaning gap is to simply say there are two kinds of truth, that which is factual and that which is meaningful. We can call these literal truth and metaphorical truth. “Most snakes have fangs” is a literal truth, whereas “we are filled with snakes” is a metaphorical truth, signifying the side of human nature that runs counter to our nobler purposes. If we understand that there are two kinds of truth, it is not very hard to figure out from the context which is which.

There is a good chance that you do not like the conclusion that fact and meaning are separate. I know I don’t. Deep inside of ourselves, we want facts to be meaningful. After all, one of the most powerful ways to show meaning is by telling stories, which come in the form of a bunch of fact-like statements. But as any good storyteller knows, there is a reason why scientific papers are boring, but science fiction novels are gripping, even if they explain the same facts. That reason is because well-written stories tickle our senses of beauty, empathy, and archetypal resonance. We wish the same thing were true for reality, but we do not have to look very hard to see that Reality is not like stories. Tragedy strikes with no bright side. Patterns seem to appear and lead us nowhere. Ultimately Reality behaves exactly as we would expect if it were governed by clockwork mechanics and probability, not by human archetypes.

Meaning exists. It is not found in the facts of science, but in our own actions. As living beings, we are driven to do things, to devote our lives to projects and responsibility. Some life projects are extremely meaningful, others less so. What determines this is not the nature of the Universe, or how we have come to be as we are, but how well our actions resonate with our internal unconscious drives. The more our actions and drives are in harmony, the nobler we perceive our purpose to be. On the other hand, we find ourselves in a world made of facts, which put conditions and constraints on how we can go about our purposes. Meaning and fact are separate, but they are both important. Our sense of meaning points us toward purposes worth pursuing, and facts tell us how best to pursue our purposes.

The Question at the Core of Existence

Meaning and Purpose:
Jungian Archetypes
The Most Important Question
Fact and Meaning

A year ago, the intellectual giants Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson got together on Sam’s podcast to talk about the relationship between fact and morality, and ended up arguing for two hours about the definition of the word “truth.” Sam argued for what Jordan called Newtonian truth, which is the set of beliefs that most closely resemble fact, while Jordan argued for what he called Darwinian truth, which is the set of beliefs that lead to the survival and flourishing of humankind. Though they parted on a friendly note, they left with the frustration of talking in circles without end, and their audience felt the same.

From the promotional poster for their Vancouver event this coming June.

Although I side with Sam over this disagreement of definition, the question begs to be asked, what went wrong between them? How can two men with IQs so far through the roof that you couldn’t see them with binoculars disagree so stubbornly about the mere definition of a single word? I suspect it was not about the word at all, but something deeper and more profound than either of them realized. It surrounds a single question so basic and monumental that the entirety of human existence revolves around it.

For most of my life, I thought the most important question was, “What is true?” After all, it seemed like the quest to understand the universe and how we have come to wake up in it was the highest, most noble goal of being alive. If someone was factually incorrect, it seemed my duty to drum up a logical argument and correct them for Truth’s sake. As recently as August of last year, I wrote a blog post titled “Truth,” in which I treated Truth with a capital T as if it were a god. But being skeptical in nature, I came to doubt that putting Truth at the center of my existence was, in fact, objectively correct. To my great surprise, I discovered that there is another, more fundamental, more profound question than what is true.

One of the observations that led me to this conclusion is that not all truth is equal. For instance, it never does you any good to know exactly how many atoms are in the paint on a particular stop sign. It is obvious that this type of fact is pointless, but I needed to know why. What makes some truths worth knowing, and others a waste of time?

We are here, existing with corporeal bodies on Planet Earth. We have internal drives that cause us to do things, but we also have a strange feature called a will, which lets us choose actions and courses that deviate from the path of least resistance. We can do things that are easy, or things that are hard. We can reach for pleasure or satisfaction, or to meet the needs and desires of others. We can set out to punish wrong, or to forgive. Thus, after the observation of self-existence, the very first question, which guides our lives from beginning to end, and which must be asked anew every waking moment, is “What should we do?”

In answering this, we find a momentary purpose. Some people go out and act on this purpose immediately, but those who are wise look open-mindedly for relevant facts, using the purpose as a guide. For the most part, the better informed we are about the facts relating to our purpose, the better we can fulfill this purpose. It may be that during our pursuit of relevant knowledge, we discover something that makes us reevaluate our purpose, and this new purpose may send us looking for other information, and the cycle continues. We might say that this is the course of intellectual maturity. Looking at this cycle, it is easy to see how one might get these questions, “What is True?” and “What should we do?” mixed up in their order of importance. It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario. Which came first? It’s hard to tell.

But it can be resolved by considering an asymmetry between the questions’ results. It is possible to have great and meaningful purpose while being completely wrong about the facts. Just compare people from different religions, who believe different sets of facts that contradict each other, but who have equally purposeful lives. On the flip side, however, things are different. It is completely possible to have deep and thorough knowledge about many things, problems that need solving, injustices that need correcting, and also have a clear understanding of the boundaries of one’s knowledge, and yet do nothing at all. While logically these amount to A and not B, and B and not A, there is no question that from a human perspective there is a world of difference between the two. It is infinitely more fulfilling to be with purpose than with knowledge, and fulfillment is what we spend every bit of energy striving toward.

I think the core of the argument between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, the disagreement between the lines, is to what degree one must ground themselves in factual reality in order to have a maximally positive purpose-driven life. Sam’s position is that it is essential to have the facts straight, and the more factually correct you are, the nobler a purpose you find, and the better you will be able to successfully live it out. Jordan is more interested in what to do when the facts are beyond one’s reach or comprehension, or when doubting one’s current knowledge might lead to a loss of purpose. Both men have important things to say, and are well worth a respectful listen.