BURN YOUR MAPS

BY HANZI FREINACHT

In our days, when we are experiencing what some have called a “sensemaking crisis”[1], we collectively struggle to align our different maps of the world. Your map doesn‘t align with mine, and that third guy’s just weird, man. Signs of this crisis are everywhere: a polar­ized America rallies around two (or more) very different maps of the world, ones that seem incompatible. People see and notice dif­ferent parts of the world from different angles. Or they see the same phenomena, roughly speaking, but they interpret them wildly dif­ferently, and so they end up on a collision course with one another. Their maps even include explanations for why the other side is so seemingly deluded (it’s their envy, or greed, or simple-mindedness, or loss of common decency, or even a conspiracy). The different sides can’t make sense of the world they’re seeing; they’re referring to dif­ferent “authorities of knowledge”, and they can’t make sense of one another. We all walk around with at least some bewilderment at the fact that most people view the world so differently than we do, and that they’re all so terribly wrong.

Beyond such polarization, you can see our map-making going hay­wire as a direct result of the Internet Age, with crazier and more far-out maps taking hold in the minds of many: Flat Earth (it’s a pretty big thing), conspiracy theories (did you know that Justin Trudeau’s real dad is Fidel Castro?), the trailer park Scientology known as QA­non, and, of course, belief in the presence of extraterrestrial aliens (reptile or otherwise, take DMT and you’ll understand). It’s a sense­making crisis, because we’re failing to make sense of the world together. “What does it all mean?” we keep asking ourselves and one another.

It’s both a question of making sense of current events and making life “meaningful” and thus bearable.

Or, you could just as well say, it’s a map-making crisis. Our maps of the world are faulty, incompatible. That’s why the practice of “me­ta-theory” (to study how theories of the world come about) is be­coming so important: to resolve the issues of the world, we need to become better at not just understanding our own maps, but how our different maps relate to each other. We need maps of the territory of map-making itself.

As they say, “the map is not the territory”. A map of Sierra Leone’s geography is not the actual ground of that country, with trees, hills, buzzing insects, and shorelines for us to walk along and experience. It’s just a piece of paper that says “If you’re in downtown Freetown and travel a few kilometers south, you’ll hit the Western Area Na­tional Park, and there will be a rainforest, with chimpanzees, because the chimpanzee reserve is also marked on the map”. And yet, without the map, you wouldn’t know. We can’t live in our maps; we always have to be surprised by a world infinitely richer than any ideas we have of it, but at the same time we can hardly live without them.

Again, that’s why you need a good map even of how others map out the world. You cannot understand other people, how they think and act, if you don’t at least understand the basics of their maps of the world. We need maps about how maps are made and used. Maps about maps: Maps about how people make sense and find meaning.

You Already Have the Best Map (Don’t You?)

As you have no doubt noticed when speaking to other people, they don’t have the same maps as you do. In fact, they never do; they can have similar maps in some regards, but never the exact same one. They’ll have other basic suppositions about life, existence, and the world. They’ll know some parts of it in greater detail, some parts in lesser detail, and they’ll have another “common sense”. Effortlessly, reflexively, they’ll be making assessments about what is worthwhile doing and why, or predictions of how the world works. But their as­sessments and predictions are all wrong, as far as you can see. And, rather annoyingly, many of them can’t help themselves from trying to teach you their ways of seeing things. Sometimes it appears as if there is something to be learned, but more often, you’ll notice that their maps are crude and lack nuance, or just make false assump­tions.

With this understanding of what a “map” is and noting that you can begin to become aware of both your own map and those of oth­ers, I’d like to make a simple prediction.

According to my personal map of how the world works, I predict that you (whoever you are, dear reader) believe, indeed you are al­most certain of it, that you have a much better, more relevant, and more reliable map of the world than almost anyone that you’ve ever met.

It’s not that you think you know everything better than everybody else, not at all. People have their areas of expertise, talents that you do not, and some are smarter and wiser or more experienced. You know that very well.

But, by and large, you are just a little more reasonable than others. You think a little more independently, and you’re better at judging what’s sensible, and you’re a more reliable judge of character. In mat­ters of politics, you’re a little less ideological than others: you just care about the facts and what’s real and effective, whereas others are more invested in certain ways of thinking. You’re a little better at psychology, at really seeing and understanding human beings. To the extent that you allow yourself to be naive, it is because you under­stand that sometimes it makes sense to have hope, and to the extent you are cynical about things, it’s for good reason. Others are stuck in ideologies and fixed ideas, but you weigh things, either by intu­ition and experience, or by virtue of your reasoning, often a balanced combination of both. So even if there are things to learn, at least you tend to know better than others what to learn from, and what to safely ignore. You see through bullshit more easily. You don’t let yourself get seduced by false promises, by tempting easy ideas, by the opiums of the masses. Quite often you see others being somewhat or even severely deluded, and somehow you just don’t fall for any of that. You have learned, through experience and studies, to see things just a little more clearly than pretty much anybody else.

Am I right?

“No, Hanzi! I have the worst map of anybody I know! I’m humble!”

But you’re not that humble. I don’t mean that people walk around thinking these things to themselves explicitly. We just assume it to be the case, implicitly. The reason this is the case is simple: We adopt the best maps that we can find, and thereby we assume we have the best map. Otherwise we would have gone for another one, wouldn’t we? And then we use our own map to assess the quality of our own maps: “It’s best to be socialist, that’s how you show the most class solidarity.” Had we come across a map of the world that we found more correct or useful, we would simply have adopted that one instead. Pretty much by definition, “we have the best map”, be­cause it’s literally the best map we can think of.

Your world map always confirms itself: Either you‘re much too crit­ically minded to be drawn into crazy conspiracy theories, or you are too critically minded to buy the mainstream media narrative, being one of the select few who recognize that “something else is going on here”. In both cases, you have the best map of the world. Or that’s what it seems like from your perspective.

Add to this the fact that we need our maps to feel a sense of safety and grounding in reality. Without our maps of the world, the world is, well, uncharted territory. You’re lost in the jungle, and can’t find your way back to the safe harbor of Freetown. And who knows what those wild chimps will do to you.

Add to this the bias that we all have –the wish to view ourselves in a positive light, as being smart and insightful and all that– and it’s apparent that we’re also “emotionally bribed” to believe in the superiority of our own worldview. And we’re pretty humble about it, too – if we may say so ourselves. Even while fully recognizing our superiority, we still let others have their own worldviews, let them learn more about the world on their own terms, leaving them alone and not bothering them or pressing our views on them. It’s so hum­ble of us that we should get a medal (not that we’d expect one, in all of our humility). So not only do we have the best maps, we’re also the most humble of all. Gotta love us.

Taken together, it should come as no surprise that we all believe ourselves to have the best maps. We sort of have to believe it. The same goes for ethics, really. We always assume that we have the “best” ethics, the “highest” ethics, because the moment we truly change our minds about it, that becomes our new ethics – and we go “wow, now that I even changed my ethics again, despite already having had a pretty high ethics, this has to be the best one!” And this assumption tends to make it seem highly unlikely that some of those losers out there may have ethical stances superior to our own. After all, if we’re pretty much the most ethically sane person we’ve ever met, what’s the likelihood that animal rights is actually a thing if we – the most ethical person – don’t care about it? So, nah, animal rights can’t real­ly be a thing. Otherwise, an ethical person such as myself would care about it. Because I don’t, it can’t really be a thing.[2]

Back to maps in general. This line of reasoning promptly leads us to the following question: If everyone naturally thinks that their own map of the world is the best one, how credible is that assumption? We can’t all reasonably be right about it, can we?

Well, then. Do you in all seriousness believe that this particular person, born into this particular position in society, at this particular moment in history, having this particular life experience, with this particular personality, at this particular point in their life, just hap­pens to have acquired the most reliable and useful worldview of all of human experience? Why on earth would that be the case? Cer­tainly, we could answer that you may have the best worldview, the best maps, for someone like yourself. But, then again, how likely is that? Everyone around you seems to have blindspots and fallacies in their thinking, too fuzzy ideas about stuff they don’t understand and of which you have a clearer view, things that limit them and hold them back. And this just doesn’t apply to yourself ?

The Oracle of Delphi, the legend goes, reported that Socrates was the wisest of all the Greeks. And Socrates went on to conclude that this was not because he knew the most, but that he alone, of all the Greeks, realized that he knew nothing. Of course, Socrates there­by also assumed he had the best map of the world: one of perpetual wonder and learning anew. Hey, he even had it from the Oracle of Delphi itself, and was he quick to assume that the drugged, rambling priestess was absolutely right.[3]

It seems as though we can hardly escape the impressions that our own maps of the world are superior. Still, if we are truly to be “the wisest of all the Greeks”, the best that we can do is probably to as­sume – like Socrates – that our map of the world isn’t that good, after all. We should see through the delusion of certainty, the illusion of our own chosenness, the mirage that our particular perspective just happens to be the most universal one.

Or, to put it more concisely: we achieve universality by realizing our own particularity.

Thus, our ninth commandment reads: Burn your maps! This is a commandment because everything else that we do relies on our “maps of meaning”, on our ways of making sense of the world. It is only appropriate to assume that if everyone else’s map is wrong, so is ours. But at least we can make it a life commitment to continuously make it less wrong.

A rather depressing part of this endeavor is that it seems to become more difficult with age: young people have more plastic brains and minds and can more easily make fundamental shifts in their maps of the world. But the commitment to update our maps of meaning can be life-long, and, indeed, it should be. By committing to such open­ness, painful and difficult as it may be, we can make our lives at a ripe age more interesting and of greater benefit to younger generations. I guess that’s the deeper meaning of “life-long learning”.

Not all who wander are lost. I invite you to a life of intellectual and spiritual wanderlust. Yes, we must settle for certain truths to live by, certain narratives, certain biases, at least for significant pe­riods of time. We need stations in life, we need to grow roots in our worldviews, and we need traditions to serve as foundations, shoul­ders of giants and all that. But we can also cultivate our capacity to move on – and travel wider inner worlds, yet more vast oceans of emotions, as well as broader intellectual horizons, throughout our lifetimes. Be a traveler, and you will get to inhabit multiple worlds throughout your life, as your map always becomes your guide to the world.

From 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People to Master Ordinary Life published by Metamoderna (December 26, 2022)

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of the books The Listening Society, Nordic Ideology and The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps.

footnotes

[1]A term popularized lately by Daniel Schmachtenberger.

[2] Likewise, interviews with criminals have long shown that they believe “squares” to be cowardly and docile, not actually more ethical than they are. If anything, the reasoning goes, the criminals are more ethical than the law-abiding citizens, given that they’re more honest with themselves. Similar findings exist in psychopaths, all the way up through the development of ethical reasoning and concern: you always believe that the person who has a higher ethic than you must be a phony or hypo­crite. It’s difficult to believe in the authenticity of ethical sentiments that we do not share ourselves.

[3] That’s how the Oracle functioned; there was a young, beautiful and chaste priestess intoxicated with volcanic ethane gas, there to impart the portents of the gods. If we put aside the issue of credibility of this method of inquiry, we should ad­mit that the whole thing undeniably sounds rather sexy. And it evidently was, as they eventually had to exchange young women for old ones to avoid sexual assaults from oracle visitors.