Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

In this lecture, I discuss the context within which the theory I am delineating through this course emerge: that of the cold war. What is belief? Why is it so important to people? Why will they fight to protect it? I propose that belief unites a culture's expectations and desires with the actions of its people, and that the match between those two allows for cooperative action and maintains emotional stability. I suggest, further, that culture has a deep narrative structure, presenting the world as a forum for action, with characters representing the individual, the known, and the unknown -- or the individual, culture and nature -- or the individual, order and chaos.

In this lecture, I begin using a particular piece of dramatic art -- the Disney film Pinocchio -- to provide a specific example of the manner in which great mythological or archetypal themes inform and permeate narrative.

In this lecture, I continue with the analysis of the Disney film Pinocchio to illustrate the manner in which great mythological or archetypal themes inform and permeate both the creation and the understanding of narratives.

In this lecture, I conclude my analysis of the Disney film Pinocchio, which I conducted to illustrate how archetypal/mythological themes permeate popular culture.

In this lecture, I make the case that we each inhabit a story, describing where we are, where we are going, and the actions we must undertake to get from the former to the latter. These inhabited stories are predicated on an underlying value system (as we must want to be where we are going more than we value where we are). In addition, they are frames of reference, allowing us to perceive (things that move us along; things that get in our way), make most of the world irrelevant (things that have no bearing on our current frame), and determine emotional significance (positive: things that move us along; negative: things that get in our way).

In this lecture, I discuss uncertainty, or anomaly. We frame the world -- or the world reveals itself to us -- as a story, with a starting point, a destination, and the behavioral means to move from one to the other. The destination is valued more highly than the starting point, and constitutes the point of the story -- the aim of the individual. Reality manifests itself within that story as what is relevant for forward movement, what gets in the way, and what is irrelevant and can be safely ignored. The largest category, by far, is the latter. Unfortunately, sometimes what has been happily classified as irrelevant rears up and gets in the way. That's a manifestation of chaos. Chaos can undermine the story, or break the frame. The degree of undermining or breakage is proportional to the time and space over which the story in question extends its operations.