An incredibly ambitious and deeply researched academic text on how meaning is derived, where do beliefs come from and why evil and mass cruelty exist. Peterson uses (hides behind?) inaccessible intellectual-speak for a better part of the text – some sentences almost comically obtuse and requiring multiple reads: “First-order pure semantic codification of the morality in behavior, and then in episodic/semantic (narrative or mythic) representation, appears to…” I’m not smart enough for this. The content is incredibly dense in micro-small type. The most frustrating aspect of the book is Peterson’s repetitiveness – maybe he believed if he repeats himself over and over and over he will convince the reader of his suppositions? An impartial editor could have easily cut the text by 40% and possibly by much more. This isn’t Peterson trying to stretch the material to reach book-length; there was plenty of substance. It was one of my most difficult reads of all time. That said, maybe the repetition worked as I felt I “got” the themes of the book, even when I failed to fully understand all the nuances of his position. Peterson is wrestling with unanswerable questions and proposing abstract (to the layman) answers. It reads as fairly original thinking, heavily influenced by Jung and other philosophers. I appreciate his effort and that overcomes much of the executional aspects of the book that I struggled with.