Peterson's first book, was published in 1999, a work which examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and motivation for genocide. The book, which took 13 years to complete, describes a comprehensive theory about how people construct meaning, beliefs and make narratives using ideas from various fields including mythology, religion, literature, philosophy and psychology in accordance to the modern scientific understanding of how the brain functions.

According to Peterson, his main goal was to examine why both individuals and groups participate in social conflict, explore the reasoning and motivation individuals take to support their belief systems (i.e. ideological identification) that eventually results in killing and pathological atrocities like genocides. He considers that an "analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality". Jungian archetypes play an important role in the book.

Peterson has been studying authoritarianism on the right and the left for 35 years and relates how ideologies hijack language and belief, finding clear evidences that Marxism is a murderous ideology. The practitioners in modern universities should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to promote such vicious, untenable and anti-human ideas, and for indoctrinating their students with these beliefs.