Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

We understand that we stretch across time, that you have to save for your retirement, because the you now will be the you that's 65 and damn soon.

And you have this perspective on the world that spans the ages, so to speak.

And you have to make a bargain between what's...

and correct and enjoyable and fills you with enthusiasm at the moment and how you have to organize yourself into the future, to make a bargain with your future self, to strike the same bargain with everyone else and all their future selves and balance all that in the moment with work.

What kind of work?

That's the story of Cain and Abel.

What sacrifice best pleases God?

Abel's sacrifices are accepted.

His life goes well.

Cain's sacrifices are rejected.

He becomes resentful, arrogant, bitter, murderous, and then genocidal.

Sound familiar?

Those two things are laid out.

Those two pathways of adaptation, those two pathways of narrative valuation are laid out at the outset of the biblical corpus in about 20 of the most tightly written sentences ever penned.

The story of Cain and Abel is inexhaustible.

It sets the pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers, between Batman and the Joker.

Between Superman and Lex Luthor.

Between the Hobbit and Sauron.

Between Harry Potter and Voldemort.

It's the eternal battle of good against evil.