The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such, and to act it out in your own personal lif… - Jordan Peterson

Snake predation was no joke. It shaped our evolutionary past. We're attuned to snakes. We are really good at detecting the camouflage pattern of snakes in the lower half of our visual field. There's evidence that the reason human beings have such acute vision—which means that our eyes were opened—is that we co-evolved with snakes and we learned how to see them. And then the price we paid for seeing was that our brain grew, because you need a lot of brainpower to see. And the consequence of our brain growing was that one day we woke up and discovered the future. And the future is where all the snakes might live instead of where they live right now. I already made the case that there's a tight link between what you eat and information—conceptual link as well as a practical link. But it's also the case that we can see colors. The question is: Why? The answer is: We evolved to see ripe fruit. In the story of Adam and Eve human beings are given vision by the snake and the fruit. That turns out to be correct.

When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, literature, and art, and all of that, to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing.