If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose… - Jordan Peterson

Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot — in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up. Why? Because the consequence of remaining silent is worse. Of course, it’s easier in the moment to stay silent and avoid conflict. But in the long term, that’s deadly. When you have something to say, silence is a lie — and tyranny feeds on lies. When should you push back against oppression, despite the danger? When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy.

A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened." If it's a pattern that repeats in many, many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true.

The dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. And the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity.