&quot;Are species or cultures that don&#x27;t need stories somehow inferior?&quot;<p>Can you point to any human cultures that don&#x27;t? I&#x27;d argue that storytelling of some kind is integral to what makes us human, and that that propensity toward abstract thought and creativity really does make us &quot;better&quot; than other species, in at least one cognitive sense (though naturally I&#x27;m biased by being a human and if I were, say, a hyperintelligent squid or AI that somehow didn&#x27;t think abstractly, it&#x27;s possible to judge it differently).