Jordan Peterson makes this point about snakes or serpents as a metaphor for evil, and everyone’s favorite mythological monster, the dragon, is a composite of the carnivores who fed on human ancestors when they were tree-dwelling monkeys: the pythons, the big cats and the raptors.

I recently read Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, and it makes the point that Kirk just made, that people in primitive societies talk incessantly, in part to convey all that useful knowledge and experience about predators, prey, and other humans.

Most stories have a reason; if nothing else, they model behavior for the audience to follow when they encounter a like set of circumstances. If you follow that line of reasoning, you can see in “the story” a form of virtual reality for the audience, one that enables them to experience aspects of the world with which they’re unfamiliar, and which actually experiencing would be highly risky.

Which is where I think the old “sit ’round the fire, boys, and let me tell you about…” thing actually comes from: It’s a mechanism by which we pass on knowledge and experience, and the narrative is actually a training tool by which we pass successful behaviors on to the next generation. Which is why bowldlerized fairy tales aren’t a good idea–There’s a reason those things are so bloody.

And, too… The prevalent story-tropes in a culture tell you a lot about it. Consider the deal with Aladdin and his finding the lamp: It’s all about taking advantage of someone you found, helpless. The Genie of the lamp is a slave, pure and simple. What does Aladdin do, when he finds this poor purple bastard (yeah, I know… Disney.) trapped in a lamp? Does he give a thought to freeing that victim from his imprisonment…? No; he does not: He takes advantage of the situation, and keeps the genie as his slave, no thought giving to freeing him or whether or not the genie should have been imprisoned in the first place.

Another culture would hold up a different exemplar; one where Aladdin, finding a cruelly imprisoned stranger, would give thought to freeing him and ask “Is there a reason this creature is imprisoned here? What do I risk, by freeing him… Should I?”. As well, the idea that the Genie would owe Aladdin service for doing what any decent sophont should, when encountering such a situation…?

You can tell a lot about a culture, simply by observing what stories it tells its children, and what stories its adults find worth telling one another. Aladdin, along with most of the rest of Scheherazade’s oeuvre, does not say nice things about the Arab source culture–Especially when you look at the underlying cultural assumptions and biases.