Great Stories are great because of what they tell us about being human.

People often say things like that, and it's quite silly. We don't learn things from those stories. Learning is quite unlike the response the stories generate, and if learning were what attracted us to them, they wouldn't have that universal appeal. What they generate is recognition. The "Great Stories" are collections of social interaction elements, patterns that natural selection has optimized us to detect in observations and recountings of events.

They're also incredibly boring to anyone willing to wrench their powers of analysis away from the thrall of their social-operations modules and look at them directly.