An essential ingredient of our old moral stories is that they work. The archetypes have been passed down for many thousands of years, possibly because their lessons stand the test of time.
As to what they say about what you guys are discussing, I don't know. But they probably say something, and it's probably of a wisdom developed with lots of trial and error.
Note: the stuff modern people like about the modern world came out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment (reason, humanism, individualism, etc.), and those were a reversion to the classics. The idea that we may be linearly progressing out of the ways of our ancestry may be folly.
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