Humans love stories because stories are much easier to relate to than facts.
However, stories are not facts: while they may contain the seed of a fact (and in this sense, they act as a map for the territory), and while they may sound more or less important depending on who’s narrating them and the power dynamics at play, they are something else entirely.
A story allows you to take a regular idea—with all its weaknesses, friction, and blind spots—and turn it into a flawless idea that appears much more robust than it really is.
This is why, when evaluating someone’s values or judgment, you should look at what they do, not at what they say: the facts are much more reliable than the stories people will make up about those facts.
The upside of this is that, if you’re good at creating stories around facts and ideas (and assuming that you wield that power very carefully), you can be highly effective at what you do, since swimming downstream is easier.