What seems to be rare is the ability to use culture a medium to store and transmit tech.
What seems to be rare is the ability to use culture a medium to store and transmit tech.
What's separates humans is we can construct common fictions that we actually believe in, eg "my job is to maximize shareholder value" where both the corporation and the responsibilities towards it are made up but generally believed.
There's of course a rather large elephant in this room, too, that decides a lot of things about our lives.
Trying to describe culture with stories feels like trying to describe biology with proteins. It gets us most of the way there but also adds a whole ton of complexity because it misses the fundamental nature of the system.
Humans are great at general and accurate imitation. This probably seeded a runaway evolutionary process, the result of which was tools, fire, and language.