I disagree with perhaps 50% of what this guy writes, but this is one of the better explanations for why the humanities are indispensably important to a functioning society.

“The entertainment industry,” and to a lesser extent “the marketing industry,” provide more direct windows into the structure of things, because they are the facets of the illusion modeled more closely after its authors. More clearly, when we consider the openly-acknowledged stories the powerful tell, we can see them following the same patterns they use in larger-scale storytelling. Nations, and history, are shaped much like bad screenwriting, and the inability of most people to understand narrative manipulation–to read and understand complex stories–is the same handicap that prevents them from figuring out what’s really going on around Earth. Understanding how stories are discovered, transmitted, and experienced (“written/created, read, and analyzed”) helps us figure out what most people are missing, and why they’re so easily manipulated–and gives us insight into how they might learn to demand better stories, both in their personal entertainment and in their outer world.

I could elaborate on that, but why? Nothing I could say would make it any better.