Try to imagine, if you can, a society without those core creeds, heroes, narratives, beliefs, celebrations, etc. It would be like not having a language. It is the gravitational center of the mass of the society.

For the Ancient Israelites the formative experience was the forty years in the desert, giving Western culture the Ten Commandments as a form of founding document.

To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Politically expressed as monarchy. Which ancient Israel was.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The various forces in society and nature interacting. The origins of the Christian Trinity going to fertility rites. The young god born in the spring to the old sky god and the earth mother. Though by the age of the Olympians, Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal. The old didn't make way for the young.

Which was why the story of Jesus, crucified for questioning the establishment and risen in the spring, had such fertile ground to take root.

Though by the time Constantine adopted it as state religion of Rome, it was the monotheism that mattered, to validate the Empire finally coming together, several hundred years after the fall of the Republic. The origins of the Trinity shrouded in the Holy Ghost, as the Catholic Church didn't do renewal or women.

So the Catholic Church served as the basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed.

When the West went back to democracy and republicanism, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics.

The logical fallacy of monotheism as some universal premise, the "all-knowing absolute," in the words of Pope, John Paul 2, is that ideals are not absolutes. Those core codes, heroes, etc are ideals, while the universal is the elemental, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. The light shining through and animating the film, than the stories playing out on it.

So Western culture has been bedeviled by this need to proclaim any and every ideology, from capitalism and communism to wokism, as somehow universal.

Morality is not absolute, as it could not be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero. Morals are those codes, behaviors, beliefs, ideals that enable a healthy society.

Realistically the primary basis of any functional society is the value and status of the individual be a function of what they add, not what they can extract. Which is why our society is necrotic in so many ways and depends on ever more infusions of resources, technological development and cheap labor, effectively modern slavery, to continue.

Could a village exist, if everyone was mostly grabbing what they could?

In basic terms, this belief in one's god as absolute creates a feedback loop with no circuit breakers, whether it is modern Israel, or the financialization of the Western economies. It spirals down the vortex in the center. All those cultural nodes have to understand their relationships with the larger networks.

The essence of the node is synchronization. The essence of the network is harmonization. With resonance as feedback in the middle.

So it is more than just stories we tell ourselves to keep entertained, but the ties that bind.