The reason we normalize everyone believing a corpus of core texts is not because we think those core texts are smarter than anything else that could be written

The reason we normalize everyone believing a corpus of core texts is not because we think those core texts are smarter than anything else that could be written or will be written. It's because to organize a huge number of people, one must create commonalities among them. Any society must have core beliefs, myths, touchstones, and practices, to keep it unified and keep people cooperating and trusting each other. The founding fathers, their writings and ideals, form the civil religion that makes a rich black Texan Catholic have some reason to trust a poor white Washingtonian atheist. Even though they may be different in so many ways, they at least have this one thing in common, which separates them together from the wider world of Others. To cooperate properly, humans need this kind of tribal identity correspondence, and an Other to separate themselves from. It's in-built tribal psychology. Even if those texts prescribe practices are sometimes sub-optimal in outcome, without them the whole society falls apart pretty quickly due to infighting and unsolvable differences in values and identities. So the value in the texts is not just policy wisdom - it is simply that they are the thing everyone believes in. This is what's happening now, in fact - a fetish for destroying normative beliefs means people more and more have nothing in common. People just didn't understand the purpose those beliefs had in the first place. They threw them away and now here we are. (None of this is to say that the content of the texts is totally irrelevant - a society organized around the writings of the founding fathers is obviously going to be different than a society organized around the writings of Confucius, or the texts of Islam. It just means the content isn't the only reason we hold onto these texts).