Ella Minnow Pea: One more thought

One of the things that kept me from wholeheartedly enjoying Ella Minnow Pea was that it seemed unbelievably silly to me that a society would hold the alphabet in such reverence that the disappearance of letters from a sentence containing all letters of the alphabet would trigger such far-reaching societal changes and government repression. But is that really so far-fetched? Say, for the sake of argument, that you lived in a society that absolutely revered the method it had invented for exchanging goods and services to the extent that this artificial entity had attained almost god-like importance in all aspects of the life of that society, and even those aspects of life not directly involved involved in the exchange of goods and services were still held up to that standard. Would that be any less silly than making decisions based on which letters of the alphabet fell off a statue?