How people romanticize community and relationships

So, I live in a giant city, but I grew up rural. And I mean properly rural: No services, no mobile coverage, mountains, wild nature, tightly knit communities in tiny villages, shitters in the back yard instead of in the house, incest, mafia, human trafficking. All the traditions and values!

There's a reason why village people are the corporate or academic fodder when they move to big cities, and why they so routinely get taken advantage of and abused. It's the mismatch between the community culture and the city culture.

In a community, you've got a social penalty for mistreating someone in public. It's a community, the point is to maintain it as such, hence the penalty for being a dick in public. Here's where neolib hipsters make a mistake: Traditional communities are not based on mutual care, they are based on fear of penalty. 

What this leads to is that while you're safe on the street, at work or in school, family members usually abuse each other. Family abuse happens behind closed doors which means there's no social penalty for the abuser as there are no witnesses. In other words, a person will think twice before they abuse you in case there are witnesses.

So, rural people who grow up in this have a different perception of who is probably safe. To a village hick, a random coworker is the person with the best odds for being safe, because they only interact in public and our hick assumes the existence of social penalty. 

The hick acts with a communal mindset in mind, so that everyone can come out relatively well out of every interaction, except when there is a very good reason to not be inclusive and trusting to a proven offender. The most important thing to our hick is to be nice in public, to avoid the same penalty, and to not say no in public unless they have an objective proof of abuse. This means that your first shot at abuse will quite often be successful.

Please stop romanticizing community.

The city culture, on the other hand, has no penalty for being a dick in public. In some cases it is even encouraged, if there is a hierarchy to be built based on race, gender, nationality, class and such. Relationships are no longer based on fear of repercussions, they became transactional. In other words, a person will think twice before they abuse you in case you've got something valuable to offer to them. 

You've got to be good looking, so that it's good to be seen with you, but not too good looking as to get all the attention to yourself. You've got to be smart to provide value for them but not too smart because that's threatening. You've got to have contacts, but the right contacts, and so on. 

So, in city culture, a random stranger is the least safe person, contrary to the hick's expectations. A stranger doesn't know you, which means they don't know what value they can get out of you, and so unless you make an impression of someone powerful, you are a fodder to be used and discarded. 

Being a polite yes-man will get your face dipped in mud pretty quickly. 

City is not all fun and games though, you've got family abuse too, but I find it is milder than in the country. That's probably because in the city, one gets plenty of opportunity to channel their psychological sadism on random strangers, and so there's less left for the family. 

The damage coming from soft abuse is now also diagnosed as PTSD. Nonviolent abuse sucks big time and city relationships are shallow as hell, but I find that people who did not recover from soft abuse are often pretentious, manipulative and lack self-control. 

Which is to say they don't have the same kind of damage as people with war PTSD, captivity, rape, incest and such. They aren't "generally good people, just jumpy and sometimes extremely tired", they are cunts to one and all, hoping to extract something from others no matter fucking what. 

I used to have empathy for them, now I resent them. I believe that you can simply tell yourself to not be a dick to people just because you feel like it. 

Or at least be an adult, if you really dislike someone call them a slur to their face and move on with your life. 

Even kids do this: When someone hurts them, they turn back directly against that same person, even if it's their parent. City people don't usually do this, for some reason. They will find a random person who has nothing to do with what happened and abuse them instead. 

Why is it? Because the abuser also provides value to them, so they feel they cannot turn back against them? 

It's a bizarre circling back to the problem with the rural abuse inside families, except now people feel bound to their abusers because in the cityman's perception, exchange of value is what defines everything.

Basically, most relationships are cancer. Just get a dog.