Rural America, in many ways, remains a living museum of this tribal wiring. In places where diversity is minimal and ideas circulate slowly, identity calcifies. Community becomes echo chamber. It’s not that people don’t think critically—it’s that critical thinking is punished. Conformity is rewarded. Outsiders—literal or ideological—are threats to the fragile cohesion of a community whose worldview has not been tested by difference but merely reinforced by repetition.

Regardless of whether it's insightful or condescending, it's wrong. Or at least incomplete.

The author attributes the different social structures of small-town life vs. big-city life to fear or threat or lack of exposure, and suggests that the increased importance of conformity is due to those factors. But those aren't the only reasons. I suspect they're not even the most important reasons.

In small communities, people face enormous pressure to conform simply because of the community size. In larger communities, the very size of the community gives you both the ability to maintain some degree of anonymity and the ability to form subcommunities within the larger whole. This dramatically changes the risk-reward ratio for nonconformity. It is structural, not ideological.

In a small community, everyone knows you. They've probably known you from birth. They know your family, your background, your personal leanings - everything. Or if they don't, they can find out very very quickly and easily. All of the social and economic institutions are built around that massive amount of shared knowledge. When you apply for a job or interact with someone socially or try to join an institution, almost everything that was ever known about you comes into that situation with you. You can't escape it, you can't hide it, you can't conceal it.

Meanwhile, large urban areas allow for anonymity - indeed, it's somewhat inescapable. It's utterly impossible for people to know everyone in the community. So employment and economic and social institutions are structured around that fact. Employers and other institutions don't assume that they're going to already know people when they walk in the door, and so they have both policies (job interviews, for example) and rules (don't ask if they're married or have kids) around that fact which would be utterly pointless in a small town.

So if you decide to be nonconformist in a small town, there's a huge possible penalty to it. Everyone will know, and there's nowhere for you to go where they won't. Meanwhile, in a large city, the costs are vastly lower - you can have a personal life or ideology or culture that's different from the majority and carve out a life for yourself regardless. It's a large enough space that you can avoid being stigmatized, and you can find enough people like yourself to build a community of like-minded folks.

And of course, that brings us to the ironic part of this analysis. There are plenty of sub-communities in dense urban areas that have exactly the same degree of rigidly enforced conformity as any small town. Go into an ethnically or religiously homogenous community in New York, whether the Hasidim or Little Odessa or Chinatown or a host of other enclaves, and see how easy it is to depart from widely held - and enforced - community standards. Or even ideological subcommunities - I imagine that if you're waist-deep in a super-liberal neighborhood in Berkley, you might find it just as difficult to voice opposition to allowing trans girls on a women's sports team as it would be to voice the opposite opinion in a small deeply conservative town.