Difference between the countryside and the city I guess.
It does seem to apply to rural areas specifically though.
Not much, no. A small community that only trusts itself and pushes any out-group away (regardless of disposition) tends to be called a "cult".
And the answer couldn't be based on the amount of effort it takes, since in the small town scenario you're doing the effortful nice behavior 95% of the time.
I'm not getting into a discussion about tribalism in general right now. You made a strong claim that goes well beyond what I normally think of as tribalism. Do you have a scrap of evidence or research for that claim?
* people are nice when they still behave in the old, tribal way.
* the tribal way is always going to be creating individuals who are racist and conformant/conservative.
* not behaving the tribal way means going outside the conformist mold, which means you take risks and eventually learn by experience that taking more risks come with consequences. You become less trustful of everyone, while almost paradoxically proclaiming yourself to be more open.
This fits observation. If you believe it's wrong, you must demonstrate why with supporting evidence without contradicting the evidence I've used, obviously.
At the beginning it can be a nice place. Until the first abuser finds them. And then... depends on the abuser.
This is not a theory; I have seen it happen, often in groups of nerds who are somewhat naive about how real life works. Then a new guy comes, borrows some money from each of them individually, then disappears. Or a new guy comes, invites a girl to his place, and rapes her. Sometimes some people even get suspicious about the new guy, but is a taboo to express such thoughts loudly, to spread suspicion in a group based on mutual trust.
To avoid things like this, you need to split people into "those I trust" and "strangers". Different people and cultures draw the line differently. For some of them, "those I trust" only includes people they have known for a few years. It is frustrating for a newcomer, and you often wish you were able to do something so that they accept you faster. Unfortunately, if that worked, the abuser would probably do the same thing.
Another strategy is to have mutual friends vouch for someone. But this only works when it is a part of the culture, where people know that vouching for someone brings heavy consequences if that person turns out to be an abuser. In cultures that do not have such experience, abusers often do the trick where they befriend someone, use them to get introduced to their friends, and while the first target is like "this is a nice stranger that I have met yesterday", their friends are like "this is a nice person recommended by my trusted friend, which means I can trust them too", and then the abuser exploits them. (And when they complain to the first target "why did you make me trust such a horrible person", the first target is confused "well, I actually barely knew them, this was a horrible misunderstanding". But the abuser probably has a lot of experience creating such misunderstandings on purpose.)
Finally, you can have a close community that is very difficult to enter. You can trust everyone in that community, because if they do something bad, they will be kicked out, or worse. But this requires the community to be very difficult to enter, and to have ways to punish the abusers in a way that actually hurts them. (Merely kicking someone out of the community is not enough, if there are hundreds of communities, and the abuser simply infiltrates the next one.)
Abusers exist. You need to build a firewall somewhere. There are different places where you can build it, but you have to build it somewhere, or you get hurt.
That's arguably xenophobic depending on how you interpret the word. But it doesn't require anything resembling racism or homophobia.
I'm objecting to the idea that the downside of a tight-knit community is some kind of bigotry. Not just barriers to entry.
(Alternatively, if it's not a specific community, it's some super-wide group based on some obvious feature, than that group isn't keeping out abusers and someone in a different group has probably the same odds of being an abuser.)
There’s something tribal-ish to it, but also something philosophical. You can also belong to a culture which makes this kind of trust or goodwill far more limited, for instance only between family members—you’re just as culturally homogenous but not nearly so kind to strangers.
Look at Japan and rural Western societies. High trust, but the trust is because they are all pretty much the same people, demographics, beliefs, etc. and the density makes it so they pretty much know each other.
I encountered this when someone was talking about where I live as being the kind of place where you could leave the door unlocked. Everyone thought that seemed overstating it because you'd only really do that if you were going out for a few minutes. We were quite shocked to hear they were talking about locking the doors while they were home. None of us had even considered that as a meaning even though it was the norm for where they came from.
Personally I default to the latter because that’s how my idiosyncratic anxiety feels comfortable, even when I’ve lived somewhere where I would be able to hear people coming a mile off. But I know people who default to the first option even in a place where some of their neighbors default to the latter. A lot of it comes down to personal preference rather than environment, I suspect.
I guess in rural areas and old style homes it might be different.
If and when you open it during the day, leave it unlocked (and perhaps open if it’s a nice day) until one of those two things happen.
After a long time, she started locking the door. But she left a copy of the key in the mailbox next to the front door. That was also for her, in case she went out and lost her keys or forgot where she put them.
It was only a few years before she passed away that she had the key taken out of the mailbox.
Then never locked the door, even when going out for an hour+ and leaving nobody home.