The urban-rural dichotomy in terms of the cycles of power

Material covered in the Anonimity, or the urban versus rural dispute article may prove itself useful in deciphering this offering.

In all rural environments (defined as those environments in which the group is small enough that it knows itself) the cycles of power follow a very simple formula :

• From Democracy to Monarchy, because the narrowness of individual experience of the common man in a rural setting makes him naturally stupidⁱ, and therefore the natural prey of the demagogue.
• From Monarchy to Oligarchy, because of the principal-agent problem (the king needs help and most of the mouthbreathers are fucking useless).
• From Oligarchy back to Democracy, because the common man in a rural setting has some very strange notions about fairness and equitability.

Meanwhile in urban environments (ie, those environments wherein the group is large enough to not know itself) the cycles of power follow the exact same very simple formula!

• From Monarchy to Democracy, because the natural jealousy of the common man runs into the natural idiocy of the common man, and they readily ally. Thus the more or less natural inquiries in the vein of "why him ?" and "why not me ?" fail to encounter their just "because..." through the very simple workings of recursive Dunning-Kruger : the common man is too fucking stupid to know just how fucking stupid he is. Explanations as to "why not him" that are simple enough he could understand can't be correct ; explanations that'd be complex enough to be correct "make no sense" to him. Therefore...
• From Democracy to Oligarchy, and precisely because the common man maintains his very strange notions about fairness and equitability even in an urban setting! In that he fails to recognize the future oligarchs for his betters, he is completely open to their onslaught.
• From Oligarchy back to Monarchy, because the knowledge problems of the urban setting force centralization of power in a single hand necessarilyⁱⁱ -- exactly as depicted by that joke with the cool guy.

This schema explains why Thomas Jefferson thought the farm (ie, rural setting) a better situation for mankind than the bank (urban)ⁱⁱⁱ, as well as everything else.

You're welcome.

1. Think in these terms : if there's a thousand boxes and a hundred balls, you can always easily select a box in which no ball has ever been. That's precisely what a demagogue does ; and the yokels will always fall for it -- from their point of view it's only natural that they do. [↩]
2. This is generally metabolized mentally as something-or-other to do with "management of risk" or similar wank. [↩]
3. Within his short, uninformed life his limited, unaided brain experienced portion C of cycle R and portion B of cycle U, therefore forming the (incorrect) impression that the rural cycle dissipates power towards the masses whereas the urban cycle concentrates it into the elites. They're cycles, they do no such thing, a wheel spinning clockwise spins just as spinfully as a wheel spinning the opposite direction. [↩]