“But the size of the community isn’t the defining parameter for how safe a place it is.”
The word fractal was trendy once, may still be but certainly applies. The true definition of fractal is a pattern that endlessly repeats on different scales. The memes that turn an ordered society into a disordered one work well and create similar lawless climates at anywhere between small town scale to national. Same poisonous ideas.
Another way of looking at it would be as entropy. A well functioning society is a highly ordered system and there are near infinitely more disordered states that ordered ones. Therefore, random changes introduced into an ordered state are near infinitely more likely to degrade the system.
Political conservatism is an instinctive method of dealing with the reality that willy-nilly releasing totally unproven assumptions into an ordered society will greatly increase the entropy (disorder) of that society. So maybe the concept that there are 73 genders that we can all sequentially occupy by simple declaration should be examined for a while before being released into the wild as a fundamental ruling precept.
