Quotation for the Day
8th February 2025
ZMan:
I think it was Charles Beard who argued that urbanization leads to dependence because people in urban areas grow used to the infrastructure. The daily interface with government supplied services results in those services becoming a part of the person’s conception of their life. They cannot imagine living without them, which leads them to support the politics that defend this system.
It may also cause them to view any threat to those systems, even a temporary one like a snowstorm, as an existential one. Since who they are is tangled up in the ecosystem of urban life, that which threatens changes to that ecosystem, or even parts of it, is the same as a threat on them. The reaction to Covid followed this pattern. Urban areas with lots of services had a greater panic reaction to Covid.
This explains why radicals hate rural people. In their mind, the self-sufficient should not exist, so there is something dangerous about them. The reason that chubby weirdo Matthew Yglesias wants a billion people is so there can be no rural areas and therefore no independent people. His fantasy world is one in which everyone is a helpless child, dependent on the benevolent state.
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