Small Towns
Everywhere you go in the world you will find them. Small towns. Be it the in the South, or North, in the West or the East of whatever. They are there. People live there, and the same social process exists everywhere; there is the good side and the bad side of town. The up scale and the down scale - the ‘across the tracks’ part of town. The nobs are always at the top, looking down on everyone; rich and complacent but nervous about their position. It only takes a stock crash to level the field.
If you scale it up, to a big town or a city, things look different. At first glance. The same dynamics apply though, except there are more people so you don’t notice it as much. Things are smoothed out. All big cities are small towns at heart. The same economic differences exist. Except the quantities of people in each social rank are larger. Also the possibility of social mobility is greater.
As there are more people in cities, one can ‘disappear’ in the crowd. One’s business is more private. But with the internet, it becomes more difficult to do so. Even if you have a private affaire, somewhere there is a trace, a photo or a posting. People are nosy, and like to gossip.
Take Tahiti. I have never been there, so I can talk about it without prejudice. There are about 2 hundred thousands people who live on the islands probably most of them live in the capitol. They are are related to each other, like all insular societies. It probably has a vacation/administration economy. The French government pays the salaries of civil servants and army/navy. The rest of the economy is geared towards tourism. Then there is the service economy. They have 13 % unemployment. I would guess that the young people seek to immigrate to the “Metropole” of France or other French speaking countries to study and work. I could imagine that everyone knows each other’s business like all small towns. Gossip must be rampant. I have a friend who lived on such an island and he finally left, tired of living in a fish bowel society.
An article from the Tahiti Info News that illustrates the Small Town Mentality.
