For my Wise and Generous Tutors, regarding creatures of the Blue Planet
Despite benefits, there are reasons to avoid large cities
I'm still debating if a quiet backwater is the best place to survey pre-emergent noogenesis.
Should I have made camp in New York, for example, or is a backwater the best vantage?
Megalopolis dwellers gain sophistication at the expense of perspective. The spot is too hot, cool is too cosmopolitan.
Though more sages than have ever lived now do so in metropolises, their combined wisdom is diminished by proximity. Peer feedback is too tight, adulation too lavish. Perspective and independence lose to conceit and vanity.
Consensus reality comprehensively consumes intellect - and irresistibly so in societal pressure cookers like cities.
Acumen is absent in both urban media and its consumer, the nexus so tight between these symbiotes that the only intellectual oasis is the nexus itself. Like bridging matter in a binary star, surviving in the nexus requires balancing irresistible forces. Only the strongest intellect resists being sucked into a stagnant zeitgeist.
Entertainment's staple, the rustic's adroit lampooning of her city cousin, takes as given dry wisdom's undoing of urbane.
Self-sufficiency sets a broad conceptual scope. Trivia is challenged, the superfluous be anathematical to survival.
Non-city folk are, by definition, unsophisticated. Not dumb, nor easily duped. As shysters and sophisticates are easily unmasked, so too stupid, dangerous ideas stand exposed for what they are in the purifying vastness of field and forest.
Small cities might happily too lack sophistication. The 'in crowd' is small and of minor influence, ruling only the feebleminded. And unlike either township of megalopolis, the pocket city offers freedom to broader perspectives.
Fashionable ideas from über-cognoscenti deflate like cheap party balloons in the absence of their proponent's affectation. Self-serving vortices of fashion and cults dissipate in regional realities as whirlwinds fade from the storm.
A large pond in a small forest - I shall stay in this tiny metroplex.
With Respect and Love
Your Faithful Disciple