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The trouble is that it is difficult to tell who is a neighbor and who is not a neighbor in a society with so many people in which it is impossible to know everyone. In the past, people tended to live in smaller towns and farming villages, and therefore it was in everyone's self-interest to be nice to everyone else in order to improve their social standing. If you chose not to help anyone and be a neighbor to anyone, then no one would feel an obligation to be a neighbor to you. In contrast, in today's society there is a sense that few people will know if you choose to be neighborly to others or not, and that people will not treat you differently regardless of what you do.
Also, there is always a danger in today's society that if you are neighborly to someone, they will take advantage of you. In a smaller community, this wouldn't be much of a problem, as you would know if someone had a history of taking advantage of others, and people would be less inclined to take advantage of others because of the social consequences. Thinking of an example from my life, I was previously quite generous with giving money to homeless people. In particular, there was one homeless woman in my old college town who I developed a quasi-friendship with, as she seemed eager to get to know me and talk with me. I gave her a considerable amount of money in smaller increments over the course of two years, totaling a few hundred dollars. Then I learned from a local restaurant owner that she wasn't actually homeless and was just a con artist. Since then, I have been very hesitant to give homeless people money, even though many of them are probably desperate and need the money. In a smaller community where everyone knew each other, I would have never been scammed like that, and I would not feel the same hesitation about giving money to homeless people that I feel now.
The question is, how do we establish a sense of trust and neighborly attitudes in a community that is too large for everyone to know each other? Obviously, this isn't a problem for Mikraite at this point, since we are only a virtual community and will remain small for the foreseeable future even if we turn into a physical community. But theoretically, how would we enforce a sense of a community where everyone helps each other if we grew significantly in size?
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