A very common present day manifestation of this: people (from all colours of politics, but it's especially funny when it happens on the left) yearning for more "community". Which isn't to say there isn't a point to it! There definitely are things we lost by moving to a more individual lifestyle, and we should maybe consider what is the best way to thread that needle. But you have ideas thrown around like "community policing", as if that would not just be called lynching, or people really invested in LGBT rights who simultaneously seem to ignore just how judgy and controlling communities tend to be on sexual mores - a tight knit community is one where your business is also everyone else's, and the community, pretty much in order to exist, has to be entitled to some of your freedom and time. Maybe the specific mores will be different this time around and we won't just replay the past, but regardless there will be someone whose individuality will have to be sanded off to fit in.
Yes, I recall an anthropologist pointing out that whenever tightly-knit communities were initially exposed to larger civilizations, a certain percentage of people would run for the cities as quickly as they could. Tiny communities aren't all Stardew Valley, and if you don't fit in, they can be very rough.
That said, there are a lot of different cultural variations here. Old-school New England, for example, has an unusual variation of small-town dynamics:
So there are multiple sets of cultural tradeoffs that can be made around small communities.
I think a part of the problem is that moving in one direction is easier than moving in the opposite direction. Which creates an imbalance of the result.
You want less community? Get a job, and you can rent a place in a different city, or on the opposite side of the same city.
You want more community? That's more tricky. For an existing community, you will be a newcomer; they can potentially ignore you for years. To create a new community, coordinating people is difficult.
So I find it plausible that on average we have fewer communities than we would ideally want, because leaving a community is easier than joining it.
I've been wondering the case of Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt. A hotel employee called the cops on them because they were "dressed in tactical clothing and protective gear, while also being armed". Does this pass the threshold of "too weird" in New England? Or maybe it was New England forbearance that let them get away with it for as long as they did? Or maybe it's possible to be weird in New England, as long as one has the right kind of vibe.
I am not familiar with the details of that case, unfortunately. And rural New England gun culture is a big and complicated subject. But yeah, if you walk around in public with, say, an AR-15 and a plate carrier vest, plenty of people are going to notice. What they do about it, that's another question. Generally speaking, you don't want to interact too directly with the sort of people who walk around wearing body armor in a town with a population of 1,000. They are, not to put too fine a point it, armed. And they have badly deficient risk assessment. The correct response to people with bad epistemics and AR-15s is the same as the correct response to bull moose in rutting season: keep your distance, avoid loud noises, and minimize direct confrontation.
As for less dangerous sorts of weird, well, I'm speaking in anthropological generalities. New England still has all the same kinds of people you'd find anywhere else. You can find amazing people and idiots and jerks and loudmouthed racists. What changes in different cultures is the proportions of these people, and the broad cultural "overlays" of what's valued, what's seen as tacky, and what's taken for granted. If you're the only black person in a rural New England town, you will absolutely interact with your local racists sooner or later. There is no place on earth where you can escape people being people. Even if you live in a culture where your economy is based on (say) elaborate competitive gifts to other villages, there's still going to be an old man grumbling about "kids these days" and their sloppy work ethic preparing gifts. Humans are going to human, wherever they are.
But the whole New England thing of rescuing strangers' cars from ditches without a second thought, but often taking 5-20 years to really warm up to new arrivals? It's almost hilariously real. But it doesn't change fundamental human nature, it only remixes it.
what is the significance of the v in RETVRN?
Its a good point, I think its a failure of heuristically thinking. We like that easy variable.
Ancient latin didn't have "u" and "v", just "v". So this is a sort of "lets return to the good old times of the roman empire, which we'll write in the same way as it would look on an old inscription". They also only had uppercase letters, which is why it's "RETVRN" rather than "retvrn".
mruwnik's answer is correct on the surface level but doesn't connect it up to the specific use. The specific word “retvrn” references particular Internet waves of rejection-of-modernity sentiment (possibly especially in reactionary politics, though how true this is seems to be contested) that use Roman iconography to represent their imagined idea of traditional Western society. People with such a sentiment often advocate for the reinstatement of stricter social mores that they believe produced better societies in the past—thus the use in the post, where the hypothetical person believes that “our problems started when the fence was removed”.
Chesterton's Missing Fence
Reading the title, I first thought of a situation related to the one you describe, where someone ponders the pros and cons of fencing an open path, and after giving it thoughtful consideration, decides not to, for good reason.
So it's not a question of removing the fence, but that it was never even built, it is "missing". Yet the next person that comes upon the path would be ill-advised to fence it without thoroughly weighing the pros and cons, given that someone else decided not to fence that path.
You may think this all sounds abstract, but if you program often this is actually a situation you come across: programmer P1 spends a lot of time considering the design of a data structure or a codebase and so on, rejects all considered possibilities but the one that they implement, and perhaps document if they have time. But they will usually not document why they rejected and did not implement the N other possibilities they considered.
P2 then comes in thinking "Gee that sure would be convenient if the code had feature F, I can't believe P1 didn't think of that! How silly of them!", not realizing that feature F was carefully considered and rejected, because if you implement it bad thing B happens. There's your missing fence, never was built in the first place, and with good reasons.
the problem here is that sometimes the past programmer didn't considered it all, and present-progeammer don't have a way to distinguish between those possibilities. which is also the problem with the Fence, except in programming it's easier to try, and roll back if you need to.
in the last place i worked, going by this heuristic would have been bad idea. the answer was mostly that they didn't think about it, or that the code is old and you can use something better now, and should.
"By the same logic as Chesterton..."
Why? Are they the same problems? The problems of not having a fence vs. having a fence? Are the false positives and false negatives symmetrical? That would be a massive claim! (Normally, by risk mitigation, they are asymmetrical; the unfortunate reason why we have anxiety in life, and that stupid smoke alarm sound).
Building a prior fence: Maybe the fence was taken down, cause there was no risk of flooding, and it was blocking the animals? Do we have a reason to build now or not?
Chesterton's Fence: We should not take a fence down, because maybe there will be flooding? Or it will not offer protection from an invading army, and everyone will die? We don't know, lets not risk it.
There NOT being a fence, is not evidence, that there shouldn't be a fence (even knowing there was or was not a fence there)...go out and see, should there be a fence or not?
One action requires refraining from destroying a possible benefit; the other leads to action of building a fence. You always normally need a good reason to build a wall. There having already been a wall there helps, but is not dispositive by logic, because as you say, the wall is down, and we have to speculate why it was there or why we should build it now.
The upsides and downsides are very different in your scenarios.
The inverse of Chesterton's Fence is this:
Sometimes a reformer comes up to a spot where there once was a fence, which has since been torn down. They declare that all our problems started when the fence was removed, that they can't see any reason why we removed it, and that what we need to do is to RETVRN to the fence.
By the same logic as Chesterton, we can say: If you don't know why the fence was torn down, then you certainly can't just put it back up. The fence was torn down for a reason. Go learn what problems the fence caused; understand why people thought we'd be better off without that particular fence. Then, maybe we can rebuild the fence—or a hedgerow, or a chalk line, or a stone wall, or just a sign that says “Please Do Not Walk on the Grass,” or whatever it is that we really need.