Rodney Stark in his “The Rise of Christianity,” describes the ancient urban areas (cities). Because of the high death rate the cities were constantly turning over in terms of core populations. Stark says,
“Greco-Roman cities were populated by strangers.”
One consequence of this was the crime rate was high because as newcomers there were no personal attachments to one another as residents.
Stark goes on to write,
“Given the immense cultural diversity of the empire, the waves of newcomers to Greco-Roman cities were of very diverse origins, and therefore fractured the local culture into numerous ethnic fragments.”
In the ancient city of Antioch for example Stark quotes Smith’s work that “estimates are that the ‘citizens were divided into 18 ethnic tribes, distributed locally.'”
Stark then offers,
“What does seem clear is that social integration of Greco-Roman cities was severely disrupted by the durability of internal ethnic divisions, which typically took the form of distinctive ethnic precincts. Ethnic diversity and a constant influx of newcomers will tend to undercut social integration, thus exposing residents to a variety of harmful consequences, including high rates of deviancy and disorder.”
It should be clear what the implications are for us today in what Stark wrote about the ancient cities. The reality is that you can’t swamp a contiguous geographic area with strangers and aliens and expect not to have large scale social disorder and unrest. Now, of course our elite know this and so we know that the elite are purposefully pursuing a policy that they know will end in social order breakdown and disarray. They do this because such disorder creates a need for a centralized government to police and manage the State created disorder. The importing of large numbers of strangers and aliens into one contiguous geographic area is a job security policy for the State. The more friction that is created by moving people of different ethnicity and religion next to each other, cheek by jowl, the more the State is needed to “police” such friction.
