You can't just throw out cliches if you're going to claim something as impactful as that. You seem to be saying there's some kind of conservation of niceness so increasing your treatment of one group requires decreasing it for another group? Why is that?
And the answer couldn't be based on the amount of effort it takes, since in the small town scenario you're doing the effortful nice behavior 95% of the time.
First of all , this is an observation of facts in the reality we live in. I agree with the OP argument that these things are intrinsically linked when we just observe the facts without trying to impose our beliefs on them. If we accept that, we can try to theorize about why that may be.
My theory is that people are nice when they live among others who look and behave like themselves because that what humans did for almost their whole existence as a species. Archeological evidence suggests that if you met a stranger, someone not from your tribe, chances were high they would be a danger, not an opportunity to make a new friend. So humans seem to have evolved to not trust outsiders, not just strangers. In a small society, conformity is highly valued because doing things without understanding its consequences could often end up in catastrophe. People didn’t understand the world, and other tribes, well enough to have any confidence in whether a new behavior would be beneficial or not. So we end up with humans who trust and depend on others from their own tribe for everything, are highly distrustful of outsiders, and not looking like yourself is the greatest sign that someone is an outsider, and who value and demand conformity as a matter of survival.
The world of today breaks some of these expectations in some ways, but they are still mostly accurate in my opinion.
People who are more open minded tend to be so because they live in fairly cosmopolitan areas, but those also tend to be bigger cities where you don’t really know most people and where trusting others becomes harder, especially when many people have completely different backgrounds than you.
Nothing you just said backs up the argument you were making earlier that who you are nice and mean to is "two sides of the same coin" and it's impossible to be nice to both (or mean to both based on the mirror comparison). You're giving a fine explanation that there are different motives involved in the treatment of insiders and outsiders, but that's much more general and nonspecific.
I'm not getting into a discussion about tribalism in general right now. You made a strong claim that goes well beyond what I normally think of as tribalism. Do you have a scrap of evidence or research for that claim?
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If you want to assume you can trust your network, so you don't need security in the hosts, you need to have a sysadmin who secures the network or have it airgapped directly. You can get rid of all of that, but then you must assume your network is untrusted and need to have security in every service you run.
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