GrimSqueaker:
What in the world does any of that have to do with the Roman urban creation myth? :)
It's kind of obvious. They were raised by wolves like Tarzan was raised by the great apes. This is definitely a severe cultural difference. the communications skills, nuances, body language, normal language, relationships with others are completely different. They have not been trained to satisfy the needs of a complex society. Their brains have been wired a different way.
Although, it may not be as prevalent as in the past due to electronic communications, people raised in the sticks may not have the required social interaction as those in an urban environment and can only learn to cope by keeping their eyes and ears open to learn the skills that may be second nature to those born in another setting.
A subset of this idea is those born in the ghettos of big cities. It has often been proclaimed that they do not know how to properly interact with the larger city about them. To myself, this has represented somewhat of a puzzle. There are only a few miles to travel from these poor areas of the city to one of greater economic opportunity. Programs and services have been created to "help" those raised in such situations. The phrase has been used, "escape from the ghetto."
I agree those in the rural setting may be more dependent on others. In my opinion, those raised in a limited rural setting have greater obstacles to overcome than those of the inner city. Yet, due to the small sample size of this population, you never hear about these people. Perhaps they are the true rags to riches stories.
Well, according to Mary Beard in
SPQR, "wolf" was a euphemism for a prostitute. She sheds a bit of light on the different aspects of the foundation myths in ancient Rome and it's worth a read.
Every subculture or society has rules and expectations about how people ought to interact or treat one another. Many of them grow out of the work and resources available in the community. When you take someone out of one environment and plunk them into another, what you get isn't a rags-to-riches story but a fish-out-of-water story. The fish doesn't always adapt, but the experience changes them, so when they go back to the water they don't always fit in like they used to. In general, human beings tend to prefer people similar to the ones they had growing up, unless they make a conscious decision to do otherwise.
One of the reasons B.E. had so much difficulty in "Nickled and Dimed" is that she didn't play by the rules of the group of people she decided to try to join, nor did she absorb them or do much more than grudgingly acknowledge their existence and legitimacy. She resented the fact that nobody seemed to recognize, appreciate, or reward what she'd always been taught to think of as evidence of her superiority: her education and advanced degree, which did not make her one iota more desirable to employers looking for someone to scrub floors or stock shelves.
The plural of anecdote is not data, however an anecdote can and should provide an example. One of the reasons my daughter was very uncomfortable in my home is because I didn't behave like the people she was used to. We don't communicate by shrieking, hitting people, or kicking holes in walls, for example, and we expect people who live in a household to contribute to it in some way. She identified more strongly with her family of origin and with other people connected to her family in her youth. It's an socioeconomic underclass subculture which I describe as rather more pro-tantrum, pro-filth, and pro-addiction than me. (Yes, I *do* feel superior to them because I regard their wasteful and destructive ways with horror. At the same time, they *do* feel superior to me because they consider the things I described to be evidence of their superior culture, their deeper emotional expression, and their higher spiritual worth. My less impressive attributes in those respects make me a curiosity at best and more consistently a less-than-human resource only useful for the material goods that can be extracted from it. These two perspectives can't be reconciled except to the extent we acknowledge that both exist and are internally consistent). My daughter chose to leave my home for good four days after her 18th birthday. I wasn't very keen about the timing but did help her in that goal and have continued to partially support her although the financial help I provide is tapering off. Since then it's been almost total disaster for her. She won't work, has difficulty holding down a job, and is supposedly taking GED classes although I've been lied to so many times about similar initiatives by her and her relatives or friends that I will believe it this time if I see a trasnscript. Her tantrums have created legal trouble for her. Her beloved family and friends treated her the exact same way she treated me, only more so. They gouged every cent of her college money out of her in less than a month, leaving her destitute, and trashed the transmission in her car while systematically stealing every item of value from her including her passport.
Incidentally, our conversation is teetering on the edge of something that's allowed other threads to explode. Discussing whether a specific group or subculture has values, habits, or default behaviors that make it easy for them to accumulate wealth can be a bit of a quagmire. One aspect of privilege is that the behaviors best rewarded by the system happen to be the ones that are the easiest and most natural for a person, instead of behaviors that are radically out of step with that individual's values and emotional needs.