Originally Posted by
consentingadult
Although I do not have an answer to the relationship between population density and Fi, I do think the following is dead wrong:
Both combinations of Ti+Fe and Te+Fi are capable of cooperation, only the way they go about it is different. Ti+Fe is more all-encompassing, i.e. within a group of people it covers all of the social domain, involving a lot of social dynamics, especially social pressure mechanisms that strive to make people conform and thus be inclusive.
With Te+Fi, cooperation is much more voluntary based, but behavior is also more critically assessed. No one is asking you to conform, but if you do not show the appropriate behaviors, you are not granted access to the group.
Sociologically speaking, the emergence of (individualistic) Fi+Te societies in the Western World is the result from the rise of a bourgeois stratum in an otherwise feudal society. This rise, which also included the development of a bourgeois ethics that ideal-typically banned the use of force from human relations and replaced it with the ethics of meritocracy, was indeed first observed in highly populated areas of Europe, such as Northern Italy and the Low Countries. As to Northern Italy, I do not know what came first: high population density or a capitalist-bourgeois social structure. But for the Low Countries, a major factor of their rise was the population surplus in the late Middle Ages (so more a matter of over-population instead of high population density), which could be made productive with early capitalist economic structures. Protestant-Capitalist ethics (Fi+Te) was invented to rationalize such an economic social structure and to give the feudal social organization of society a bad name (so nowadays everyone believes that e.g. slavery is a bad thing, not realizing that such believes are just social knowledge constructs).
Ultimately this led to the Enlightenment, which de facto ended the feudal era and started the Modern(ist) Era. However, the Modern Era give rise to the new stratum of the Proletariat, which by these days have risen economically on the social ladder, but not so much culturally (Fi-wise, in the sense of being capable of showing capacity for developing self-restraint). The current economic crisis we are in, is the final transition from the Modern Era to the Post-Modern Era, in which the descendants of the Proletariat become the dominant cultural force at the "expense" of the middle class bourgeois. This selfish 21st century society you are talking about, will, imho, not be dominated by Te+Fi (a thing of the past), but by Fe+Ti. This will probably be a more Alpha kind of Fe+Ti than a Beta type of Fe+Ti, because there will not be much room for Se-like attitudes (yes, the Western World are becoming softies!)
Unless of course, shit will hit the fan for some reason and history will branch off into another direction.