It's culture and upbringing. If you grow up in the city, you live your whole life in a system where things mostly work pretty well. The stoplights control the flow of traffic every 90 seconds, the elevators take you to the floor you live on, the subway shows up every 6 minutes, the bus shows up every 11 minutes, and if there's a problem, you're expected to call 911. That's your role in the fine-tuned machine called city life. It's a system... and it mostly works pretty well under normal circumstances.
If your whole life has been lived in that system, though, it's tough to understand that most of the rest of the country doesn't function like that. And the "system" also has terrible weaknesses, since when the system is overloaded (hurricane, flood, power outage, terrorist attack, crime outbreak) , it fails the people who live within it in a big way. People who rely on the system pay the ultimate price when the system fails. And it doesn't have to be a hyper developed metropolitan area. It's the fact that people depend on the system exclusively rather than developing self reliance like that found in the rural areas of the country. Thus, wherever peolpe live reliant upon the system, when there is a water outage, people die of thirst. When there is a blackout, mass looting / rape/ mayhem breaks out. When there is a riot, people are beaten to death in the streets for days. Etc., etc.
