The Stepford Wives Fallacy
Nothing can actually be perfect, so many people have a great suspicion of groups or individuals which seem to have it all together. We do not believe that anyone can actually be that organized, charming, and happy, so there must be something wrong. Let’s call this the Stepford Wives Fallacy.
In its weakest form, this is just the recognition that no one is perfect, so a person has no visible flaws probably has a few small imperfections that you’re not seeing. This form of the belief is actually true, and not a fallacy.
The stronger, fallacious form operates on the hidden assumption that all people and communities must have roughly the same level of dysfunction. So if someone(s) seem to be doing better, they must have something especially bad that they’re hiding, which, if known, would bring their degree of dysfunction back up to the average level.
In its strongest form this fallacy is actually used as a kind of litmus test. Something being superficially flawless, or even significantly better than average, is treated as positive evidence that something especially heinous is going on unseen, and people under the influence of the strong form of this fallacy often express an explicit preference for visibly dysfunctional communities and individuals.
Sometimes people falling prey to the Stepford Wives fallacy are themselves the victims of communities or individuals which looked perfect to others. These people at least have an excuse. More often, however, this fallacy is simply used as a way to discount people who are your political or personal rivals by ascribing unnamed crimes to them without evidence.
I suppose the fallacy that you describe probably does exist in the form that you describe it, in the sense of “there are people who make those particular calculations for those particular reasons,” but…at least in my experience, you more often get a very similar result from a form of logic that makes a lot more sense.
In this model, the reasoning doesn’t rest on some kind of abstract variable representing “things being wrong in the community,” but rather on specific stereotypes of community types (based on experience, cultural osmosis, etc.).
Free-happy-joyful-creative-whatever communities – “good communities,” by the standards of the people making the calculations – tend to involve a lot of expressiveness, a lot of unrestrained communication, a lot of people wearing their hearts on their sleeves. When you enter such a community, you’re likely to encounter its dramas and dysfunctions very quickly. Maybe there will be very few such problems, maybe there will be a fair number, but either way they’ll be visible on the surface.
There are, of course, many different varieties of bad communities. But one of the best-understood is the Repressed Vicious Puritan Community, where there’s lots of abuse and cruelty behind closed doors, but everyone is super concerned with keeping up an appearance of flawless functionality.
So if you find a group of people who seem flawlessly functional at first glance, it might be that they actually are, but it’s more likely that they’re hiding whatever dysfunctions they have…and “taking pains to hide your dysfunctions” is a red flag for Repressed Vicious Puritan Communities.
I don’t fully buy into this model by any means. Given your general predilections, I assume you buy into it even less. But it’s basically coherent, whereas “there are no variations in functionality” is not. RVPCs are real, although reports may differ on how widespread they are, and taking pains to avoid them isn’t crazy.