It suffices for an intransigent minority to reach a minutely small level, 3-4% of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. This dominance of the minority would lead a naive observer to believe that the choices and preferences are those of the majority.

A behaviour can be emergent - studying individual ants will effectively never give us an idea as to how the ant colony operates. Taking Kosher food / drink for example, this is required by 0.03% of US population, yet most products Kosher because the minority is intransigent and majority is flexible.

The geography is important because it is a requirement that the minority are dispersed. Also, if there is a substantial cost to pleasing the minority one can safely assume their desires will not get any traction. Other examples in the real world include halal, non-GMO, lingua franca, intolerant Islam, and intolerant Christianity.

Tolerance cedes power to the intolerant. To go on a tangent, the West must learn to be intolerant of intolerance, just as skeptics must be skeptical of skepticism. Freedoms of speech cannot apply to those who wish to ban freedom of speech. Intolerance, when tolerated, can and will destroy democracy.

It is the inflexibility of the minority that can force the local flexible majority to conform. With a newly converted local flexible minority in line, the superordinate flexible majority of what is now the local minority will equally concede, and so on until the majority are vastly over-represented in a larger pool. Each step establishes a new ‘renormalisation’ group where the veto power of the intransigent incentives a search for something on which everybody can agree. A way to counter this is via decentralisation. One of the reasons the US succeeds is because it is a federation, not a republic; the state boundaries prevent minority rule from spreading.

The minority beliefs that do spread are those that allow for the conversion. To take Islam, a religion which has spread rapidly, we can note that a non-Muslim ma must convert to marry a Muslim woman. Reverting, apostasy, is then punishable by death - apostasy. A counter-example would be Judaism which is less inclusive because there needs to be a maternal lineage. Gnostic faiths are even worse - only those born into the religion can marry one another and there is no conversion. As one can see, rules around interfaith marriage play an outsized role in any specific religion’s capacity to spread.

The dichotomous thinking that we see plague the culture and politics in a fallout of the minority rule. Black and white think is far stronger than nuance. Richard Feynman pointed out that science is an area which actually benefits from the minority rule. Science is not the sum of what scientists think, once something is debunked, even by a single person, It is irrecoverably wrong. Had science been operated by majority consensus it would be stuck in the middle-ages.

Alexander the Great said that “it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion to an army of lions led by a sheep”. Indeed, the entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is present in about everything.