Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host Andrew Heaton, and I hail from a part of the country where people take neighbors

very seriously.

And I've always fancied that the cultural import we place on neighbors

the Cenus us sunked us is a remnant of our not so distant frontier days. When you were out on the range, hours

from town and your barn burned down or your wife got bitten by a rattlesnake or bitten by a vampire or by a

venomous bear or something or your water pump broke. I don't know stuff that

happened on farms. You had to rely on your nearest neighbor or you die.

And so they're developed an unspoken emphasis on knowing neighbors, treating them well, watching their property, and when they fell on hard

times you'd help them because neighbors were your insurance policy.

That could be nonsense. I don't think it is, but it could be nonsense. It could well be that everywhere

there are people, there are neighbors, and they take them seriously,

and it's... Everybody likes neighbors I'm I'm looking to project

or monopolize some societal virtue which anybody could lay claim to but let's try a

different take let's try a different take. Let's try a different take in terms of circumstances affecting society.

Let's say you grew up in a standalone house with your own yard in a suburban neighborhood or a rural area.

You have neighbors, but you don't share walls with them, and they're reasonably far away, far enough away that you can play

music however loud you want. You can watch movies in your living room with a booming sub-woofer

really enjoy those explosions. You can smoke cigars in your bedroom, you can

brew beer in your garage, you can even work with some explosives in your garage, no

what really cares. Growing up and living in that environment where your personal activities are to a great extent

buffered by space from the people around you.

...