... By the time push comes to shove, my neighbor's interests will ALWAYS be subordinate to those of my family.
Interesting, I have 6 more or less adjacent neighbors. Your statement has to be false.
"ALWAYS be subordinate" means what? When those other neighbors can indeed cause you so much grief? Tit for tat. Each neighbor thinks pretty much like you - their interests are more important to them than yours.
You get these interesting conflicts where Tit-for-Tat prevails.
If you like to rev up your engine to 100+ decibels several times a week so that it interrupts work-from-home Zoom meetings, you might be sued by more than one neighbor. Such a lawsuit could impact your family's interests. Or if your daughter throws a wild party with 200 high school kids getting drunk and noisy in the backyard - that could have the neighbors calling the police out to quell the ongoings.
These feedback mechanisms. They do exist and they are often very direct and very fast.
So the statement above is of course total nonsense. You do have to get along with the community or collective.
Just like on this little forum. If you don't watch out for other people's interests, sometimes at the expense of your own, you may suffer consequences. It is easy to see you tread far more cautiously than I do. So, again, your statement is nonsense. You yourself should know that all to well.
I suppose you are really talking about people in general - and there are people in the population who do occasionally forget all about the surrounding collective and wind up being sued or spending some time behind bars - or paying a fine.
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I'd rather talk about the science or managing such collectives in an optimal way.
Trump, for example, was correct in many respects. Unfortunately, he has some kind of personality disorder and can't get anything done without a tremendous expenditure of energy to overcome the wrath of his crazy enemies, - whom he more or less created.
