There is much talk this week of “Freedom”. It should be undeniable that each of us should have an inalienable right to think and believe anything they choose, free from persecution. The complication occurs whenever anybody acts upon those beliefs in a way that seeks to force them on others. One person’s freedom is the other’s persecution.

We live inside a tension between opposites. We may be prepared to die for the Cause of our beliefs, and that often happens because there are others willing to kill for theirs. 

Some beliefs are so anti-human as to drive a wish for the extermination of people who don’t believe in them. At the extreme end there are some who believe that “humanity is the problem that needs to be exterminated”. 

The survival of humanity depends upon limiting tolerance. Tolerance ends at the point of tolerating the intolerable. 

Free speech, as with all freedom, has limits. A community that allows the individual full freedom to torture, maim, rape and kill is not a society, it is anti-social. Indeed it is inhuman, because humans are gregarious, cooperative and inter-dependent for our very survival. 

Nuances abound. We should not be banned from upsetting people by our words. Opinions are almost infinite and therefore bound to clash. The limits to what can be said are surely somewhere around the point at which a set of ideas are taken-up by a large enough group of people to produce sufficient power to shut others down.

That’s why it is important to seek fact from fiction, evidence and validation, and the motive behind opinions. Our own mind is our personal sanctuary, and sacrosanct. But when we act on our beliefs we cannot help but have an impact on others. To speak out is to invite responses including opposition.

We have to own-up to our personal responsibilities towards other people. That is what restricts social behaviours – if everyone is free to do exactly what we want, no-one can be free because everyone will be negatively impacted by the care-less behaviours of others.

There are always social rules governing human societies, and always will be. Perhaps, in a classless society in which no-one has any more or any less agency than anyone else, individual power over others no longer exist and self-determination is valued to the utmost, rules would be at a minimum. Indeed, we would be born and raised not even thinking that we could impose ourselves on someone else.

But Capitalist society is very far from any Utopia, the social class tensions produced by the competitive quest for wealth and power-over-others at a premium. 

We live in contest. Every penny paid to a worker is a penny less in profit for the business owner. That’s simple enough. Every idea that benefits the collective rights of the worker is an idea that impacts upon the right of the business owner to exploit us. Ideas matter in the real world. The current so-called “Culture-Wars” is evidence enough – opinions have an impact. 

The Culture War is going to dominate the fast-approaching General Election. The right-wing of the far-Right Tory Party are preparing to mount an ideological assault on our society, promoting nationalist racism, anti-woke anti-Trans white-male supremacy, and the “Good Old Victorian Values” of “know Thy Place”, Respect the Rich Protestant Capitalism.

The immediate example is be Climate Change, general denial now raising its head again after the calming-down of Greta Thunberg’s great school strikes. Following last week’s three by-elections, the London ULEZ low emissions zone brought to the fore as an anti-working class, anti-business agenda, the Opposition Labour Party has matched the Tory pull-back on climate action, and will go further. 

It doesn’t much matter that there is sufficient evidence of climate crisis from the hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies identifying the fastest changes to climate ever recorded, linking this unnatural phenomenon to the emissions of global heating gases from burning of fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution. From international scientific analysis and personal observation you’d think it undeniable.

Politicians are encouraging those people who think the environmental studies are lies and part of a global conspiracy seeking to limit our freedoms. Some deny Climate Change outright whilst others choose to believe it’s nothing to do with the recent activities of humanity but instead is natural or god given – either way, we shouldn’t be doing anything about it. There are even people who think climate collapse will make humanity extinct which they consider would be a benefit to the environment and Ecology they say they love. 

There are also people with power and privilege who, as ever, want to use the crisis to make money, exploit our concerns and force the working class to pay through poorer living conditions and restrictions on movement. 

There are groups who want to impose solutions, and opposing groups – like the one I belong to – who want to organise cooperatively to find solutions and adapt to survive as a caring and inclusive society seeking a new equilibrium with Nature.

This Summer’s record-breaking heatwaves, fires, floods and famines certainly require action if we are to protect each other. We will each do according to our beliefs. But denial of the facts will impose a heavy price on the lives of others, and those pronouncing the climate crisis as a conspiracy to be ignored should expect to be challenged by those of us demanding the freedom to live.