What almost no political figure will say publicly is something that should be as self-evident as the “inalienable rights” so beloved by the Founding Fathers: Not all freedoms are the same.

There are, in theory, two general categories of freedoms. The first category holds those freedoms or rights whose expression physically and economically harms no others, provided one doesn’t carry them to extremes. The second category includes those rights whose exercise can and often does harm others.

The problem is that, as with anything, human beings are good at carrying things to extremes.

Your belief and worship of a different god, or no god, harms no one [if you use belief to justify harm to others, it’s a different story]. What gender or sexual or non-sexual self-identity you express harms no one. What clothes you wear harms no one [provided those clothes are not designed to physically harm others]. What opinions you express harm no one [but using those opinions to put others out of business, incite riots, or public uprisings goes beyond the freedom of speech and self-expression].

Your freedom to fire a gun can in fact harm others. So can dumping sewage into the stream that runs through your property. Your freedom to smoke in enclosed spaces definitely harms others. Your right to drive or fly aircraft or use heavy equipment is limited because you can definitely harm or kill others.

In more lands than not throughout history, freedom of religion or freedom from religion did not exist. All too often, there was, in effect, a mandate of what religion was or was not allowed. More than a few countries, until recently, effectively had sumptuary customs or laws that limited who could wear what garb. And censorship in some form exists in all too many lands.

Part of the freedom problem is, as noted above, that all too many human beings carry their freedoms to extremes. They not only want to worship as they please, but also want to force others to worship in the same way, “for their own good,” as well as to enshrine their religious values in law. They tell lies and partial truths for their own benefit, claiming that they should be able to do so because they have freedom of speech. Men have historically generally claimed that their rights superseded those of women, and that women did not have the right to sexual and reproductive freedom – and men used, and often still do, the law to restrict that freedom, while effectively granting themselves rights women did and do not have.

The other part of the freedom problem is that to function societies need sets of rules that people will abide by, because without accepted laws, societies disintegrate into anarchy. Those in power in society always structure those laws in a way that reflects their beliefs, usually maximizes their freedoms, and restricts the freedoms of others – even those freedoms that seldom harm others.

Representative governments were designed to come up with laws acceptable to all, but that structure is fraying across the world as people use technology to associate with just those who share the same values. The more they do so, the more each group rejects the others, and demonizes not only “the other,” but also the diminishing number of moderates, and the more they struggle to impose their values on others.

And that may well be how our vaunted technology destroys us… and our freedoms.

Why is he keeping everyone he can from testifying? Why is he threatening and denigrating lifetime federal employees and decorated military officers with impeccable and honorable records? Why is he trying to keep his tax records out of the hands of public prosecutors?

The Republicans are trying to claim that Democrats don’t have testimony from enough people with “first-hand” contact with Trump, but at the same time, Trump is doing everything possible to keep as many of those individuals as possible from testifying before Congress.

What’s occurring on the Republican side doesn’t look like honorable individuals trying to get the truth out. It looks like a Mafia gangster using every stratagem possible in the law book, and some that are anything but legal [threatening witnesses, directly or indirectly, is a crime], to keep the truth from coming out.

Supposedly, if one is innocent, truth is the best defense, yet while Trump complains and calls the impeachment hearings a hoax and claims he’s innocent, he’s doing everything possible to keep whatever happened from coming out or being investigated.

What amazes me is how many people, particularly his supporters, don’t see this, and don’t want to. Their attitude is similar to an old sculpture my grandmother had with three monkeys in a row. Under the monkeys was the inscription: Hear No Evil; See No Evil; Speak No Evil. The first monkey has his hands over his eyes; the second over his eyes, the third over his mouth.

And, in a perverse way, that seems to fit Trump and the Republicans at this point. They don’t want to hear, see, or speak of Trump’s evil.

In the latest issue of Time, the attorney Robert Ray argues that President Trump should not be impeached and convicted on the grounds that Trump committed no crime. This is already the basis of some Republicans’ defense of Trump. Ray’s argument rests on two bases. First, that the “quid pro quo” offered by various Trump appointees and subordinates was not a “corrupt arrangement” under the law because the law requires a specific benefit and because an investigation of the Bidens by Ukraine would have provided only a “nebulous” benefit. Second, that because the Office of Management and Budget had no authority to permanently withhold the aid appropriated and authorized for Ukraine and because the aid was finally released [after newspaper reports of withholding surfaced] no harm was done. Therefore, there was no crime.

The first contention is an incredibly ingenuous argument, and one that a great number of convicted criminals would like to be able to use. “Because I didn’t know what I might get, it wasn’t a crime.” And law, in fact, recognizes this problem because we have penalties for attempted crimes that were never completed. In addition, even Trump’s attempt to ask for such a favor has damaged the future credibility of the United States as well as pointed out that Trump will do anything for his personal gain, regardless of the impact on the U.S. national interest, and suborning the national interest to personal interest is in fact a form of treason.

The second base ignores the fact that the White House did in fact freeze the aid. The fact that it didn’t have the authority to do so is immaterial to the fact that the freeze was ordered. Also, there’s no basis to assert that no harm was done… or could have been done. Ukraine may well have been able to use that aid against the Russians, for which that aid was intended. Even the slowing of that aid harmed Ukraine and benefited Russia, which, again, is an act against the national interest.

Then Ray goes on to argue that, in any case, it was only a case of bad judgment. In the case of most criminals, it usually is. Trump’s no different, but because he’s a white Republican [for the moment] male, the white male Republican Senate may well use a different [and far more lenient] standard for him.

Think about it.

The other day, my wife, the professor of voice and opera at the local university, took her students to a collegiate state-level voice competition. When she returned, I asked her how it went. She said that it had gone close to what she expected, although she was initially surprised that one of her very best students hadn’t placed. I asked why, and her response was that, as sometimes happens, the judges in that division hadn’t seemed to judge the contestants so much on technique, diction, and musicality as on the size of their voices. For whatever reason, some judges highly reward the size of the voice, the sheer volume and projection, even if it results in impaired diction and a lesser degree of musicality than presented by other singers. In short, some supposed professionals reward volume over everything else.

I got to thinking, but only for a few instants, before it struck me that a certain segment of our electorate reacts in the same way. They like big-voiced and strident politicians, so much so that they ignore facts, context, unpleasant character traits, and outright lying. These people seem to think that volume equates to truth, that shouting makes something true, even when it’s not.

But it doesn’t stop with politicians. It’s why so often television commercials run at louder volume than the programs that they’re interrupting. It’s why men so often talk over and shout down women, especially those with whom they disagree… and why women often have difficulties in getting heard in political debates. It’s why companies place large advertisements in magazines or online.

The fact that so many human beings react favorably to volume, even in the world of classical vocal music, suggests the trait is at least partly hard-wired, at least in Caucasians, but I have to say that this response troubles me, especially at a time when we need to pay more attention to facts and quiet reason and not to loud appeals to emotional prejudice.

Last week was the World Fantasy Convention, which I attended, as I usually do, and I couldn’t help but reflect on book awards. No matter what anyone says, book awards are essentially popularity contests. The award may reflect the popularity of books among a large number of readers, as in the case of Goodreads awards, or the popularity among a small number of judges, as with the Pulitzer Prize, or by some combination, as in the case of the World Fantasy Awards. Now… judges of more prestigious awards may protest mightily, and cite various criteria, but the bottom line is whether they like it… and that’s popularity.

Sometimes a book wins awards, and after all the furor, it vanishes, like Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer. And sometimes a book that’s ignored by every critic and award giver hangs on… and is eventually recognized… like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was seen as mere light reading and critically panned for almost a century.

And sometimes, the controversies aren’t about the books, but the awards.

For the last two years, the Nobel Prize for Literature has also been plagued with scandal. In 2018, a series of sexual assault charges against the author husband of one of the Literature Committee members resulted in such disruption that no prize was awarded in 2018. Then, this year the 2019 Prize was awarded to Peter Handke, an Austrian writer and firebrand “infamous for his Serbian nationalist sympathies.” In 1996 Handke published two essays that blamed the media for presenting Serbs as the “evil” party in the Yugoslav Wars and Muslims “as the usual good guy,” despite the fact that Serb forces killed an estimated 100,000 Croatian civilians and Bosnian Muslims. Handke even spoke at the funeral of Serbia’s President Slobodan Milošević (Nickname: “Butcher of the Balkans”), who had died before his trial for genocide and war crimes was completed.

F&SF has had its own “award” dramas. The World Fantasy Convention had for years presented its annual awards in the form of a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, a noted U.S. fantasy author who died in 1937. With the rise of a more diverse community of fantasy writers who became increasingly vocal about an award depicting a writer known not only for horrifying fantasy, but for stridently racist and xenophobic views, in 2015, the WFC announced it would replace the “Lovecraft” award statuette with another trophy, and in 2017 a “fantasy tree” award was adopted. Now, there’s a controversy about the John W. Campbell Award (for best new writer) given at the World Science Fiction because of Campbell’s anti-Semitic and misogynistic views.

In the meantime, the awards go on, and sometimes great books are often ignored, and sometimes fair but wildly popular books win awards… and, in the end, the fact that a book won an award, or didn’t, is lost, and the book has to stand or fall on its own.