Like so many other cinema goers in 1982, I was moved by Rutger Hauer’s final speech at the climax of the movie, Blade Runner. Playing the antagonist replicant, Roy Batty, Hauer delivers a moment of shining poetic brilliance that sums up the situation that he and his fellows face; the fear of death after only 4 years of life. It is a curious turn of events that we now find ourselves, some 40 years after the film was released, living like replicants.

I grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Provisional Irish Liberation Army, the IRA, attacked not only in Northern Ireland but also in Britain. We were warned to be vigilant. Bombings and shootings did happen and people did die, but one thing about those times that I do not remember is paranoia instilled fear. That came later.

We then moved to climate change and a growing hysteria that the planet was dying. Even today there is the insistence that nature is in crisis, which is true, but the truth is that nature has always been in crisis since life first appeared. The one imperative of life is to survive and it has for over 3.7 billion years, including the 5 mass extinction events that we know of. The language used in this subject is not rational nor is it scientific, it is alarmist and combat is the preferred metaphor. We must fight, we must use trees as soldiers, we must all do our bit just like we did in World War Two. None of it helps create a constructive debate on the subject.

Today, we are living in what feels like an international society that reeks of fear. It is not only terrorism. We have had the war on terror and that only led to an upsurge in violence across the world. The war on drugs failed in a similar manner. The real paranoia came, however, with the Covid-19 pandemic. That was a time when governments acted not to calm the population but to instil a fear that few had ever experienced previously. It both shocked and dismayed me how quickly people turned to support extreme right wing measures, surrender their freedoms, and stop thinking for themselves. Even worse was how anyone who offered an alternative opinion was attacked for doing so. Recently, it has been revealed that Nick Hancock, the former Health Secretary in the British Government, wanted to unleash a new Covid variant to maintain fear and guilt as a tool to control the British people’s obedience to the measure already introduced, including enforced vaccination.

Rutger Hauer’s observation was quite correct; slaves live in fear. Slaves also learn to do what they are told and not to question those giving the instructions. No concept of democracy or free society should countenance the existence of slavery in any form, physical or intellectual. When the right to free speech is impeded then it is one step closer to being removed. One observation I have made of recent developments is a move to suggest that contrary opinions do not exist in science, which is a ridiculous notion. Science advances through opposites theories being considered and tested. The one that fits the extant evidence best is the one that succeeds, the others fail. In a culture where contradiction is not welcome science, and by extension truth, cannot thrive.

Of course, some slaves never realise the truth that they are already enslaved, and neither do they want to.