Categories: Life

When Respect Runs Out

I have built my life around one core value: respect. Not the superficial kind that exists for appearances, but the difficult kind that requires restraint, listening, and the willingness to accept that other people see the world differently. For most of my life, I believed that respecting opposing opinions was not only possible but necessary. It was how a functioning society held itself together. I could disagree strongly and still honour the humanity of the person across from me.

That belief is now under strain.

I feel myself becoming intolerant, and that is not a comfortable admission. Some of it may be age. With time comes a sharper sense of right and wrong, and a reduced tolerance for nonsense disguised as conviction. Age strips away patience for arguments that lead nowhere and for ideologies that cause harm while insisting they are righteous. Still, everyone arrives at their beliefs through their own experiences. That truth has always mattered to me. So why does this moment feel different?

Because this is no longer about difference of opinion. It is about extremism.

Far right ideology, particularly in its current form, is not rooted in debate or policy disagreement. It is rooted in fear, identity threat, and an obsessive need for certainty. Psychology explains why this creates an unbridgeable gap. Extremist thinking simplifies the world into absolutes because complexity feels dangerous. Grey zones invite doubt. Doubt threatens identity. So the world becomes binary. Loyal or traitor. Strong or weak. Us or them. Empathy is reframed as surrender, and nuance is treated as betrayal.

This is why centrists and liberals struggle not only to accept but to even comprehend this mindset. Our political and moral frameworks allow for ambiguity. We expect evidence to matter. We accept that reality is complex and often uncomfortable. To an extremist worldview, this flexibility is not a strength. It is an existential threat. When fear drives ideology, truth becomes negotiable and cruelty becomes rational.

The consequences are no longer abstract. They are painfully real. The recent murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota by federal immigration enforcement are a stark example of what happens when dehumanization meets authority and weapons. A citizen, a mother, a human being, and a well respected Veterans’ Affairs nurse lost their life during an operation justified through rhetoric that frames entire groups as threats rather than neighbours. The cover-up and justifications came quickly. The outrage followed just as fast. What remains is a deep fracture in public trust and a haunting question about how easily violence is now explained away when it aligns with ideology.

This is how democracies erode. Not all at once, but through normalization. Normalizing misinformation. Normalizing contempt for institutions. Normalizing the idea that force is acceptable when used against the “right” people. When lies are repeated loudly enough, they stop being challenged. When cruelty is framed as strength, it attracts followers. When accountability is dismissed as weakness, power operates without restraint.

Respect cannot survive in that environment. It cannot be extended endlessly when one side rejects the humanity of others. There is a difference between tolerating disagreement and tolerating dehumanization. There is a difference between free speech and the deliberate spreading of falsehoods that incite fear and justify harm. Pretending otherwise is not open mindedness. It is abdication.

This is why families are fracturing and friendships are collapsing. Politics is no longer a topic to debate; it has become a litmus test for moral alignment. I avoid these conversations now, not out of fear, but out of refusal to sacrifice relationships to an ideology that thrives on division. With strangers online, the response is simpler. Block. There is no obligation to absorb hostility in the name of civility.

Here is the moral, stated plainly and without apology. Respect ends where dehumanization begins. Democracy cannot survive if we tolerate ideologies that reject truth, celebrate cruelty, and excuse violence. Rejecting far right extremism is not intolerance. It is a moral duty. Silence in the face of this threat is not neutrality; it is permission. If we fail to draw this line clearly, we will not lose democracy overnight, but we will wake up one day to find that it no longer recognizes us, nor we it.

That is the seriousness of this moment.

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