The core claim of the lecture would be that contemporary conflicts over freedom of speech tend to attract disproportionate attention not because speech itself is the central problem, but because it functions as a highly visible conveyor belt for much deeper disagreements about the good life, the good society, and the proper role of government. Drawing on the Let’s Agree on Poland project, I would use the Polish case to show how free speech disputes often serve as proxies for unresolved conflicts over moral, political, and institutional visions in deeply divided democracies — and why focusing on speech in isolation, without this broader context, risks obscuring rather than resolving the underlying tensions that the seminar seeks to address.