civilization-5
When asked to adopt a social policy, you can right click to opt out.
If you do this, do you lose those cultural points, or do they roll over until your next cultural advancement?
I don't like any of the currently available social policies, but I have been asked to choose a new policy twice.
Regarding barbarians - I think you just over-expanded too much. Barbarians spawn in uncontrolled areas, and if there are a lot of these near your borders then they are going to give you a lot of pain. Concentrate on eliminating these areas. By the way, barbarians camps are only created on unseen tiles - so you could actually send scouts to camp around these dark corners to provide visibility and thus prevent the barbarians from spawning there.
Regarding happiness - I think the main reason you face such a problem (besides the fact you chose a very high difficulty, of course) is that you have nobody to trade with; that means that the only luxury resources you have are the ones you obtain yourself, which forces you to expand over huge territory to get these resources - and of course, every city you create costs you happiness, so the net gain is very small!
The only solution I can think of, at this stage of the game, is to:
In the in-game Civilopedia it is stated that Free Thought needs Humanism, which is also reflected (in the social policy chart) in the image below.
If you have a different policy tree, then it might be a bug, as the policy tree shouldn't change no matter which OS you are playing on.
Best Answer
You will accumulate Culture Points even if you already have enough points to buy a policy. This can be very important strategically:
If you build the Cristo Redentor Wonder (or are close to building it) you should wait to buy your policy until after it's complete, in order to gain the 33% discount.
If you build or annex more cities the cost of future policies goes up, so you should purchase your next policy before obtaining a new city.
As far as not wanting any of the currently available policies, sometimes you have to just take a non-ideal policy to open up future policies you DO care about.