On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The Ukrainian word de-occupation, which she and I are using in conversation, is more precise than the conventional liberation. It invites us to consider what, beyond the removal of oppression, we might need for liberty.

For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take, and for what reasons.

Markets are supposed to enable competition, spread information, and separate economics from politics. But what would happen when giant Soviet enterprises came into private hands?

If you believe in the primacy of the larger forces, then you have no choice when they seem to turn against you: you run. And you cannot imagine that others would behave any differently.

We protect free speakers because truth threatens the power of tyrants. Zelens’kyi was speaking truth amid the lies of Russian propagandists who claimed that he had abandoned the city. He was speaking his truth to power, because Russia was invading with terrifying force. Zelens’kyi was putting his body at risk for what he knew to be true. Indeed, it was what he was doing with his body—staying—that was the truth.

In the story, it is the Samaritan who is free. He is sovereign, in that he is acting according to his own values and is able to realize them in the world. The road that he walked was material, but not only. We are in nature but not entirely of it. Our bodies are subject to inertia, but we can choose to stop by the side of the road.

Our bodies are pulled down by gravity, but we can raise someone else up from the ditch.

Empathy, in other words, is not a condescending concession of a rational person to the emotions of others, but the only way to become a reasonable person. To acknowledge the corporeality of others is not a gift to them but a step toward our own reason.

Algorithms herd us into categories defined by our least interesting features and distract us from the choices to be made in the physical and social world around us. Social media make us more predictable than we need to be and so easier to rule.

If we are not careful, social media will turn our sovereign capacities to declare and accommodate against us, leaving us predictable and easy to rule. This is, sadly, not a hypothesis.

We give away the hours of the day. Our time without the machine is broken up by our time with it. Even

Our minds flutter hither and thither, landing nowhere. Attention is no longer about a special state of mind but about eyeballs on screens. Things get our attention, but we no longer pay attention. And then we do not remember. When memory fails, our future has no past, and we are not really present.

We are being tamed by the machine, dulled to one another. The American university class is yielding to the screen, to the cave, to the death principle. Let us all pretend that something is happening while another hour passes, do that for four years, get the piece of paper, and move on to a world of further fakery.

As we lose our sense of why, we are being colonized by our machines—with the vertiginous twist that our mechanical colonizers have no agency. We are submitting to an entity that cannot even enjoy its domination.

The algorithms locate the parts of us that are most predictable, nourishing them until they suppress our character. They carry out what the mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815–52) long ago called a “calculus of the nervous system.” Their dread superpower is to predictify, to dominate people by making them predictable as individuals and classifiable as groups.

At first, the machine demobilizes. It takes up the time we need to attend to the bodies of others. It consumes energy and imagination. It tends to provide us with reasons not to act: not to exercise, not to make love, not to make friends, not to help our neighbor, not to vote, not to demonstrate. But at some point, when the algorithms locate our political fantasies, we find ourselves acting on the basis of unreality.

Mobility is the challenge of maturity. To break free means to move in all five dimensions. It means having a waterfall to find or a mountain to climb, a day to do it, another to reflect on it. In the romantic imagery of freedom, we get to that idyll ourselves. In reality, all of us have help.

The imprisonment of Blacks communicated that being white was superior and safer. White Americans have accordingly grown up with a racialized notion of freedom as negative: as not going to prison. That absence of oppression, though a poor sort of privilege, is nonetheless awkward to acknowledge. And so the very subject of law and order immediately triggers angry emotion. It becomes hard to talk about freedom at all.

How did Americans come to think of immobility as normal?

Sadopopulism replaces the American Dream with that American nightmare. It directs the attention of a fragile middle class toward those who are doing still worse, rather than toward those who collect the wealth and decline to be taxed on it. It activates racism as the substitute for a better future. It creates barriers that block the many, then defines freedom as their absence for the few. Putting Black people in prison offers no social mobility (except to newly employed guards), but it might leave white people feeling less stuck than others.

Social media serve up what we are prone to accept, which is not the same thing as the truth.

People tend to endorse conspiracy theories when they doubt the efficacy of their own actions. It follows that, in the words of Peter Pomerantsev, we must “build an environment where facts matter.”

It is logically incoherent, morally obtuse, and politically ineffective to claim freedom only for oneself.

It will be far easier to stop the greenhouse effect on Earth than to find and settle a suitable exoplanet, or to terraform Mars. Space exploration is a worthy goal, but it is far harder than, and no substitute for, keeping our own planet habitable. The logical sequence is simple: fusion reactors, renewable energy, freedom on Earth; then fusion rockets, exploration, and discovery in space. Even if this sequence somehow did not hold, it is implausible that we could establish order in the universe if we cannot do so on our home planet.

To reach the stars, we will have to look away from our phones. We can get to other planets only with fusion rockets. We will develop fusion rockets only when we have fusion power. We will have fusion power only if we try to address climate change. We will address climate change only if people believe that it is happening. People will believe that it is happening only if social media are reformed. Musk owns a platform that instructs us that climate change is a hoax. That makes space travel much less likely.

it is hard to make money from keeping people well, so we let it go. We are an aging population, and preventive therapies—geroscience—can aid well-being and freedom. It is not clear, though, whether they will make money. Certain kinds of illnesses are more profitable than others. Death is profitable when efficiently managed, when families are drained of wealth during the last days of a loved one’s life. Commercial medicine profits first by depriving our lives of years, and then by adding to them a few days.

If efficiency is the only measure, then values evaporate and solidarity is impossible. Leib becomes Körper, to be used and cast away.

The special American national algorithm is the false tragedy of choice. This conviction leads us to constrict the world of values and make ourselves less free. It has cut lanes so deep into common sense that it takes work even to see it. The false tragedy begins with the acceptance that choices must be made between values. So far, so good. But rather than encouraging you to realize as many values as you can, the false tragedy demands a final disposition whenever tension between values appears. In making a choice now, you must nullify forever the value you cannot realize. After the unchosen value has been banished, you are to be congratulated on your hardheaded realism: manly nod, downturned lips.

If we think that opting for one value means obliterating another, we retreat step by step from the borderland of the unpredictable. Rather than using our minds to seek ever new combinations, or ever new values, we persuade ourselves that the easy answer was correct, that only one value really matters. As we concede our right to practice and choose, we try to persuade others to do the same. Freedom then winds down.

We do not have Eden, a place where all the light comes together, where all good things are united. Nor is there a single truth of which all the facts are mere parts. And that is why we have a chance at freedom.

Support campaigns to tax social media companies in order to fund local reporting. Without solidarity, we fail to see others’ travails as like our own, and so we lose the ability to see ourselves. Choosing a way to express solidarity makes us freer—and helps us to resist frustration and demoralization. Deliberate in organized settings. Pick a civil society organization to join, and another (if you can afford it) to support financially. Try to listen. Remember that neighbors might have had worse luck. Help others vote. Listen to those whose families’ historical experiences are very different from your own. Find organizations that allow you to help others. If you have the means, pay off someone else’s medical debt. Support a project in a war-torn country that empowers those affected. (Documenting Ukraine is one I helped establish while writing this book.) If you can, show solidarity by taking care of Earth. Global

Eat less meat, plant a tree, insulate your home, get solar panels, use and agitate for public transportation. As climate change makes Earth less habitable and accelerates and exacerbates conflict, the fifth dimension becomes harder to find. Make a point of mentioning climate change every day. Americans know that it is real, but we are deterred from speaking about it by an entirely artificial controversy. Do not vote for a party that denies climate change. People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends.

it’s giving “don’t look up”

Our political divisions draw us away from freedom as principle, making it harder to get to freedom as practice. They have been hardened by the collapse of local news, the rise of oligarchy, and the reach of social media. The algorithms push us toward mindless controversy and away from mindful discussion of priorities. The repetition of mechanized clichés makes our political discussion endlessly stale. The mechanization has to be addressed by government policy, but the human misunderstandings are for us to resolve. Some conservatives proclaim that they want freedom but that sadly it must be traded for security. This is almost never true. In general, we need freedom for security, and security for freedom. Others proclaim freedom as the highest value but have trouble saying what this means.

Denying incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people the vote is a moral hazard, since it tempts politicians to imprison people who might vote against them. That has been American practice for forty years. Hence our system selects for politicians who think about how best to prevent citizens from voting. A democracy cannot be formed from people whose first thought is how to disable it.

Voter suppression reflects the racism of the past and projects racism into the future. Since both its perpetrators and its victims know that its purpose is white supremacy, it confirms tribalism and reproduces a politics of pain. Doing nothing to halt voter suppression means complicity in white supremacy. If white Americans do not care that others’ votes are at risk, they take for granted that the country belongs to them as a tribe or a mob and thereby partake in the decline of democracy.

To frame freedom of speech as the wealthy person’s right not to have to run against publicly financed opponents goes beyond mockery to insult. If we do not immediately see this oligarchical nonsense for what it is, this is perhaps because we have been trained to think of freedom of speech as negative, as only a matter of preventing the government from doing something, rather than as positive, as protecting human beings who take risks by speaking truth to power and as creating settings in which people can listen to one another.

We still treat the interests of the fossil oligarchs as more important than the freedom and security of everyone else. We still dig up the remains of ancient life and burn them. We are still consuming the energy left behind by hundreds of millions of years of life, and in doing so we are accelerating the end of our own kind of life. We need solar panels, wind power, and miniature stars: fusion reactions on Earth. Fusion could create essentially unlimited energy without greenhouse gas emissions. A country that could reach the moon in eight years in the 1960s should be able to attain fusion in twenty years starting in the 2020s.

Applying what we know about the brain and social media, we must care for young minds. A second way to strengthen sovereignty is to claim a right to one’s mind: habeas mentem. It is a venerable idea that freedom begins from the control of one’s own body: habeas corpus. In the twenty-first century, taking freedom seriously means redoubling concern for our embodied minds, and attending to sovereignty and unpredictability as forms of freedom.

This is sticking with me

Fear opens the way to unfreedom, and much of the fear in our country has to do with children. You cannot be a better parent than the structures around you permit you to be. Few American parents can devote the time, attention, and resources to their children that they would like. And the work of having children is greater when anxiety is the norm. In a land of the free, all of this would have to change for the better.

If you can, do some physical exercise every day before you reach for your phone. This alone can alter how free life seems, how unpredictably a day plays out, how the eye meets the pixel when the time comes. If you reside in a place with more than one room, avoid having screens on tables where people eat, or in rooms where people sleep. At night, charge your devices as far away from you as possible, in a place where you cannot see them, such as a drawer. The last thing you touch before you go to sleep should not have a microprocessor. When you are not at work, try to spend no more than an hour per day in front of a screen.

Try to write and post one paper letter each month to someone you care about. Don’t rage against the machine; page against the machine. Read books in physical form. Keep a couple by your bed and a list of those you have read. If this sounds radical or strange, remember that not so very long ago no one had a smartphone, and people then were freer, more intelligent, and more physically fit.

Keep in mind, as well, that the people who run Silicon Valley take drastic measures to prevent their own products from making addicts of their children. They set timers to cut the power on their routers, for example, and contractually oblige babysitters not to show screens to their children. They want the best...