On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants.

Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants.

Advances in medicine made possible a profound gain of freedom. People who are more confident about health will have greater ambitions for life. People who expect to live short lives are more likely to risk them in violence that, in turn, shortens the lives of others.

Advances in medicine made possible a profound gain of freedom. People who are more confident about health will have greater ambitions for life. People who expect to live short lives are more likely to risk them in violence that, in turn, shortens the lives of others.

we can only get to freedom with the help of those we might otherwise demean, mistreat, or ignore.

It is empathy that allows us to know that the external world is real. 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. “The constitution of the foreign individual,” wrote Stein in her dissertation, “was a condition for the full constitution of our own individuality.” The bodies of others allow us to see them as subjects, as in the same predicament as we are. Empowered then by empathy, we can see ourselves as others see us. That helps us both to know ourselves and to know the world. That knowledge, in turn, makes us better subjects, more sovereign. We have to see the bodies of others as subjects, because otherwise we cannot see ourselves as subjects. And if we fail to do that, we cannot be free.

Freedom is the value of values, because it is the condition in which all other values may be exercised. A government is not legitimate just because it has power and uses the word sovereign to embellish decrepitude and deception. It is legitimate insofar as it enables freedom, enacting policies that allow young and coming generations to become sovereign.

Humans evolved to be patient and evaluative, as hunters, gatherers, nomads, and farmers, and as parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents of children who need years of attention. Patience and evaluation continue to serve us in our modern world. But such capacities arise only if young people make contact with people around them. The creation of individuality must be a social act.

Babies are thrown into a world that, if governed by negative freedom, must be senseless and grotesque. They cannot be raised by the absence of barriers. They need things they cannot themselves know. No infant can liberate its parents, or give them time, or set policy. Freedom works as a larger cooperative project, over generations, or not at all.

Individual freedom is a social project and a generational one. For people to grow up in freedom, the right structures must already be in place when they are born.

Simone Weil wrote that “the one thing that man possesses that is essentially individual, that is absolutely his own, is his capacity to think.” And yet in the million years our species has trod the earth, this “essentially individual” capacity has never been developed individually. Babies who are left alone learn nothing. This is, sadly, not just a hypothesis. Historians have all too much confirmatory evidence—from the Gulag, for example, or from the orphanages of communist Romania.

If we are nothing more than our first reactions, we are prey to the people who arouse those reactions. Only individuals can resist pressure from others, yet it takes others to create such individuals. We can learn to govern ourselves only with the right kind of guidance, at the right stage of life.

Babies can be raised and educated to become free, but babies cannot create for themselves the setting where this is possible. Since freedom requires capacities that we cannot develop by ourselves, we owe our freedom to others. Every free adult had manifold help as a child.

The occupations that are most relevant to freedom are the caregivers: the elementary school teachers, the preschool teachers, the childcare workers. A society concerned with freedom would respect such people and pay them well.

There are indeed ideals, but they are not ideal bells or beds. They are virtues, notions of how the world might be different from and better than it is. As sovereign individuals, we learn to care about these ideals, and balance them, and bring them to life. We can also learn to create them. We don’t borrow from an ideal world. We reach toward it and expand it.

It might seem harmless to concede that there are no virtues, nothing to value in life. It might even seem to be consistent with freedom: If nothing is true, then surely everything is permitted? On this basis, we would oppose barriers to our impulses—but we would lack an argument against the powerful whose impulse is to control us. If we accept that “everything is shit,” if nothing is any better than anything else, we have no basis for sovereign choices, and gain no practice in the building of a self. We will mutter under our breath and accept our place in a system.

Modern tyranny, Havel concluded, required not devotion but predictability.

A sovereign person, in making choices, is acting not only within the physical world, but in a realm of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. That zone, which Stein called “the world of values,” is not an extension of the world of things. It is a kind of fifth dimension, with its own rules, and as such a reservoir of unpredictability for our own world of four dimensions, of space and time. The virtues do not interact with one another, or with objects, as objects do with other objects.

choosing between values is an act of affirmation, not of consumption. When we choose beauty, there is more beauty, not less.

When people are sovereign together, they generate unpredictability. As they do so, they recognize this in one another, welcome it, and gain from it. When we apprehend others as Leib, we see them doing what we are doing, making choices in the zone between the world of things and the world of values. Working together, people bring human unpredictability into the world, and joyfully. This helps us to be free of all the people and forces who would rule us by predicting us or by making us more predictable. Free people are predictable to themselves but unpredictable to authorities and machines. Unfree people are unpredictable to themselves and predictable to rulers. Such unpredictability allows us to become our individual selves, together. The texture of the world of values enters our own world.

The freedom that Havel had in mind was a “life principle,” resistance to a deadening politics of predictability. When we have access to ideas of the good, of virtue, we bring something fresh to the universe: “Life rebels against all uniformity and leveling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the restlessness of transcendence, the adventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo.” A single improbable act “illuminates its surroundings” and makes possible other such acts.

Social media make us more predictable than we need to be and so easier to rule. Havel anticipated just such a digital future. He called computerized predictability an example of the “death principle.”

Like the Czechoslovak communists, the Silicon Valley libertarians first promised a brave new world, then told us that there were no alternatives, then invited us to live inside a screen. Like the communists, they passed from great certainty about utopia to total nihilism about everything, to a world in which “everything is shit.”

The Czechoslovaks who signed Charter 77 were taking part in a larger movement. Brezhnev’s desire that nothing change led to a change of concepts. This is not just irony, or what Marxists called dialectics. It is a reminder that what might seem normal, predictable, and inevitable can be resisted, and that resistance begins with a definition of what might be. Sovereign people will see chances where others might not and will help to wrench the rest of us from our most probable states.

Freedom is not a drama we watch. It is a play that we write on a stage that we build for an audience of everyone.

Yet emancipation is a negative notion of freedom: it is always “emancipation from” something. It does not call into question the whole structure; it asks instead for inclusion within it. It need not mean freedom for all; it tends to mean, rather, joining a set of emancipated groups. In 1968 it often meant “emancipation from the older generation.” Contrary to appearances, this notion of liberation lets the old off the hook.

The story of freedom cannot be told without virtue, since freedom is the state in which we can affirm what we think is good and bring it into the world.

The possible combinations of virtues are infinite, and so our actions as free people are not predictable. Kołakowski also thought that we could invent new virtues, and that they were the most important ones. They emerge when we do things that no one has the right to expect of us. His value pluralism was an adventure directed toward the future. We believe in the possibility of new values because we believe that there is new good to be discovered in the world. This adds still another layer of unpredictability.

We have to be very mindful if we want to assert our purposes through social media. We have to manipulate software that is designed to manipulate us. 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. Surveilled, harried, and nudged, I am undoubtedly less free than I was when I was sitting in Andrzej’s apartment, backpack set aside, computer quiet in a corner. We are all less free.

Knowledge of the past is therefore a reservoir of power and self-liberation. The future might flow down many channels, but its sources are in the past. Many things are possible, but not everything is possible. When we know nothing about the past, we think anything is possible but are quickly disillusioned. When we know something about the past, we know about some things that might be possible, and we have a chance at realizing them, a chance at freedom.

A Leib needs sleep in order to be sovereign and unpredictable; when we give sleep away to the screens, we are less ourselves and less free. Few things are more important than sleep to our maturation, happiness, and memory. Sleep has been the quiet casualty of our unfreedom.

As I travel around the United States for invited lectures, I notice the same shift everywhere. The lectern has been moved from center stage to extreme stage left, so that the human lecturer does not block the students’ view of the huge, wall-sized screen where slides are to be projected. People pay me to speak, then bargain down the time of my lecture, then ask me for my slides (which I never have). The daring impulse of inviting a stranger to lecture gives way to increasing fear that something might actually be said. 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. The university should enliven, and at its best it still does; certainly there is no substitute for it. But teaching is about the Leib, not the machine.

Conforming, you are easily led. Having withdrawn from the rugged borderland of the unpredictable into the cozy cove of your digital demographic, you await orders, or nudges. You have exposed your buttons, and you wait for them to be stroked and pushed. Anyone (or anything) that caresses your naked anxieties will also be arousing those of the legion of cowards in which you have enlisted. The more people there are who fear the same things, the easier tyranny becomes. Unfreedom is efficient.

Declaring and accommodating are the basic capacities of a sovereign person. Exercised alongside other sovereign people, declarations and accommodations generate an unforeseen realm, a land of the free. Coming to know other people, we know the world and ourselves better. Our values, our sense of what is right and what is wrong, are tested along with this everyday knowledge. This is what is best about us and what enables us to be free.

Freedom needs human thinkers, sovereign and unpredictable. Unfreedom needs yielding and predictable creatures, quaking from fear in self-built cages, dreaming of enemies they never meet, and of friends and lovers they do not have.

Traditions are an enriching restraint. In order to build on traditions, to correct them, we have to know them, and that takes time. Our current mood of discarding the past, usually on some self-righteous ground, has to do with our engineered inability to concentrate and tolerate. We are trained by our social media nemesis to join the herd and cull the herd. If we refuse to read, though, we are not trading the past for the future. Without the past, there can be no future. We are trading the past for quibbly static.

We are drawn by what seems to be about us, even to entities that we know we cannot trust.

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.

I love the places I am from, but I am glad that I could leave when I did. We all need mobility, but young adults need it in a special way. If everything goes as it should, they become sovereign and unpredictable, then break free of the structures (and the people) that allowed them to become so.

Tyrannies make anxiety seem normal. They attach a threat to a group (in this case Blacks) whom the authorities don’t really fear, then boast to their supporters of having protected them from that threat. They substitute relief from fear for freedom and teach citizens to confuse the two. The cycle of anxiety and release is not liberation, of course, but manipulation. It is not immobilizing the way that prison is. It is nevertheless a policy of immobility that extends from the Black bodies on the inside to other American minds on the outside.

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. Sadopopulism normalizes oligarchy. If I am comfortable with stagnation because others are drowning, my attitude to the highfliers will be one of supplication.

Americans traded a future full of possibility for a false sense of certainty. Negative freedom was enough: lift the barriers, and all would fall into place. History was over, only one future was possible. The politics of inevitability sucks the life from values as well as facts, then presses the dry shells together. It abolishes the difference between what is and what should be: the world as it is supposedly brings the world as it should be.

Freedom cannot be inevitable, because in a world governed by inevitability, there can be no freedom. The politics of inevitability generates passivity, dampening the fighting spirit of individuals. Free people resist impersonal forces or turn them to their own purposes; they do not kneel before abstractions.

Family by family, personal experience undid the story of inevitable progress. Faith in negative freedom brings staggering inequality, which freezes social mobility. The politics of inevitability, though it promised a better future for everyone, delivered imperial immobility, which is to say nothing or less than nothing for almost everybody. The claim that everything is getting better for everyone justified policies that left most people worse off than they had been before.

I have had a steady view of the experiences of people ever younger than me, as the age gap between me and my undergraduates has widened from one decade to three. The unmistakable trend, even before Covid, was increasing anxiety and accordingly greater reluctance to learn things that might complicate a planned life path.

Children born in America at the end of the Second World War were almost certain to earn more money than their parents. An American born in the 1980s had only about a fifty-fifty chance. Since then, inequality has only gotten worse. I graduated from high school in 1987. Since the 1980s, new wealth generated by the U.S. economy has remained in the hands of an almost invisibly minuscule fraction of the population. The number of the oligarchs is numerically insignificant. The people in question are not really the 1 percent made notorious by the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Not 1 percent, but 0.01 percent. Not 1 of 100, nor even 1 of 1,000, but 1 of 10,000.

There are many values, and we all need a chance to realize our own combinations of them. Any attempt to select just one at the expense of all the others will end in tyranny. The politics of inevitability acknowledged only a single value: entrepreneurship. To be sure, entrepreneurship is a very good thing. But no value is enough in itself, and no value alone generates all the others. Left on its own, untempered by other values, entrepreneurship becomes (and became) an argument for wars of profit and private prisons, for the impotence of government, and for the nonexistence of communities. It becomes an excuse for blaming others for their poverty. Treating entrepreneurship as the only value actually hinders entrepreneurship, by creating monopolies that prevent competition; by weakening the public services that young people need to gain skills; and by littering minds with exculpatory nonsense about how the status quo is the only alternative, the end of history, and so on.

The future has vanished: social mobility is lost, we are disoriented by crises. And so we need a still more reassuring story, one that is invulnerable to our fears or that turns them against another people. Politics can be safely located in legend. Time loops back to a mythical moment when the tribe was great. What was lost since then is the fault of some other group. We are innocent. They are guilty.

Putin’s genocidal undertaking was supported by the wealthiest digital oligarch, Elon Musk.

In the politics of inevitability, the facts about the past are just dispensable details since we see a general trend and a happy end. In the politics of eternity, the past is a morality play of innocence and guilt. In the politics of catastrophe, the approaching disaster enervates the present and occludes the past. Then the oligarchs appear, naked in their power, perfect in their petulance, fighting wars of racial competition and global famine.