On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

History is a foundation of mobility and thus of freedom. We need history to slip free of the time warps and find our way to a more reassuring sense of time. When we think historically, we see structures inherited from the past, plausible choices in the present, and multiple possibilities for the future.

History defends us against the politics of inevitability by reminding us of the multitude of possibilities at every point. History undoes the politics of eternity by teaching us to learn responsibility from the past rather than resentment from the present. Confronting catastrophe, as we do today, we need to extend time, first backward and then forward, stretching our minds, extending ourselves. Indeed, to see our way forward, we will have to look back.

Negative freedom is the fantasy that the problem is entirely beyond us, and that we can become free simply by removing an obstacle. We have confronted a few forms of negative freedom: just eliminate property (Marx); just eliminate the Jews (Hitler); just eliminate the imperialists (anti-colonialists); just eliminate government (Americans). Negative freedom presents itself as revolutionary, but the revolution it demands ignores the terrain that matters: the way we think about ourselves and the way we evaluate the world. Our contemporary American version of negative freedom is presented as the hard truth, but it fails entirely to deal with how the world actually works. It does not assimilate the most essential knowledge: biology, chemistry, and physics; birth, death, aging; the earth we live on; our place in the universe; our power to consider that place.

We will not be free, nor will we survive, if we ignore the limits of our Earth or deny the rules of our universe. Freedom and survival depend on recognizing constraints and turning them in our favor.

Our freedom is not something outside the universe or against the universe but a way we learn to work with the universe, and therefore something we add to the universe. If we start with what the universe is, we can find our way to ourselves.

“In the struggle between you and the world,” says Kafka, “take the side of the world.” Freedom is not negative, not a matter of our breaking what is around us. Freedom is not us against the world but us within the world, knowing it and changing it. Freedom involves turning restraints into possibilities, a habit that can save our species.

The Industrial Age brought new forms of pain and inequality but also the spread of capacities that could enable ever larger numbers of people to be free.

The remains of former life, the fossils we have used as fuels, should stay in the ground. Respect for the deep past would enable a more prolonged future. If we built fusion power plants, we would be imitating solar energy by lighting tiny stars on Earth. Accompanied by other renewables, that would be a graceful solution, bringing both freedom and survival. If we act to bring fusion to Earth, we will be applying some of our knowledge of the universe and thereby changing it. The universe is already a bit different, since we have built fusion devices on Earth that generate more energy than they consume. A universe in which a self-aware life-form uses fusion to thrive is a different universe than one in which the spark of life in freedom is allowed to die.

Our lie about nature is that there is no global warming, or that if there is global warming, there is no technological solution. Unlike Hitler, some of the fossil oligarchs who sponsor this lie are motivated by the desire for profit. They finance propaganda instructing us that hydrocarbons are safe and that renewables are risky. Some of them share Hitler’s view of life as conflict: they imagine that when the catastrophe comes, their money will allow them to escape, or that their race will be spared.

The slower we are to react to global warming, the more dire will be the consequences, and the greater the temptation will be to blame those who suffer. Then the ecological lie returns the favor and reinforces the electoral lie: politics, in catastrophic times, becomes a matter of punishing the weak rather than preventing the disasters brought by the strong. That is what our extinction spiral will look like.

Facts enable sovereignty by allowing people to decide for themselves, without relying on authorities. Facts are needed both for court rulings and for elections. Facts enable self-defense against the wealthy and the powerful. Since they can be known in common, they can enable an individual to seek allies and, along with them, justice. If it is agreed that facts are no different from opinions, the free person has no ground on which to make a stand. If facts do not count, what James Madison called “clamor and combinations” will always win, which means that tyrants and oligarchs will always win. When facts are respected, each of us is entitled at least to a hearing and has a shield against the hail of static. Even when we fail, there is dignity in trying.

Dissidents rejected the big lie and valorized local everyday truths. Their central labor in the communist bloc was the chronicle, the list of specific details about human suffering and injustice. Throughout the communist world, those in opposition labored to record the names of those sent to psychiatric prison or to the Gulag. Then they themselves were sent to psychiatric prison or to the Gulag. These courageous people understood that facts were a condition of freedom, and that the facts would not record themselves. Facts need us, and we need them.

Americans live in a country where a sitting president gave advance warning that he would declare victory even if he lost an election. Having lost decisively in November 2020, Donald Trump proceeded to declare victory with Hitlerian boldness, speaking of “a historical landslide.” He repeated claims of fraud that he knew to be false, and he urged his followers to support him in overthrowing representative government. Thousands obliged by invading the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A major television network, Fox, lent credence to his lie, even though the television hosts knew that they were repeating an untruth. They were worried that the stock price of their company might otherwise fall. This chain of events should give pause to anyone who believes that unregulated capitalism is consistent with democracy. When push came to shove, capitalism was consistent, in the case of one very important company, with a coup and with the propagation of the associated big lie.

Freedom is positive, a struggle and an act of creation. Factuality depends on people who are ready to hear the truth and are ready to seek it. This requirement is not at all as straightforward as it appears. We can live a lie. We can be fooled. We can pose as people who doubt everything, and yet believe the most outrageous lies. Those who wish to fool you will tell you that you know right from wrong, by which they mean that you are about to believe what they say. Social media serve up what we are prone to accept, which is not the same thing as the truth.

No one person can find out the truth about every matter essential for a life.

If we lose track of the difference between “it is true” and “it feels right,” we are not free; forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right.

Truth is a human value. The value is in the hunt. To say that there are no facts because we can’t define truth is like saying that there are no families because we can’t define love. Without facts, we are led leaderless. James Baldwin called truth “freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.” Leszek Kołakowski spoke of a “horizon of truth.” The horizon is to be chased. It is a pursuit worthy of free people.

Amid all the blather we now hear about freedom of expression, it is easy to forget its purpose: to create the circumstances in which facts ennoble the individual and challenge the powerful. We protect truthful, risky speech because tyranny is born of lies.

Freedom of speech requires free human speakers, as free as possible and as many as possible. Such people are sovereign, capable of judgment on their own; they are mobile, able to see and take risks; they are unpredictable, and so they can accept that facts challenge beliefs. They are facing danger for the rest of us and helping us to see the state of the world.

Reporters are the heroes of our time, and heroes are to be defended, not just commended. If we protect those who take risks, then we protect everyone else. If we make their careers safe and appealing, we build a land of the free.

Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so that they can speak. Freedom of speech means nothing without free speakers. Only people can take risks. Only people can be free.

Freedom of speech for people means safe circumstances in which to express oneself, and an opportunity to learn, so as to have something to say—which means access to journalism, access to science, access to education. The declaration of the First Amendment that the government shall “make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” is meaningless without the accommodations needed to create free speakers.

If freedom is the value of life, one of its forms is the self-conscious labor of making freedom possible for others. Solidarity is the guiding light of a land of the free.

A world or a country in which we are entirely alone with our experiences is not a place of freedom.

Freedom cannot be selfish. To declare oneself free is to promise to act such that others can be free. We must imagine a society of free people and try to build it. Morally, logically, and politically, there is no freedom without solidarity.

When the very privileged believe that they and their families can elude the tragedy unfolding around them, they will obstruct the national work needed to create the forms of freedom. Having chosen escape, they will deride those who work in solidarity for freedom. Their money will draw others into the snide chorus. Wealth preservation distorts politics for everyone who is not wealthy—in the demanding circumstances of the twenty-first century, fatally and finally. The attempt by the monied few to monopolize the future closes it down for everyone else.

Escapism is the absolutely predictable oligarchic posture during catastrophic times. The rest of us have to endure the oligarchs’ moronic fantasies—Ukraine is Russia, immortality is possible, space travel will save us, life might be a simulation—as time runs out on our hopes for dignity and survival as a species. A poignant element of our tragedy is its profound stupidity. There are things so idiotic that you need $10 billion to believe them.

Since 2010, when social media took over the internet, the hyped new technologies—think cryptocurrency, self-driving cars, the metaverse, the whole gig economy—have generally turned out to be scams. Social media are not high technology in any meaningful sense: they are mid-twentieth-century behaviorist manipulation done at scale. They hinder scientific thought. Elon Musk’s version of Twitter is anti-evidence and pro-conspiracy, proposing a new dark age of charismatic leadership and magical thinking. The idea of technology itself has to be rescued from the cycle of propaganda-driven investment scams.

Because what remains for us from early Near Eastern civilizations are walls and idols of stone, we tend to imagine progress as ever lower barriers and ever less paganism. From a terrifying regime of exploitation and human sacrifice, humanity moves forward, the walls recede, and the gods are tamed. But those appearances might well be deceptive. Cities as old as those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were designed in concentric circles, like the rings of a tree, with no visible sign of organized worship or hierarchy. Although it would be a mistake to draw too firm conclusions, we should keep our minds open. Progress is more than the removal of some previous evil, and freedom is more than the reduction of repression. The notion of a horrifying past might just be nothing more than an excuse for an untenable present.

There is, after all, nothing especially human about avoiding barriers. Pathogens are good at it, and so is malware. If we think of freedom as negative, we wake up one day as the champions of both kinds of viruses, of alien bits of DNA and unknown computer code. They must be allowed to penetrate our mouths, invade our retinas, go everywhere. In practice, among the most unquestioned American rights are those of photons to flow from computer displays to optic nerves to deliver targeted advertising, of electrons to move among banks to allow tax evasion, and of carbon dioxide molecules to heat the air and doom the species.

The problem is one not of technology but of worldview. Following the logic of negative freedom, we concern ourselves with an abstraction (the economy) rather than the bodies of people. Instead of free people, we find ourselves speaking of a “free market.” The people become the barriers, to be removed—or penetrated. The myth of the free market instructs us that things should be free to circulate without hindrance. When the word freedom is conceded to the economy, it follows that the market has rights. Such rights will be enforced against people, who are expected to experience the market’s rights as duties. On this logic, people have a duty not to concern themselves with how things are bought and sold, or with how money is moved, or with monopolies, or wage slavery, or pollution, or carbon dioxide emissions.

Markets are indispensable, and they help us do many things well. But it is up to people to decide which things those are and under which parameters markets best serve freedom. In important areas, such as health care, the market provides a poor service. If the body is a site of profit, it is not a site of health. We need to understand our bodies, and treating them as commodities makes this much harder to do.

Birth is the most important moment of our lives, but obstetrics is hard to make profitable, and so mothers and babies die who ought to have lived. Infant and maternal mortality is higher in the United States than in any other rich country—and the trend is in the wrong direction. Prevention is the most important part of health care, but 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. And so Americans live shorter, sicker lives while spending far more money on health care than others in comparably rich countries. Without a positive idea of freedom, without some concept of the Leib, we do not see how strange this is. Being unable to see a doctor or afford medication when we are sick is not a mark of freedom. Nor is being dead.

efficiency, a nonvalue that poses as the highest value. The word resets the conversation. It places why out of bounds, offering an endless how. Efficiency talk distracts us from thinking about purposes and hastens us instead toward a calculation regarding how quickly something is being done. Commercial medicine, for example, is efficient in extracting money from the sick. And that is how hospitals are judged by those who own them. Accepting profit as the goal, however, means forgetting about life and health.

History confirms that efficiency talk can lead a people away from freedom. Efficiency was the argument for shifting American manufacturing to China in the 1980s and 1990s. The result was the decline of freedom in the United States, and the rise of China as the superpower of oppression. In repressive conditions, workers in China make our cell phones and much else. They are instruments in a political project that has no purpose beyond the pleasure of their rulers, who (for example) find it efficient to sell the organs of murdered political dissenters and the hair of ethnic minorities imprisoned in concentration camps. Today’s China, with its communist ideology and capitalist practice, is about efficiency.

The “free market” only exists as a slogan covering senseless contradictions and justifying political bullying. There is no such thing as a “free market” in the world, nor can there be. Capitalism minus norms and laws is murderous conquest. If someone invades your country, seizes your house, enslaves your children, and puts your kidneys up for sale, that is the magic of the unregulated market at work. Markets cannot be free. Only people can be free. Freedom is a human value. It can be recognized and pursued only by humans. There is no substitute for freedom, no way to delegate it. The moment we delegate freedom, to the market or anything else, it becomes submission. When people surrender the word free, freedom vanishes from their lives.

In practice, the “free market” is directed against social mobility. By categorizing redistribution, welfare states, and political action in general as forbidden “interventions” in the economy, libertarianism guarantees the triumph of giant corporations and the concentration of wealth. This makes social advance ever more difficult. Though libertarians pose as defenders of freedom, they create societies in which young people have nowhere to go.

We are free within a borderland of the unpredictable, a human zone between what is and what should be. When ideologies claim that there is no difference between the two, or that the difference is being closed by some higher power, they are denying our zone of freedom. Like the ideology of “scientific socialism,” the ideology of the “free market” claims that what is can become what should be thanks to some larger economic logic. Restore private property, or remove it, and all will be well. In both cases, the rhetoric begins as a fantasy of revolution—free the market! unite the proletariat!—and ends with the odious assurance that nothing is really true and nothing really matters and so there is no alternative to the status quo.

The notion that freedom is state inaction makes sense only for the tiny minority who can protect their families without a representative government.

Wealthy libertarians favor the state interventions that allowed them to generate their wealth; they just oppose government action that might enable others to do the same.

For those who are not wealthy, the free-market fantasy is seductive for a different reason: it lifts the burden of responsibility that comes with freedom. We can dream that the “free market” will make all decisions for us. Our one and only decision is to concede our freedom to it. Once we join the libertarian cult, we do not have to take the trouble to evaluate the world. We are soothed by the notion that our impulses are automatically translated into the general good. We use our minds to rationalize, to justify whatever the markets give us, a habit that is submissive in the extreme.

The extreme solutions calm us by removing any occasion for thought: large state and tiny market (Stalinists), or large market and tiny state (libertarians). When we give ourselves over to these total solutions, we are pacified, no longer wrestling with the world. We have an answer for everything, like a simple computer program. We have retreated from the borderland of the unpredictable into the safe space of automatic replies. Havel defined ideology as a “bridge of excuses between the system and the individual.”

Markets should work for us, not the other way around. Properly managed, they can indeed create some of the conditions that allow people to be free. They work depending on the rules. These rules should be informed by values, not by spurious notions of purity. When the rules are right, many of our cares are lifted. Free people will do what makes sense for them, without shame. When the market fails, to react by changing course is normal. When markets constrain freedom, we work together to alter them. When we need new institutions, we build them. Facing a challenge such as a depression or a financial crisis, we intervene. Facing a species-threatening calamity such as global warming, we come together to intervene again. Solidarity helps us to see all of this.

Freedom begins with the recognition of the difference between the is and the ought. Free people operate in the space between, in a borderland of unpredictability. Totalitarianism claims to close the gap between what is and what should be permanently and for everyone. A notalitarian shrugs and says that the problem does not exist: Who knows what (if anything) exists, and who knows what (if anything) should be? Totalitarianism takes all the oxygen from the room; notalitarianism fills the space with laughing gas.

Notalitarianism is seductively snide. Believing in nothing is presented as intelligence. Facts are all contested, and so they are no better than opinions, which are no better than emotions—so forget the reporters, historians, and scientists. Those who express values are dismissed as fools. Everything is excused, because anyone’s excuse is as good as anyone else’s. Let the liars lie and the truth perish. Let the oligarchs try to escape and enjoy watching everyone else suffer. Let the world end with a smirk.

Freedom is hard, so we are tempted by simple algorithms that stand in for thinking and keep us from acting. The simplest is to defer any evaluation and to stay clear of the world of values. Let someone else make decisions for us. Let God tell us what is right. Let the members of the politburo or the prophets of the “free market” tell us what is right. Let the Leader, the tribe, the television, the internet tell us what is right.

Americans’ false tragic choice is between entrepreneurship and social justice. But we can sometimes have both, as much of American history shows. It is always right to try for both, since both are good things, and indeed work well together. Without a baseline of fairness, especially for children, there will not be much entrepreneurship. The people who will innovate in the future require care now. The better our public schools, the more start-up stars we will educate. The more we enforce opportunity with antitrust laws, the more room we create for founders of small businesses. The greater their access to health care, the more people are free to try something new. “There is no incompatibility,” as the economist Hayek rightly says, “between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.”

The first trick in reconciling values is to avoid the trapdoors: submission, totalitarianism, notalitarianism, the false tragedy of choice. We must not give up on a value just because we cannot realize it right now.

Over the course of a life, or the history of a nation, we can find ways to bring values together. As we practice freedom, we climb higher and see new vistas. Simone Weil, musing about “contradictory virtues in the souls of saints,” envisioned a winding elevation: “If I am walking up the flank of a mountain, I might first see a lake, and then, after a few steps, a forest. I have to choose between the lake and the forest. If I want to see both the lake and the forest, I have to climb higher.”

We can learn something about which structures are best, and some are certainly better than others. But we can build them only with the help of values. “We rely not upon management or trickery,” as Pericles said in his funeral oration for Athenian soldiers who had perished in the Peloponnesian War, “but upon our own hearts and hands.”