On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good. —

The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

The forms resolve two apparent conundrums: a free person is an individual, but no one becomes an individual alone; freedom is felt in one lifetime, but it must be the work of generations.

And yet freedom must be about possible futures, and any possible future exists on a line from an actual past. How were we to draw those lines without history?

A provocation works when a less powerful entity turns a more powerful actor against itself. The attack of 9/11 was one of the most successful provocations of all time.

Any vacuum of facts and values will be filled with spectacle and war. The fascist nature of the Russian regime ought to have been clear well before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The American experts had excluded freedom as a factor in the world, so their prediction was incorrect.

A sovereign person knows themselves and the world sufficiently to make judgments about values and to realize those judgments.

A little leap of empathy is at the beginning of the knowledge we need for freedom.

Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance of understanding it.

Unlike God the Father, Jesus is neither litigious nor vengeful, emphasizing instead the simple laws of loving God and loving one’s neighbor.

When we see ourselves as others see us, we know ourselves better. This is liberating.

To be sovereign means to have a sense of what ought to be and how to get there.

I don’t think I ever asked myself what it might mean for African American players to stand for a song about liberty that was written when their ancestors were enslaved. I do remember wondering what it meant for the players who were not American to stand for the anthem of another country.

We say that a symbol stands for something, but all too often a symbol merely stands in for something. The American flag is supposed to stand for freedom, but it can very easily stand in for freedom. In singing the anthem, we treat its values as permanent, or as if they were enacted by song. But praise is not practice.

Political systems that are oriented toward freedom to are doing better than we are on freedom from. This suggests that there is no contradiction between the two. Indeed, it suggests that freedom to comes first.

Freedom to, positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don’t think of freedom as positive, we won’t even get freedom in the negative sense, since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom.

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. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to.

Freedom is positive. It is about holding virtues in mind and having some ...

From regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity. It seems normal in the United States to see the body as a source of profit. And that was my next problem.

The absence of freedom threatens life, just as threats to life undermine freedom.

It is this tradition that leads some of us to think that government action must work against non-Black people if it is working for Black people.

If we do not recognize the general predicament of illness and death, if we do not recognize all bodies, then we do not recognize our own predicament when we are sick and what it means for freedom.

Freedom is neither the lack nor the acceptance of constraints, but rather the use of them.

Ukrainians are to be exterminated because they are Nazis, Jews, gays, Satanists, ghouls, zombies, vermin. The next step is violence, the opposite of recognition of the Leib. When we torture or humiliate a body, we further objectify it. After the body has been degraded and the person humiliated, the killer finds the work easier to bear. Some enjoy it.

We learn from people with whom we spend time, whom we respect—a word that, in its origins, means “look back, look attentively.” We understand their thoughts in a different way when we have acknowledged them as people. We are more aware of our own thought processes when we think together with others. Even the books that stay with us are often given to us by people we know.

You “have to see the body of others to see your own body,” and so objectivity “is not being yourself without distractions, it is recognizing the other body as being like your body, and then seeing the world.”

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.

What we learned about Jim Crow was that it had come to an end. We should have known that Jim Crow inspired German racial laws, which made Jews (such as Edith Stein) second-class citizens. Along with the laws came initiatives from below, such as banning Jews from swimming pools.

The fascist notion of sovereignty is puerile, a boyish joke. We need to begin not with overgrown boys but with actual children.

It is legitimate insofar as it enables freedom, enacting policies that allow young and coming generations to become sovereign.

Those who care about childhood should care about freedom, and those who care about freedom should care about children. This means caring about the society into which the next American baby will be born. 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.

resistance begins with a definition of what might

Another formerly incarcerated person I know, a man about my age, began his sentence in the twentieth century, well before smartphones were invented. When he was released after twenty-six years, he was troubled by the spectacle of people staring at the little screens. “I’ve seen more unfree people out here than I ever saw inside” was his comment.

On social media, our attention is divided into fragments that are the right size for analysis of us but not by us. 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. 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.

When we forget the why and have only the how, our imagination seeps into the gully of the status quo. We rationalize, using our residual intelligence to explain that the world cannot be otherwise than it is, and that we cannot do otherwise than we have done.

When we think with values, we are drawing from the past, but we are not stuck in it. We are considering the present, but we are not sanctifying it. We are oriented toward the future, and we are making it.

Confirmation bias, the third brain hack, works together with the fourth, social conformity. In real life, we tend to accept what people around us say; on the internet, the algorithms nestle us in an environment where we seem to be with like-minded people.

When your fears are predictable, then so are you, which means that you (and your digital demographic) are ripe for manipulation. When you are predictable, you predictably bring your country down.

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.

This is cognitive dissonance, the fifth and final brain hack, the machine’s coup de grâce. We use what is left of our human reason to defend actions that were based on an alien one. We retreat from the borderland of the unpredictable and surrender the realm of freedom: not just for ourselves but for others who must endure our preprogrammed rants, senseless violence, and tiresome rationalizations.

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.

The plurality of virtues is real, but in his novel 1984, people lack the words to name them. People are unfree not simply because their bodies are always observed but because their language is famished. In 1984, the reduction of the number of English words is a cumbersome affair, drudge work carried out by people in offices. In our lives, social media reduce our vocabulary (and thus our references) at terrifying speed. Colonized on our couches, we accept a pidgin of English.

Although the individual Leib is mobile, mobility for all can be achieved only together.

Mobility is a form of freedom because we are free when we structure society with this in mind. It is not so much a final state as an accumulation of capacities and imaginings over the course of a life.

Recalling Buchenwald, Bass said, “Racism is at the root of all of this. Under that umbrella comes bigotry and prejudice and discrimination. We haven’t come to grips with that institution called racism. And we have to, because we see the ultimate of racism, which was what I saw at Buchenwald.”

Because a young African American anticipates violence, every reaction to his skin suggests future pain. For David, “thinking without the threat of trauma” comes before freedom.

Mobility, as a form of freedom, has to do with values and time as well as with space.

Mobility in only three dimensions means desperation and colonization.