On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The certainty of a single future justified tyranny in principle, and it created a tyrant in practice. The classical form of tyranny was given the modern dress of scientific certainty. Until communism was reached, and all were liberated, people were just Körper to be manipulated. The consequences of this single future, which of course was never reached, swept through the twentieth century and into our own.

In the United States, the elevation of negative freedom in the 1980s set a political tone that lasted deep into the twenty-first century: the purpose of government was not to create the conditions of freedom for all but to remove barriers in order to help the wealthy consolidate their gains.

The Connecticut prison where I taught was beyond the electoral districts of the cities from which my students came. In my home state of Ohio, people are moved from counties with big cities to rural counties. In this way, not only are the incarcerated denied a voice, but their voice is taken by others—and precisely by those who have an incentive to see prisons as a source of jobs and of political power.

Their imprisoned bodies are converted into someone else’s right to elect people who build more prisons.

Postimperial immobility summoned a tragic echo of the age of imperial mobility. Where once prison inmates were forced to work, now they are forced to do nothing. Where once disease was a tool of empire, now drugs have become a means of self-oppression. Where once guns allowed men to tame a frontier, now they are instruments of self-annihilation. Postimperial immobility is not simply personal tragedy but the birth of tyranny.

Populism offers some redistribution, something to the people from the state; sadopopulism offers only the spectacle of others being still more deprived. Sadopopulism salves the pain of immobility by directing attention to others who suffer more. One group is reassured that, thanks to its resilience, it will do less poorly than another from government paralysis. Sadopopulism bargains, in other words, not by granting resources but by offering relative degrees of pain and permission to enjoy the suffering of others.

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

The claim that everything is getting better for everyone justified policies that left most people worse off than they had been before.

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.

The group of Americans who control as much wealth as half of the population is even smaller: as numerous as my high school class. And those few hundred oligarchs are paying less tax now than the actual members of my high school class—which is to say they have a lower effective tax rate than working-class and middle-class Americans.

Since half the national wealth is owned by an irrelevantly small group of people, the country is only half as wealthy as the numbers present it to be.

The full-scale invasion of 2022 demonstrated how the atavistic whining of the wealthiest fossil oligarch, Putin himself, could direct the world’s attention away from the future—and draw resources away from where they were needed most. Putin’s genocidal undertaking was supported by the wealthiest digital oligarch, Elon Musk.

moving forward. Eternity politics comes down to the idea that some single person should rule forever, usually to preserve personal wealth and avoid responsibility for crimes.

The cheerleaders wrote books to spread rationalization memes: we are getting smarter (we’re not); it’s not as bad as the newspapers portray (it’s worse); in the end, maybe all this is just a simulation (it’s not), so we are not responsible (we are) and shouldn’t worry since we don’t really exist (we do).

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.

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 are not at the center of everything. We are special thanks not to location but to vocation. It is not where we are, but what we do, that counts. And to do, we have to know.

If you are reading by sunlight, the photons that allow you to distinguish the letters from the page took eight minutes to reach you—but they arose in the sun’s core thousands of years before this alphabet was invented, perhaps at around the time humans began to use symbols to write in Asia or were killing the giant mammals of North America.

In our own politics, in a less strident way, an ecological lie also works together with a political fiction. In the United States, the political party that denies (or ignores) global warming also suppresses votes. Breaking democracy also breaks the ecosphere.

An actual AI would remind us that (by Google’s own count) we put about two thousand tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day with our Web searches alone—and that every query to the programs now termed “artificial intelligence” burns about ten times as much as every Web search.

Reality fades, even physical reality, when we have no one to help us concentrate on what is right in front of our faces.

The internet cannot report. It can only repeat. And as AI (or rather “AI”) enters the picture, it will not even repeat what people once reported—it will invent what people want to hear.

Since no one knows what truth is, runs their ploy, there is no point knowing anything. Searching for facts risks hurting your feelings, and you don’t want that.

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.

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.

The leading source of health information in the United States now is direct-to-consumer drug advertising.

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.

Totalitarianism is religious science, or scientific religion. Notalitarianism is bottomlessly agnostic about both values and facts. Totalitarians give us one truth that seems to hold everything together. They merge what is with what ought to be, making both meaningless, leaving the power to custodians who explain why the rest are creatures of how. When the one truth slips away, notalitarians arrive to give us the one truth that there are no truths.

Freedom does not mean denying others good things because of some remorseless logic; it means thinking of ways to hold values, and thus individual people, together.

The fourth rule is tension. We cannot just pull all the virtues from the fifth dimension into our four of time and space. In practice, the virtues compete with one another. I might like to be punctual, but I should also be patient. I might wish to be a person of integrity, but sometimes I should compromise. We might value skepticism, yet we have faith. Love is blind, but it takes discernment to know what not to see. That leads us to the fifth rule: combinability. People can bring together virtues in creative ways and sometimes create new ones.

Better than raging against the machine is reading against the machine. Search engines make you more mechanical; library shelves make you less so. Staring at screens makes you easier to handle; listening to people makes you less so.

African Americans and Native Americans today face entrenched difficulties in voting. American laws also allow the very richest to avoid paying taxes and to influence elections (and then policy) by spending money. Such laws disenfranchise all nonbillionaires by granting to the few electoral power not enjoyed by the many. A country with oligarchical elections and voter suppression is not a land of the free. A democratic America would establish an equal right to vote for all citizens at all times.

The point of freedom of speech is to challenge accumulated power, which means accumulated wealth. Associating freedom of speech with spending private money on elections is therefore perverse in the extreme.

Schools must teach the hard parts of American history—those censored by cowards as “divisive concepts.” People who are taught to fear “divisive concepts” cannot be sovereign, since they will lack the terms of engagement needed to learn from others. A nation built on fear of conversation will be too fragile and porous for solidarity. The toughness needed to face the past is the same toughness needed to face the future.

“freedom is the process of grappling with the past.”

Three new rights would complement Jefferson’s traditional ones: the right to vote, the right to one’s mind, and the right to health care.

Right now, for example, American companies get a tax break for buying robots but not for training people. This should be reversed.

It follows that we are all responsible for creating the conditions that make it possible for others to become free.

Babies are not responsible when their parents are poor; kids are not responsible when their schools are bad. The very existence of the carceral state becomes a silent excuse not to create a welfare state. To see the pain of others as confirmation of one’s own superiority is to be irresponsible—complicit in sadopopulism and tyranny.

The enforcement of existing laws would be a very good start. Americans lose about $1 trillion every year to tax fraud and evasion by the very wealthy. Offshore tax evaders should be given a year to come onshore or be prosecuted. Known practices that serve oligarchical escapism should be banned. These include mirror trades, anonymous real estate transactions, and limited partnerships that hide true owners and beneficiaries.

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.

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.

and rebels, dangerous men.” It is perverse to celebrate a past fight for freedom while accepting tyranny in the present. Each epoch demands a courage specific to its challenges.

Our problem is not the world; our problem is us. And so we can solve it. We can be free, if we see what freedom is. We can see creativity in the past, possibility in the present, liberty in the future. We can recognize one another, create a good government, and make our own luck.