On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Slavery was conceived of as negative freedom: a right of the slaveowner to own property, with which the government was not to interfere.

the right to health care. But we will only achieve that if we manage something that the Founders did not: recognizing other bodies as equally human.

We are neither gods nor objects. We are humans who can become sovereign. Freedom is neither the lack nor the acceptance of constraints, but rather the use of them.

Sovereignty has to do with the body, with what we learn to do. It also has to do with the past, with the world we inherit. “The past and the future,” says Weil, “are man’s only treasures.”

Hitler wanted Ukraine as Lebensraum, living space.

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.

Edith Stein.

Equal dignity is easy to grant in theory. But how do we recognize others in practice? Tending the wrecked bodies of men wounded at the front, Stein found that we acknowledge others through the Leib.

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.

And America has become a flawed republic threatened by oligarchy and fascism for many reasons, but negative freedom is among them.

Public goods like swimming pools passed to the private sector, where membership rules could informally enforce prejudice.

Having been excluded from swimming pools, Black kids were less likely to learn to swim than white kids. And so white kids were instructed that Black bodies were not buoyant. This was “common knowledge.”

If we expect people to accept the institutions into which they were born, on the basis of an agreement that is largely (or totally) fictional, how can that be generative of freedom?

Heidegger and the existentialists were part (phenomenology),

Regulating emotions is a step toward the evaluation that enables freedom.

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.

Freedom is not about being right, which is elusive, but about trying to do right.

we accept that “everything is shit,” if nothing is any better than anything else, we have no basis for sovereign choices,

Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” a profound meditation on freedom.

Freedom requires a positive presence, not a malign neglect.

Free people are predictable to themselves but unpredictable to authorities and machines. Unfree people are unpredictable to themselves and predictable to rulers.

Normalization, by contrast, was a politics of entropy, a decomposition. Life was pre-death.

“The Power of the Powerless” was a guide to the lure of unfreedom and a suggestion of how to become less probable.

You feel free when your prior choices make sense of a moment. Your actions are then predictable to you, though unpredictable to the world.

“Accident,” but it was accident followed by commitment.

Shakespeare has Hamlet say: “Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament / Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.”

An important Russian actor in the campaigns of 2014 and 2016 was Yevgeny Prigozhin, who ran Russia’s Internet Research Agency. Prigozhin also directed a private military company called Wagner.

Things get our attention, but we no longer pay attention.

“We all have our own values. Live in truth. Maybe you want to play the guitar. Learn to play the guitar. Start a band.”

Freedom is positive; it needs the vivifying world of values. If we have no purpose, we serve someone else’s, or we serve a purposeless machine.

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.

Intermittent reinforcement is the second brain hack. It depends on experimental isolation—if the animal has company, the device is less beguiling.

communists shifted to zero values and intermittent reinforcement.

Simone Weil, “what we get is icy tumult.” The cold stream of manipulation erodes us into caricatures of ourselves.

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.

If we knew that we had access to health care and a retirement pension, we would live more interesting lives.

For middle-class people, dependence on private health care makes it difficult to change jobs.

This drastic restraint on mobility—and thus on freedom—is, sadly, taken for granted in the United States.

The first three forms of freedom—sovereignty, unpredictability, and mobility—should be present throughout our lives. There is nevertheless an order of development. In childhood, we attain sovereignty, with the help of others; in youth, we sustain unpredictability as we realize our own combinations of values. As we become adults, we need somewhere to go and the ability to get there.

In 1946 segregation in interstate travel became illegal, in theory. Nothing much changed in practice.

Lebensraum, living space. This was a kind of imperial mobility: the world was covered by empire; Germans should impose their own.

the word freedom in American English came to mean little more than the privilege of a few wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.

prison gerrymandering. Incarcerated people are counted as residents for the purposes of deciding how many elected representatives a given district will have.

Urban Americans are extracted from cities where they would have voted and placed in the exurbs or countryside where their bodies magnify the voting power of others—very

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.

redlining, which mutated into new forms after housing discrimination as such was later banned.

In positive freedom, we recognize that there are many good things, and we try to bring them together.

Racism stops us from being pluralists and so prevents us from being free.

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.

The worst possible analysis prevailed: the collapse of the USSR was somehow the fault of the welfare state.