On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The Ukrainian word de-occupation, which she and I are using in conversation, is more precise than the conventional liberation. It invites us to consider what, beyond the removal of oppression, we might need for liberty. It takes work, after all, to get one older woman into a position where she can greet guests and perform the normal interactions of a dignified person. I have trouble imagining Mariia being truly free without a proper house with a chair and without a clear path to the road for her walker. Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

Russians kill children with missiles, and kidnap them for assimilation. But the absence of these crimes is not enough; de-occupation is not enough. Children need places to play, run, and swim, to practice being themselves. A child cannot create a park or a swimming pool. The joy of youth is to discover such things in the world. It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.

I came to Ukraine during the war while writing this book about freedom. Here its subject is palpable, all around. A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, I spoke with some Ukrainian lawmakers: “We chose freedom when we did not run.” “We are fighting for freedom.” “Freedom itself is the choice.”

It was essential to remove repression, to gain what philosophers call “negative freedom.” But de-occupation, the removal of harm, was just a necessary condition for freedom, not the thing itself. A soldier in a rehabilitation center told me that freedom was about everyone having a chance to fulfill their own purposes after the war. A veteran awaiting a prosthesis said that freedom would be a smile on his son’s face. A young soldier on leave said that freedom was about the children he would like to have. Their commander in his hidden staff room, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, told me that freedom meant a normal life with prospects. Freedom was a future when some things were the same and others were better. It was life expanding and growing.

I worry that, in my own country, the United States, we speak of freedom without considering what it is. Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government. An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.

If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.

It matters how we speak and think about freedom. Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

Nor is it because freedom is a vacuum left by a dead God or an empty world. Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens; when we are free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life. Over time, our choices among virtues define us as people of will and individuality.

Americans are told that we were given freedom by our Founding Fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this or any other external source of freedom. If we associate freedom with outside forces, and someone tells us that the outside world delivers a threat, we sacrifice liberty for safety. This makes sense to us, because in our hearts we were already unfree. We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.

Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the wor...

Russian propagandists claim that there is no right and no good, and so everything is permitted. The consequences of that view are all around me in de-occupied Ukraine, in the death pits I saw at Bucha, in ruined settlements such as Posad Pokrovs’ke, in concentration camps such as Yahidne. Russian soldiers in Ukraine speak of cities they destroy as “liberated.” And indeed: all barriers, from their perspective, have been removed. They can bulldoze the rubble and the corpses, as in Mariupol, build something else, sell it. In that negative sense of free, they are free to murder and steal.

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government. And so this book begins with an introduction about freedom, and ends with a conclusion about government.

The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.

Freedom justifies government. The forms of freedom show us how.

Your Leib pushes back into the world, changing it. It translates physics into pain and pleasure, chemistry into desire and disappointment, biology into poetry and prose. It is the permeable membrane between necessity and freedom. It is a Leib that is capable of the kind of concentration that marks a free and sovereign person. Körper we concentrate in a camp.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a Jew who has been “stripped of his raiment” is lying “wounded” beside the road. Other Jews walk by and do not help him. A non-Jew, a Samaritan, recognized the injured Jew as a fellow person, “had compassion on him” (Luke 10:30–33), tended his wounds, and found him shelter. Who is thy neighbor? He that showed mercy. Go and do likewise. In the story, it is the Samaritan who is free. He is sovereign, in that he is acting according to his own values and is able to realize them in the world. The road that he walked was material, but not only. We are in nature but not entirely of it. Our bodies are subject to inertia, but we can choose to stop by the side of the road. Our bodies are pulled down by gravity, but we can raise someone else up from the ditch.

The Bible also asks us to love “the stranger that dwelleth among you” as we love ourselves (Leviticus 19:34). “To love a stranger as oneself implies,” says Weil, “that we love ourselves as strangers.” Like many of her formulations, this one is a challenge. It is not just that we do right when we love a stranger. It is that we see ourselves as a stranger might see us, see what is strange in us, which is what we need to see. When we see ourselves as others see us, we know ourselves better. This is liberating. We experience the restraints of the external world and push against them, in the company of others who are doing the same. We are free when we know in which direction we wish to push and how we can do so.

Weil called our bodies “a source of mystery that we cannot eliminate.” We are here as our bodies or not at all; we are free as our bodies or not at all. In notebooks that she kept during the war, Weil wrote of gravity and grace. We are a special sort of creature, subject to the laws of physics but able to understand them—and to bend them to purposes that are not reducible to them. The body wends its way between the world of things as they are and the world of things as they might be. Weil’s “mystery” was the presence of the body in both realms, the is and the ought. To be sovereign means to have a sense of what ought to be and how to get there.

Considering the Leib of others (as Stein put it), or seeing the strangers among us (as Weil said), we attune ourselves differently. Thinking about that physical act of standing at attention from other perspectives, we hear the anthem’s lyrics differently. The questions it poses become less rhetorical: Does the American flag wave today? Most assuredly it does. This is the easy part. But does it fly over “the land of the free”? It is easy to imagine that freedom will be brought to us by a song, by jets over a stadium, by the land, by the ancestors, by the Founders, by capitalism. But is the notion that we are granted freedom right for a “home of the brave”? Is it not more courageous to ask what Americans have done, could have done, should do? 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.

By no meaningful index are Americans today among the freest peoples of the world. An American organization, Freedom House, measures freedom by the criteria Americans prefer: civil and political liberties. Year after year about fifty countries do better than us on these measures.

The truth about the “land of the free” is more sobering still. Most of the countries with higher rankings than ours in civil and political liberties would surpass us by still greater margins in the measures that their citizens would consider elements of freedom, such as access to health care. If such measures were included, we would fall even further down on the scale. The countries where people tend to think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from. That should give pause for thought. 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. That is not what we are used to thinking or want to think. It helps to look at others if we want to understand ourselves.

We tend to think of freedom just as freedom from, as negative. But conceiving of freedom as an escape or an evasion does not tell us what freedom is nor how it would be brought into the world. 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 power to realize them. Insofar as such a thing can be measured, Americans could be doing better. As I write, in self-reported well-being, Americans are fifteenth in the world. In about fifty countries, people live longer lives.

Having nearly died in that American hospital, I gave some thought, pacing its corridors, to the “right to life.” In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s right to life is followed by a right to liberty and a right to pursue happiness. Liberty is in the middle. Life comes first, which makes sense. We can only be free as a Leib. No Leib, no freedom. There can be a Körper without me, but no Leib without me, as Stein said. Negative freedom makes a Körper of us, one object of many, supposedly free when other objects are not in the way. That will not do. Whatever our freedom is, it must begin from what kinds of creatures we are, involve how we differ from the world beyond, and suggest how we make contact with that world and change it. Liberty and life are connected, if perhaps not in the way that we are usually told. It is not that we have to trade the one for the other, freedom for safety. Had I been freer when I was sick, I would also have been more secure. The absence of freedom threatens life, just as threats to life undermine freedom.

Freedom is about the body. The Founders knew this, but they knew little about the human organism. John Locke, an English philosopher important to American constitutional thought, treated health as an element of good government. Thomas Jefferson thought that after ethics, health was the most important thing in life. The Founders bemoaned the epidemics that plagued their young republic, but they had no remedies. We do. George Washington inoculated his troops the best way he knew how. We know better. He died after being bled by his doctors. We wouldn’t do such a thing.

The Founders held a variety of views about slavery, but even some of those who opposed its spread (such as Jefferson) owned slaves themselves. As a general matter, we can say that early American elites often did not see the body of an African as a Leib. They generally believed that people from Africa were not fully human, that their bodies were different from their own. This belief remains with us, and it makes it harder for us all to be healthy. The racism was clear to me in the emergency room because I was dying. White people in the United States know about race, but they suppress that knowledge in an everyday covenant of ostensible ignorance. I did not learn about racism from the incident in the hospital; when I was at death’s door, what I already knew surged forward to clarify the situation, because it was relevant to my own survival. Only at the extreme did I need ordinary knowledge. Black Americans cannot deny what they know, because they need it to get through the day. When white people deny what we know, we turn situations where we might all do better into situations where we all do worse. While the doctors ignored my friend, I was dying a truth I hadn’t lived. Slavery was conceived of as negative freedom: a right of the slaveowner to own property, with which the government was not to interfere. 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. Negative freedom invites wh...

I had three problems when I was very sick: my own attitude toward my body; the commercialization of medical care; and racism. These really amount to one problem. 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. If we conceive of liberty only as freedom from, we don’t think expansively enough; we think only of ourselves, or about ourselves against the world. When...

With respect to health, the idea of negative freedom is a dangerous relic of the past, of a time when the most that could be hoped for was property, slaves, and women to surround an ill man. We can do so much better now, and for everyone. A revolution in medicine and hygiene began after the Civil War. Physicians—and following them, governments around the world—implemented policies of hygiene, vaccination, and preventive care. These programs created not only the reality but the expectation of a much longer life. 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 bring Jefferson’s thought to its lo...

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. The mound is sixty feet and six inches from home plate, and it is elevated ten inches above the ground; that both restrains and enables a pitch. We are free to do only the things we can do, which are usually things that others taught us to do and that we practice. What a pitcher does on the mound is a result not only of choices appropriate to a game situation, but of all the repetition that came before. The same holds for any choice we make. Just thinking about the virtues is not enough; as Aristotle said, we have to practice them by working them into the world. “Nature resists,” says Simone Weil, “but it does not defend itself.” You feel that resistance when you pick up a baseball or touch the strings of a guitar. The guitar strings resist the pick but yield the chord. The baseball resists as you lift it but yields as you place a middle finger on a stitch, a forefinger against the middle finger, snap your wrist, and throw a curveball. Nature gives way in beauty. When we know how to play, and that we want to play, the resistance and the yielding are the same thing.

Leib first reverts to Körper in the mind. In Nazi propaganda, east Europeans were subhuman beasts. On Soviet posters, rich peasants were pigs. Russian television today takes this notion to a postmodern extreme: 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. In dehumanizing others, we make ourselves unfree. If we see others only as Körper, we cannot see ourselves as Leib; we lose the promise of our own freedom. So we can only get to freedom with the help of those we might otherwise demean, mistreat, or ignore.

We imagined a disaster thousands of miles away, in a country that none of my students had visited, and that to them at first was all but unknown. The application of what we were discussing, though, was clear enough. If Russian invaders believed that Ukrainians were less than human, then raping women and executing men was no crime: Ukrainian bodies were objects to begin with. In acting this way, of course, the Russians opened the logical possibility that they, too, were simply objects: to be sent somewhere to die pointlessly on the basis of lies. If we do not recognize one another through the Leib, we not only cause suffering to others but bring unfreedom to ourselves. What if I think that my body is something more than a Körper, but no one else agrees? Then (my students pointed out) others can attach and detach meanings to me as they will, and my own values will never make their way out into the world. I can be enslaved, tortured, segregated. If I do not exist as a Leib because the existence of my group is denied, I can be subjected to genocide.

Russia has become a genocidal fascist empire for many reasons, but one of them is negative freedom. This concept made it hard to see that its oligarchy was the antithesis of freedom (rather than a side effect) or that Putin was a fascist (rather than just a technocrat seeking wealth). And America has become a flawed republic threatened by oligarchy and fascism for many reasons, but negative freedom is among them. It leads us to think that we have solved our problems when we have privatized them, when in fact all we have achieved is separating ourselves from one another.

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.

Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” a profound meditation on freedom. In the essay, Havel translated the experience of “normalized” Czechoslovakia into general political lessons. “Normalization” meant adaptation to the party line, even though no one believed it expressed anything beyond the convenience of the powerful. Normality in this sense of “normalization” has no substance, only form. It is the habit of saying (and then thinking) what seems necessary, while agreeing implicitly (and then explicitly) that nothing really matters. Life becomes an echo chamber of all the things we never dare to say. The pretending was what Havel called “unfreedom,” the concession of the authentic self. All the authorities needed was for people to react to stimuli: positively to consumer goods, negatively to the threat of prison. Modern tyranny, Havel concluded, required not devotion but predictability. Normalization forced life into “the most probable states.”

If what is normal is what everyone else does, then conformism can collapse to a single, meaningless, dark point. But if normal is what one should do, then an aperture opens instead, into a realm of dreams, aspirations, and judgments. If Havel is right, and unfreedom means predictability, then freedom must involve unpredictability. It is the second form of freedom, arising from sovereignty, or what Havel called “autonomy.” Sovereignty (or autonomy) takes work. Havel did not dwell on this, having been raised in a prosperous family and having had an excellent education. We need support to become autonomous people, sovereign individuals. Freedom requires a positive presence, not a malign neglect. Youth is a chance for freedom that must not be wasted. By the time brain functions are complete, at the age of about twenty, sovereign young people can show the world their unpredictability.

Havel was concerned with the power of the state to make us predictable. But what is such a state working against? How does our human unpredictability arise? The choices of each sovereign person will be in a unique combination, grounded in a unique set of commitments. But uniqueness at a given moment is only the beginning of unpredictability. No choice is ever final, not just because the world changes around us, but because different values will suggest themselves to us at different points. 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. The fifth dimension, so to speak, has its own physics, its own geometry. When we make choices and affirm values, that different geometry of the fifth dimension seeps into our world, making us and it less predictable.

The values cannot be judged in the same terms as physical objects: we can say that a thing is bigger than another thing, but we cannot say that loyalty is bigger than honesty. Another difference: choosing between values is an act of affirmation, not of consumption. When we choose beauty, there is more beauty, not less. We leave behind the unchosen thing, whereas the unchosen value always awaits us. We might affirm it later, or even find some way to combine it with other values. As we move forwa...

Havel strained toward that world of values, that fifth dimension, which he called “moral standards.” Yet he also had in mind the physical world, the first four dimensions, the restraints we need for creativity. Havel was preoccupied with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, according to which disorder, quantified by entropy, grows over time. “Moral standards” meant a limitation of chaos by ethics. “Just as the constant increase in entropy is the basic law of the universe,” he wrote to Husák, “so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.” Normalization, by contrast, was a politics of entropy, a decomposition. Life was pre-death. 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.

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.” And then they ask us if we are not, perhaps, living in a computer simulation ourselves—or, in an older language, inside Plato’s cave. Unfortunately, wealthy and important people who speak of simulations are searching for an excuse to be irresponsible. If we decide that we are not real, that life is elsewhere, we can drop into a cave where morality has no sense and freedom is impossible.

Human rights meant a universal recognition of equal human dignity. Once that idea was formally incorporated as law, it became an argument for the legal autonomy of a citizen of an actual communist state. Communist regimes treated law as subordinate to the party, as the written emanation of the power relations of a given moment. But law could also be understood differently, as an aperture to a world of values, in which normal meant “following moral standards” rather than “accepting normalization.” Courageous people in the USSR and throughout eastern Europe decided, in this spirit, to take their regimes’ new legal obligations seriously. They saw in human rights an opportunity to draw attention to the plight of their friends, whose imprisonments for speaking and writing could be chronicled as violations of human rights.

Havel did not like the word dissident because it suggested a separate vocation. He thought the “dissidents” were just being themselves, living their truths, sovereign and unpredictable. Dissidence was just a matter of trying to live according to virtues rather than conforming.

Normal can mean what everyone does, as in normalization. But it can also mean what everyone should do. In his book on Poland’s Solidarity movement, Timothy Garton Ash gives the word to a Polish peasant who says normalnie! in the sense of “great!” Mariia of Posad Pokrovs’ke, when she asked me how I liked her little hut, actually said vse normalno? (“everything normal?”) in the sense of “as it should be.” She meant by normal not the routine of rubble around us but the virtuous order that a home represents. Human rights restored to the word normal its ethical direction: what one should be doing. Although the punishment for trying to live normally in this sense could be drastic, the self-presentation was modest.

Totalitarianism offers an appealingly simple resolution: all the apparent diversity can be reduced to a single good. But this solution, said Kołakowski, is simply not true. The “world of values” is not a puzzle in which every piece has its proper place. There is no greater whole. Negative freedom also offers an easy dodge: once the barriers go down, all is permitted, and somehow all will be well. But this approach provides no definition of freedom and gives no sense of how a free person behaves. 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.

Aristotle was a value pluralist—like Kołakowski, he believed that there were many good things, not one or zero. When we are exercising judgment about which virtue applies in which situation, said Aristotle, we are doing right. This is true, but not quite all the truth. More than one virtue applies to almost any situation, so we have to choose. Since there are many good things, as Kołakowski argued, we must do some wrong even as we do right. The world of values is simply structured in this fashion. Since we are always deferring some virtue when we are affirming others, freedom assumes, in Kołakowski’s words, “the reality of evil.” As we gather from his use of the word evil, Kołakowski’s value pluralism means not relativism but a commitment to creative courage amid the clash of absolutes. We do right when we combine values and compromise with others, and when we accept that the concomitant evil leaves us responsible. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel concludes, “There can be good judgement without total justification.” A graduate of my high school, Hannah Beachler, put it this way when she accepted an Oscar: “Do your best, and your best is good enough.” 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 to...

My friend Andrzej Waśkiewicz, a Polish social thinker, would point to my computer and ask, “Kto komu służy?” Who is serving whom? Is the human serving the machine, or is the machine serving the human? At

I try to see the computer in front of me as a tool to reach other people, and to motivate them to think or act differently. I know that readers of On Tyranny took action on the streets and in parliaments. On the basis of my notes, the CEOs quickly drafted a statement about respecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election that became a model for others and that made it harder for Trump to stage his coup. That said, I would not have had to resort to the internet for these defensive maneuvers if Trump had not been elected, and had democracy around the world not crashed—developments enabled by social media. I might be able to turn the machine to my purposes, and I know that others do. I fear, though, that overall the machine creates a special kind of entropy (Havel) or gravity (Weil). Because portable networked microprocessors—our ever-present phones, tablets, and laptops—can seem to do everything, they draw us into a messy mental world where we are not sure what we are doing. We leave behind the gifts of the Leib as we retreat toward the more predictable Körper. We lose our quiet, individual why amid the superabundance of how. And then the world shifts. Who is serving whom? Or what? The purpose of most tools is self-evident. As Martin Burckhardt points out, the networked microprocessor has no clear purpose; it is less a tool for us than an invitation to us, or a seduction of us. It can be a pan-tool, capable of everything; but also an anti-tool, making its users less ...

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. In remembering that scene, I am freer than I would be had I forgotten it. Freedom involves possible futures, unpredictable to aspiring tyrants and uncaring machines. And any plausible future must be connected to a remembered or historical past. 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.

In Ukraine, the pro-European protests of 2013 were led at first by students and young people, those who had the most to lose if Europe was out of reach. After the students were beaten by riot police, the journalist Mustafa Nayyem summoned people to Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan. Nayyem closed his Facebook post with the words “Likes don’t count”—only living bodies count, only the Leib counts. He was using the machine for an unintended purpose. The rule of law and human dignity would be protected, in the last instance, by the assembly of human bodies in a public place.

Whereas in American English a celly is a cellmate in prison, outside the United States it can be slang for a cell phone. Watching people leave their cells and get cell phones can be disconcerting. A former prisoner released in the early 2020s asked a reasonable question about his new iPhone: “How do I get this thing away from my face?” 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. When I repeated it, that remark annoyed some of my incarcerated students: a touchscreen is no prison wall. But the perspective of the middle-aged man who had never encountered the portable internet is valuable: it provides a view of what has happened to us, from someone who was not eased gradually into our brave new world but encountered it all at once.

The algorithms of social media keep us online with a painfully elegant formula: too much contact with (apparent) others in the form of rapid affirmation, yet also too little contact with the actual Leib of actual humans. We feel as though we are recognizing and learning, but without the Leib we are disoriented, stressed, and prone to poor judgments about ourselves. We get used to all the dopamine hits, but they are delivered without any bodily sense. We get more psychological reinforcement from the device than we could possibly get in real life—and then get depressed because all the contact lacks tangibility. That experience of too much and too little leaves us trapped.