On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The politics of inevitability acknowledged only a single value: entrepreneurship. To be sure, entrepreneurship is a very good thing. But no value is enough in itself, and no value alone generates all the others. Left on its own, untempered by other values, entrepreneurship becomes (and became) an argument for wars of profit and private prisons, for the impotence of government, and for the nonexistence of communities. It becomes an excuse for blaming others for their poverty. Treating entrepreneurship as the only value actually hinders entrepreneurship, by creating monopolies that prevent competition; by weakening the public services that young people need to gain skills; and by littering minds with exculpatory nonsense about how the status quo is the only alternative, the end of history, and so on. A single value and a single future will collapse into a politics of eternity, in which values and the future vanish entirely. Fake cheerfulness and real determinism give way to nostalgia and resentment. This happened in the USSR and in Russia, then in the United States.