On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

You were not born free. But neither were you born to be a vessel of lies. Your destiny is neither subjugation nor automation. You can evaluate, transform, and take responsibility. Declare yourself free. Then accommodate yourself to tender virtues and bruising facts, to friends and neighbors, to fellow citizens, but not to expectations or algorithms. Life can be much better than it seems to us now, as individuals and as citizens. We can become free. Our political divisions draw us away from freedom as principle, making it harder to get to freedom as practice. They have been hardened by the collapse of local news, the rise of oligarchy, and the reach of social media. The algorithms push us toward mindless controversy and away from mindful discussion of priorities. The repetition of mechanized clichés makes our political discussion endlessly stale. The mechanization has to be addressed by government policy, but the human misunderstandings are for us to resolve.