On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

It is disturbing to think that our emotions, and even our actions, arise from the work of such people. But they do, and that makes us less free. Our emotions can be automated because our networked portable microprocessors ceaselessly communicate data about us. It is easy to calculate our vulnerabilities—to find our most probable states. When my Ukrainian student Zhenya was taken prisoner, he managed to erase his cell phone data while locked in the trunk of a car, so that he would not put his friends in danger. On a macro scale, though, we cannot easily protect others or ourselves. The agglomeration of data about our social media use makes us vulnerable, as groups, to targeted propaganda. Data collection can become the structure of unfree politics. China has a smaller incarceration system (at least officially and proportionate to its population) than America or Russia; perhaps this is because the entire country is a kind of prison. Chinese authorities judge you quantitatively, with a numerical rating that determines which spaces your body can inhabit. Your body, rather than enabling unpredictable connections to others, becomes a part of a system of measurement. Your qualities are turned back into quantities and turned against your freedom. The physical world closes down around you. In a certain way, every citizen of China then becomes a celly.

We give away the hours of the day. Our time without the machine is broken up by our time with it. Even if we are not using a phone or tablet, we forget what we are doing when we see one. If someone else glances at a device, we look at our own. We live as if in suspension, awaiting an interruption. In everyday life, our sense of time dissolves into a permanent rush. Even the precious moments just after wakefulness and just before sleep are sacrificed in the tiny glow. A Leib needs sleep in order to be sovereign and unpredictable; when we give sleep away to the screens, we are less ourselves and less free. Few things are more important than sleep to our maturation, happiness, and memory. Sleep has been the quiet casualty of our unfreedom.

Odysseus wanted to understand the sirens, but he also wanted to live and move on. He knew how vulnerable his body was, but also what it could do. He made a plan with his men. He had his sailors stop their ears with wax and tie his body to the mast. He heard the sirens, he felt his limits, he learned, and he persisted. That is where we are. Like Odysseus and his ship, we have the technology we need to live and move. We have also created a digital siren song that will tell each of us what we want to hear, until we are no more, forgotten skeletons on a nameless shore. Together, though, we can understand our nemesis and ourselves, and move on. It took him twenty years, the time we need to become sovereign and unpredictable. But Odysseus made it home.

Mobility is the third form of freedom: capable movement in space and time and among values, an arc of life whose trajectory we choose and alter as we go. For all of us, mobility means access to food, water, hygiene, health care, parks and paths, roads and railways, to help us make what we can of our bodies. Access includes safety: we are not free to go where it is not safe to go, especially when we are responsible for children.

For some of us, mobility means the time and encouragement to take care of our bodies. For others, it means more substantial support for our ability to move. None of us is capable of mobility without assistance. Those who require more assistance remind us of our general condition. We all need some help; beyond this general realization, it is all a matter of degree. Although the individual Leib is mobile, mobility for all can be achieved only together. Mobility for individuals requires collective political attention to the logic of life: the risk of injury and illness, the progression from infancy to old age. Mobility is a form of freedom because we are free when we structure society with this in mind. It is not so much a final state as an accumulation of capacities and imaginings over the course of a life.

One of my relatives is blind and has limited movement. The better the technology around her, the better she can express herself. My friend stricken with ALS was more free, I like to think, when we were together doing something. Physical presence could generate a sense of spiritual freedom. But as I learned to operate his gear, another simple truth struck home: he was freer when he had a functional wheelchair (and would have been freer still had it been provided by American health care). Soldiers in Ukraine who have lost limbs to artillery are aided by prostheses and time and care. Rehabilitation belongs to freedom, and so does attention to aging. As the average population age, geroscience—preventive treatment of the afflictions associated with old age—becomes important to our liberty. Care is important, as is the prior confidence that it will be there. We are more mobile when we can count on certain basic human requirements being met. If we knew that we had access to health care and a retirement pension, we would live more interesting lives. Lacking such confidence, we will be stuck where we are. Most America...

Poverty forces people into their most probable states. It impedes mobility. This is a point my students in prison made repeatedly. My student Marquis called poverty “the daily basis of unfreedom” and said that for many people he knows, ...

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.

A free person ranges through the borderland of the unpredictable. But how to do so in our crowded century? Imperial mobility brought to bear some powerful weapons of predictability: superior arms and infectious diseases. Both immunity and technology spread, eventually aiding the victims of colonization. Anti-colonialists, generally victorious against overseas metropoles from the late 1940s, fastened on national sovereignty as the response to empire. National self-determination became the global norm, codified by the new United Nations. The language of national self-determination was borrowed from liberal ideas of individual freedom; the notion of sovereign states, nevertheless, left open the question of how individuals become sovereign. Nationalism was effective as resistance, defining freedom collectively and negatively as the removal of imperial rule. But it provided no formula for the freedom of the individual.

Americans helped Europeans adjust to a postwar era, which was really a postimperial era, by encouraging European economic cooperation. They indirectly subsidized the health care systems, social services, redistribution, and state investment of the European welfare states. That created an idea of mobility that did not depend on imperial expansion. The new social mobility improved on imperial mobility, while reducing the exploitation of some people by others.

The American Dream meant social mobility. Rather than promising more land forever, it offered a sense of unpredictable but possible social advancement on the present territory of the United States. Mobility was no longer about families settling down on land but about new generations creating new kinds of lives. In this conception, the permeable borders were those of social classes. In the American Dream, society was fluid, subject to achievement by individuals over the course of a single life. Unlike historical estates, such as the peasantry or the nobility, the middle class was defined not by ancestry or vocation but by life. Entering the middle class was not only about individual Americans achieving a certain level of prosperity but about the general possibility that everyone could live unpredictably and end up somewhere new. Children would not be stuck in the estate or profession of their elders, as in previous centuries, nor caught in a race or class mobilization, as in the Nazi or Soviet regimes. Although sometimes presented as the natural result of capitalism, the American Dream depended on social policies developed after the capitalist collapse of the Great Depression. It lasted until its origins were forgotten and capitalism itself was enthroned as the lone source of freedom. That happened in the 1980s. During that decade, the west European and American responses to the postimperial age diverged (though Britain was more like the United States, and Canada was more l...

Prison halts movement in space and takes away time. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, prison deprived millions of Americans of the years when they might have been educated, found a job, or had children. It also stripped many of them of the vote, their voice in the political future. Denying the franchise to felons is morally hazardous. It incentivizes aspiring tyrants to define felonies in a way that suits their own political aspirations—in short, to lock up people who might vote against them. More fundamentally, it is inconsistent with any program of freedom to create urban zones of hopelessness as a matter of policy. Those Americans who were incarcerated from the 1970s through the 2010s were disproportionately Black. A Black man was about five times more likely to be imprisoned than a white man. A second moral hazard is the American procedure known as prison gerrymandering. Incarcerated people are counted as residents for the purposes of deciding how many elected representatives a given district will have. When prisons are built and filled, the bodies of prisoners increase the electoral power of the nonincarcerated people around them. 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 often others who vote for politicians who run on the platform of building prisons.

Leib becomes Körper here in an especially sinister way: what people might want counts for nothing, while the physical existence and location of their bodies count in someone else’s quest for power. The historical precedent of counting bodies against people does not go unnoticed by imprisoned Black people. By the terms of the Constitution, slaves could not vote, but their bodies were reckoned (as 60 percent of a body each) in the calculations of how many representatives the slave states could elect. Representation in Congress was therefore structured directly by slavery to the benefit of the slaveholders and to the detriment of those enslaved. The more slaves lived in a state, the more people could be elected to preserve and expand slavery.

Prison gerrymandering is a phenomenon that Black and Latino people know and white people do not, or at least convince themselves that they do not. But for Black people and for Latinos, who tend to live in cities and who together comprise the majority of the imprisoned, the logic of the situation is clear. Their imprisoned bodies are converted into someone else’s right to elect people who build more prisons.

In the class on freedom I taught in prison, we read works by dissidents under communism. Soviet political prisoners spoke of the “little zone,” their concentration camp, and the “big zone,” the USSR itself. American incarcerated students, once they heard this formulation, picked it up and applied it to the United States. They were not doing this to provoke me, though I did find it startling. It just fit an experience. The extreme immobility of prison (little zone) seemed to them to be the focal point of the immobilization they had experienced their whole lives (big zone). These incarcerated students were not cynical: they had competed to be admitted to the university program, they wanted to earn a degree, and they were working at a high level. It was rather that they had begun their lives in an America where social policies to aid mobility had largely collapsed, in a way especially unfavorable to them. The idea that Black people were proto-criminals worked against the welfare state, even as white politicians defined policies of social mobility as a benefit for Black people.

The American idea that we must choose between entrepreneurship and social justice is racist. It works in politics insofar as white (and other non-Black) people think of themselves as entrepreneurs, and of Black people (or immigrants, or other groups) as slackers. The image of work-shy or inherently criminal Blacks dates back to the period before the Civil War, when enslaved people of African origin were performing the hard labor, and their main “crime” was their attempt to escape. This lingering racist specter displaces the reality that the welfare state served the American Dream. Seduced by a sense of ethnic honor, whites (and other non-Blacks) looked away as the world’s largest prison system grew up around them, replacing a welfare state that, in many cases, had helped them or their families. Socrates thought that disabling others prevents us from enabling ourselves. As Toni Morrison has argued, punishing a minority educates a majority. My lifetime has been the mass incarceration period of U.S. history, and this half century has left a mark on the minds of Americans. The imprisonment of Blacks communicated that being white was superior and safer. White Americans have accordingly grown up with a racialized notion of freedom as negative: as not going to prison. That absence of oppression, though a poor sort of privilege, is nonetheless awkward to acknowledge. And so the very subject of law and order immediately triggers angry emotion. It becomes hard to talk about freedom ...

How did Americans come to think of immobility as normal? Postimperial immobility involves a sleight of hand, a trick that might be called sadopopulism. In the twenty-first century, politicians who claim to oppose “the system” are often called “populists.” That is not always accurate. Some of them are rather sadopopulists. 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. Donald Trump proved to be a compelling sadopopulist, teaching his supporters contempt for others during his campaigns, then declining to build infrastructure as president—precisely because it would have helped people. When sadopopulism works, the majority is satisfied with what is, never asking for sensible things like roads or railroads. My roads are bad, but yours are worse. I am trapped in my social class, but you are trapped in a ghetto. Sadopopulism replaces the American Dream with that American nightmare. It directs the attention of a fragile middle class toward those who are doing still worse, rather than toward those who collect the wealt...

Freedom is positive, not negative. It is a presence, not an absence. The American Dream does not come true on its own. Older people have to enable younger people to be free. Young people do not choose the conjuncture in which they come of age. If they are sovereign and unpredictable, they will have the capacity to make choices. But they will be frustrated when mobility has been halted and few options are available.

Since the 1980s, new wealth generated by the U.S. economy has remained in the hands of an almost invisibly minuscule fraction of the population. The number of the oligarchs is numerically insignificant. The people in question are not really the 1 percent made notorious by the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Not 1 percent, but 0.01 percent. Not 1 of 100, nor even 1 of 1,000, but 1 of 10,000. Essentially all new wealth generated by the American economy since 1980 is in the hands of that tiny percentage of the population. 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.

Politicians of inevitability and their acolytes like to talk about averages, but they are worse than meaningless. If Jeff Bezos is in a room with a hundred impoverished working mothers, their average wealth is north of $1 billion, but that means nothing to the women. If you have $12 million, and each of your ten friends has $100,000 in college debt, you and friends are, on average, $1 million in the black. But your friends can’t pay off their debts with that average. It only seems that the typical American has some money because the wealth of a few hundred families—again, a group the size of my high school class—gets into the mix and spoils the math. 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. If we remove oligarchs from the sample, it becomes brutally clear that the national wealth is spread thin. Typical Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, which is a polite way of saying that they are poor. A typical American cannot come up with $1,000 in an emergency. A typical American cannot pay for the funeral that negative freedom hastens.

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.

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

Negative freedom is the fantasy that the problem is entirely beyond us, and that we can become free simply by removing an obstacle. We have confronted a few forms of negative freedom: just eliminate property (Marx); just eliminate the Jews (Hitler); just eliminate the imperialists (anti-colonialists); just eliminate government (Americans). Negative freedom presents itself as revolutionary, but the revolution it demands ignores the terrain that matters: the way we think about ourselves and the way we evaluate the world. 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.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A right to life begins with knowledge: what life is; how life works; how life is possible on this earth. If we neglect that knowledge, we cease to be. We are vulnerable to nature and to those who wish to manipulate and harm us. Yet if we gain and apply knowledge about the energy of life, we can not only avoid the worst but ensure the best. Our universe neither makes us free nor prevents us from being free. It leaves open a realm of what should be, a law of freedom that allows us our endless combinations of virtues. Its constraints become our capacities if we understand them and apply our knowledge with a purpose. Negative freedom is enmeshed in lying. That we need no government is a false account of us and the world, defended by people who falsify the world. Because burning fossil fuels will make life impossible, those who thereby profit spread lies that lead us all toward death. Conversely, the sources of energy that will also allow us to live will allow us to do so freely and more honestly. Alternatives such as solar energy and fusion are hard to centralize and therefore do not favor oligarchy. They are consonant with what we understand about life on Earth and so do not require a deadly net of propaganda. If we can break the oligarchical lying now, a better future awaits.

The right to life comes before the right to liberty on Jefferson’s list, and for good reason. We must understand life in order to enjoy liberty. When we know where the regularities of the universe halt, and where our own inspiration begins, we can navigate the borderland in between. We have to respect what is, peel away from it, transform it, and create something we think should be. The more we know about the facts of the universe, the better equipped we are to change it by realizing values. And we know an extraordinary amount.

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. The Founders knew more about the universe than the ancients; we know more than the Founders. The Founders had an idea of gravity but did not know that the sun is made of plasma. They owned farms (and often slaves) but did not know how plants mediate solar energy for us. Jefferson was an acknowledged authority on fossils, which he called “bones,” but he mistook the claws of extinct ground sloths for those of living lions, and he thought Earth was only six thousand years old.

It is not reasonable to expect those who came before us to be ideal. Only tyrants present their predecessors as icons, inert and perfect. The best that free people can hope for is a legacy of self-correction. The Founders were wise enough to expect us to know more than they did. They inscribed into the Constitution an institution (a patent office) to promote the “Progress of Science and useful arts.” They believed that scientific advances could improve political life. John Adams applied an analogy from physical equilibrium to defend the political checks and balances of the Constitution. Jefferson delighted in “the tranquil pursuit of science” and half jested in letters that he preferred agronomy to politics. Benjamin Franklin tried to understand electricity.

We will not be free, nor will we survive, if we ignore the limits of our Earth or deny the rules of our universe. Freedom and survival depend on recognizing constraints and turning them in our favor.

Technology can help. But it must be the right type of technology, enabling us to shift from three dimensions into four and five, rather than driving us into two dimensions or one, a flat screen or a party line. Artificial intelligence will really be such when it answers our frivolous queries by pointing out that we are burning the planet and should stop. 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. We do not see the grim coal-powered air-conditioned server farms that we activate with our internet traffic, and so do not think of our screen-staring as globe-warming and Earth-destroying. Yet it is. We think of clicks as magic tricks, but each one burns a bit of the past and a bit of the future.

A big lie is more than the absence of truth and the presence of deception. It has the power to shape how minds and therefore societies work. It turns people away from others’ Leib and the little truths around them. It provides an interpretive scheme for all facts and values, allowing us to live without the effort of declaring and accommodating. When a lie is big enough, it confirms the power of the Leader, who becomes the arbiter of reality. A big lie enters into institutions, magnifying its own force. It creates enemies, those who do not wish to follow the new article of spontaneous faith, or those who are too slow to do so. A big lie can bring down a whole country. The twentieth century should have been Germany’s century, but Germans got caught in a story. The twenty-first century could be America’s, but Americans…

Like freedom in general, freedom of speech cannot be negative. It cannot be a matter of stripping people of all education and protections and setting them loose as atomized individuals in a jungle of money, power, and spectacle. Freedom of speech is positive, in the sense that it depends on protecting those who take risks, encouraging others to listen, and indeed maintaining all the other forms of freedom.

Truth is a human value. The value is in the hunt. To say that there are no facts because we can’t define truth is like saying that there are no families because we can’t define love. Without facts, we are led leaderless. James Baldwin called truth “freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.” Leszek Kołakowski spoke of a “horizon of truth.” The horizon is to be chased. It is a pursuit worthy of free people.

Russian war propagandists begin from the premise that nothing is true. If nothing is true, then there is no dignity in speech and no reason to protect it. If there is no truth, then our utterances are no different from any other sound; our mouths, minds, and bodies are objects among other objects, in no way special. We are just Körper among other Körper, and the contest for dominance in a conversation space is no different from, say, the contest of boulders in an avalanche. It is just about size and power.

Freedom is positive, and so is freedom of speech: it makes no sense without the affirmation of truth as a virtue, and the creation of institutions to protect people seeking it. It is the truth seekers’ freedom, their capacity to take risks with their bodies, that reminds us what the protection is for. Freedom of speech requires free human speakers, as free as possible and as many as possible. Such people are sovereign, capable of judgment on their own; they are mobile, able to see and take risks; they are unpredictable, and so they can accept that facts challenge beliefs. They are facing danger for the rest of us and helping us to see the state of the world.

Reporters are an avant-garde. They declare freedom for us every day. We should be accommodating them and their work. The celebrated Austrian reporter Hugo Portisch said that “journalism is the freest profession,” adding the important qualification: “in a free, democratic world.” Freedom of speech requires institutions that no single free speaker can create. Reporters are the heroes of our time, and heroes are to be defended, not just commended. If we protect those...

Freedom of speech means a right to facts. Defending that right means sharing the facts about which people can speak. Only humans go into the world to discover the new and unpredictable. The mass delivery of plagiarism and fiction can be done by machines. Reporting cannot. Machines have no Leib and no values. Truth and risk mean nothing to them. They are not speakers, and they cannot be free. They cannot do the investigating; we need more human reporters to investigate the machines (and everything else). Freedom of speech is not a firehose of digital information. Freedom of sp...

The very phrase free speech, though we say it all the time, gets us on the wrong track. It suggests that speech is what is oppressed and what is to be liberated. That is incorrect. There is no speech without a Leib, without a person. Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so that they can speak. Freedom of speech means nothing without free speakers. Only people can take risks. Only people can be free. 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. How then to establish the structures that produce free speakers? Affirming truth, though necessary, is not enough. Even generating facts, though indispensable, is not enough. We do not have the natural capacity to distinguish truth from lies, or even an inborn preference for facts over fiction. We need the forms of freedom—sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility—to become free speakers and good listeners. Getting at the truth requires determined and cooperative work. Factuality, in other words, depends on solidarity.

Freedom is the value of values, but it does not stand alone. Nor can a free person. The practical recognition of these philosophical truths is solidarity, the fifth form of freedom. We need the salve of solidarity in the hard logic of life. Young people can become sovereign and unpredictable thanks to the care of others. The time needed to care for them can be organized only by common effort. As young people grow older, they need to be able to move: out of school, out of the house, into futures that they can imagine and shape. Even rebellion should be nurtured. Their mobility begins with their own initiative but also requires the work of previous generations.

Solidarity is not just a pleasant cloud of good intentions. It is a necessary component of a working project of social mobility. In the absence of solidarity, such a project will turn against itself and toward racism, sadopopulism, the politics of eternity, postimperial immobility. If the goal is not opportunity for all, some will be satisfied when others are still more immobile. The sad facts of American history bring this home.

Solidarity closes a circle. None of the things that we need to become free, including knowledge, can we produce by ourselves. The most fundamental truths, the ones about ourselves that allow us to see the world, we must owe to others—as both Stein and Weil argued. To be free, each of us needs the truth, but factuality requires institutions as well as risk-takers. If freedom is the value of life, one of its forms is the self-conscious labor of making freedom possible for others. Solidarity is the guiding light of a land of the free. Solidarity is the mark of a just person. Our values differ, as they should and must. Freedom is the value of values, because it is what allows that difference to reside in us and in th...

Positive freedom leads us back to one another. Were freedom just negative, the mere absence of barriers, I could think of you as just one more barrier. Since it is positive, a presence of virtues I affirm in a world I shape, I see you doing the same. Positive freedom leads us to treat one another as actors in history. If freedom is something we must build together, then each of us has a stake in the other. If virtues are real but clash, then we have to declare our own as well as accommodate those of others. If freedom is about the future, we must work together to keep it open. Getting this wrong is not just a philosophical but an existential mistake. If we accept the erroneous tradition of negative freedom, we will end up turning against one another. We will have trouble seeing the other as a person, a Leib, an equal. Unable to see others, people who have fallen for negative freedom will have trouble seeing even themselves (and the harm they are doing to themselves). If we think of freedom only as a liberation from unwanted barriers, we will fail to create the right structures. If we start with the idea of freedom as “inside and outside,” we will end up with a fascism of “us and them.”

American defenders of negative freedom are in the habit of arguing that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were results of positive freedom. Any attempt to “intervene in the economy,” goes the argument, must lead to totalitarianism. This view has been repeated incessantly since the 1940s, and it is familiar to the point of being common sense. But it is the purest propaganda, entirely contrary to history. Hitler and Stalin, leaders of revolutionary parties bent on violence, would have been baffled to learn that they came to power as a result of kindergarten or pensions. They did not. Positive freedom saves not only freedom but also the market from the free marketeers. Stalinism and Nazism had a chance precisely because defenders of negative freedom had no challengers in the 1920s, and capitalism collapsed into the Great Depression as a result. Negative freedom in our American sense—the demolition of government services—generates fear and anxiety, making extreme politics more likely. The welfare state reduces the human anxiety and political risks inherent in the boom-and-bust cycle of markets. It thereby makes extreme politics of the Nazi and Soviet variety less likely, by depriving them of their undergirding of loneliness and anxiety.

Freedom requires care with words. When we are not careful, we drift along with familiar solecisms until we founder on the shores of cliché. In conceding a word, we concede a concept, and in conceding a concept, we give up the thing itself. A key example is the concession of the word free before we even begin, as in free market. A different example is our embrace of efficiency, a nonvalue that poses as the highest value. The word resets the conversation. It places why out of bounds, offering an endless how. Efficiency talk distracts us from thinking about purposes and hastens us instead toward a calculation regarding how quickly something is being done. Commercial medicine, for example, is efficient in extracting money from the sick. And that is how hospitals are judged by those who own them. Accepting profit as the goal, however, means forgetting about life and health. Efficiency talk is dismissive of virtues, which are presented as hindrances to getting things done. Efficiency mavens sneer at values as “irrational,” a waste of time. Accepting this means supplanting the manifold commitments of people with the hidden purposes of those who hold power. Those who deploy efficiency jargon are actually demanding that you work for their purposes, which you are to accept as a matter of course. In this way, efficiency talk generates submission: we do not choose our ends, but race to realize those of others.

There is nothing new about dehumanizing efficiency jargon. Efficiency was an argument for American slavery in the nineteenth century and for Nazi and Soviet concentration camps in the twentieth. Julius Margolin, in his memoir of five years in the Gulag, defined it as a place where no one could ask why? “Here there is no why,” said an Auschwitz camp guard to Primo Levi. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews labored until the food they consumed was regarded as more valuable than the labor that could be extracted from them. Then they were sent to Treblinka to be gassed. The clearing of the ghetto was timed according to efficiency. If efficiency is the only measure, then values evaporate and solidarity is impossible. Leib becomes Körper, to be used and cast away.

A free person sees the world in color, as through a kaleidoscope. There is no one right answer but countless combinations, which we learn to imagine and make. Believers in an ideology have only black and white, others and themselves, a single truth. A value left alone perverts itself and opens a void. This happens in politics, as well as in our minds and bodies. Holding on to just one value, we never practice and never attain grace. If we believe in only one good thing, then every choice seems easy—for a time. What happens, though, when we cease to believe? Then we have nothing to fall back on: no other values, and no practice considering values. We have grown accustomed to discrediting all other values for the sake of the one. And so when we lose that one value, absolute clarity gives way to total cynicism. A world of black and white blurs into gray.

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 begins with the recognition of the difference between the is and the ought. Free people operate in the space between, in a borderland of unpredictability. Totalitarianism claims to close the gap between what is and what should be permanently and for everyone. A notalitarian shrugs and says that the problem does not exist: Who knows what (if anything) exists, and who knows what (if anything) should be? Totalitarianism takes all the oxygen from the room; notalitarianism fills the space with laughing gas.

Totalitarians and notalitarians are self-righteous. If we accept a single value, we feel that we are always right, because we think we are saying the right things with the right people. If we believe that nothing is of value, we also feel that we are always right, since it is impossible to be wrong. Since nothing (in the notalitarian mode) really matters, all that is sure are our feelings, on which we are the only authorities, and which we authentically express. Feeling is not only first, as the poet E. E. Cummings said: it is first and last, alpha and omega, everything. When a billionaire emerges who rules from impulse, notalitarians embrace their fickle Führer. Notalitarianism is seductively snide. Believing in nothing is presented as intelligence. Facts are all contested, and so they are no better than opinions, which are no better than emotions—so forget the reporters, historians, and scientists. Those who express values are dismissed as fools. Everything is excused, because anyone’s excuse is as good as anyone else’s. Let the liars lie and the truth perish. Let the oligarchs try to escape and enjoy watching everyone else suffer. Let the world end with a smirk.

We have encountered, but not quite yet listed, five rules of the geometry of the fifth dimension. The first rule is difference: the world of what is (the first four dimensions) and what ought to be (the fifth) are distinct. They can be brought together only through us, through our bodies. The second is plurality. In the realm of what should be are many virtues, not one. The third rule is intransitivity. The various goods are good for various reasons. The virtues are not reducible to one another. They cannot be ranked. It is not that honesty is better than loyalty; they are simply different. 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.

The space between what is and what ought to be is where we roam as free people, extending the borderland of the unpredictable. We decide which values to affirm, in what combination, for what reasons, and at what time. Then we try again. With practice, we attain our own human form of grace. There is no escape from judgment, the choice of values. We can add our own rules to those of the fifth dimension, but we remain subject to its peculiar geometry. There will be tensions among the rules we choose, just as there are clashes among virtues. No rule can be final, since there is no way to rank all the virtues. We always have to judge the circumstances in order to decide which rules might apply.

We cannot wish away the rules of the fifth dimension, any more than we can wish away gravity or entropy. It is when we accept the tensions and clashes, and navigate courageously among them, that we become free people and help others to become so. Simone Weil wrote that our task was to see the clash among virtues for what it is, and to make it as easy for one another to handle as we can. This purpose is served by the forms of freedom. They are the justification of government, and the outlines of a good one.