On Freedom: The instant New York Times bestseller

by Timothy Snyder

Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.

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.

Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

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.

We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.

FREEDOM IS ABOUT knowing what we value and bringing it to life.10 So it depends on what we can do—and that, in turn, depends on others, people we know and people we don’t.

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.

Because the Leib is at the source of knowledge, it is also at the source of a politics of freedom.

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.

As we engage with the digital world, we grow comfortable with the how questions, the inhuman ones, and we find awkward the why questions, the human ones involving judgments about good and evil. We phrase how questions in terms of “efficiency,” “maximization,” and “optimization.” The idiom of productivity is senseless in itself; it can be meaningful only when we know what we value. No notion of means-ends rationality105 (if you value a, you should do b) coheres without a value judgment; no amount of how can get you to why.

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. We have been assigned a senseless task: to adjust, to adapt, to normalize, to internalize the death principle before we die, to regard ourselves not as Leib but as Körper, to consider ourselves as nothing better than a computer simulation, to die without having lived, to self-zombify.

A human intelligence that asks why before it asks how, that is directed toward freedom rather than utility, is not rational so much as reasonable. It does not waste its energy rationalizing the existing state of affairs or its own weakness. It reasons instead, with the help of values and others, toward better futures. It operates in the borderland of unpredictability, considering values and facts. It seeks to understand the world as it is and to bend it toward the way it should be.

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.

We must begin with the Leib, the knowledge we gain when we see the defensive flaccidity of others and realize that the same has happened to us. A digital policy that liberates our bodies can begin with our minds, since that is what we have to lose. Americans should all have a reasonable chance to develop and to protect their minds, a right to habeas mentem. In twenty-first-century America, a right to habeas mentem would suggest a public mandate, a private one, and a charter for fair transparency.