More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 2 - June 15, 2025
Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.
Freedom is not an absence but a presence,
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.
We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good 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.
Any vacuum of facts and values will be filled with spectacle and war.
Without ideals, it is impossible to be a realist.
A little leap of empathy is at the beginning of the knowledge we need for freedom.
We say that a symbol stands for something, but all too often a symbol merely stands in for something.
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.
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
...more
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.
Sovereignty usually means the sovereignty of the state,66 its capacity to dominate or at least to set the terms of life. But if we regard freedom positively, we can think of sovereignty differently, as being about the person rather than the state. We then take the first step toward a better justification for government.
The creation of individuality must be a social act.
Simone Weil wrote that “the one thing that man possesses that is essentially individual, that is absolutely his own, is his capacity to think.”80
How many alternatives present themselves to us has to do with how we feel. Positive emotions broaden the range85 of choices we see and extend our experience of time. Negative emotions limit that range to immediate fight or flight. Fear is like that, limiting us to the binary. It turns our minds into circuits, our bodies into objects: Leib recedes into Körper.
Free people are predictable to themselves but unpredictable to authorities and machines. Unfree people are unpredictable to themselves and predictable to rulers.
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.
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.
Few things are more important than sleep to our maturation, happiness, and memory. Sleep has been the quiet casualty of our unfreedom.
Things get our attention, but we no longer pay attention. And then we do not remember.102 When memory fails, our future has no past, and we are not really present.
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.
The algorithms locate the parts of us that are most predictable, nourishing them until they suppress our character.
When we think with values, we are drawing from the past, but we are not stuck in it. We are considering the present, but we are not sanctifying it. We are oriented toward the future, and we are making it.
The first three forms of freedom—sovereignty, unpredictability, and mobility—should be present throughout our lives. There is nevertheless an order of development. In childhood, we attain sovereignty, with the help of others; in youth, we sustain unpredictability as we realize our own combinations of values. As we become adults, we need somewhere to go and the ability to get there.
Mobility feels personal, but is political.
Mobility is about the free movement of individuals toward their own individual futures; mobilization is about everyone catching up (Stalinism) or returning (Nazism) to how history or nature must be.
Social mobility has three meanings. Politically, it is the alternative to postimperial immobility and its sadopopulism. Historically, it was the twentieth-century alternative to mobilization and imperial mobility that allowed European societies to flourish. Philosophically, it is an example of the third form of freedom.
The market shifted from being a source of alternatives in life to a jealous behemoth that permitted no rivals. Americans traded a future full of possibility for a false sense of certainty. Negative freedom was enough: lift the barriers, and all would fall into place. History was over, only one future was possible. The politics of inevitability sucks the life from values as well as facts,
Freedom is positive, not negative. It is a presence, not an absence.
Freedom needs the fourth dimension—time, an open future. The politics of inevitability reduced the future to a single possibility. When there is only one vision of the future, the moral muscles grow limp. If there are no alternatives, why imagine them?
In the time warps of inevitability, eternity, and catastrophe, we lose history. We lose knowledge of the past and the sense of time’s flow. In the politics of inevitability, the facts about the past are just dispensable details127 since we see a general trend and a happy end. In the politics of eternity, the past is a morality play of innocence and guilt.128 In the politics of catastrophe, the approaching disaster enervates the present and occludes the past.
History is a foundation of mobility and thus of freedom. We need history to slip free of the time warps and find our way to a more reassuring sense of time. When we think historically, we see structures inherited from the past, plausible choices in the present, and multiple possibilities for the future.
The practice of considering and combining values is impossible without a sense of time past and time to come.
Nothing is entirely new. Everything has some instructive connection to past events. Nor is anything really eternal or inevitable. If we have the references, we remember that past catastrophes have been survived, overcome, and even exploited. Then the present seems less shocking, and the future more open. The possibilities are more numerous than they seem, and some of them are good. Indeed, some of them are wonderful.
Indeed, to see our way forward, we will have to look back.
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).
“In the struggle between you and the world,”5 says Kafka, “take the side of the world.”
When we are open to facts, they help us to be unpredictable and therefore free. Facts are not what we expect or want. They do not fit our prejudices but knock holes in them.
When a lie is big enough, it confirms the power of the Leader, who becomes the arbiter of reality.
If we lose track of the difference between “it is true” and “it feels right,” we are not free; forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right.
The pursuit of truth is the first bulwark in a defense of the self. Believing a lie means serving a master, living or digital. That is a plausible end station for us: deluded and unfree, living and dying in a tedious alternative reality.
Truth is a human value. The value is in the hunt.
Freedom of speech means a right to facts.
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.
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.
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 a high and vital form of freedom. It makes of freedom justice.
When the word freedom is conceded30 to the economy, it follows that the market has rights. Such rights will be enforced against people, who are expected to experience the market’s rights as duties.
libertarianism is an ideology of submission to the nonexistent “free market,” based on contradictions and lies.
