Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

In our country, the Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews had always respected one another, because they cared about the nation more than they cared about their disagreements on what God looked like. Then the Party had come, more people started to read and write, and the more they learned about how the world worked, the more they discovered that religion was an illusion, something that the rich and powerful used to supply the poor with false hopes, promising them justice and happiness in another life. We

This is why not only is there no God,’ teacher Nora said in conclusion, ‘but we also no longer have churches and mosques. We destroyed them all.’ She raised her voice slightly. ‘We must never return to those backward customs. There is no God anywhere. No God, no afterlife, no immortality of the soul. When we die, we die. The only thing that lives eternally is the work we have done, the projects we have created, the ideals we leave to others to pursue on our behalf.’

She liked to repeat the bit of Robespierre’s speech that said that the secret of freedom is in educating people, while the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

That was the point, he explained, when he realized that ‘democracy’ was just another name for the violence of the state, a violence that for the most part remains an abstract threat only to materialize when the powerful risk losing their privileges.

that despite all the obstacles she had encountered on the way, she had remained in control of her fate. She had never ceased to be responsible. Freedom, she said, is being conscious of necessity.

For the Party, the sacrifice of individual preferences was a matter of historical necessity, the cost of the transition to a future better condition. Every revolution, we learned in school, goes through a stage of terror. For my family, there was nothing to explain, to contextualize, or to defend; there was only the pointless destruction of their lives.

Executing leaders, imprisoning spies or sanctioning former Party members, would have fuelled the conflicts even further, sharpening the desire for revenge, spilling more blood. It seemed more sensible to erase responsibility altogether, to pretend everyone had been innocent all along. The only wrongdoers it was legitimate to name were those who had already died; those who could neither explain nor absolve themselves. All the rest turned into victims. All the survivors were winners. With no perpetrators, only ideas were left to blame. Communism was considered a vision so hopeless for some, so murderous for others, that the sole mention of the word would be met with either scorn or hatred. This revolution, the velvet one, was a revolution of people against concepts.

Not only were new trees no longer planted; the existing ones were being chopped down. Power cuts and heating demands on the one hand and the brand-new cultivation of free individual initiative on the other meant that every night more trees disappeared from the forests. One might also have called it theft, except that an individual appropriating common resources constitutes the very foundation of private property. Bottom-up privatization would be a better description.

‘It’s freedom,’ my grandmother concluded. ‘It’s what too much freedom brings. There are good things, and bad things. It’s impossible to keep people always under control. Impossible to stop everyone from contracting this virus. I suppose that’s why we need these NGOs. To protect us from all these new diseases, all these upcoming disasters. We can’t rely on the state to do it. That’s why we need civil society.’

We had no savings in 1993. Lending between relatives and neighbours was slowly disappearing, in part because there was now the possibility of travelling abroad, or of spending what one saved, which had seldom been the case in the past. And in part because people’s incomes had started to differ sharply so there was a risk that knocking on someone’s door to ask for help might single you out as a loser. What used to be called ‘workplace lotteries’, a form of credit pulled together through voluntary contributions from salaries to help colleagues buy a washing machine or a television set, were also disappearing. Personal transactions were anonymized; lending companies and insurance agencies were on the rise. My family didn’t trust these companies enough to deposit any savings with them, or to rely on them for loans.

My father assumed, like many in his generation, that freedom was lost when other people tell us how to think, what to do, where to go. He soon realized that coercion need not always take such a direct form. Socialism had denied him the possibility to be who he wanted, to make mistakes and learn from them, and to explore the world on his own terms. Capitalism was denying it to others, the people who depended on his decisions, who worked in the port. Class struggle was not over. He could understand as much. He did not want the world to remain a place where solidarity is destroyed, where only the fittest survive, and where the price of achievement for some is the destruction of hope in others.

society that claims to enable people to realize their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive.