Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

had done my best and still ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now the result of all that freedom was the sheer terror that the dogs might return to devour me or that I would be crushed in a stampede.

The honour of belonging to a just society would be matched only by the gratitude felt for being sheltered from the horrors unfolding elsewhere in the world, places where children starved to death, froze in the cold or were forced to work.

Everyone was already free, just like me, simply exercising that freedom, or defending it, or making decisions that they had to own, about which way to go home, whether to turn right or left or to walk straight.

But one can't exercise freedom one doesn't know one has.

Perhaps both sides were simply chasing each other without knowing who was following whom, and that is why people had started to shout, ‘Freedom, democracy,’ out of fear, and uncertainty, to explain that this was what they did not want to lose, rather than what they wanted.

For the first time I wondered whether freedom and democracy might not be the reality in which we lived but a mysterious future condition about which I knew very little.

while my grandfather said that my father’s willpower was ‘like butter’, and that he was merely living like ‘a satisfied pig’.

once you knew those limits, you were free to choose and you became responsible for your decisions. There would be gains and there would be losses. You had to avoid being flattered by victories and learn how to accept defeat. Like the moves in chess my mother used to describe, the game was yours to play if you mastered the rules.

If there was one thing that could convince us children of the irrationality of religion, of the ridiculous nature of belief in the existence of God, it was the idea that there could be a life after the one we had.

The mastery of the subtle boundary between following rules and breaking them was, for us children, the true mark of growth, maturity and social integration.

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.

In my family, everyone had a favourite revolution, just as everyone had a favourite summer fruit. My mother’s favourite fruit was watermelon, and her favourite revolution was the English one. Mine were figs and Russian. My father emphasized that he was sympathetic to all our revolutions but his favourite was the one that had yet to take place. As to his favourite fruit, it was quince – but it could choke you when it wasn’t fully ripe, so he was often reluctant to indulge. Dates were my grandmother’s favourite fruit: they were hard to find, but she had enjoyed them when she was little. Her favourite revolution

Beautiful analogy

there was no way one could make money without exploiting someone who lacked it. If you had a lot of money, you also had a lot of power and could influence important decisions, making it very difficult for people who didn’t start off with the same amount as you to get to the same position.

unless all those who suffered from injustice everywhere in the world became free, no single, lasting victory could be achieved.

‘First comes morality, then comes food,’

She insisted that we do not inherit our political views but freely choose them, and we choose the ones that sound right, not those that are most convenient or best serve our interest. ‘We lost everything,’ she said. ‘But we did not lose ourselves. We did not lose our dignity, because dignity has nothing to do with money, honours or titles. I am the same person I always was,’ she insisted. ‘And I still like whisky.’

She wanted me to remember her trajectory, and to understand that she was the author of her life: 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.

We strove to grasp the power of our enemies, to reverse their rhetoric, resist their efforts to corrupt us and match their weapons. But when the enemy eventually materialized, it looked too much like ourselves. We had no categories to describe what occurred, no definitions to capture what we had lost, and what we gained in its place.

The Party had gone, but it was still there. The Party was above us, but it was also deep inside. Everyone, everything, came from it. Its voice had changed, it had acquired a different shape and spoke a new language. But what was the colour of its soul? Had it ever become what it was always meant to be?

Democracy had its martyrs.

She had convinced me that our present is always continuous with our past, and that in every set of apparently random circumstances one can observe rational characters and motives. Her very look, her posture, her way of speaking – all of it contributed to conveying that same impression.

If I could understand the link between cause and effect the way she had explained things to me, I would accept that decisions have consequences. I would find continuity where others saw only rupture. I would be the product of freedom rather than necessity.

The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated like criminals.

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 wouldn’t be exploitation without consent. It would be violence.’

In general, my father’s determination to make his views known matched my mother’s resolve to ignore them. My parents argued all the time. But they almost always argued as equals. When my mother made decisions without asking my father the symmetry broke down, and my father felt hurt. My parents had built their relationship on heckling, and as the years went by, the boundary between the playful and the bitter exchanges became increasingly blurred. Their marriage was like a rocky mountain range; as experienced climbers, they knew how to ascend the dangerous peaks, and how to shrink back from the abysses into which many others had fallen.

For her, finding the truth about family property was as much a matter of rectifying historic injustice as of regulating property rights. The only purpose of the state, as she saw it, was to facilitate such transactions, and to protect the contracts necessary to ensure that everyone could stick to what they had earned. Anything else, anything that went beyond that, encouraged the growth of parasites who wasted money and resources.

Comrades would speak out to condemn the appearances of an act whose essence was attributed to the limitations of human nature, or community norms, or the legacy of religion. Socialism had succeeded in ripping the veil off women’s heads, but not in the minds of their men. It had managed to tear chains carrying crosses from their wives’ chests, but those chains still shackled their husbands’ brains. There was little to do other than wait for the times to change or, as my mother saw it, to defend yourself.