Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

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.

“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.”

This revolution, the velvet one, was a revolution of people against concepts.

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.

Perhaps freedom of movement had never really mattered. It was easy to defend it when someone else was doing the dirty work of imprisonment. But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out?

Unlike my father, who thought people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good; one simply had to channel that evil so as to limit the harm. That’s why she was convinced that socialism could never work, even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature. People needed to know what belonged to them and to be able to do with it what they wanted.

I accepted it although my mother was a Gheg and my father a Tosk, and throughout their married life only their political and class divisions had ever mattered, never the accents with which they spoke.

experience? Is this what losing hope looks like, becoming indifferent to categorization, to nuance, to making distinctions, to assessing the plausibility of different interpretations, to truth?

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

My friends’ socialism was clear, bright, and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody, and of the past.

But if there was one lesson to take away from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose.

It is easy to say, “What you had was not the real thing,” applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsibility. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologize, and learn.

My family equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, of the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms. I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, selfish enrichment, cultivating illusions while turning a blind eye to injustice.

My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain divided.