Status Updates From On Freedom

RADICAL TRADITION

"Mobility is the challenge of maturity. To break free means to move in all five dimensions. It means having a waterfall to find or a mountain to climb, a day to do it, another to reflect on it."

“A free person is an individual, but no one becomes an individual alone; freedom is felt in one lifetime, but it must be the work of generations.”

“Freedom is about knowing what we value and bringing it to life. So it depends on what we can do - and that, in turn, depends on others, people we know and people we don’t.”

“We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake. Freedom and security work together… We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take and for what reasons.”

“Americans are told that we are given freedom by our founding fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free... Only people can be free. If we believe something makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.”

“Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas… Freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

Freedom is not an absence but a presence. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens; when we are free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life.”

“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.”

“It was essential to remove repression, to gain what philosophers “negative freedom.” But de-occupation, the removal of harm, was just a necessary condition for freedom, not the thing itself… Freedom was a future when some things were the same and others were better. It was life expanding and growing.”

“A liberation suggests a woe that has dissipated. But the adults need support, the children a new school. It is so very important that the town is no longer occupied. But it would be wrong to end the story of Yahidne when the survivors emerged from the underground, just as it would be wrong to end the story of Posad Pokrovs’ke when the bombing stopped.”