Beka’s Reviews > On Freedom > Status Update

"We link the words democracy and freedom, and rightly so -- freedom is the value of values, and the case for democracy must begin with it.
Democracy is the system toward which the forms of freedom lead.

We The People will be sovereign in government only when individual persons are sovereign in their lives."

"To reach the stars, we will have to look away from our phones. We can get to other planets only with fusion rockets. We will develop fusion rockets only when we have fusion power. We will have fusion power only if we try to address climate change. We will address climate change only if people believe that it is happening...+ that will only happen if social media/algorithms are reformed."

"To be free, each of us needs the truth -- but factuality requires institutions as well as risk takers.
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."

"We need the salve of solidarity in the hard logic of life.

Young people can become sovereign + unpredictable thanks to the care of others. The time needed to care for them can be organized only by common effort. As young people grow older, they need to be able to move -- out of school, out of the house, into futures that they can imagine + shape."

"Searching for facts risks hurting our feelings.

This version of fascism is, weirdly, a safe space.

You're fine the way you are; you have no need to learn. Reporters are enemies, since they might challenge you. Historians are to be ignored -- they rob you of your tribal certainties.

James Baldwin called truth 'freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.'"

"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."

"Lacking everyday institutions of factuality (local reporters who publish and upload local stories, in their town as well as others' towns across the country), all people have to go on are impulses amplified by social media."

"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.
They challenge what people around us think.
Facts temper our minds to resist the machine's power to predictify us.
We cannot build without some sense of a shared reality."

"Without factuality, every form of freedom is manaced: if we cannot know how brains develop, then we cannot educate for sovereignty. If we cannot know how algorithms work, then we cannot confront the problems of social media. If we do not know how few people have how much money, nor see the barriers to mobility that keep us unfree. Without facts, we cannot measure the changing climate."

"...the political party that denies or ignores global warming/climate change also suppresses votes. Breaking democracy also breaks the ecosphere."