Timothy Snyder On Freedom Quotes

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

10 Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of political parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. DO NOT FALL FOR IT.

People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When

In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

We are told that we are "born free": untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman's blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

We chose freedom when we did not run.

Social media make us more predictable than we need to be and so easier to rule.

The word freedom is hypocritical when spoken by the people who create the conditions that leave us sick and powerless. If our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree.

Without a sense of what should be, we cannot be clear about how what is could ever change.

But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

When we are very young, we all need someone else's goodwill if we are to learn to stand at all. Because we live in time in a certain direction, we cannot make up later for what we were not given earlier.

In dehumanizing others, we make ourselves unfree.

We cannot be neutral: we either deaden the world around us, or we make it more lively.

From regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity. It seems normal in the United States to see the body as a source of profit.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility.

The absence of freedom threatens life, just as threats to life undermine freedom.

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

When politicians today invoke terrorism they are speaking, of course, of an actual danger. But when they try to train us to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two. Sometimes we do indeed gain one by losing the other, and sometimes not. People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

None of us remembers being born, but all of us were born. None of us will remember dying, but we remember others dying. Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance at understanding it.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Stand out: someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

We talked about how, over time, beginning in youth, an accumulation of decisions makes us who we are. Then a moment comes when we do what we must because of what we have chosen to become. An unfree person can always try to run. But sometimes a free person has to stay. Free will is character.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.

When we are trapped in fear we see everything in binary terms: us or them, fight or flight.

Taking a seat on the bench and listening to Mariia, I think about freedom. The village, one would say, has been liberated. Are its people free?

to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The

It is easy to imagine situations where we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we enter an abusive relationship or vote for a fascist. Similarly,

It is the government’s job to increase both freedom and security.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.

It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.

In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like.

Появилась даже такая шутка: Украина — это страна, где люди говорят по-русски, а Россия — это страна, где люди молчат по-русски [141].

that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

Якщо ніхто з нас не готовий загинути за свободу, усі ми загинемо під тиранією.

Люди, які запевняють вас, що безпека можлива лише коштом свободи, зазвичай хочуть забрати у вас і безпеку, і свободу.

freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

...we gain knowledge of ourselves when we acknowledge others. Only when we recognize that other people are in the same predicament as we are, live as bodies as we do, can we take seriously how they see us. When we identify with them as they regard us, we understand ourselves as we otherwise might not. Our own objectivity in other words, depends on the subjectivity of others.

When Americans think of freedom, we usually imagine a contest between a lone individual and a powerful government. We tend to conclude that the individual should be empowered and the government kept at bay. This is all well and good. But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer. Insofar as we take pride in these activities, and come to know others who do so as well, we are creating civil society. Sharing in an undertaking teaches us that we can trust people beyond a narrow circle of friends and families, and helps us to recognize authorities from whom we can learn. The capacity for trust and learning can make life seem less chaotic and mysterious, and democratic politics more plausible and attractive.

... one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families.

A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like. Communists required all such groups to be officially registered and transformed them into institutions of control.

The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

Believe in truth: to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and the others will follow.

History allows us to see patterns and make judgements. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being cocreator of another.

The occupiers had gotten in the way of a sense that the world was opening up, that the next generation would have a better life, that decisions made now would matter in years to come. ... Freedom was a future when some things were the same and others were better. It was life expanding and growing.

As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

Although sometimes presented as the natural result of capitalism, the American Dream depended on social policies developed after the capitalist collapse of the Great Depression. It lasted until its origins were forgotten and capitalism itself was enthroned as the lone source of freedom. That happened in the 1980s.

Those who believe themselves free because they dominate others define freedom negatively, as the absence of government, because only a government could emancipate the slaves or enfranchise the women. The conflation of a Liberty Bell with the American Revolution dodges the issue of what freedom is, and for whom that bell tolls.

The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual, and thus the collapse of any political system that depends on individualism

All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant. Total doubt about all authority is naïveté about the particular authority that reads emotions and breeds cynicism. To seek the truth means finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.

Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, of each of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer.

In my childhood, the Soviet Union always seemed close, a few minutes' flight by intercontinental ballistic missile. Reader's Digest featured articles on Soviet and American nuclear arsenals. The obsession with the superpowers' destructive capacity was a way to ignore the people who suffered directly in the Cold War, such as the Latin Americans we kept invading and the East Europeans the Soviets kept invading.

The oligarchical turn made mobility very difficult and warped the conversation about freedom. The more concentrated the wealth became, the more constrained was the discussion—until, in effect, the word freedom in American English came to mean little more than the privilege of a few wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.

In conditions of extreme inequality, the word freedom, which should belong to everyone, attaches instead to abstractions that suit oligarchs. When we speak of “free markets” instead of “free people,” we are in trouble. In American oligarchy, “free speech” all too often means the privilege of the very wealthy to transmit anonymous propaganda and to fund electoral campaigns. In such a situation, we the people will have little to say.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

Tyrannies make anxiety seem normal. They attach a threat to a group (in this case Blacks) whom the authorities don’t really fear, then boast to their supporters of having protected them from that threat. They substitute relief from fear for freedom and teach citizens to confuse the two. The cycle of anxiety and release is not liberation, of course, but manipulation. It is not immobilizing the way that prison is. It is nevertheless a policy of immobility that extends from the Black bodies on the inside to other American minds on the outside.

Beginning in the 1930s, an incipient American welfare state took shape. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” described the shift from imperial expansion to social mobility. For many Americans, these were the decades of the American Dream. Through the 1970s, the gap between the richest and the rest was closing, enabling ever more Americans to join a broad middle class. The American Dream meant social mobility. Rather than promising more land forever, it offered a sense of unpredictable but possible social advancement on the present territory of the United States. Mobility was no longer about families settling down on land but about new generations creating new kinds of lives.

Демокрациите умират, когато хората престават да вярват, че гласуването има значение. Въпросът не е в това дали се организират избори, а дали те са свободни и честни. Ако е така, демокрацията поражда усещане за време и очаквания за бъдещето, които успокояват настоящето. Смисълът на всеки демократичен избирателен процес е обещанието за следващия. Ако очакваме, че ще се състоят други пълноценни избори, ние знаем, че следващия път ще можем да коригираме грешките си, които междувременно стоварваме върху хората, които сме избрали. По този начин демокрацията преобразува човешката погрешимост в политическа предвидимост и ни помага да преживяваме времето като движение напред към едно бъдеще, върху което имаме някакво влияние. Ако смятаме, че изборите са просто един повтарящ ритуал на подкрепа, демокрацията губи своя смисъл.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

We don't borrow from an ideal world. We reach toward it and expand it.

Sovereignty begins with birth and arises as a child is held, loved, reared, and educated. For the universe, a human birth is nothing special; for us humans, natality is the possibility of a life in freedom. We close that potential when we limit freedom to avoiding other objects, or begin our philosophy with death rather than life.

What I remember is the way the bat felt in my hands when I struck the ball. I knew that I had hit it just right. I had that feeling of rightness on my palms, in my wrists, up my arms, and into my thin chest. I was an alienated teenager who could program a computer; earlier that year, in school, I had created a game called "Lifegame" and was excited and then a little disturbed by how it could take over players' attention. I had been obsessed since early childhood with the possibility that everything could be a simulation and that therefore I was not really alive. But when the bat hit the ball, I knew that I was.

This irresolvable disagreement about how to pursue happiness affirms a right to liberty. Happiness has to do with what we value. The things we hold dear are real, but none of us values the same things in the same way as anyone else, nor is there a single correct way to order all the virtues. There is no one good thing of which all the others are just parts or examples. If there were such a singular good, our universe would be different, and freedom would be impossible. Were humans to agree on the sources of happiness, we would be far simpler creatures, subject to programming, incapable of freedom.

In Russia, we see the transition from the definition of freedom as the lack of barriers to a politics of fascism in which there are no barriers to the Leader's whims. Yet Moscow's own propaganda position — that nothing is true and nothing is good — was not perceived as a danger. The invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the fallacy of economic determinism: oligarchic Russia was an aggressive empire, not an emerging democracy. For people who believed that freedom was negative, Russian nihilism did not seem hazardous. It was, of course. Any vacuum of facts and values will be filled with spectacle and war. The fascist nature of the Russian regime ought to have been clear well before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

A provocation works when a less powerful entity turns a more powerful actor against itself.

As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism.

The distinguished history professor Timothy Snyder wrote, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”1 Truth matters, but it is human nature to take solace in myths and believe they are true. However, many myths are deadly. The deadliest include American Slavery’s “positive good,” the “Noble South,” the “Lost Cause,” the evils of Reconstruction, the good of Jim Crow, and the nonexistence of institutional racism in the United States.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

Perhaps that hypothetical nuclear holocaust drew attention away from what the Jewish Holocaust might have taught us. A possible catastrophe involving long-range missiles overshadowed the recent demonstration of how easily a partially democratic system like ours could collapse, how quickly big lies could create restive alternative realities, and how callously humans could kill one another.

Cynicism about the system slips into nihilism that serves the system.

A sovereign person, in making choices, is acting not only within the physical world, but in a realm of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. That zone, which Stein called “the world of values,” is not an extension of the world of things. It is a kind of fifth dimension, with its own rules, and as such a reservoir of unpredictability for our own world of four dimensions, of space and time. The virtues do not interact with one another, or with objects, as objects do with other objects. The fifth dimension, so to speak, has its own physics, its own geometry. When we make choices and affirm values, that different geometry of the fifth dimension seeps into our world, making us and it less predictable.

digital nemesis

Freedom is a human value.

Unlike God the Father, Jesus is neither litigious nor vengeful, emphasizing instead the simple laws of loving God and loving one’s neighbor.

Political systems that are oriented toward freedom to are doing better than we are on freedom from. This suggests that there is no contradiction between the two. Indeed, it suggests that freedom to comes first.

Freedom to, positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don’t think of freedom as positive, we won’t even get freedom in the negative sense, since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom.

Black Americans cannot deny what they know, because they need it to get through the day. When white people deny what we know, we turn situations where we might all do better into situations where we all do worse.

We can bring Jefferson’s thought to its logical conclusion and unite his three basic rights in a fourth: the right to health care. But we will only achieve that if we manage something that the Founders did not: recognizing other bodies as equally human.

It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.

We think that we would be free if not for a world outside that does us wrong. But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

We are told that we are “born free”: untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman’s blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.

Americans and others wasted outrage on phantoms even as a real war of aggression began.

If we believe that freedom is negative, the problem is only a barrier outside, and never our own lack of judgment.

Like freedom in general, freedom of speech is not negative but positive, not about the barriers but the person, not about an absence but a presence. We protect free speakers because truth threatens the power of tyrants.

The first form of freedom, as I hope to show, is sovereignty. A sovereign person knows themselves and the world sufficiently to make judgments about values and to realize those judgments. For Stein, we gain knowledge of ourselves when we acknowledge others. Only when we recognize that other people are in the same predicament as we are, live as bodies as we do, can we take seriously how they see us. When we identify with them as they regard us, we understand ourselves as we otherwise might not. Our own objectivity, in other words, depends on the subjectivity of others.

Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance of understanding it.

A government that does not claim to be sovereign, but that aims for the sovereignty of its children, legitimizes itself by its work for freedom. And it does so with respect not to a myth of the past or to people who are dead but with respect to each coming generation and to people who are coming to life.

Those who care about childhood should care about freedom, and those who care about freedom should care about children. This means caring about the society into which the next American baby will be born. Individual freedom is a social project and a generational one. For people to grow up in freedom, the right structures must already be in place when they are born.

Freedom is not about being right, which is elusive, but about trying to do right.

Freedom is the value of values, because it is the condition in which all other values may be exercised. A government is not legitimate just because it has power and uses the word sovereign to embellish decrepitude and deception. It is legitimate insofar as it enables freedom, enacting policies that allow young and coming generations to become sovereign. A

If what is normal is what everyone else does, then conformism can collapse to a single, meaningless, dark point. But if normal is what one should do, then an aperture opens instead, into a realm of dreams, aspirations, and judgments. If Havel is right, and unfreedom means predictability, then freedom must involve unpredictability. It is the second form of freedom, arising from sovereignty, or what Havel called “autonomy.

Beginning in 1957, European states joined in a project of economic and political cooperation that in 1992 was named the European Union. The EU permitted not only free trade but also freedom of movement. It subsidized roads and agriculture and financed student exchanges. Imperial mobility was forgotten as social mobility became the rule. The process was far from innocent. Europeans suppressed (and forgot) their own colonial pasts, which was frustrating to others. That lack of historical self-reflection made it harder for Europeans to recognize Russia's colonial wars of 2008 (Georgia), 2014 (Ukraine), 2015 (Syria), and 2022 (Ukraine) as such. Wealthy Europeans found ways to extract their cash from their former colonial homes and stash it out of sight of European tax authorities. This made economic development in postcolonial states mode difficult, and it created a culture of tax avoidance that spread globally. It now threatens freedom in the United States.

In the American Dream, society was fluid, subject to achievement by individuals over the course of a single life. Unlike historical estates, such as the peasantry or the nobility, the middle class was defined not by ancestry or vocation but by life. Entering the middle class was not only about individual Americans achieving a certain level of prosperity but about the general possibility that everyone could live unpredictably and end up somewhere new. Children would not be stuck in the estate or profession of their elders, as in previous centuries, nor caught in a race or class mobilization, as in the Nazi or Soviet regimes. Although sometimes presented as the natural result of capitalism, the American Dream depended on social policies developed after the capitalist collapse of the Great Depression. It lasted until its origins were forgotten and capitalism itself was enthroned as the lone source of freedom.

The more concentrated the wealth became, the more constrained was the discussion—until, in effect, the word freedom in American English came to mean little more than the privilege of a few wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.

Art is what shakes up the everyday and exposes the present moment for us, enabling us to make the unexpected connections from the past to the future. A lyric in a song, a peal of a bell, or a bit of stained glass can open a channel and change a person’s world. Students need books in the library that will surprise and challenge them.

In Russia, we see the transition from the definition of freedom as the lack of barriers to a politics of fascism in which there are no barriers to the Leader’s whims. Yet Moscow’s own propaganda position—that nothing is true and nothing is good—was not perceived as a danger. The invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the fallacy of economic determinism: oligarchic Russia was an aggressive empire, not an emerging democracy. For people who believed that freedom was negative, Russian nihilism did not seem hazardous.

It is not reasonable to expect those who came before us to be ideal. Only tyrants present their predecessors as icons, inert and perfect. The best that free people can hope for is a legacy of self-correction.

The communist big lie was that the party was always right. It was a kind of meta-lie, a lie about all the other lies. It demanded the capacity to adapt to anything, especially to contradiction.

Reality fades, even physical reality, when we have no one to help us concentrate on what is right in front of our faces.

I liked history’s inexhaustibility—a surprise awaited in each new book, behind each half-understood event, within each new language. The past is full of wild possibilities that were actually realized,

I liked history’s inexhaustibility—a surprise awaited in each new book, behind each half-understood event, within each new language. The past is full of wild possibilities that were actually realized, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, or the American one. The east European revolutions of 1989, unpredictable as they had been, made me wonder whether other surprises might be coming.

Postimperial immobility is not simply personal tragedy but the birth of tyranny.

Solidarity is the mark of a just person. Our values differ, as they should and must. Freedom is the value of values, because it is what allows that difference to reside in us and in the world we make around us. Each of us has the right to a freedom that allows us to learn, choose, and combine values. We are not the same, but in the most essential sense, we are equal.

A world or a country in which we are entirely alone with our experiences is not a place of freedom.

Everything is excused, because anyone's excuse is as good as anyone else's.

If the body is a site of profit, it is not a site of health.

Commercial medicine profits first by depriving our lives of years, and then by adding to them a few days.

Without factuality, every form of freedom is menaced.

We cannot enable freedom without institutions, that we cannot build without some shared sense of reality. Values will vary from person to person so it must be facts that anchor conversations about which structures we decide to build together. If we have different values, we will nevertheless sometimes have a shared interest in action. But if we have different facts, concord is impossible. We can disagree about how best to get clean water, but if we disagree as to whether lead is poisonous, we won't get far.

If it is agreed that facts are no different than opinions, the free person has no ground upon which to make a stand. If facts do not count, what James Madison called 'clamor and combinations' will always win. Which means tyrants and oligarchs will always win. But if facts are respected, each one of us is entitled at least to a hearing and has a shield against the Hail of Saturn. Even when we fail. there is dignity in trying.

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.

The pursuit of truth is the first bulwark in a defense of the self. Believing a lie means serving a master, living or digital. That is a plausible end stations for us, deluded and unfree, living and dying in a tedious alternative reality.

Some Americans seem to think that defending freedom of speech just means saying the words 'Free speech! Free speech!' over and over, like an incantation. Too often, our free speech 'debates' involve practiced provocateurs yelling 'Free speech!' after saying something they know to be untrue and obnoxious. ... These everyday trivializations of an important idea demand that we think carefully about how we speak of this fundamental right. If it becomes one more cliche, losing its sense of meaning, the thing itself will wither. The very phrase free speech, though we say it all the time, gets us on the wrong track. It suggests that speech is what is oppressed and what needs to be liberated. That is incorrect. There is no speech without a lieb, without a person. Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so they can speak. Freedom of speech means nothing without free speakers. Only people can take risks. Only people can be free.

Everyone we encounter is facing an unceasing succession of choices in their own arrangements of unique circumstances, applying their own combinations of values. When people are sovereign together, they generate unpredictability. And as they do, they recognize this in one another, welcome it, and gain from it. When we apprehend others are "leib", we see them doing what we are doing: making choices in the zone between the world of things and the world of values. Working together, people bring human unpredictability into the world - and joyfully. This helps us to be free of all the people and forces that would rule us by predicting us - or by making us more predictable. Free people are predictable to themselves but unpredictable to authorities and machines. Unfree people are unpredictable to themselves and predictable to rulers. Such unpredictability allows us to become free, together. The texture of the world of values enters our own world.

resistance begins with a definition of what might be.

The story of freedom cannot be told without virtue, since freedom is the state in which we can affirm what we think is good and bring it into the world.

It hurts to say that something is wrong and that I bear some responsibility; but without that bit of courage, freedom never begins.

Only a free person can be responsible. And no one can become free by themselves. The structures that enable freedom are moral but also political. It follows that we are all responsible for creating the conditions that make it possible for others to become free. No doubt people will commit crimes and be sentenced to prison. But before we self-righteously speak of the responsibility of others for their actions, we must be sure we have done whatever we can to allow young people to grow up free.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

As we engage with the digital world, we grow comfortable with the how questions, the inhuman ones, and we find awkward the why questions, the human ones involving judgments about good and evil. We phrase how questions in terms of “efficiency,” “maximization,” and “optimization.” The idiom of productivity is senseless in itself; it can be meaningful only when we know what we value. No notion of means-ends rationality (if you value a, you should do b) coheres without a value judgment; no amount of how can get you to why.

politics of catastrophe

3 Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. Thomas Jefferson probably never said that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” but other Americans of his era certainly did. When we think of this saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others. We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end. The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.

Make a point of mentioning climate change every day. Americans know that it is real, but we are deterred from speaking about it by an entirely artificial controversy. Do not vote for a party that denies climate change. People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends. Divisions

As we come to feel more lonely and helpless, we are more likely to believe in ideologies that explain everything, conspiracy theories that make sense of the world, big lies that reassure us of our place in it.

For us, the experience of having our brains hacked is emotional and political, even as our emotions hollow and our politics narrow. Our opinions, showered upon us, must be correct. Our feelings, repeatedly reinforced, become obsessive. We grow unshakably certain on matters about which we have zero knowledge. We come to believe that people who think differently are malicious. If we hear other people speak their minds, we are instantly suspicious. We are presented with images of the enemy on the internet, but rarely have contact with the bodies of other people in real life.

empire transforms humans from why creatures into how creatures. A colonizer portrays other colonizers as having agency, and colonized people as without agency, and therefore as instruments.

A human intelligence that asks why before it asks how, that is directed toward freedom rather than utility, is not rational so much as reasonable. It does not waste its energy rationalizing the existing state of affairs or its own weakness. It reasons instead, with the help of values and others, toward better futures. It operates in the borderland of unpredictability, considering values and facts. It seeks to understand the world as it is and to bend it toward the way it should be.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights,

Our contemporary culture of commemoration takes for granted that memory prevents murder. If people died in such large numbers, it is tempting to think, they must have died for something of transcendent value, which can be revealed, developed, and preserved in the right sort of political remembrance. The transcendent then turns out to be the national. The millions of victims must have died so that the Soviet Union could win a Great Patriotic War, or America a good war. Europe had to learn its pacifist lesson, Poland had to have its legend of freedom, Ukraine had to have its heroes, Belarus had to prove its virtue, Jews had to fulfill a Zionist destiny. Yet all of these later rationalizations, though they convey important truths about national politics and national psychologies, have little to do with memory as such. The dead are remembered, but the dead do not remember. Someone else had the power, and someone else decided how they died. Later on, someone else still decides why. When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.

Mobility is a form of freedom because we are free when we structure society with this in mind. It is not so much a final state as an accumulation of capacities and imaginings over the course of a life.

Mobility is the third form of freedom: capable movement in space and time and among values, an arc of life whose trajectory we choose and alter as we go. For all of us, mobility means access to food, water, hygiene, health care, parks and paths, roads and railways, to help us make what we can of our bodies. Access includes safety: we are not free to go where it is not safe to go, especially when we are responsible for children.

Sem istenek, sem tárgyak nem vagyunk. Emberek vagyunk, akik képesek szuverénné válni. A szabadság sem a kényszerek hiánya, sem a kényszerek elfogadása, hanem a kényszerek használata.

Жменька людей з яхтами є політично згуртованішою та могутнішою за величезну масу тих, хто яхт не має, — і ця жменька готова діяти, щоб так тривало й надалі.

Declaring and accommodating are the basic capacities of a sovereign person. Exercised alongside other sovereign people, declarations and accommodations generate an unforeseen realm, a land of the free. Coming to know other people, we know the world and ourselves better. Our values, our sense of what is right and what is wrong, are tested along with this everyday knowledge. This is what is best about us and what enables us to be free.

A lie belongs to someone else, and believing it puts you in someone else’s thrall. You are predictable to the person who writes your lines. As the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy put it, the danger is not that the chatbots replace us but that we become the chatbots.

Freedom needs human thinkers, sovereign and unpredictable. Unfreedom needs yielding and predictable creatures, quaking from fear in self-built cages, dreaming of enemies they never meet, and of friends and lovers they do not have.

National self-determination became the global norm, codified by the new United Nations. The language of national self-determination was borrowed from liberal ideas of individual freedom; the notion of sovereign states, nevertheless, left open the question of how individuals become sovereign.

Americans helped Europeans adjust to a postwar era, which was really a postimperial era, by encouraging European economic cooperation. They indirectly subsidized the health care systems, social services, redistribution, and state investment of the European welfare states. That created an idea of mobility that did not depend on imperial expansion. The new social mobility improved on imperial mobility, while reducing the exploitation of some people by others.

The famous appeal “Go west, young man!” expressed an American spirit of imperial mobility. The vagueness of west and frontier suggested that there was always somewhere to go. A life can be shaped amid the certainty of superiority and the uncertainty of new terrains. The young man of European origin brought to the frontier his bravado and his hopes—and his bullets and his germs.

Mobility is about the free movement of individuals toward their own individual futures; mobilization is about everyone catching up (Stalinism) or returning (Nazism) to how history or nature must be.

Since there was only one future, and it was known to be good, then mass death along the way must have been necessary. At the 1934 congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that was exactly what Stalin’s supporters said.

The end of local factuality, of home truths, brings national discord. As a sense of local reality dissolves, Americans cede their opinions to faraway people on talk radio or cable television, then to placeless algorithms. In the absence of shared local knowledge, human anxieties and fears have to be processed as national politics, ideological conflict, or social media spats.

People tend to endorse conspiracy theories when they doubt the efficacy of their own actions.

The pursuit of truth is the first bulwark in a defense of the self. Believing a lie means serving a master, living or digital.

We have named the first three forms of freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, and mobility. Factuality is the fourth. To get purchase on the world, we have to test ourselves and our convictions. Truthfulness is not an archaism or an eccentricity but a necessity for life and a source of freedom.

Negative freedom is the fantasy that the problem is entirely beyond us, and that we can become free simply by removing an obstacle. We have confronted a few forms of negative

We will not be free, nor will we survive, if we ignore the limits of our Earth or deny the rules of our universe. Freedom and survival depend on recognizing constraints and turning them in our favor.

Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so that they can speak. Freedom of speech means nothing without free speakers. Only people can take risks. Only people can be free. Freedom of speech for people means safe circumstances in which to express oneself, and an opportunity to learn, so as to have something to say—which means access to journalism, access to science, access to education. The declaration of the First Amendment that the government shall “make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” is meaningless without the accommodations needed to create free speakers.

Freedom is positive, not negative. It is a presence, not an absence.

The tiny group of “have yachts” are more politically coherent and powerful than the enormous mass of “have-nots,” and they will act to keep it that way.

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom,

Thomas Jefferson probably never said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but other Americans of his era certainly did. When we think of the saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others. We see ourselves as the city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different, that human nature was such that American democracy must be defended from Americans, who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

Freedom requires its forms: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, and factuality. If I claim them for myself, then I must do so for everyone.

We cannot be free unless our truths can be greeted by others, which means that we and they must share a common human understanding that there is such a thing as truth, that someone else’s bodily experience has a dignity that I can understand even if the experience was not mine.

The space between what is and what ought to be is where we roam as free people, extending the borderland of the unpredictable. We decide which values to affirm, in what combination, for what reasons, and at what time. Then we try again. With practice, we attain our own human form of grace.

five rules of the geometry of the fifth dimension. The first rule is difference: the world of what is (the first four dimensions) and what ought to be (the fifth) are distinct. They can be brought together only through us, through our bodies. The second is plurality. In the realm of what should be are many virtues, not one. The third rule is intransitivity. The various goods are good for various reasons. The virtues are not reducible to one another. They cannot be ranked. It is not that honesty is better than loyalty; they are simply different. The fourth rule is tension. We cannot just pull all the virtues from the fifth dimension into our four of time and space. In practice, the virtues compete with one another. I might like to be punctual, but I should also be patient. I might wish to be a person of integrity, but sometimes I should compromise. We might value skepticism, yet we have faith. Love is blind, but it takes discernment to know what not to see. That leads us to the fifth rule: combinability. People can bring together virtues in creative ways and sometimes create new ones.

We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions.

What must we provide to children born in the 2020s so that they will live in a land of the free in the 2070s? Three new rights would complement Jefferson’s traditional ones: the right to vote, the right to one’s mind, and the right to health care.

Democracy ensconces us in the greater history of our own country: our own choices are part of a deeper past and, we may hope, a brighter future.

We the people” will be sovereign in government only when individual persons are sovereign in their lives. Only the unpredictable voter (in the unrigged district in the unmonetized election) gets the attention of the candidate. A person who is socially mobile will believe that better futures are possible and will vote for the candidate who offers one. A person who expresses solidarity will care about the votes of others; a person who cares about factuality will count the ballots. Democracy remains the best available way to address differences in value commitments.

Advances in medicine made possible a profound gain of freedom. People who are more confident about health will have greater ambitions for life. People