On Freedom

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

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.

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

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

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

We chose freedom when we did not run.

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.

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?

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

In dehumanizing others, we make ourselves unfree.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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