On Freedom

Forthcoming seminal work by Tim Snyder

https://timothysnyder.org/books/the-road-to-unfreedom-tr

Notes

• How many alternatives present themselves to us has to do with how we feel. Positive emotions broaden the range of choices we see and extend our experience of time.
• The existentialists and their teacher Martin Heidegger thought that our problem was that we ignore death... The real problem is that we ignore life.
• For people to grow up in freedom, the right structures must already be in place when they are born.
• The creation of individuality must be a social act.
• 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.
• Gummit is legitimate insofar as it enables freedom, enacting policies that allow young and coming generations to become sovereign.
• Fascists pointed out the problems with this tradition of sovereignty. The most intelligent of them, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, argued that true sovereignty resided not in following the rules, as laid down by the contract, but in making an exception to them.
• And why exactly should newborns be subject to an ancient order that they could not possibly have chosen? How is that freedom?
• A negative idea of freedom seems plausible when we begin our thought process from an idealized image of adults and forget the bodily predicament that we all shared as newborns.
• Defining freedom only as something that can be lost, we never ask how it was gained, how people become sovereign in the first place.
• Recalling that we all begin with a shriek can deliver us from philosophical errors that stand behind American oppression.
• I began to see the world differently when I cut my son’s umbilical cord.
• The land that celebrated its bicentennial in 1976 was on the way to locking up more of its citizens than any other, as a matter of racial policy
• Russia has become a genocidal fascist empire for many reasons, but one of them is negative freedom
• Empowered then by empathy, we can see ourselves as others see us. That helps us both to know ourselves and to know the world
• Empathy, in other words, is not a condescending concession of a rational person to the emotions of others, but the only way to become a reasonable person.
• the book that Tony titled Thinking the Twentieth Century.
• Zelens’kyi told me that “we never really speak, others speak through us,”
• They are not in the first four dimensions of space and time but in a fifth, in what Edith Stein called “the world of values.”
• We are neither gods nor objects. We are humans who can become sovereign. Freedom is neither the lack nor the acceptance of constraints, but rather the use of them
• 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.
• Advances in medicine made possible a profound gain of freedom. People who are more confident about health will have greater ambitions for life. People who expect to live short lives are more likely to risk them in violence that, in turn, shortens the lives of others.
• If we conceive of liberty only as freedom from, we don’t think expansively enough; we think only of ourselves, or about ourselves against the world. When we don’t see the bodies of others, we don’t really understand our own, and we end up giving away our own freedom and our own lives.
• Thomas Jefferson thought that after ethics, health was the most important thing in life.
• On only one point do we find agreement about happiness among thinkers at all times in all cultures: health favors it.
• Were humans to agree on the sources of happiness, we would be far simpler creatures, subject to programming, incapable of freedom.
• Then Snyder summarizes 22 thinkers' perspectives on the source of happiness. Consensus is hard. This means is is genius - happiness is in everything.
• From regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity.
• Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants.
• 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
• When we see ourselves as others see us, we know ourselves better.
• Jesus spoke patiently in riddles And allegories
• Build structures that promote understanding
• Unlike God, we can be free