Notes

The deep source of Soviet collapse was the end of mobility. Prewar Stalinist mobilization had never given way to anything like the postwar social mobility on display in western Europe.
This addictive mix, postimperial immobility, leads to stagnation and isolation. In the United States of the early twenty-first century, it brought suicide and addiction.
In the 1980s, Americans blocked themselves from completing the transition from imperial to social mobility, then looked around for people to blame.
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
prison gerrymandering. Incarcerated people are counted as residents for the purposes of deciding how many elected representatives a given district will have
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.
It lasted until its origins were forgotten and capitalism itself was enthroned as the lone source of freedom. That happened in the 1980s.
American Dream depended on social policies developed after the capitalist collapse of the Great Depression.
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.
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 more difficult, and it created a culture of tax avoidance that spread globally. It now threatens freedom in the United States.
Yet when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it suffered defeats. Soviet leaders pushed Polish communists to suppress the Solidarity movement in 1981 on their own rather than ordering the Red Army to invade Poland. In 1989 the USSR was forced to retreat from Afghanistan; it lost its external empire in Poland and eastern Europe that same year.
From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union fought a colonial war for Ukraine, which we remember as the Second World War. The fact that two European powers were contesting an east European borderland indicated that territory elsewhere was unavailable. Ukraine was now the focus of global colonialism.
In the Compromise of 1877, Union troops were withdrawn from the South, and racial authoritarian regimes were established (by the then all-powerful Democrats). The Union Army then returned to combat Native Americans in the West. As the West became a land of displacement, the South became a land of repression.
Indeed, without the Stalinist singularity, China could never have taken the form that it takes today.
We haven’t come to grips with that institution called racism. And we have to, because we see the ultimate of racism, which was what I saw at Buchenwald.”
Poverty forces people into their most probable states. It impedes mobility. This is a point my students in prison made repeatedly. My student Marquis called poverty “the daily basis of unfreedom” and said that for many people he knows, freedom would begin with three meals a day and a decent school.
If we knew that we had access to health care and a retirement pension, we would live more interesting lives.
geroscience—preventive treatment of the afflictions associated with old age—becomes important to our liberty.
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
It took him twenty years, the time we need to become sovereign and unpredictable. But Odysseus made it home.
In 1984, the reduction of the number of English words is a cumbersome affair, drudge work carried out by people in offices. In our lives, social media reduce our vocabulary (and thus our references) at terrifying speed.
Traditions are an enriching restraint. In order to build on traditions, to correct them, we have to know them, and that takes time.
As the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy put it, the danger is not that the chatbots replace us but that we become the chatbots. The Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin said that “he who is deceived is turned into a thing.”
We are predictified. By algorithms.
The Welsh theologian Rowan Williams contended that “spiritual maturity” means that “there isn’t very much choice.” For him, “that’s not a diminution but an expansion of the personal because here is someone who by a long and hard route has become someone whose seeing and responding is instinctively truthful. Y
Necessity is the mother of invention; the better we understand necessity, the more inventive we are.
It is a reminder that what might seem normal, predictable, and inevitable can be resisted, and that resistance begins with a definition of what might be.
Normalization in Czechoslovakia followed the end of faith in Marxism in 1968, the collapse of a certain view that technological change must bring human freedom
We need knowledge of both what is and what should be to experience that “restlessness of transcendence”—a phrase of Havel’s that sounds very much like Weil.
Like Simone Weil, Havel was seeking a descriptive transcendence, a language that respected the truths of the physical world, including the truth that we can get beyond it
“Life rebels against all uniformity and leveling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the restlessness of transcendence, the adadventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo.
Working together, people bring human unpredictability into the world, and joyfully. This helps us to be free of all the people and forces who would rule us by predicting us or by making us more predictable.
When people are sovereign together, they generate unpredictability.
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.
tyranny, Havel concluded, required not devotion but predictability. Normalization forced life into “the most probable states.”
In 1975 Havel also wrote an open letter to Gustav Husák, the leader of the Czechoslovak communist party, about “the gradual erosion of all moral standards.” Havel was a Bohemian in every sense; by “moral standards” he did not mean buttoned-up self-righteousness. He meant freedom, beginning with an affirmation of humanity. Only on that terrain do meaningful choices exist. Without a sense of what should be, we cannot be clear about how what is could ever change.
In 1975 Havel also wrote an open letter to Gustav Husák, the leader of the Czechoslovak communist party, about “the gradual erosion of all moral standards.” H
If we accept that “everything is shit,” if nothing is any better than anything else, we have no basis for sovereign choices, and gain no practice in the building of a self. We will mutter under our breath and accept our place in a system.
Toward the end of his life, Plato tells us, Socrates compared philosophy to childbirth, and thoughts to children.
So the cave allegory, if we do the optics correctly, leads to an entirely different conclusion from the one proposed by Plato and accepted by tradition
If we think, though, that the world we experience is not the real world but is only a cave or (as people say now) a computer simulation, then we might conclude that such activity makes no sense. If we believe that life is elsewhere, then freedom is senseless, since we have no power to exist on that other plane, let alone to change it. Our only chance at freedom would seem to be to reach that elsewhere by shedding our imperfect bodies by dying (or as people imagine now, becoming one’s own digital avatar).
(Ideals) are virtues, notions of how the world might be different from and better than it is. As sovereign individuals, we learn to care about these ideals, and balance them, and bring them to life. We can also learn to create them.
Re:Public and the Allegory of the Cave - There is no cave, except the one we enter when we close our eyes to the world and our hearts to others.
What people can become is limited by both the prospect and the memory of rape, and we can fully grasp this idea only when we take the bodies of others seriously.
We can learn to govern ourselves only with the right kind of guidance, at the right stage of life.
Regulating emotions is a step toward the evaluation that enables freedom. If we are nothing more than our first reactions, we are prey to the people who arouse those reactions.
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

On Freedom

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On Freedom

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