← The Preamble
The Preamble
On Freedom with Timothy Snyder
00:48:20
Timothy Snyder explains how a shift in how we define freedom could transform society.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:33]
Jenna Fischer
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- [01:10]
Sharon McMahon
Delighted to have you with me today and I am so excited for today's guest. It is somebody that I've wanted to have on this show for such a long time and we finally made it happen. I am chatting with the one and only Timothy Snider and he has a new book out called On Freedom and this is going to be such an eye opening conversation about what does freedom actually mean. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you so much for being here.
- [01:44]
Timothy Snyder
I'm very glad we can do it.
- [01:46]
Sharon McMahon
We are recording this not long before the presidential election and the topic of freedom is really top of mind for many Americans. And of course what freedom means is defined by different groups, right? In various ways. But I'm very interested in your definition of freedom because you've written a whole book on it called On Freedom and you even say in the introduction we need to define what freedom is. So for people who are not familiar with your work, who haven't read On Freedom yet, what even is freedom? What's like a working definition that we can use?
- [02:23]
Timothy Snyder
I think that's a great question because we Americans have the habit of talking about freedom, but I don't think we really do know what it means. And I guess I'm a conservative in the sense that I think there are right and wrong answers to questions like this and it's not really a matter of opinion particularly so I Think. The way to think about freedom is to think about the good things in the world. That there are such things as decency and honesty and integrity and beauty and grace and so on. And freedom is the condition in which you can choose among those good things and bring them into the world. That's my definition of freedom. So freedom is positive. It's a happy thing. It's not an angry thing. But it's also positive politically because to become the kind of person that can choose those virtues, make those choices, and have the power to actually change the world, we need to work together. Nobody actually can become free by themselves. And so, politically speaking, freedom is also positive in that we have to work together to get there.
- [03:20]
Sharon McMahon
You talk about what negative freedom is and how many Americans view freedom in the negative sense, not in the sense of it being a bad thing, but as sort of a more academic definition of negative freedom. Can you talk a little bit more about what that is and contrast it to your definition of freedom?
- [03:37]
Timothy Snyder
Yeah. Negative freedom is the big brain trap in which I think almost all Americans find themselves. I think it's what we mean when we say freedom. I don't think we query whether freedom is positive or negative like you say. I think we just take as commonsensical and natural negative freedom. And what I'm trying to do in the book is to show that we're doing that and to show that it's wrong and to show that it's dangerous. So negative freedom means freedom from. It means you against the world. It means the problem is on the outside. The problem is some kind of barrier. You know, a prison wall, a barbed wire fence, an oppressive government. Now, it's not that this is wrong. It's just that this is kind of a baby step towards what freedom is. So to take some practical, historical examples, when the concentration camps were, as we would say, liberated, the doctors and nurses who arrived in 1945 would say, Liberation isn't the word. Just because the barbed wire is cut, the inmates are no longer guarded, doesn't mean that they're free people. They're still mental and physical trauma. And that's true in all dramatic situations. I noticed it in my visits to Ukraine, where the Ukrainians talk about de occupation instead of liberation. Because even when the torture stops and even when the killing stops, when the deportation of children stops, that's still not freedom. You still have to rebuild the playgrounds and the schools and get the buses running and so forth before people are actually free. So our common sense is wrong, or it's just a First step. And it has negative consequences for Americans. Because if you think that freedom is just negative, it's just about a barrier, then you're angry all the time. If you think freedom is just a barrier, you never ask the question which is, who am I? What am I for? What do I want to become? Those are the free questions. And if freedom is just negative, what you end up doing politically is you end up saying, and this is what Americans do pretty far deep into the left too. It's not just a right wing problem. They say, well, the government's the problem, therefore we make the government smaller and then we'll be free, which is not true. You'll be free when you have the kind of government that creates the conditions that allow you to be free. So if you give up on government, you're not going to be free because power pours a vacuum. The social media and the oligarchs will fill in that space. And they're not going to make you free either. They're going to be oppressive. And then the other thing, which is wrong, and we see this is just in the air now, if you think freedom is negative and it's you against the world or you against the government, it's very easy to decide that freedom is you against your fellow American. And in that way, negative freedom very quickly becomes a politics of us and them. That is to say, it very quickly becomes fascism.
- [06:19]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah, you say in the book, freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens. When we're free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life. Over time, our choices among virtues define us as people of will and individuality. And I think that is such a beautiful example of sort of the difference between a positive and a negative version of freedom. And you also quote this sort of idea that like a prison is not made up of stone walls and barbed wire. Sometimes that's a prison, sometimes that can represent something else. I would love to hear you expound on that idea that a prison is sometimes made up of stone walls and barbed wire, but sometimes it's not.
- [07:14]
Timothy Snyder
I'll answer that, but I want to thank you for reading that passage because what I'm trying to get across, I think is actually really quite simple and logical. It's just very different from the way we're used to thinking of freedom. And I think most of us would agree that some things are better than others. Most of us would agree that honesty is better than dishonesty. Most of us would agree that beauty is better than ugliness and so on. And that's where freedom actually starts. If we make the move, as a lot of folks want to make the move, of saying, well, nothing is really true, either morally or aesthetically or factually, that's the path to fascism. You'll never get to freedom that way. It feels like freedom to say that nothing is true. But if you say that nothing is true, you're just opening the space for people who have the bigger loudspeakers or the bigger platforms, more wealth, more power. It's ultimately the things that we think are true. And that's why freedom is a kind of everyday, beautiful thing, because it's about what we actually think is good. And that's also why freedom is hard, because it's easy to say nothing is true and then just bully everybody who tries to stand for something. It's hard to say, well, actually, I believe certain things are better than other things. But that's the first step towards freedom. As with the walls and the barbed wire, the crucial thing is the person. So the prison wall is a problem because there's a person inside, and the barbed wire is a problem because it's restraining a person. If it weren't for the person, those things wouldn't be a problem. And that's how we have to think about freedom. We have to start from the person first. The barrier is a problem because it's a barrier to a person. But even when the barrier comes down, you still have to ask what is best for that person. Right? So when a baby is born, yes, it would be very good if that baby weren't constrained. But that's just the beginning of the question. The baby is going to need a thousand positive, constructive things to grow up to be free.
- [09:02]
Sharon McMahon
You say when we assume that freedom is negative, the absence of this or that, we presume that removing a barrier is all that we have to do to be free. This speaks to what you were just saying, that like, well, let's just make government smaller, because government's the barrier to this way of thinking. You say freedom is the default condition of the universe, brought to us by some larger force when we clear the way. This is naive. Americans are told that we were given freedom by our founding fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. You say freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a free country, but no country is free. Noting the difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident. Eritrean poet YF Mavratu reports that they talk about the country, we talk about the people. And then this is the thing that I think is so interesting. You say only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. And the moment you believe freedom is given, it is gone. That is very counter to the way most people think. We think like it's your birthright. It's part of our national identity. How many times have we all heard, well, it's a free country, right? Like schoolchildren say that. Where did your ideas about freedom come from?
- [10:34]
Timothy Snyder
First, I'm just going to try to restate my own prose for a minute because it's so nice listening to you read it. And you're so right that this is not how Americans think about freedom. And I just want to say that's a big problem. If your major national value is a misunderstanding, you have a problem. And it's not just a misunderstanding in the sense of an error. It's that if you get freedom wrong this way, you're actually inviting authoritarianism. Because we have to create the conditions for freedom. Like, it's good for there to be parental leave, it's good for there to be kindergarten, it's good for there to be roads. There are all kinds of conditions we can create that will help people to become free. But while we do that, people have to themselves, from themselves, out of themselves, value things. And they have to value freedom as the condition in which they can realize those things in the world. If we don't do that, if you don't think it's from you, if you don't feel the friction, if you don't feel the resistance, if you don't feel that discomfort, you're definitely not a free person. And all of those moves, like, it's a free country, for example, that's conceding your freedom. The moment you take the word free and you put it in front of anything else, you're basically saying, I want authoritarianism. That's it. If you say, oh, it's the free market, you're saying, I have duties to the market, which is, of course saying, I would like to submit to a social construction. These are all submissive, authoritarian moves, every last one of them, including that we inherit freedom from the Founding Fathers. You can't. You can take an example from them. You can say, they were rebels in their time. I'm going to be a rebel in my time, too. But the moment you think Any outside force, a country, the past, the economy, whatever is going to bring you freedom, you're conceding freedom. As you've very kindly read, freedom can't be brought from any place. It can't be brought from any time. It can only be achieved now in the name of the future. Where did I get these ideas? Partly it came from writing about the most horrible things which happened in the 20th century. I'm a historian of political atrocity, and then trying to imagine how it could be that things could be better. Part of it came from pushing the logic of defending the American Republic, which was the subject of my little book on tyranny, to the question of what it is that we're actually defending. And how can you formulate that positively? Because defending things, although you have to do it, can also be a trap, because then you don't ask what is the thing that you're actually defending. Partly these ideas came from the good luck of having a life in which I was able to do a lot of things freely and also learned from my mistakes. Insofar as this book is kind memoir of my mistakes, freedom is a condition. It's a state of being. It's not something you can be right about, like the way you can be right about the atomic number of lithium or something. And so to get to it, you have to listen to other people. In this book, I try to give a lot of other people voice. And when I thought I was done with the manuscript, I took it to other places where people were talking about freedom, but were in a very different perspective from my own. And I tried to listen to them before the book was finished.
- [13:31]
Sharon McMahon
Where do you think Americans are getting these sort of wrong ideas about freedom? Because it occurs to me that they are like in the Bill of Rights, that, you know, the government will not do any of these things to you. We're not going to restrict your freedom of speech or religion or right to assemble or petition the government for your grievances. And so it even seems like in reading the actual Constitution itself, that freedom is the freedom from government interference. Where are Americans getting it wrong? Like, where is this coming from, this idea that freedom is a negative?
- [14:07]
Timothy Snyder
I'm not going to blame the Constitution. I mean, my attitude towards the Constitution is kind of ambiguous because I think what was good about the Founding Fathers, aside from their own personal courage to be rebels in their time, was their awareness that people were going to improve upon them later on. So when you go back and say everything should be as it was in the 1780s, you're not being faithful to the Founding Fathers, you're actually betraying the Founding Fathers. I think one always has to have that kind of edginess in mind with them. But that said, I'm not going to blame the Constitution for this. I mean, the preamble was very clear. We're supposed to care about things like welfare and justice and that we're supposed to think in common. Right.
- [14:43]
Sharon McMahon
Domestic tranquility.
- [14:44]
Timothy Snyder
Yeah. We, the people of the United States, reform our perfect union, establish justice, provide for the common defense. Domestic tranquility, so on and so forth. Like, these are positive values. These are things that you cannot achieve by just being alone or against the government. And likewise, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, of course, is rejecting a very specific British colonial oppression as he sees it. But he's also trying to establish that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I actually riff on those words throughout the book and ask, like, what it would seriously mean to have a right to life or a right to liberty or a right to pursue happiness. Those are big, as I see it, pretty positive claims. You're not going to be able to pursue happiness just because the government doesn't oppress you. You're going to have to have ideas of what happiness is, people who educate you so you can have those ideas, books to read, sources of values. And those sources of values can't just be an absence. So where do Americans get these bad ideas? It's more that the Constitution gets reread or the Declaration gets reread as a negative freedom document for other reasons. And those reasons are hysterical and of convenience for the very wealthy. So historically, and this is true of American shadow slavery, but it's true of slavery in general. It's true of the Greeks and the Romans too, historically. One way to talk about freedom is to say, I am free because I have property, I have slaves, and I have women at my beck and call. And that may be very pleasant for the person making that statement, but it raises the obvious question of the freedom of the other people who are in the background somewhere to whom freedom somehow doesn't apply. Right. Very specifically, in the United States, our notion of negative freedom comes from the fact that if you're in that position, if you have the property and the slaves, if you have the women, then the only power that can enfranchise the slaves, give the vote to the women, is the government. And so therefore you'd find freedom as negative. It's, I don't want the government interfering with this state of affairs. That's the historical source of negative freedom in the United States. The convenient source is that if you are an aspiring oligarch and you want to control American society, or just you personally don't want to pay taxes, then you say that all freedom is about is the government leaving people alone. By which you mean you alone. By which you mean really your ability to expand your own power at the expense of other Americans. So those are some of the sources.
- [17:17]
Jenna Fischer
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through Instacart? Because maybe you only bought two wreaths, but you have 12 windows. Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the Advent calendar. Or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm. Or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason, this season Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday haul. Get decorations from the Home Depot, CVS and more through Instacart and enjoy free Delivery on your first 33 service fees and term supply. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies where we rewatched every single episode of the Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs.
- [18:03]
Timothy Snyder
Guess who's sitting next to me?
- [18:04]
Jenna Fischer
Steve Carell in the studio. Every Wednesday we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the Office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus on Mondays we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:48]
Sharon McMahon
You mentioned in the book that there are actually five types of freedom and I would love to hear you first of all take us through each one and then if we have time, I'd love to hear a little bit about how people should be applying these ideas to their everyday because if it's not, just, well, the government left you alone and thus you're free. What actually are the five types of freedom?
- [19:12]
Timothy Snyder
The structure of the book is that in the beginning I try to say what freedom actually is, just as we did at the beginning of our conversation and at the end I make some, I hope, pretty clear prescriptions for what government ought to be doing. And that's part of the Point of the book, that freedom and government are, as we've been talking about. There is no natural tension between freedom and government. That's American naivete, the idea that all you have to do is make the government smaller. It's either American cynicism or American naivete. It's one or the other. It's the cynicism abusing the naivete. Whereas the truth is that in order to be free, you have to have a government that's doing the right things and not the wrong things. So of course you don't want an oppressive government, but because in order to become free people, we need certain conditions to be out there. You need the right kind of government. So in my view, a legitimate government is one that acts in order to create the conditions of freedom precisely for everybody. So in between that beginning and that end, that introduction, that conclusion, there are these five chapters about what I call the forms of freedom, which are sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and sovereignty. And these are between in every way. Like they're trying to connect the philosophical ideas to the politics by an account of how we behave, how we should behave, and what would be necessary for us. And the first three of them, sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility. They describe how we are when we're free and what we need to be free, but they also describe what we need to become free. So by sovereignty, for example, and this goes a little bit back to our Constitution discussion, I don't mean the sovereignty of the state. I mean the ability of a baby to become a person who can actually appreciate values, judge values, combine them, realize them in the world. In other words, how do we take an infant and allow that infant to become a free person? Going back the negative freedom discussion, it's just obvious you can't do it by leaving the baby alone. That's not going to do the trick. The baby needs love, attention, time, all kinds of things. And if that's true, then we need to create a situation where parents and friends and educators and others can give that baby, every baby that love, attention, and time that it needs to become a free individual. And so sovereignty is about beginning from the beginning and trying to create a person who can make the kinds of choices that you would need to be free. Unpredictability is, for me, very important. The outside world is, in some sense, physically predictable. The digital world that we've created around ourselves is meant to make us more predictable so we can be more easily ruled, or so that we are easily persuaded to buy things so we're born into A world where there's a lot of predictability. And indeed, predictability is kind of bearing down on us in a way that it wasn't, let's say, 20 years ago. But whereas what makes us different from everything else in the universe, different from the digital world, from the physical world, is that in combining values, we're unpredictable. So, like, you and I might agree that loyalty and honesty are both important, or we might agree that punctuality and spontaneity are both important. But when those values clash, we're going to make different decisions, we're going to make different judgments, and in doing that, we become different people, and also we project different kinds of unpredictability out into the universe. That's what's special and beautiful about us, is that we can do that if we cease to exist, that that spark will be gone from the universe, that will no longer be here. The universe will be a darker, colder, less interesting place, because our unpredictability will be gone. And so the question is, though, how do you make sure that people become unpredictable? And so that involves how we treat social media. It involves relationships with other people, involves reading books. The kinds of things which prepare us give us a stock of values, a vocabulary, a way of negotiating with the predictability of the world. The third is mobility. And mobility means, as you come of age, going somewhere else if you want to, becoming a different kind of person if you want to. And so it means on the one side, it means just are there public universities, are there roads? Are there all these things that no one person can create on their own? And again, this is a basic conundrum which we can solve with the right understanding of freedom. If freedom is negative, nobody has to care about those public universities and nobody has to build those roads. It's just you against the world, right? Everything is fine. But if you want to go out into the world and actually be a free person, you need the road, you need the school, you need a place to go, and you can't get there on your own. That's a counterproductive, destructive myth, right? And then the fourth and fifth factuality and solidarity are more reflective. Factuality is about the traction we have in the world so that we can resist, or so that we can do something constructive. Without facts, we can't cooperate, but also without facts, we have no basis to resist those who are trying to oppress us. If there is no truth, or if we can't know the truth, we won't be able to resist. And solidarity is a logical point and a Political point. If freedom is for me, it's also for you. And if it's for you, it's also for me. And that's just not a moral recognition. It's also a political truth. If we try to design freedoms, if it's just for one group, we end up not just tyrannizing the excluded people, but even the people we favor end up not really believing in freedom. So those five forms of freedom are between the philosophy and the politics. They're about how we should live, but they're also about how we create the institutions so that we can all become free people.
- [24:23]
Sharon McMahon
Is it possible to be a free person in an authoritarian government? If you live under an authoritarian system, you live in North Korea, you live in Russia. Is it possible to be a free person?
- [24:37]
Timothy Snyder
That's a really interesting question because you asked earlier where I get these ideas. And a lot of the people who have influenced me are people who lived in authoritarian regimes or live in authoritarian regimes or survived political prison, survived the Gulag, survived some form of oppression or other. A lot of the prose that I'm quoting was actually written in prisons, so. Yes, but with an asterisk. Right. There are certainly very special people in authoritarian regimes who are able to use the extreme situation to theorize, as it were, for the rest of us. So, for example, Vaclav Havel, who is an important figure in my book, was imprisoned in Communist Czechoslovakia because he came to the defense of a rock and roll band. That was his choice. And by the way, that's an interesting point about freedom. We think of freedom as being like this incredibly glamorous thing. You know, you're defeating the monsters from outer space, you're defeating the evil empire. You're doing something incredibly grand. It's you against the world. But in fact, what Havel said is, freedom is about doing the things that you really want to do, accepting that you really love certain things, having the courage to admit who you are, having the courage to find other people. Like, that's everyday freedom. And that's. That's hard. But it's also something which is really beautiful. But I think certain people in prison or in authoritarian regimes can take advantage of their situation to write helpfully about freedom. And there are certainly people who are internally free when they are in prison. But that said, you can take the ideas and the example from those people. But then you still have to ask, okay, what would we do besides not having the best people in prison? Where do we go further from here? What are the institutions that we need for everyone?
- [26:19]
Sharon McMahon
I Love that you say that freedom requires a sense of past and future, and democracy produces political time. Democracy invites deliberation, insisting that we take the time we need to declare and accommodate values. Its enemies are always in a hurry to make us angry or efficient or both. I thought that was such an interesting statement, that the enemies of democracy are always in a hurry to make us angry or efficient. What does that mean?
- [26:58]
Timothy Snyder
It relates to the positive negative freedom discussion we were having. So in the negative freedom model, where it's all about the barriers, it's really just like a three dimensional Euclidean geometry situation or classical physics situation, right? We're all just kind of billiard balls. We're bouncing around. We don't have to ask what the purpose of a billiard ball is. Just like in negative freedom, no one asks what the purpose of life is. We're just bouncing around. And the assumption is we're bouncing around the way we want to be bouncing around. Somehow this is the normal bouncing around that we're doing. And then the problem is, oh, well, wait, there are some walls that we bounce against. And then those barriers are the enemy. That's the negative freedom model. It's basically just requires this kind of mindless notion of physics or geometry. And it has to be like that because in negative freedom, you deliberately never ask about what's good. The whole point of negative freedom is, and this is the trick, and this is why Americans love it, you assume that you, the rolling billiard ball are right, that you're rolling in the right direction, that there's some reason why you're doing what you're doing, and you never have to ask, right? And that's incredibly convenient, but it's also incredibly seductive because it means whatever you're doing that's great, whatever impulse you're following, you're fine. That means you're a free person, you're a good person. Whereas the truth is that freedom has more dimensions than three. It has a fifth dimension, which we're already talking about, which are the values, and the values are what make us not like those billiard balls. The values mean that we don't just roll one way. We can pause, we can stop, we can consider, we can start rolling a different way, we can jump off the table. We can do all kinds of things because we want to or because we see a point to it. And then there's also the fourth dimension, which is overlooked in negative freedom, which is time. Like you say, time we came from somewhere, we were born, we're going somewhere, we're going to die along the way. We have decisions we have to make and we're making them alongside other people, all of whom are in a similar predicament, but with whom we are in a political or other communities. And that's the way things are in a positive type freedom situation. You would say democracy is good, not just as a cliche, right? Democracy is another American cliche. But you say it's good because as you were saying, it generates time. Like, I know there's going to be another election, or if I'm a kid, I know someday I'm going to be able to vote, right? And you can imagine that the government's going to change, which we take for granted, that the government can change and we really shouldn't. If you put the wrong people in power, then you're in a different regime where you don't get to choose your rulers anymore. And then in a certain way, time stops. Which gets to your question. The people who are trying to rule us, what they will do is. I'm going to start with efficiency, because that seems like the weirder part. What they will do is they'll say, let's just work really hard, right? This is really an American trap. We spend so much time working and we do it and we're told that we should be efficient or productive or we should maximize or whatever the slogan is of the day. And the truth is, this is a little painful, but we're actually not that productive. Like in terms of hours at work, we're not as productive as other people who work fewer hours than we do. And yet somehow we've swallowed this idea that the only important thing is efficiency. And the thing about efficiency is that it treats us like objects, right? If in this conversation we're supposed to be efficient, like, oh, we've got to get through a thousand topics before it's over, then somebody else has given us a goal, right? And we're just kind of mindless cogs in the machine chugging through those thousand points. Whereas if we're not trying to be efficient, if we're actually trying to understand things, we're behaving in a completely different mode. So efficiency is a fake value. I'm not saying that I don't work hard or anything like that. What I am saying is that what efficiency does is that it gets in the way of discussions of values, because efficiency basically means the status quo, but faster. And so it just dodges the issue of, hey, what kind of a country should this be? Or what sort of people should we be? And then with the anger. To just give you an example from this last weekend, I don't usually get to watch sports. I'm in Ohio with my family of origin, and I watched a bunch of sports over the weekend. And so I saw a lot of Trump commercials. And the gist of the Trump commercials is that Kamala Harris is going to allow in millions of immigrants, and then she's going to make them all change gender, and after that, they're all going to take your jobs. That is targeted to make people angry because it aims for their vulnerabilities. People are worried about borders, so political borders, corporeal borders, economic borders. Right. So these commercials have nothing to do with any sort of reality. They're just about aiming for the things that make you frightened and thereby they keep you in the present. So instead of doing what freedom would do, which is to say all of these constraints, we need to turn into opportunities some way or another. It makes people ashamed and worried and frightened about the things that make them feel vulnerable. And then on the strength of that anger, you're supposed to vote for somebody who's just going to continue to make you angry over and over and over again. And in that way, you lose time. Right? Because in democratic politics, time is your friend. You learn from the past, and learning from the past makes it possible to imagine and even realize various good futures. But if you're stuck by anger in a kind of permanent present, then the past doesn't matter and you forget it. And the future is literally unthinkable because you're just stuck being angry at these people in the present. So that's what I meant.
- [32:10]
Sharon McMahon
That's such an interesting point to reflect on that. The idea that there are forces that benefit from you being stuck in this anger mode, whether they are financially benefit or they benefit electorally, that being stuck in that anger forces you to remain, never looking towards the lessons of the past, whether they're positive or negative lessons of the past, and never able to really imagine a better future if all you are doing is fighting for your.
- [32:41]
Timothy Snyder
Proverbial life in this moment, yeah, that's so essential. And I think it's a shortcut towards understanding what's gone wrong. If you're angry, you're not free. Something else has made you angry. And of course, sometimes anger is appropriate, right? And sometimes you have to be angry because of injustice. But in general, if you are angry or frightened, it's because someone else has made you angry or frightened. And if you're regularly made angry or frightened by the same stimuli, like the ones I was talking about. It's because computer algorithms have figured out that people like you are made angry and frightened by those things. And so you're dosed with that over and over and over again. And if the way you respond is that you keep on being angry and you keep on being frightened, you're no longer living in your story. You're living in somebody else's story. Someone else has found what your buttons are, and they're pushing them. You're alive, but you're not living free. It might feel free because you have that rush of emotions that comes with fear, but that's the mistake Americans make. They confuse impulse with freedom. But your impulses can be triggered by other people. And so the only way to get out of somebody else's story is to say, wait a minute, I'm deliberately being made angry. I'm deliberately being frightened by these people. And that's a sign that these people don't want my freedom. These people want to make America into something which is not a land of the free, which is 100% correct. This is literally the shortcut. Like, if they're trying to make you angry, they're not trying to make America land of the free. If they're trying to make you see possibilities and see ways we could work together, then there's a chance that they're trying to make America land of the free.
- [34:24]
Sharon McMahon
Wow, that's really good. If you're feeling angry, especially if you're consistently being made to feel angry by some outside force that you are not living a free life, I think that's something that a lot of people might need to press pause and think about that a little bit more, because we're so acutely aware of the bombardment of messages that we receive. Like a fire hose, all one has to do is turn on the news for 10 minutes. It's entirely bad news. It's entirely things that make us feel like the world is quickly going to hell in a handbasket, that this is the worst it's ever been, that this group or that group is intent on destroying you, and they want to have all the violent crime, and they want to steal everything you own and ruin your life as you know it. And the amount of fear that I think the average American lives in today is really significant, whether they're afraid of this thing or that thing. Most Americans, I would estimate, would report that they devote at least a good portion of their waking hours to being afraid of something, or at least feeling anxiety about something, even if it's not like a Full on fight or flight response. They feel constantly anxious about the future, constantly anxious about, like, well, the Democrats are taking us in a terrible direction, or Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Like whatever somebody's viewpoint is, it seems like the other side in this very two party binary represents a very legitimate and existential threat to who you are, to your own life and to America as a whole. Right. Isn't that sort of the American existence?
- [36:05]
Timothy Snyder
By and large, yes. But I'm going to blame negative freedom for a big part of this in terms of the structures of the United States. So we are a very wealthy country and we have incredibly bad public services. And that is a political choice that we have made on the basis of a mistaken idea of freedom. We have far too many people who somehow think that if we have clean water, that's a violation of freedom, or if we have healthcare, that's a violation of freedom, or if we have good schools, that's a violation of freedom. And it's exactly the opposite. If you got the good schools and you've got the clean water and you got the good roads and so forth, those things enable people to be free. They enable people to be free. So we have chosen fear over freedom by not having adequate government services. And we're doing it to ourselves by thinking that the government is always the enemy. Sometimes it is, but the whole point of having a government is to get it to do the right things. And it's too easy. And it's just wrong to say, okay, the government only does wrong things, therefore we have to shut it down, we have to hate it, we have to despise it, we have to pour scorn on it, we have to mock the people who work for it. We have to mock the people who believe it can do things, the government can do things. So comparably wealthy countries to the US or even less wealthy countries have citizens who live longer lives, who report higher levels of happiness, and who score higher on freedom and democracy according to our own measures and our own institutions. So we're locked in a situation where we're reproducing our own fear. Of course there are things to be afraid of, but we have a political system which is structured around generating fear, different kinds of fear for different people, of course, but the political system generates fear and then we get stuck in fear. And when you're in fear, you can't create things. And then this was the case in 2010 when social media arrived and then social media metastasizes all of this. It makes all of this much thicker and much faster than it was before. And it seeks out the things that we're afraid of. And what it does is it leads us away from the solution, which is working together with other people, right? So social media takes away the time that we need to make contact with other people. It takes away the habits and the skills that we would need to make contact with other people. Because in all of that fear that you're talking about, there are two solutions. The first, as I was saying, is you have to have institutions so people are less afraid if you know you're going to have retirement pensions no matter what happens. You're just less afraid if you know you're going to have healthcare even if you lose your job, you're less afraid if you know that your kid has an okay school, you're less afraid and you're freer. So they're the right institutions. But then there's also the habit of doing things together with other people. That always makes you feel better. Even in a terrible situation, an objectively terrible situation, if you're doing some little thing with other people, then you feel less afraid.
- [38:51]
Sharon McMahon
You say, our problem is not the world, our problem is us. And to my mind, and I think to yours too, that actually can be good news. Because if the problem is us, then we can solve the problem. If the problem is me, then I can fix it. You say we can be free if we see what freedom is. We can see creativity in the past, possibility in the present, liberty in the future. We can recognize one another, create a good government, and make our own luck. And I wonder what it is that when the reader closes on freedom, what is it that you hope the reader learns?
- [39:34]
Timothy Snyder
I appreciate that question, because I wrote this book entirely in a positive mode, in the awareness that some things are going wrong and in the awareness, as a historian, of where some of those trends can lead. And very soberly. But I wrote this book full of hope because I believe that ideas matter. I think one of the traps of negative freedom is that it leads to the idea that ideas don't matter, right? Because again, if freedom is just about overcoming a barrier or it's about ridiculing the government, then you don't really have to have any ideas. And it's a very short step from there to saying that ideas don't matter at all. And that's where a lot of us are. And of course, ideas always matter. It's just sometimes they're bad ideas. So, for example, the notion that ideas don't matter is itself an idea. It's just a bad idea. It's a destructive idea. It's not only incorrect, but it's destructive. Ideas really do matter. And it's my firm conviction that we've attached the wrong meaning to the right word. Freedom is the right word. And we are right to talk about freedom, but we've attached the wrong meaning to it. And I think that because ideas matter and because we can change our minds, if we can turn this thing over, if we can think, oh, yes, actually, freedom would mean that I am becoming who I am, as opposed to I am being afraid of everything. Or freedom would mean I'm working together with other people, as opposed to it, meaning I'm alone, by myself, alien and lonely. If we could get this all right, if we could turn that around, a lot of the other preconditions for a much better America are already there. The wealth is there, the technology is there. And by technology, I don't mean social media. Social media is not high technology. Social media is low technology that just runs really quickly. But there is lots of interesting technology. We could solve global worry. There are all kinds of things that we would be able to do, I think, if we could just turn over a new leaf, think about these things fundamentally differently. So I end the book with a long riff about how the world could be in 2076 on the American Tricentennial. And the notion is that there are things we've got to get done, there are ideas we have to change, but it could be a much more beautiful America. It could be a land of the free in 2076. And that the problems that we need to solve are above all these problems of concepts. They're problems that are within us. And because they're within us, we have a chance. Catastrophes are approaching us, but they're catastrophes of our own making. And at their root, these catastrophes are based in, I think, a single basic misunderstanding. And if we can turn that around, I really do believe that things could get much better pretty quickly.
- [42:15]
Sharon McMahon
I love that. Well, it was truly a treat to be able to talk with you, Tim. It's always a delight to be able to read your work. Your work always gives me so much to think about. Like, I always want to close a chapter and just kind of ruminate on it for a while. And I appreciate any. Anything that gives me that kind of pause. I've read a few books, Tim. I've read a couple of books. At this point in my life, I read over 100 books a year. And so I always appreciate it when somebody's work is so thoughtful and causes me to be introspective and it was just really a delight to speak with you and hopefully this will not be the last time we meet.
- [42:54]
Timothy Snyder
Oh Sharon, I just wanted to thank you for the care you took with all of of this and your preparation and your very thoughtful questions. And it's been a great pleasure for me too to talk, so I'm really glad we could.
- [43:03]
Sharon McMahon
Thanks Tim. You can buy Tim Snyder's book on freedom wherever you get your books. If you want to support a local bookshop, head to yours or go to bookshop.org I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much? I'm your host and executive producer Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.