Tim Snyder: On Freedom

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. First of all, thanks for the kind introductions. I'm really pleased that we're going to have the chance to talk about this and have a dialogue. I mean, to be clear about that, I first have to say something about what I mean by freedom, because Americans immediately begin talking about freedom and we generally mean nothing by it, or we mean something that I think doesn't actually make sense. So my notion of freedom is a positive one: freedom is about flourishing, developing, becoming the kind of person that you want to be. Freedom is about affirming values in the world, in the sense of believing in them, affirming them to yourself, but also affirming them in the sense of making them real in the world. So freedom is a state in which we can make our own choices about what is good and have some amount of power to realize those things. And then freedom is also positive in the sense that to become free in that way, we need other people's help. You can't become free on your own. The things that help us to become free people are legion and complex and require cooperation and generational cooperation.

So in the passage that you cited from the book, the irony is that Freedom House judges freedom in a pretty narrow way. It judges it in a very American way: political freedoms, civic freedoms. It's not about the welfare state or the quality of roads or anything, health insurance or things that I also think count towards freedom. And nevertheless, we scored about 50. And the reason for that, in my view, is that if you want to get to negative freedom — you know, our view of just the government staying away and people having dignity — you have to have positive freedom first, rather than the other way around. And that's the thing that Americans basically tend to get wrong. So, sorry I had to do that long prelude, because I didn't...

Well, I mean, coming from that, the people who are in charge in the US now, Musk and Trump, are heroes of negative freedom. They are people who tell you that freedom is about being against things, and it starts by being against the government. And this is a trap, of course, because if you think freedom is you against the government, then you help make the government smaller, and then the government becomes so small it's dysfunctional, and then the government can't do the basic things it needs to do to allow you to have a free life — like, for example, make sure there's no pollution in the water, or make sure that there aren't measles outbreaks, the kinds of things that are now starting to happen in the United States. So there is actually an intellectual mistake at the beginning of Musk and Trump. The reason why Musk can say this is about efficiency, and Americans for the first six or seven weeks nod their heads and say, 'Oh yes, this might be about efficiency,' is that we deeply believe that freedom is about making government smaller. And so if somebody comes and says, 'I'm going to make government smaller,' we think, 'Oh yes, that's probably acceptable in its own right.' Whereas in fact, if you make government smaller so that it's dysfunctional, then the oligarchs remain, right? It's like you drain... you have a beautiful, you know, you start down an analogy and then you just have to keep going. So watch this: you have a beautiful swimming pool, but there are ugly dark children's toys on the bottom of it that fell down there years and years ago. But then you drain the swimming pool and you see that they're the ugly dark... anyway, the ugly dark children's swimming toys are the oligarchs in this analogy, and they're there, right? But there's a swimming pool, right? There's something nice around them. But if you get rid of the government, the oligarchs are still there, and they're relatively much more powerful than they were before, and that's where we're going, right?

So we have these — and Trump is a hero of negative freedom too. He says you don't need government, but then he uses government to oppress you, or uses government to oppress other countries, and we go for it. So obviously we're much less free. I mean, the universities are under attack. They're staging these spectacular kidnappings of people on the street to terrify the rest of us. They're sending people to a foreign gulag on the basis of tattoos that they have, including autism awareness tattoos or 'I love my mother' tattoos, and people are self-censoring in a very large way. But also the positive things that are necessary for freedom, so our welfare state, as you might have heard, is a little bit less well developed than yours in general, and such as it is, it's now being dismantled. And so if you're an older person and you're going to be denied Social Security and Medicaid, which is coming, you're also less free.

Yeah, the problem is that it's question-begging, because freedom — and I agree with you, it sounds good and of course it also is good. You don't want to be oppressed, you don't want to be subject to a tyrant. But the important part of the equation is the 'you' part. So, I mean, to make it really simple: barbed wire isn't bad if there are no people around it. It's just barbed wire. A wall isn't bad if it's not holding people back, right? The essential thing is the person and not the barrier. And the problem with negative freedom is that it puts all of the emotional and moral and psychological attention onto the barrier. And so you think freedom is just a matter of liberating us from this bad thing. But if you think about freedom that way, you end up being caught in a moral trap, because if freedom is just about liberating yourself from some bad thing, you've never really asked what the good thing is. You've never really asked what you are. You've never really asked what it means for you to be free. And then if you think the bad thing's gone away, let's say you succeed in quote-unquote liberating yourself, all those questions are still open, and then you look around for the next thing to oppose. And politically speaking, the way that it works, and you can see this, is that you oppose the government, you make the government weak. But not having answered the question of freedom positively — who am I? What do I care about? What do I value? What do I affirm? — your next move is immediately to turn against your neighbors. Because your notion is that freedom means being against something. And once you're against one thing, your next move will be to be against something else. That's the problem with negative freedom: you get caught in this loop.

Yeah, thank you. That's very helpful. And thank you also for referring to Ukraine, because it's a lot of what — I took this book on the road with me in various places, and I took it to various audiences, because the premise is: if you believe that freedom is positive, then the premise can't be 'I know what freedom is on my own'. It has to involve listening to other people. So I tried to listen to the people I was reading. Yeah, I wrote a fair amount of it in Ukraine. I revised it in Ukraine quite significantly, and Ukrainians helped me to clarify some of the basic arguments, including this business of positive freedom.

So I'm going to start somewhere else and I'm going to land in Ukraine. The concentration camps are the classical example of where a Canadian or an American or a British person would feel very comfortable using the word 'liberated'. The concentration camps that we got to, we're very comfortable saying that we liberated those camps. And I want to say that even in that case, it's not appropriate — that it disguises something and it misleads. And when I say that, I'm leaning into the primary sources left behind by doctors and nurses and other people who arrived after the 8th of May or the 9th of May, 1945, who pretty regularly said something along the lines of 'liberation is not the word'. And what they meant by that was: here you have these traumatized, sick people, and we can't just imagine that because we've lifted the evil that we've solved the entire problem. And if you'll go along with me that far, if you accept that replacing the SS with British or American or Canadian or whatever soldiers is not liberation, then I think all the other examples fall into place pretty easily.

And so the word 'deoccupied' from the Ukrainians is very helpful here, because it suggests that negative freedom is a step towards positive freedom, but it's not the same thing. So you can remove the SS from a concentration camp, or you can remove the Russians from a Ukrainian village, and that's a very good thing, but there are a lot of other things that have to happen after that. So the Ukrainians say 'deokupatsiia' — the noun — 'deokupovanyi' as an adjective, and I'm trying to bring that word into English, and there are a bunch of you here so you can help. But I think 'deoccupy' and 'deoccupied' is a very helpful notion, because it helpfully removes some of the glamour, some of the notion that it's just a matter of black and white, and reminds us that in the case where I begin the book — there can be a village where there's an old lady, she's now 86, she was 85 at the time I talked to her, now she's 87. Maria is 87 now. But if there's an elderly person and her village has been quote-unquote liberated, but she has a bit of a handicap and she uses a walker, and there's rubble between the corrugated metal shack she lives in and the road, she's not free, right? From a great distance, maybe. And of course it's good that she's no longer being bombed, but until the buses are running and she can get to the grocery store, until she can walk to the bus stop, she's not free.

There are probably like 150 Ukrainians out here who will then jump in in Q&A. Well, I'm now — well, yes-ná, yes-ná — but yes, it is implicit in the word. It is implicit in the word, and that's why it's a helpful word.

Oh, that's such a wonderful question. It really is, because I've come to the view that you can't defend it without defining it. So, on my own little political or intellectual journey, 'On Freedom' is the antipode to, or the answer to, 'On Tyranny'. 'On Tyranny' is an old political pamphlet I wrote in late 2016, and it's very useful. I think for a lot of people it's been very helpful. I mean, it's the book that's the best seller in the United States right now, I mean, sadly. So I gave like 150 talks about 'On Tyranny' in the early days of the first Trump administration, trying to get people to understand what was going on and how to behave. But a very reasonable question at that point was the question that you're asking: if we're defending against tyranny, what is the thing that you're defending? And I think ultimately the answer is that you're not defending it, you're creating it. And if you're just defending it, then eventually you'll always lose, because if you're just defending in everyday organizational terms, you'll just be reacting. And if you're just defending, then you don't have a clear sense of what future you're aiming for.

And so politically, that was what I was trying to answer. But then also intellectually, it's just much more interesting to try to figure out what freedom actually is. And when I started trying to answer in 2017, I didn't have a sense of — I didn't know where I was going to go with it, and that's why it was so much fun for me and so obsessively interesting. But I think it's philosophically necessary to do it from the ground up, and I also think it's politically necessary. I mean, I don't think we can do without a bigger notion of freedom. I don't think we can — the concepts that we use are things like democracy and institutions and rule of law, and that's all very important, but I think there has to be something which is bigger and more capacious and more human and more vibrant than that.

Well, of course I've gotten it 100% right.

Come on, you can't let me get away with that.

I'm very happy with it. I'm very happy with it. But the point of it is that it's not like — so I wrote the book in vignettes, and I didn't write it as a series of propositions, because I don't think you can actually define freedom that way deductively. I think the nature of freedom is that it's a little bit on this side — it's a little bit about the factual world — but it's also a little bit on the other side, in the metaphysical world. Freedom is about not just the way things are, but about the way things ought to be. And what makes us special is that we too live on both sides. We live where things are, but we also live in the way things might be, ought to be, should be. And freedom means being good at that. It means having various notions of how things might be better. And so you can't — I take a stab at various points in the book in characterizing freedom, but I don't think you can actually define it, because it's a state in which many good things are possible. It's a jumble. It's a bunch of combinations. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I think about it.

Well, I mean — am I allowed to give two?

Because I think it's important also, looking at the US today, to understand the connection between negative freedom and the history of slavery. Because these arguments are not just arguments I enjoy having; they're also rooted in history. The reason why negative freedom is plausible — okay, this is another critique of negative freedom — but if you think the only problem is the government, what kind of life are you leading? If the only problem for you is the government, if that's really the only problem, that means that you yourself are a feudal landholder or a slaveholder, right? You yourself must have behind you serfs, slaves, women, right? You have a whole pyramid at which you're the top, if the central government is really the only problem for you. Now, I'm not saying that 150 million Americans believe the central government is the only problem, but I mean if it's really the only problem for you — in our history that was the position, of course, of the plantation owners in the South, where they defined freedom as the ability to have slaves working their property. And that's negative freedom, because the central government, the federal government, is the only instance that can take that away from you, right?

So one moment is the foundation of the United States. The second moment would be 1981, January 1981, the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president, because he very persuasively and charismatically and intelligently made the argument that government is never the solution, it's always the problem. 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' Yeah, exactly. That was supposed to be a joke, right? The scariest words in the English language, I think he said.

And that was very persuasive. But it was also connected, by the way, to the history of slavery and the history of race, because the undertone of all of that was a phrase which Reagan probably didn't coin but which he made popular — the idea of welfare cheats, welfare mothers, 'welfare queens' was the phrase. And you may not hear that with your Canadian ears, but that means black women. And so the notion is that the welfare state — I'm sure Canadian ears hear every American thing plus — so I promise not to do that again. But in the US that would be obviously racially coded. And the notion is that you don't need the welfare state because you're white people and you're very hearty, and if you're sick or whatever you're just going to get through it. But those black people, they will abuse the welfare state. They'll take everything, they'll take your tax dollars and then they'll just use them, right? And so the notion that the government can't help you is bound in, even at that late date, and today it's bound in with the idea that some people are hearty individuals and true, and other people are just going to abuse the government. So that's on the domestic front.

Yeah, that's also a wonderful question. I think both 1989 and 2003 are very important. So there was a historical coincidence, which is that the Reagan era and the Thatcher era corresponded with the end of communism in Eastern Europe. And that coincidence led many people to believe that the end of communism discredited government action as such, or the social welfare state as such. Whereas the end of communism discredited the one-party state. It discredited central planning, perhaps, it discredited many things, but it didn't discredit all government action. And that's the way it got read, especially in the UK and in the US — less so in Canada, interestingly. And you see then from that point on a pretty sharp divergence between American and Canadian policies, interestingly, and you guys start living longer. So, bless you from that point forward.

Well, I'm not sure how to understand that laughter. It's like, is he going to make it through this whole discussion? Look at that frail person.

But so 1989 was, I think, misunderstood in this way. And in an odd way — it's kind of a Hegelian irony — but in an odd way we took over historical determinism from the Soviets, because many Americans, many people speaking English started to say, well, of course the economy determines everything, but the economy is going to take care of democracy for us, right? And that means you don't need government. It means that government should just get out of the way, right? But of course that is actually very anti-democratic and anti-freedom, because if you think economics is going to take care of things for you, then you're not really a free person.

2003, the invasion of Iraq, was an example of how far you can go with this notion. There were many things wrong with it — and I was against it at the time, by the way, and I was in a minority. It was one of the few times that I couldn't get my op-eds published, was around the war in Iraq. But there were many things wrong with it, and I'm just going to focus on this one thing: the people who made that war really did think that if you knocked over a government, then freedom and capitalism and stuff would just kind of sprout up. And if you really believe in negative freedom, that's what you think. You think the good things just kind of come along automatically. And so the notion that we were going to dismantle the army, dismantle the Baath Party, make Iraq kind of start from the beginning — or to put it in a slightly more malicious mode: you're not harming a country by destroying everything, because if you destroy everything then they can just start again, right? And that's freedom.

Yeah. Well, part of it is that the left has ceded the ground. The left doesn't talk about freedom, which I think is a terrible mistake. So the left has opened the ground to freedom — freedom at large has been claimed by the right. As the right has claimed the word, the left has — at least in my country and in countries I know well in Europe — part of the problem is that the term has been granted to the right. But the second reason, which we've already talked about, is the libertarian-to-fascism transmission belt, where if you believe the government should be weak — if you're saying the government should be weak, what you're really meaning is either that oligarchs should be strong, or... and the oligarchs, you might have noticed, are not particularly benevolent in general. I mean, I'm sure there are some nice ones out there. But at least you know — I'm sure they're nicer here, like everyone, you know, but—

But the ones that really matter, at least in the United States, are fascists. I mean the ones who matter right now. And there's the logic that we talked about earlier, which is that you make the government small, you create chaos, you create anger, and then you mobilize that in a certain direction.

Yeah. So a lot of the discussion that we have of freedom brackets all the things that are important. And this also bears on the right-wing question a little bit, because when we start talking about freedom, at least in English, what we're usually doing is assuming: okay, there's already a rational person, and that person knows his interests. And I'm using the pronoun advisedly — that person knows his interests. And so that person, knowing his interests and being perfectly rational, is looking out at the world. And so for freedom, all we need to do is make sure that person can pursue his interests. All of that is, in my view, completely logically bankrupt. I mean, it's historically bankrupt, because it doesn't ask how did you get to that ideal-typical situation where that one person actually had that power. But it's philosophically bankrupt, because it takes a huge amount of investment — collective investment, political, social, familial, amicable investment — to create a person who's actually like that, right? And the way that we do it has to do with the body.

So if you're doing negative freedom, then it can all be very abstract. You don't have to think about the body. There's just a mind, right? There's a disembodied mind. There's a mind in a jar. It's also a 50-year-old male, but it's a mind in a jar. And that mind in the jar has interests and it reacts rationally to stimuli and so on — all that nonsense. But the truth is that you have to create it. And once you know that you have to create it, you ask: how do you get from the neurological to the moral, right? And how do you do that? Early childhood development has answers to these questions. We know that the first five months — the first five years are really important, the first 18 months even more important. And children — this is for me the most obvious bodily example — children need stimulation, they need attention, they need time, they need all kinds of physical attention. And that's relevant to freedom, because in giving them those things they're developing the capacities that they would need later on to make moral choices.

So that's the most basic way. Basically, in my view, if books about freedom don't talk about childbirth, you don't have to read them. And that rules out almost all of them.

Okay. So the way that I'm talking about positive freedom and negative freedom, I should stress, is my own. And I have to first rehearse a critique of positive freedom before I get to that question. So the most famous treatment of positive and negative freedom was an essay some 70 years ago by my teacher, the late Isaiah Berlin, in which he critiques positive freedom along the following lines. He says positive freedom means a person becoming himself. But the problem with that is that somebody on the outside is going to be deciding what it means to become yourself. Whereas in my view of freedom, I'm not assuming that there's a single human nature. I'm assuming that we're all different, and that the moral worlds that we would create or project outside of ourselves would all be very different. I'm not assuming that there's one good thing and that some kind of guidance, like a proletarian revolution, for example, would lead us to that one good thing. I'm assuming that there are a million good things. And so my account of positive freedom is different from the critique that Isaiah Berlin and others make of, for example, Marx. Their critique of Marx is that Marx is positive freedom and you can't allow that. That's dangerous, it gives authorities too much power, and therefore you can draw the conclusion that only negative freedom is safe.

Now, my view of Marx is different. My view of Marx is that it's not in fact positive freedom at all. I think positive freedom involves value pluralism — the notion that there are many good values. Marx does not. So I don't think Marx actually is an advocate of positive freedom. I think he's in fact an advocate of negative freedom, because he takes the view that all we need to be free is the removal of one thing. Marx's view is that private property is essentially the original sin of modern human civilization, and that if you could get rid of that thing, then we would return to ourselves and all would be well. I think that's wrong. I think it's turned out not to be true empirically, but I also think it's conceptually wrong. I think all views that say all we have to do is get rid of some external factor X and we will be free are going to turn out to be wrong, whether they're right-wing, left-wing, whatever. I, for example, don't think it's true that just getting rid of colonialism means that you're free. Getting rid of colonialism would be a very good thing, but if you then immediately found a new colonial state on a smaller scale, which is not unheard of in the history of postcolonialism, that's not freedom, right?

So the main kind of negative freedom we have to contend with is the American 'destroy the government' kind. But in my case for freedom, I'm trying to point out that any view which says the problem's on the outside, there's just one problem, you have to eliminate it — that should arouse suspicion as an account of freedom.

Well, I think in the account of Russia, the problem with 'freedom from' probably comes earlier. I don't think that accounts of freedom are at the center of what's going on now with Putin, but I think the way that Putin became possible and then was rationalized by us has a lot to do with negative freedom. So there are probably others who were in Eastern Europe in that turn of the 80s and 90s. It was an incredibly strong view then, by the people who parachuted in speaking English, that really all you needed to do was clear the landscape — you privatize as quickly as possible, don't worry too much about the details, and things will take care of themselves. And that comes straight out of a negative freedom account of the world. The problem with that is that it was a particularly ill-suited approach to a centrally planned economy with a few valuable things, because it allows you to get to oligarchy very, very quickly, which is what happened in Russia and also in Ukraine, although they've diverged very much since then. And so part — I mean, many things. Central planning set that up. It—

Central planning set up oligarchy because of the centralization, but the fact that the...

Well, first, I mean, to be fair, I did a much better job with 2014 than with 2022. So I'll answer the question with that. In 2014, it was the media. It was the media. Somewhere around late November 2013, early December 2013, there was this shift in the Russian media where they were portraying the Ukrainians in these drastic ways and incidentally contradictory ways. So like one day the Ukrainians were all gay and the next day they were all Nazis and the day after that they were all Jews. Which is a view, by the way, a view which you know that those elements are still present in Russian propaganda. They might seem contradictory but they're all still present. And then there was a very specific thing that I wrote about at the time, early December 2014, which is that Putin had gone from, he'd said it before and there are sources where I cite but they're not that well known, but in pretty prominent ways he was now talking about Russia and Ukraine being the same nation. And Russia and Ukraine being the same nation I thought was unambiguously war talk, as it turned out to be and as it always is, right, as it always is. So that's what, and I think I just was different from other people in that I was a little bit more like autistically focused on what was actually being said as opposed to the overall, like the overall context was invasions don't happen anymore and like all leaders are basically rational and we're past all of that. And I was just focused on those primary sources. The 2022 was similar but I didn't do as good a job in 2022.