A full house doesn't get much fuller than this, isn't that wonderful? Thank you all for joining us. Good evening. My name is Tracy Mets. I'm the director of the John Adams Institute. Thank you for joining us also in such numbers. I think that really speaks to the deep need that we all feel for the best and the brightest of American thinking, which is what the John Adams does, but also thoughtful people who can explain the important concepts of our time and how to move forward in these turbulent times. So a word of welcome to you all, and of course a special word of welcome to our guest of honor, Professor Timothy Snyder.
In 2018, Professor Snyder spoke at the John Adams on his book The Road to Unfreedom. You can watch the video of his talk on our website, and we are delighted that he has returned to discuss the ideas in his new book On Freedom. As you can see, it's a theme that has been with him for many years, and he has thought about it deeply. We also have with us this evening the translators of the book. I'd like to ask for a shout-out for them: Ton Doma and Janine F. Decoy. Where are you?
"Freedom is the value that makes all others possible," says Snyder. Not the freedom from oppression or tyranny, but the freedom to — the freedom to create, to thrive, to take risks, the freedom to be ourselves. Snyder was at Davos yesterday. He just arrived this afternoon, where he said that he had the feeling that the World Economic Forum brings in humanity's people like himself, as a historian, as court jesters, whose role is to create contrast to the other various serious things, i.e., money, that they're talking about in Davos today. I think — I'm curious what you think of this idea. I think his role here might be better described as a messiah, bringing hope and a vision of the way forward in these turbulent times, when the word freedom is used and abused by different people to mean very different things. In his inaugural speech, of course, the timing of this evening could not have been better. In his inaugural speech on Monday, President Trump said that the journey to reclaim our freedom has been long. I'm curious how Snyder sees this concept of freedom. We'll hear more about that in the conversation and your questions between Snyder and our moderator, Elco Bos Rosental. Elco, the floor is yours.
Thank you all. Yeah, I have to put this up a little after Tracy. Thank you all for coming in this beautiful venue. I'm not a person of faith myself, but I have been told that when people leave a church, they usually leave it more upbeat and optimistic and hopeful, or maybe even more serene than when they came in. I'm not sure if tonight will be an exception to that. We'll find out. I do want to start on a happy note, and that is by thanking the program coordinator at the John Adams, Ian Kenny.
And I'll tell you why. On the announcement of this evening on the website of the John Adams Institute, the topic obviously being freedom, he could have recommended as a reading list Jean-Paul Sartre or John Stuart Mill for their writings on freedom. But Ian decided to include a link to the YouTube rendition of David Hasselhoff's version of Looking for Freedom. And for those who are too young or too old to remember who David Hasselhoff is, he's a well-known American TV actor who, in the 1980s, was the star of an action series, Knight Rider, and in the 1990s of Baywatch. So whoever claims that the John Adams Institute is only a place for high culture, highbrow stuff — meet Ian, I would say. My heart goes out to you, Ian. Thank you.
But you have to be really careful with the hand salutes. You know, you can't even make the Hitler gesture without the woke mob calling you a Nazi. Anyway, back to the inaugural. As Tracy mentioned, it has been four days since Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, and I counted, he mentioned the word freedom three times. First, Trump announced that he would give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and their freedom. He then went on saying that those who wanted to stop this cause tried to take away his, Trump's, freedom. And lastly, Trump spoke about America having been built by patriots who gave everything they had for our, the American, freedom. That kind of freedom that Trump is referring to seems to be, although you're never entirely sure what it means, the kind of negative freedom that Tracy was referring to and about which we will talk tonight, because it's not exactly Timothy Snyder's favorite kind of freedom, since true freedom is positive freedom, the freedom to, and not the freedom from.
And if those notions now sound rather vague, his book On Freedom makes them crystal clear. In the book, Timothy Snyder investigates the idea and the concept of freedom, which he calls the value of values, and he does so with surgical precision. It's a remarkable book. It's really hard for me to describe the genre. It's a very philosophical book in which Timothy Snyder revisits the case for positive freedom made by some of his favorite thinkers. It's also a deeply personal book. It seems to be mostly aimed — but correct me if I'm wrong, not now, later — it seems to be mostly aimed at the US audience, since the concept of freedom is so much in America's DNA and so often misunderstood. But it also makes a desperate appeal to keep funding and arming Ukraine, since Snyder sees President Zelensky, and particularly because of his decision to stay in Kyiv while the Russians invaded, as the true defender of real freedom. The book also takes us, the reader, back to Timothy Snyder's youth in Ohio and to his hospital bed back in 2019 after having fallen seriously ill. In the book, Snyder also objects to the glorification of the concept of free speech, let alone free markets. And if that does raise some questions, I'm sure he'll be happy to explain.
Timothy Snyder is, among many other things, a professor of history at Yale University. He is the recipient of countless academic awards and the author of acclaimed books such as Bloodlands, Black Earth, and The Road to Unfreedom. He is an expert in Stalinism and Nazism and knows a thing or two about tyranny. And his book On Tyranny was published in 2017. It was a bestseller during Trump's first term in office. What Timothy Snyder cannot do is travel to Russia. He's one of the 200 Americans which Russia, in November of 2022, has banned from visiting, which may have something to do with the online courses on the history of Ukraine which he has made available on YouTube and which were a huge hit in Ukraine, with President Putin obviously having created his own revisionist history of Ukraine. I think it's fair to say that this ban is very telling of the power of Timothy Snyder's arguments. We'll talk for about 45 minutes, then there'll be room for audience questions. We'll talk about freedom, Ukraine, the US, and I'm curious to hear why Mr. Snyder is still on X, and I'll ask him that later on as well. Please, the floor now for Timothy Snyder.
Okay. Okay, all right. I'm lowering the microphone because I'm not showing off. So when they invite us foreigners to Amsterdam, it's usually with the promise that this is an exciting city with a very special nightlife. And yet I can't help but notice that there are about 500 of you gathered in a church to listen to a talk about philosophy. And I'm telling this joke because I want to reflect a little bit on this idea of being a court jester, which reveals that Tracy was actually watching me at Davos, because that's not something I told her or even remember saying, but it sounds like me. There's a wonderful historical painter, a Polish painter, an artist called Jan Matejko, and one of the things he's famous for is a portrayal of the king and his closest advisers carousing around the table, and everyone's having a wonderful time, and in the background you see sitting by himself the court jester, and he's the one person who actually seems to understand the depths of what's going on. So if I'm going to be a court jester, it's going to be a court jester in that sense.
Around us, many people are having a good time. In the United States, many people are about to make a lot of money. But we have to have a moment where we actually reflect on what might actually be going on. So the easiest way to do this, of course, is to talk about Mr. Trump, and I'm sure we'll have occasion to do that. But where I'd like to begin is by asking the somewhat deeper question of how you get to a United States of America where Mr. Trump is possible. Because of course it's very easy to criticize him personally, just as it is always easy to criticize any leader personally. And in fairness, he is a man — and now I'll say something that will make you uncomfortable — he is a man of considerable intelligence, considerable charisma, and considerable political talent. There are personal reasons why he is where he is, but there are deeper reasons as well. And if we're going to fulfill the promise of the subtitle of this talk, imagining a better America, we have to be able to get our minds around what it is about the United States which made him possible.
What is it that makes the disinformation possible? What makes the spectacle of a figure like this so functional, so appealing? What is it that allowed an oligarchy like the one that we see forming in the United States? How is it possible that we reached levels of wealth inequality which are greater than anything we have known since those figures have been recorded? Why are we deliberately accelerating climate change? Why is our health care so dreadful? And why are we, to use a word that some of the worst Americans apply to Canada these days — I'm going to apply it to us — why are we becoming denationalized? Why are we having such a hard time recognizing Americans as Americans? Why do some American citizens refuse to recognize their fellow Americans as such? So what I'm going to do in the time that I have here, and then we'll develop it in conversation, is to suggest that the problem has to do with the wrong idea of freedom. And for this, I'm going to use David Hasselhoff and the Berlin Wall, because I can't do lectures, I can only do conversations, and in conversation, so I have to kind of work with what was given me. So Tracy gave me court jester and Elco gave me David Hasselhoff. So think about the Berlin Wall.
When you think about the Berlin Wall, what do people say? They say, they always say, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's an unbelievably irresistible cliché. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall. It never fell. No, it never fell. The Berlin Wall never fell. That event never happened. There were protests in East Germany, there were some misunderstandings, there was a press conference, a couple of doors were opened, East Germans were making their way from Hungary, Austria to West Germany, but the wall never actually fell. It never fell. That never happened. And yet that statement, that cliché, dominates a whole historical age. When people talk about 1989, they say the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why is that? Why is that? Because in our minds, at least in our English-speaking minds, although Americans are not the only ones to do this, the notion of freedom is the wall comes down and then we're all free. And that is of course not true at all. It's not true at all. That's the wrong idea of freedom. And this is where I'm going to start with the counterintuitive part, and hopefully it gets more intuitive as I go. Yes, it's good if you're behind a wall for the wall to come down, but it's only good because you're behind the wall. It's not important that the Berlin Wall fell or didn't fall. What's important is whether the people behind that wall became free or not. And as we can see, looking at East Germany or Eastern Europe or Western Europe or the United States or the entire world, having walls come down doesn't end up making people necessarily more free than they were before. In my country, we are substantially less free by essentially any measure than we were in 1989.
So that wall not falling down didn't make us free. There's a philosophical problem here, which is the definition of freedom. It's a shortcut to say when a barrier comes down, we're free. The barrier comes down and the human remains, and the question then becomes, what do we do to allow that person to become a free person? Freedom is about the person. It's not about the barrier. The barrier only matters because of the person. If you believe in negative freedom, if you believe that freedom is about getting rid of the barrier, if you focus on the barrier and not the person, it leads you to some fairly dramatic political consequences, as you can see in the United States. So if you believe the barrier is the problem, then you will say, aha, the government is the problem, and we will be free when we make the government smaller and less functional. And what does that do? It leads to some of the consequences I mentioned: wealth inequality, monopoly, oligarchy for that matter, unregulated social platforms, disinformation, right? All because we define freedom the wrong way. But you can go deeper than that. If you think that the barrier is the problem, the government is the problem, it's very easy to next take the next step, and people do, and say, actually, it's other people who are the problem. It's not just those bureaucrats who are the problem. It's the fact that they let in all those migrants, that's the problem. It's the fact they gave all those rights to those gays or to those women, that's the problem. It's the fact that I don't like my neighbor, that's the problem. And then the next step, which also follows, is if freedom is just about the things that are holding me back, well, I feel like the truth is holding me back. There are a lot of facts that I don't like out there in the world. They're just a barrier to me becoming who I want to be. And so the truth then becomes a casualty of negative freedom, as it has done. The idea that I can just believe what I want to believe, wherever you think its origins might be, is very widespread at the moment and identified with freedom. And underlying all of this is the basic mistake of negative freedom. If I am saying that freedom is about the barrier, the government, other people, the truth, the one thing it's not about is me. I've never asked the question, who I am, what do I value, how am I going to change the world? And that's what freedom is essentially about. Freedom has to be positive. It has to be positive. It has to be attached to people. Logically, it has to be positive because, and here's my conservative moment, which I know a lot of you have been waiting for in this audience, so enjoy it. It has to be positive. It's going to last 24 seconds. It has to be positive because virtues are real. Virtues are real. Honesty is a real thing. Integrity is a real thing. Loyalty is a real thing. Beauty is a real thing. Grace is a real thing. Justice is a real thing. Those are all real things. They're not real the same way that this pulpit is real, but they are no less real than it. And the reason why freedom is the value of values is that freedom is the condition in which we can decide for ourselves which of those virtues are most important. It's the condition in which we can live through them, combine them, try to bring them out into the world. And freedom is necessary for that because the good things don't all go together. They contradict, and this is the beauty of human life, and it's the anti-totalitarian way of seeing the world, because if all the good things came together as one thing, then one person or one ideology would be enough, right? But they don't. So mercy is good. Probably most of us would accept consistency also good. But mercy must be inconsistent. That is the very definition of mercy, is inconsistency. Loyalty is good. Honesty is also good. And when I say to Elco, you look great without a tie, which one is it? Values are real, and they really clash, which is why freedom is the value of values.
Philosophically, in human terms, there's a logic of empathy. Freedom only attaches to humans, or I mean, I'm happy to go with the octopuses as well and other intelligent creatures, but the idea is that freedom only attaches to people, to beings, and it only attaches to us because we are the kinds of creatures who can have values. That's why we're special. And once we recognize it attaches to people, then we have to think about what life is actually like. So we have to recognize that we're all born helpless, and once you make that basic recognition, you understand, aha, freedom is also positive politically, because there's no way that any newborn infant can become a free person on its own. It's impossible. And so if freedom is the value of values, then you ask, how do you organize politics in such a way to make it most likely that as many as possible infants could grow up to be free people? And that can only be done by collective work. There's no other way. And so you have to empathize with the position of the infant, but not only that, you have to empathize with the position of people whose position is different than yours, because if you don't, you will get trapped in a politics of us and them, and you will end up being less free. In my American context, one central example of that is that if you are a white person and you do not recognize the essentially different position that African Americans have in the history of the country, if you don't recognize that and try to empathize with it, you will end up in a position where people will deny you things that would have made you more free. One of the reasons that we fail to have a welfare state, or we fail to have health care, or we fail to have a lot of good things, is that Americans are unable to empathize, to see the position of other Americans. And there's an even more basic logic to empathy, which is this: in order to be free, you have to know who you are, which sounds easy, right? It sounds easy, but it's incredibly difficult. We all go through life with bits of metaphysical spinach between our teeth. We all have flaws and problems and shortcomings which we cannot recognize on our own. We can only recognize them with the help of other people, which means that in order to be a free person, you have to know yourself, and to know yourself, you have to take other people's judgments seriously, which means you have to take them seriously, you have to empathize with them, you have to see them as people. So in all of these ways, I'm trying to claim freedom is positive. It's positive. In the book, what I do is I then work from that forward towards a politics which could apply, I think, generally, but a politics of a better America. But to make sure we have time to talk, I'll just close briefly on a few ideas of how changing the idea would change the political conversation. So if we think about freedom the way that I'm describing, and we only apply it to people and only apply it positively, then there is certainly no such thing as a free market, which, by the way, there is not. There has never been such a thing as a free market. It's impossible. Property rights themselves are a government intervention in the economy, right? There is logically no such thing as a free market and never can be. But the problem goes deeper than that. Whenever you take the word free and you put it in front of something that's not a human, you are inviting authoritarianism. Using the phrase free market is taking an authoritarian position, because if the market is free, you owe duties to the market, and that is what the phrase free market means. Anyone who says the word free market is saying you humans have the duty not to intervene in the free market. And I would push this claim even further into, you know, maybe a less comfortable zone. There's no such thing as free speech either. Speech is not free. The utterances are not free. The people who talk ought to be free. The speakers ought to be free. The humans ought to be free. If we think about free speech negatively, that is, no barriers to the utterances, where do we end up? We end up with oligarchs who own social platforms complaining that the idiocies that they pronounce are magnified only three quadrillion times and not four quadrillion times. That's where a negative view of freedom leads you. If you take a positive view of freedom, you would say every human has the right to speak truth to power, and you would try to create a situation in which people feel not threatened when they do that, but also have access to truth. So it's a much, if you see freedom this way in the context of speech, it leads you to a much richer notion. Or the right to health care, which perhaps this audience takes for granted, but which in the United States would be extraordinarily controversial. If you think that freedom is about the person, and that freedom requires empathy, and that we have collectively the duty to create conditions so that people can become free, then things like health care or parental leave, for that matter, or even vacation, can be associated with freedom. So I'll just close on two thoughts very quickly. The first is that in my country at least, and I think in the English language in general, we have this problem that we talk about freedom, but we don't mean it, or if we mean it, we mean something which is actually incorrect and makes us less free. I think in Europe the problem is different. I think in Europe there are a lot of sound policies which ought to be justified in terms of freedom, but which are not, which are justified in terms of solidarity or equality or the nation. And those are all fine things, but I think actually a very strong argument for parental leave or vacations or health care is freedom. I think that's actually the best argument. And then the final thought is this: the people who are seeking to break the American state, the people who are seeking to break European states, the people who are trying to take us to a larger world of extreme wealth inequality and extreme inequality in access to information, the people who are trying to break things, they have a coherent idea, and that coherent idea is precisely negative freedom. That idea gives them a justification every day to break things, because after all, they're just expressing themselves. The people who are trying to stop them, whether they're Europeans or whether they're Americans or whether they're someone else, don't seem to have such a coherent idea. It's pushing here, pushing there, a bit of that and a bit of this and a bit of that is fine. But I guess I want to suggest that I think the idea of freedom, when properly understood, can be more than coherent. It can be actually true and also politically powerful. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for that introduction. We'll spend a big chunk of this conversation talking about freedom. I do want to start with this week, inaugural week, and what you have written about Trump in the past. So I'll start with something you have told me before. We've — I interviewed you about eight years ago when the first Trump term had just started, and your office at Yale when you had published On Tyranny, and you warned that with Trump in the White House, everybody had to be on guard the entire time instead of, you said, deceiving ourselves, thinking it will not be that bad. I wonder, because I did notice a lot of complacency among Democrats in the past few months, among the left, I wonder what your state of mind is right now compared to eight years ago at the same time.
Oh, sorry, I think you're sitting on it. But I wanted to share — we heard the introduction. So, I mean, my state of mind isn't that important. Let me try to analyze what I think is similar and what's different. So speaking of the American left or the Democrats, on the one side, there is much more certain knowledge that the American regime can change than there was in 2016, for sure. And you have far more people who made very specific preparations for Trump this time. And those people are those who hold state-level offices, right-minded lawyers. And you see this, for example, in the reaction to, you know, the stack of executive orders, where almost as quickly as the executive orders can come out, you know, there are already objections filed in courts. So there's that. There are more people who are more aware that it can actually happen. He is more prepared, but so is the opposition. Yeah, I mean, on the other side, so there are specific people who are prepared, but there's also a weariness which wasn't there in 2016, because in 2016 people still thought they were living in a normal world and they just had to get to 2018 in the elections. Now people think, okay, well, we lost, Clinton lost, Trump tried to overthrow the government, he was still elected again, Kamala lost, what exactly are we supposed to do in general? And so I think that is kind of open, and my hope is that there will be a different kind of resistance this time around after some of the policies start to strike home, so in the next six months. But then your thought is exactly right. He's much more prepared, where the people around him are much more prepared. I mean, last time he thought he was going to lose, and this time they actually have spent — not him particularly, but the people around him have put a good deal of thought into what they're going to do.
Having written On Tyranny, which basically became a Bible on how to resist Trump-style authoritarianism, the fact that he again won, a fascist, you call him, not every expert on fascism, I think, agrees, but does that mean you lost that argument?
No, I think it means — I mean, it wasn't an argument I was having with Mr. Trump. I'd be very happy to have an argument directly with Mr. Trump and see how that goes, right? But I wasn't having an argument with Mr. Trump and his followers. I was trying to get more people to be more prepared. And I think, so it's not exactly an argument with a winner or a loser. It's an attempt to enable and empower. And I got to say, I'm glad I did it. You know, I'm really glad I did it because, I mean, the first lesson of On Tyranny is do not obey in advance. And there are an awful lot of Americans who are obeying in advance, and I can't personally stop them all from doing it. But at the same time, the consciousness that there is a problem called anticipatory obedience is now present in the American conversation in a way that it wouldn't have been if I hadn't read the book and written the book. And so in that sense, I'm glad. I'm very glad. So it's like, I'm glad it's out there. I wish it weren't a bestseller, if you see what I mean.
Sure, right. What seems must be difficult for you, though, as a writer, you know, if you do publish in the mainstream media, it would be in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. You teach at Yale. Everybody at Yale agrees with you. Everybody in this audience agrees with you, because if there is somebody here, a fan of Trump, they probably won't say it out loud. So you're preaching to the choir in a sense, or doesn't it feel that way? And how do you reach across the aisle, if that is what your intention will be?
I'm a big fan of preaching to the choir. That's why the choir comes to church on Sunday. I'm explaining this because you've advertised yourself as not being a person of faith. So the choir comes to church on Sunday because they want to be preached to. I have no idea. Yeah, no, so now, so I'm glad we've clarified this. But it's actually a really important point. I am 100% in favor of preaching to the choir, and I admire people who preach to the choir because we all need to hear others make a case. We need to hear each other make a case. Being preached at or being part of the choir is much better than staying at home and being alone. But what if everybody makes the same case for the same audience? You know, I know where you're going. I just, I'm just actually, before we get to the negative thing, I'm just trying to talk about the positive thing, which is that it really is a good thing to have friends and to see them and to talk about the problems. It really is a good thing to speak in public because that's what keeps people going, right? So this is why I just, I have to go this way with preaching to the choir, because preaching to the choir sounds negative and it's always used negatively. And I think preaching to the choir is actually 100% good, and we should do it. We should either preach or be the choir. We can take turns, like one day you're the choir, I'm the preacher. But it's 100% a good thing to preach to the choir. And the idea — yeah, and the choir, it's like, so I'm so, like, it would be like if I weren't preaching to the choir, they would be out doing those other things in Amsterdam, which I've heard about, right? And instead — dangerous things, exactly. And instead, they're here, right? So it's good. But I mean, I don't want to dodge your question. I just really dislike the idea that preaching to the choir is negative, and I want to turn that cliché around. I think it's like, I think being in the choir is great. You know, I wish I could sing, and if I could, I would stand up and do it right now, and they'd be very happy.
Okay, but you must see the risk of echo chambers, right? Or we're not there yet?
I mean, no, I'm going to — no, so I'm going to get to your question, but I just don't want to turn immediately to the, like, oh yeah, like the progressives all think the same thing and they're incredibly boring and all they do is look at themselves in the mirror. You know, I don't want to turn to that immediately because it's, it's, it's, that's how you lose in a way. Like, you only win if you know the things that you care about and you're willing to talk about, you're willing to take that small risk of being the person who preaches to the choir or take that small risk of being in the choir and listening, right? Like, it's really important to have things that you care about and believe in and stand for rather than just being worried, right? Rather than just being worried. And one thing that people worry about is, oh no, are you just preaching to the choir? So as far as reaching across the aisle, I don't believe in that. What I believe in is speaking to people where they are. So I don't believe in accepting, okay, there are people like me in America and people not like me in America, right? There are people like me in America in some respects, and then there are people who are not like me in some respects, and I try to talk to everybody, and I do talk to everybody. I literally knock on doors during election time and talk to whoever's on the other side of the door. I do that, and people should do that. But you also have to recognize that it's important to have positive ideas, and you can't reach people on the other side unless you have them. Take health care, for example. Or take Trump's electorate, for example. Trump's electorate liked Kamala Harris's policies far more than they liked Trump's policies, which is an argument for talking to them, but it's also an argument against the idea that everybody is on one side or another side.
Right. The New York Times interviewed a right-wing blogger last week, and I have to be honest, I had never heard of him, Curtis Yarvin. I don't know if you know him. He was a tech blogger, still not a household name, but apparently he has the ear of people like J.D. Vance and Michael Anton, who was a Trump administration official. They all quote him and praise him as an interesting thinker. Well, what he preaches is basically dictatorship and a purge of government officials. I don't know if you know this particular person, but the fact that thoughts about authoritarianism become more mainstream, the fact that Americans — you know, many polls show that Americans favor the idea of a strongman, of bending the rules, even of shutting down news organizations if they undermine American values. They're more open to that. How do you explain that if there are still people like you making the counter-argument?
How do I explain that I haven't persuaded everybody in the country?
No, not just you, but I mean, how is it possible? It's not just you, but many people have written about democracy and the rule of law, etc., etc., especially during the Trump administration, but the response is even more people liking the idea of a strongman, even academics like this person, you know, being, it seems to be more mainstream than before. I'm just wondering how that is possible.
No, no, I mean, I'll give different kinds of answers. The first is it's not historically surprising because democracy is hard, and democracy is always simultaneously an elite effort and a popular effort, right? So you can't do democracy without an elite which says, we are actually willing to yield power every two years or every four years, and we're even going to talk like we think that's a good thing. And you also can't do democracy without people who think that their votes make a difference. And it's not that easy to keep both of those things going. And history shows how hard it is to keep both of those things going, because democracy is just — the number of people who have lived in democracy is very, very, very small, especially if you define democracy stringently, right? It's very, very small in world history, and it's smaller all the time right now. Second part of the answer has to do with the list of things that I was giving. So it's not just that people have bad ideas. People do have bad ideas, but it's also that, for example, the technological environment we're in favors bad ideas. So social media platforms are designed to separate human beings from other human beings, keep them in front of screens for as long as possible, and essentially educate us to see other people as being really no better than bots. That's the education process, right? It drives us away from empathy and towards the notion that other people are just kind of algorithmic entities. I'm the real, I'm a person, but the bots aren't, and also the other people aren't. And that's just one example of how this works. And these things favor that. Or wealth inequality. Wealth inequality teaches people that it's all a hustle, the rules don't really matter, it's all about who you know, and if you don't know anybody, you just have to cower and you have to try to find some kind of patron. So it encourages an authoritarian set of behaviors. So there are object — or illness, fear, right? The fear, there's so much fear inside American society now, which can't really be expressed as fear. People are afraid they're going to die, they're afraid they're going to get sick, they're afraid they're going to lose their jobs and therefore their health insurance, and you can't express that as fear. The culture doesn't allow it, so you can express it as anger, and then that anger can be turned towards other people. So there are structural reasons. But — and then, since you mentioned this, I'm just going to say there's also the problem with the humanities. So, okay, another 25 seconds of being Joe Conservative. It's really, really important to teach the humanities. It's really important to teach literature and history and philosophy in schools and in universities. And the reason why it's important is it helps with empathy in general, but it's also important because it helps to kind of put bad history or abusive history into context, whether that's government attempts to censor history, which we have, and all those attempts to censor history are in their direction of telling people that they're good and they should be angry at people who say they're not good. But also because, like, when someone comes along with the idea that monarchy is great and because monarchy, like dictatorship, you know, and therefore, hey, let's all be dictators, and then suddenly they're held as universal geniuses by people who have power. Like, if anybody knew anything about history, you know, you could say different things. Like, you could say, wow, in Northern Europe, monarchy seems to go really well with social democracy, but why not? Or you could say, in the United States, if we'd had the monarchy longer, we would be more like Canada, we would have gotten rid of slavery early, and we'd be a better country. But instead, like, these sort of escapades from the humanities, where people jump in with one clever point, you know, that carries the day, because we're driving knowledge of the past out of ourselves.
Final question before we really go to the book. You mentioned do not obey in advance, the first lesson of On Tyranny, your book from 2017. From what you've seen after November 5th, who got that lesson, don't obey in advance, and who didn't? Particularly, for instance, the media, or I don't know, the courts, it's still early. Who gets it and who doesn't?
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Because, so the media in my country, and of course this is a lesson, the media in my country, an important part of it, are owned by very wealthy people who have the salient characteristic of what they see as particular vulnerability to the government. So you have this ironic situation that if you let somebody become a billionaire or, you know, a decillionaire or a centibillionaire, they actually feel more rather than less vulnerable. And this is where I realize I talk about empathy, but this is where my own empathy kind of collapses. I just don't really get it. Like, I don't. And in general, I don't really get this business of the more privileged you are, like, the more you have a right to whine. No, it's true. Like, I mean, look at the president of the United States. Like, you're okay, so now you're the president, and you just made billions of dollars on a meme coin. So you've finally gotten rich, which is what you wanted to do your whole life. Now you're finally rich, you've finally done it, okay, and you're the president, and yet you whine all the time. Okay, but so, but returning to the question, when it's a, you end up in a bad position when the owners of important media are billionaires who think they're vulnerable to the government, because then they see their newspapers as a way to obey in advance, which we saw with The Washington Post and which we saw with The Los Angeles Times, which are two newspapers with incredibly proud traditions of reporting. And so, but you need to make a distinction in the media there, as you very well know, between the owners who stopped those newspapers from endorsing a presidential candidate and the reporters. And the actual reporters, almost to a person, understand about not obeying in advance and generally try, and many of them resigned in the wake. So reporters, many reporters understand, let's put it that way. Many, many governors of American states now understand, don't obey in advance, and have made plans. And I know this sort of from personal contacts, but also from public statements. And, you know, the people who have done bad, it's interesting. I mean, it's like now I'm going to go from my conservative moment to my Marxist moment, but you can almost predict how badly people do by their social position, right? Like seeing the spectacle of the tech billionaires lined up behind Trump. I mean, there are many things which, there are many pro-American syndromes that that expresses. It expresses the problem of disinformation, it expresses the problem of wealth inequality, but it also expresses this business of obeying in advance, where the people with the visible power who are known to have visible power make it clear that what they're doing is compromising right from the top.
You wrote a wonderful book. It's actually a very touching book, also because it's very personal. I did wonder when I began reading it, maybe some readers were expecting, since it's such an urgent time, a more rousing pamphlet or whatever. What they got instead was a philosophical book, and you just explained how it's in a way an answer to On Tyranny. Ukraine plays a big role in the book, and you write that the ultimate example of true freedom is the decision that Zelensky made to stay in Kyiv when the Russians invaded, or words along those lines. Can you explain why, for you, that is the ultimate proof of somebody who's free?
Yeah, I mean, you're right, On Tyranny and On Freedom relate to each other. The thing about On Tyranny is it's still there the whole time, you know. And so, and as I said before, it kind of makes me a little sad that it's the bestseller week after week, and it is because people think they need it. Whereas with, but On Tyranny leaves you with a reasonable question, which is, what is this thing that we're defending? And I was trying to take that question seriously, and so I spent seven years working really hard on this book.
What is essentially a kind of philosophy book, trying to answer the question of what freedom actually is. And I got drawn into that and think it's incredibly interesting and that it leads us in fruitful political directions. Um, sorry, now I've forgotten your question. You'll...
Well, the question was about Zelensky and why you [see him as] a model of freedom.
Yeah, okay, so it has to do with, it has to do with the two things I was trying to set up in the little talk. It has to do with the, the balancing of values, but also with the fact that we live over time, that we live over time. So if, if I'm right that freedom is about balancing values, that, you know, sometimes you're loyal and, and sometimes you're honest and sometimes you find a way to do both at the same time, but each time you make a choice in life between values, among values, you're also leaving behind a trace in, in the world, but also inside yourself, because we live, we live in time and only in one direction. And so the, the ironic consequence of this is that if you do live this way, like if you live as a free person and you make these moral choices, that creates the thing which we call character. That's how you have character, and that means that, you know, there's a kind of living record of your moral choices inside you, and it's something more than a personality, it's something more than a set of quirks or inclinations, it's a sense of who you actually are. And I believe that, I mean, ironic as it might seem, if you were a free person in that sense, you arrive in situations where you feel you can only do one thing, and the reason why you feel you can only do one thing is precisely because you're a free person. Or to put it the way that I put it in the book: if you're not free, you can always run, but if you are free, sometimes you can't. And that's what I meant with Zelensky. And I was, it's not me, it's, it's a conversation that I had with Zelensky in September of 2022 about this, where I asked him the direct question, and his answer was very indirect, and it had to do with his childhood and his parents and choices he'd made before and what other people expected of him. He, what, what he didn't do at all, at all, was say, 'I was the lonely hero who climbed the mountain,' you know, and pointed the way to the promised land. That's the opposite of what he did. There was not a shadow of that in his answer. What he said was it had to do with people who taught me certain kinds of values, it had to do with other choices I made before that, and it also had to do with the fact that I knew that people expected this of me, and for them, right, for them I had to do it. And he also said something, I'm not sure I put it in the book, he said that the president is only the first grain of sand passing through the hourglass.
You brought up in your introduction, and you, it's, it's early in the book, the newborn basically, your theory of freedom begins where life begins, with a newborn, a newborn, and you just mentioned that is not free but can become free. You're not a newborn. Your stage in life as an American, as an academic, you're here now. How, how free are you? What part of your life right now, just that maybe we understand the concept of your definition of freedom better, how free are you?
Well, I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to dodge that at least for a moment, um, because I think we are, we have the ability to think about freedom correctly if we dwell on the business of birth and, and also the business of, of death. And I write about, I write about both birth and death in the book for that, for that reason. The, the, I mean, this is a good example of bodily empathy or corporeal empathy, where of course a man can't, you know, can't as an experience childbirth the way that a woman does, but you can be present when it happens. And if you're present when it happens, one of the things that you can't help but be aware of is how much has to go into that child from the beginning. So yes, I am of a certain age, but one of the things that I am is a father of two children, and I'm trying hard to think about freedom along with child rearing or along with childhood, because, or to put it in, in a critical way, usually when we think about freedom, we're thinking about somebody who already is an adult. They're already an adult. Usually you imagine they live in a nice house, like all their other problems have been solved, but are they free, right? Are, are they free? Whereas I'm trying to think, what are all the things you would have to do for a child so that child could become a free adult? And that's the way we actually live. So I mean, the reason I'm, the childbirth thing is in the book because it mattered to me when I saw it, like things came, things became clear to me when I saw childbirth that hadn't been so clear to me before. But it's also in the book because the only thing we have, I mean, maybe we have other things in common, but one thing we all have in common, we all have in common is that we were once newborns. We all have that in common, and that is precisely the thing that a negative idea of freedom gets us to forget, right? Negative idea of freedom says, 'Hey, you're great wherever you are, let's go knock down a wall, um, let's go defeat something.' Negative freedom doesn't remind you of what it's like to actually be alive. And, and the same goes, the same goes with death. I mean, I write about the time that I almost died in the book for many reasons. One of them is to talk about healthcare, but another is that the awareness that life has a shape helps you to realize, okay, you have a limited amount of time to make these choices. You're living in one direction, there's one kind of trajectory. You can't, if you, and if you imagine that you, if you, if you lose sight of that, then you're going to lose sight of your ability to be free. And so, like, that birth and death make you free isn't the way that this is usually argued. Usually birth is ignored and death is a bad thing. And you'll notice that the extreme, the extreme thinkers about negative freedom are trying to deny death. They're trying to treat death as one more barrier that they're going to overcome, which is an incredibly silly idea and is not going to make anyone free. And actually, for those of you who are fans of immortality, um, uh, aren't we? Um, see, see, you're like, you're becoming more of a religious person as we, as we sit here. Um, the, um, there actually, immortality and its, and its, you know, and its, and its problems are actually something I dwell on in, in the book. So how free am I? I'm very free is the answer. I'm very free. I, and, and that partly has to do with, um, with a hell of a lot of good luck, and I try to recognize the good luck of where I come from as a person, um, in order to be more articulate about what some of the conditions of freedom would be generally, right? So like, it's one thing to be, the American word for this is privilege, and it's one thing to say, okay, I'm privileged, therefore I'm guilty, but in a way, like, that's a kind of, that sort of short circuits the whole question. The question would be more like, okay, I was lucky to have a good public school, so maybe it would be good if everybody had a good public school, right? I was lucky that nobody held me back because of the color of my skin. Well, maybe it would be good if everybody, if nobody were held back because of the color of their skin. So I, that I'm starting from the idea, as you know, because you read the book, that I have had an unusual amount of freedom in my life, which, and I'm trying to use that in a constructive way.
Do you expect to become freer? More obstacles being removed that, that you want out of the way?
I haven't actually thought of it that way. I mean, what, I, I don't, because I don't, as an American, the barriers of my being more free are almost 100% about structural matters that would help other people become more free. So I would be like, I can't be more, more free in the American healthcare system by myself. There's literally nothing I can do. Like when I was sick, this is kind of a disgusting example, but when I was really sick, that, and when I almost died, this was about five, six years ago, correct? Yeah, five, December of 2019. And I, and I, and I went into the American healthcare system kind of naively. Um, one of the things that happened, and I don't think I wrote about this in the book, but one of the things that happened was that afterwards, everyone said, not everyone, but many people said, well, Tim, why didn't you call up rich and famous people that you know? And like, being a kind of naive, you know, like I, I didn't, like honestly, that didn't occur to me. And I'm kind of glad it didn't occur to me. I mean, it would have been bad for my children if I had died because it didn't occur to me, but I'm sort of glad it didn't occur to me that when I'm sick, what I should do is call up a rich person I know and like have them call the hospital and make sure that like good doctors come and treat me. But that was a kind of normal American response. Like they were like, Tim, you know, rich and famous people, why didn't you call rich and famous people so that they could get... And I can't fix that. I mean, just that's an example. I can't fix that by myself, right? For me to be more free when I'm sick, the whole system would have to be, would have to be changed. So for me to be, I mean, I think this is true for Americans generally. I think like the idea that what we need is more negative freedom is going to make us less free because if we tear down the existing rules, so one thing that's going to happen in America now is that there's going to be even less enforcement of the laws we have on the books against monopolies. We have decent laws against monopolies, they're not really enforced, except recently we have done some, we have done some enforcement these last four years. That's going to stop, and the logic will be negative freedom. If you have a monopoly, hey, great for you, you know, but that monopolies end up stifling competition, raising prices, um, and in general making people less free than, less free than they are. So more negative freedom, right? Or we get rid of our very weak regulations on social media platforms, we get rid of those, um, we're all going to end up less free. So I think I can only really become more free as an American anyway if the structures change.
If negative freedom is now the, the dominant narrative, um, it seems to me, but, but maybe I'm wrong, that, that originally positive freedom, that the cliche of the American dream, everybody has a house, car, you know, was, was positive freedom or not? And, and if that was the case, when did that, when did that turn? When did negative freedom become the, the overarching, um, um, concept of freedom?
Yeah, there are American historians who can do this better than me. Like, I'm an American and I'm a historian, but I'm not an American historian, if you see what I mean. But the, the, um, the, you're, you're right. The phrase American dream arose, um, in the early 20th century as a kind of hybrid, I think a good kind of hybrid between the notion that you can go off and find a good job plus there's going to be a welfare state behind you. Like it was, it was both things at the same time. So the American dream is you can do better than your parents, and that's partly because you can go off and get a better job, but it's also partly because Roosevelt, the New Deal, um, what I'm calling positive freedom, which President Roosevelt believed in. The, the turning point is January 1981 and Ronald Reagan come to office. Ronald Reagan was another very talented, very charismatic politician and probably the most important public advocate of the idea of negative freedom. Um, he said that, he, he, he said very funny, appealing things about how government is always the problem, and that's an, that's a simple, elegant thing to believe. You know, he said the most, the scariest words in the English language where I'm from, 'the government and I'm here to help.' And that's a funny joke, but of course, you know, if your house has just been blown down by a hurricane, or if you need health insurance, or you want your roads to be paved, or you want, want your children to have a doctor, um, it's actually not that funny at all. Those are, there are a lot of things that you can't do without, without a government, and the government is often there to help. So, um, it's the, it's the 1980s, and, and I experienced this like as, as a young person. I experienced the pull of these ideas and how articulate he was and the thinkers he brought into the mainstream which hadn't been mainstreamed before, and the associated ideas that like trickle-down economics, we called it that, if you let the rich get very rich, then somehow the poor will also get less poor, which the last 50 years have demonstrated is, is not the case. But I also want to say with Reagan that it's very much connected to race. It's very much connected to race. The assault on the welfare state has to do with the idea of negative freedom, that government's always a problem, therefore we should shrink the welfare state. But it also, there's, it also has to do with race because what Reagan said was not in so many words, because he found intelligent ways to talk around it that everyone could understand, but what he said was, you can't have the welfare state because the black people will just use it and they'll exploit it and they'll never work and they're just exploiting you, the hardworking white people. And that division, which is what I was calling in the talk a lack of empathy, like that division is also a hammer which is used to break the welfare state.
You just mentioned Roosevelt. Roosevelt's famous for four freedoms. Two, two of those were negative freedoms or freedoms from, right? Freedom from fear, freedom from want. Or is that, are those not negative?
