"The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone." (Preface)
"We tend to think of freedom just as freedom from as negative. But conceiving of freedom as an escape or an evasion does not tell us what freedom is nor how it would be brought into the world. Freedom to as a positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don't think of freedom as positive, we won't even get freedom in the negative sense, since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom.Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to. Freedom is positive. It is about holding virtues in mind and having some power to realize them." (p. 31)
I like his comparison to our situation in which we are often blind for the context that we live in, the automatic responses that we have without truly understanding that there is something outside of the box that we are trapped in, like animals in a behavioural test that our current digital technology could well be:
"The first brain hack is experimental isolation, getting you alone, out of bodily contact with your fellow creatures. It generates an artificial loneliness that enables four more brain hacks, four more kinds of manipulation. In the experiments, the isolated rat or pigeon works one end of the tool but does not see its other end, nor the actions and intentions of the experimenters. We similarly set our eyes on the display of a computer or a phone. We are ignorant of what lies on the other side: the tangle of algorithms, the vacuum of purpose. Fingertips on a keyboard, we fall into a trap. We speak of "my computer" or "my phone," but these objects are not ours, any more than the lab belongs to the ratunless we figure out how they work on us." (p. 101)
The deliberate intention of people behind the scenes to create algorithms that determine your thoughts and behaviour may seem paranoid but as we're currently witnessing in real life, and many Western politicians and intelligence services seem very naive in this context:
"Our fears are cultivated to conform to what others in our categories fear. If you are a middle-aged white male and you fear exactly what other middle-aged white males fear, you have been had. When your fears are predictable, then so are you, which means that you (and your digital demographic) are ripe for manipulation. When you are predictable, you predictably bring your country down.
Conforming, you are easily led. Having withdrawn from the rugged borderland of the unpredictable into the cozy cove of your digital demographic, you await orders, or nudges. You have exposed your buttons, and you wait for them to be stroked and pushed. Anyone (or anything) that caresses your naked anxieties will also be arousing those of the legion of cowards in which you have enlisted. The more people there are who fear the same things, the easier tyranny becomes. Unfreedom is efficient." (p. 105)
The autocrats like Putin and others are real masters at this: taking advantage of the weaknesses and isolation of individuals to rally them for a great sense of historical community:
"Politicians of inevitability are fake economists who lull us to sleep with the idea that larger forces will always bring us back to equilibrium. Politicians of eternity are real entertainers who assuage our sense of loss with an appealing tale about the past. They gain our confidence by circling us back to a mythical era when we as a nation were (supposedly) innocent. These time-looping con artists nudge us away from democracy and toward their own feeling that they should rule forever and never be sent to prison (a motive especially apparent in the case of Trump and also Benjamin Netanyahu). Deprived of historical knowledge and of the habit of ethical thinking by the politics of inevitability, we are easy marks. Rising authoritarians succeed in this century not by proposing futures but by making any conversation about them seem pointless or absurd.
"Vladimir Putin was the most important politician of eternity. His Russia drew directly from Brezhnev's 1970s, a time of nostalgia for the victory of 1945. Putin and his generation were raised with the idea that the supposed innocence of an older generation justified any action by a younger one. He looped back to Brezhnev's 1970s, and from the 1970s to an imagined 1945, and then to a baptism a thousand years before that, which supposedly joined Russia with Ukraine forever and made Russians eternally innocent. Russia was always the victim and always the victor. Russians had the right to determine whether or not Ukraine and Ukrainians existed; anyone who denied that right was an enemy. A Russian fascist tradition that spoke in just this way was discovered and celebrated." (p. 156)
Yet he is equally severe for libertarianism, where everything is left to market forces.
"According to the libertarians, the "free market" defends freedom. If the market does not defend something, it follows, that thing is not freedom. If the market does not protect a certain right, then we are expected to concede that it is not a right. When libertarians argue that markets defend freedom, they really mean that humans have a duty to defend markets. In a "free market," freedom is defined as the right of things to move around unhindered by humans, who are defined as barriers, or as entities with duties toward things. Human beings must be denied the freedom to change how capitalism works, and that denial must be labeled "freedom." Thus in a "free market," politics begins from Orwellian oppression. The "free market" only exists as a slogan covering senseless contradictions and justifying political bullying. There is no such thing as a "free market" in the world, nor can there be. Capitalism minus norms and laws is murderous conquest. If someone invades your country, seizes your house, enslaves your children, and puts your kidneys up for sale, that is the magic of the unregulated market at work. Markets cannot be free. Only people can be free. Freedom is a human value. It can be recognized and pursued only by humans. There is no substitute for freedom, no way to delegate it. The moment we delegate freedom, to the market or anything else, it becomes submission. When people surrender the word free, freedom vanishes from their lives." (p. 215)
For us Europeans, who live in a free world where we can do and act as we please, all this seems pretty obvious. My assessment is that many Americans do not understand what freedom means, and they are definitely not the Leaders of the Free World. Obama made this claim, and many presidents before him, but the US is not and has never been this Leader. I think it's up to us Europeans to step up and show to the rest of the world that real population happiness and prosperity are the result of deep democracy, with rule of law, human rights, press freedom, solidarity and a socially corrected free market.
Snyder's book gives a good analysis, food for thought and also a framework from which to design this freedom we all crave.
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