🔔 The Freedom Trap: How Our Obsession with Being "Left Alone" Is Making Us Less Free

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We've got freedom all wrong.

For decades, Americans have embraced a dangerously narrow definition of liberty – one that Timothy Snyder, in his penetrating book "On Freedom," calls "negative freedom." It's the freedom from interference, from rules, from being told what to do. It's about being left alone.

And it's making us more vulnerable than we realize.

On Freedom: A New Politics of the Body 

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Transcript

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So you're looking for that deeper understanding, the kind that really gets to the heart of big ideas without feeling totally overwhelming. Yeah, cutting through the noise. Exactly. You want to feel informed, but not like you're wading through jargon. And that's what we try to do here. Today, we're doing a deep dive into freedom. It's a huge concept, obviously. We're using Timothy Snyder's book on freedom as our guide. He's a historian, really sharp on global affairs. And our mission, so to speak, is to really unpack what freedom means beyond just, well, beyond just being free from stuff. Restrictions, constraints, that sort of thing. That's often called negative freedom, isn't it? That's the term, yeah. Freedom from. And Snyder's perspective, drawing on history, philosophy, philosophy. It pushes for something more, something more active. We think it'll give you some surprising facts, maybe spark some different ways of thinking. Okay, let's start there then, this negative freedom. Freedom from oppression, from barriers. It feels kind of intuitive, right? Remove the bad stuff and boom, you're free. It does seem like the default setting sometimes, but Snyder challenges that. And he uses a really powerful contemporary example of the Ukrainians facing invasion. How so? What was their take? Well, when you look at how they talked about freedom, it wasn't overwhelmingly framed as just freedom from the Russians. I mean, obviously that was critical, but... But there was more to it. Yeah, much more. Their focus was often on what they could be free for, what kind of future they were fighting to build. Ah, okay. Free for? Free for? That's a really interesting shift. What did that actually look like for them? Can you give some examples? Sure. It was about, you know, the world opening up again. Prospects. A soldier recovering. Thinking about a future where people could perceive their own goals. Right. A veteran just wanting to see his son smile again. simple, profound things. A young soldier dreaming of having kids one day. Wow. Their commander talked about getting back to a normal life, you know, full of opportunities. So it wasn't just about surviving the threat. It was about the presence of hope, the ability to shape what comes next. Agency. So it's definitely not passive. It's an active stance. And Snyder connects this to the idea that freedom isn't something you can just receive. Like a gift. Exactly. He really pushes back on the idea that freedom is just handed over by, say, founding fathers, or that it's baked into a national character, or that it just automatically springs from capitalism. He mentions an Eritrean poet who made this really sharp distinction. Though powerful talk about the country, this abstract thing, but the oppressed, they talk about the people. The actual individuals? Yes. Snyder insists that only people, only individuals, can actually be free. And the minute we start thinking something else, the state, the market, whatever makes us free, we kind of risk losing it. We become passive. And this is where it gets uncomfortable historically, right? If your power relies on keeping others subjugated. Well, yeah. Your definition of freedom might conveniently become the absence of any government or authority that could challenge your power. Yeah. think about slave owners or those who denied rights to women throughout history their freedom was the freedom to dominate precisely so this purely negative view just being left alone has often served the powerful that image of the liberty bell ringing for all well it kind of papers over who was actually included in that all back then doesn't it it certainly does the absence of constraints on some meant the reinforcement of unfreedom for others snyder also weaves in his own experiences which is interesting his family roots in ohio seeing history unhold there That sounds like it gave him a real sense of grounding. It seems so, yeah. A sense of continuity, of place, but also smaller things. Like his grandmother, he describes her as very thoughtful, critical, and finding refuge in his grandparents' attic with all sorts of books. Paleontology, a wrinkle in time. Just this wide exposure to ideas early on. That breeds a kind of intellectual freedom, you know. Sure. Opens up possibilities. And then he mentions reading about martial law in Poland in 1982. That must have been stark. Absolutely. That contrast between, you know, Soviet style repression and the images of solidarity resisting. It's a powerful lesson in what unfreedom looks like and the courage it takes to fight back. Yeah. He contrasts that with how Americans understood threats back then, like nuclear war, now the term Holocaust sort of emerged later in public memory. It shows how our understanding of deep unfreedom isn't static. It evolves. That makes sense. He also talks about an early interest in government efficiency. How did that change? Yeah, it sounds like initially he leaned towards a more maybe technocratic view, getting things done smooth line. But then his academic work, especially on the Soviet economy and these surprising conversations he had with Soviet scholars in Moscow around 1990, it showed him the messiness, the complexity of real societal change. Efficiency wasn't the whole picture. And isn't that where the story about the bells comes in, the ones exiled in Russia? Yes. Such a striking detail. Bells being literally banished because they could be used to call people together, to incite public gatherings. It's a potent symbol of suppressing associations, suppressing that collective voice. Wow. And his economic analysis back then was quite prescient, wasn't it? Predicting that the Soviet structure might accelerate collapse and that just letting capitalism rip wouldn't necessarily lead to perfect markets. He did. He suggested it could lead towards oligarchy instead, which, you know, looking back. Seems pretty spot on. It shows he was already thinking about the complexities, the vulnerabilities of freedom even then. Definitely. Definitely. So let's circle back to this idea of negative freedom being the default, especially after the Cold War. What were the downsides Snyder saw? Well, a big one was how the collapse of the Soviet Union was interpreted, particularly in the U.S. It was often seen as this simple, straightforward victory for capitalism and negative freedom. Just remove the state control and democracy and markets will flourish. A bit simplistic, perhaps. Very much so. It tended to gloss over the really deep historical political factors. For instance, Yeltsin dissolving the Russian parliament by force in '93. I remember that being framed as necessary for economic reforms. It often was, yeah. But Snyder argues it actually paved the way for monopolies, capitalist monopolies, and then ultimately for Putin to consolidate power on top of that structure. Ah, so the focus on just removing the old constraints missed the new ones being built. Pretty much. And the whys of that Russian oligarchy wasn't just an internal Russian issue. issue was it no it had ripple effects big time it brought this new much more aggressive kind of politics onto the world stage trying to rig elections in Ukraine back in 2004 than the invasion in 2014 and the propaganda all the propaganda was wild yeah often totally contradictory nonsensical the goal seemed to be less about convincing people of an ideology and more about just creating chaos confusion undermining the idea of truth itself. So is Snyder's warning here that a society obsessed only with negative freedom, just being left alone, becomes vulnerable? Vulnerable to this kind of power grab? That seems to be the core of it. If you believe freedom is just the absence of rules, you might not see the danger when someone starts filling that void with What with lies, spectacle and ultimately unchecked power. Russian nihilism, as he calls it. Where nothing is true, nothing is good. It's just about power. Exactly. And he argues this belief in negative freedom blinded some people, perhaps, to the dangers brewing in Russia long before the full-scale invasion in 2022. The signs were there. And he sees parallels in the U.S., With wealth concentration, capitalism tending towards monopoly here, too. He does draw that parallel. He suggests that maybe our own overconfidence in American freedom, this idea that we're exceptional, could actually make us more vulnerable to similar forces. Like propaganda. Yeah. He points directly to things like Russian social media campaigns targeting U.S. politics, especially around 2016. fooling Americans not just about faraway places like Ukraine, but about each other. Dividing people internally. Right. And potentially, he suggests, contributing to the rise of a more oligarchic style of politics even here. OK, that's a sobering thought. Which brings us then to the alternative he proposes. Positive freedom. How does that look different? He comes back to the Ukrainians resisting Russia, their sheer refusal to give in, even when facing annihilation. That's a powerful example for him. It wasn't just about physical defense. No, the threat was existential to erase their society, their identity. And what made the difference, he argues, wasn't just weapons. It was their commitment, their collective will. That's positive freedom in action. And this is where he introduces those German philosophical terms, Leib and Kerber. Can you break those down? Sure. So Kerber is basically the body as an object, you know, the physical thing, like a collection of cells and organs that a doctor might examine. Okay. But Leib, that's the body as a subject, the lived body, the center of your experience, your feelings, intentions, your inner world. Ah, okay. Yeah. The difference between a body and my body or your body is... as experienced from the inside. Exactly. And Snyder's point is that recognizing others as live, seeing them as subjects with their own inner lives, not just objects, Kerper, is fundamental. It's what allows for empathy. And how does that connect back to freedom? Well, he argues that if you only focus on negative freedom, just freeing the physical body, the Kerper, from external chains, you miss this whole subjective dimension. My inner life. Right. Negative freedom alone can become a kind of self-deception, he suggests, because it ignores the live, ignores our shared subjectivity. True freedom, this positive freedom, requires engaging with others as subjects, understanding their perspectives. So barriers aren't just bad because they physically stop us. They're bad because they prevent that mutual understanding. They stop us from seeing the live in others. When you see someone's inner world, their perspective, you get a more objective, more complete picture of reality rather than just seeing them as an obstacle or a tool in your own world. That makes sense. And how does live, this subjective body, work? shape our experience. You mentioned pain, pleasure. Your live is like the translator. It takes raw physical data, biological needs, and turns them into human experiences. Pain, yes, but also joy, desire, disappointment. Even art poetry, prose comes from this interpretation of the world through our lived experience. So it's the bridge between physical necessity and... Well, human freedom. That's a good way to put it. It enables that focus concentration that characterizes a free person choosing where to direct your attention, which is totally different from the forced concentration you'd find in, say, a prison camp. Right, right. So given all this, how do we actually cultivate this positive freedom, this awareness of live? Snyder points to thinkers who focus on this. Edith Stein, for example, wrote a lot about empathy. Simone Weil talked about the importance of truly seeing the stranger, the person who is different. So it's about actively trying to understand others. Yeah. Making that effort. Attuning ourselves differently. Recognizing shared subjectivity, even across different. He also uses that personal story about his appendix, doesn't he, to make a point about how we view bodies. He does. It's a stark example of what can happen when the body is treated purely as kerper, as an object, potentially just a source of profit in a health care system, rather than as libe, the seat of someone suffering an experience. The misdiagnosis, the delay, it highlights the risks of that objectification. Exactly. It shows our vulnerability when that subjective experience isn't recognized. And then there's that lovely idea about practice leading to habitude and grace, like playing cats with his daughter. How does that fit? It's about finding freedom within an activity. Through practice, some actions become so ingrained, so natural, that you do them without conscious effort, almost effortlessly. There's a kind of liberation in that skilled, unselfconscious movement. Freedom from awkwardness, maybe? Sort of, yeah. Freedom from the clumsiness of conscious control. And finally, this world of values idea from Edith Stein. How does that tie in? It's the idea that beyond the physical world of things, there's this other realm, a realm of values, purposes, meanings, maybe even where ancestral influences live on. And Snyder suggests that our intentional actions, the choices we make based on our values, justice, creativity, kindness, whatever they are, create little pathways, little connections between that world of values and the concrete world of things. We make our values real through our actions. So our free actions bridge the gap between ideals and reality. In a way, yes. That's how we manifest our freedom, by acting purposefully in the world according to values we hold. Okay, so bringing it all together then, the big takeaway seems to be that real freedom isn't just about being left alone, not just the negative stuff. Definitely not. That's maybe a starting point, but it's not the destination. True freedom, positive freedom Is active, it's engaged It involves recognizing the humanity The libe in ourselves and others Revolving empathy? And acting in the world based on our values Participating It's a much richer and maybe more demanding Picture of freedom It really makes you think about how we usually talk about it, doesn't it? It does, it challenges those easy assumptions So as we wrap up this deep dive What's a final thought for our listener to chew on? Maybe consider this idea of libe more consciously Think about your own inner world, sure, but also actively try to tune into the inner worlds of the people around you. How might really practicing empathy, trying to see from others' perspectives, change how you understand freedom, not just as an abstract concept, but in your daily life and how you interact with the world? That's a great challenge, thinking about how empathy might actually be a pathway to a deeper freedom. Exactly. And if you're intrigued, definitely check out more from Snyder or those other thinkers we touched on, Berlin, Stein, Weill, Havel, Kuszkowski. There's a lot more to explore there.