PREVIEW: 1.5-billion Years Of Early Death Awaits Americans Who Don’t Understand Freedom

1.5-billion years of life are lost in America because an elite has fooled the voting public with a self-serving definition of ‘freedom’.

To this handful of the elite, freedom in America means the right to charge whatever fee they want for their healthcare products and services.  This is ‘freedom of the marketplace’. 

According to Timothy Synder in his new book “On Freedom”, this is “negative freedom” – the blocking of public welfare for private profit.  Just over the border in Canada, freedom means the right to live as long as you can – and public healthcare keeps Canadians alive an average of five years longer than Americans.  This is “positive freedom” – a freedom based on values, not profits – and adds up to the billion-plus years of wasted life in the US.

In his new book, the best-selling author explores ‘freedom’ and what it means. He brings his lessons home to America, to spell out an agenda to ensure freedom – and thus prosperity – for the future.  True freedom isn’t so much freedom from something as freedom to do something—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.

Freedom was taken away from Mariia, for example.

For most of the time that her village was occupied, the Russians had packed 350 civilians, its entire population, into the school basement, an area of less than two hundred square meters. Seventy of the villagers were children, the youngest an infant.

Mariia is 85 years old and living alone. Now that she has her neat little residence, she is certainly freer than when she was homeless. That is because family and volunteers came to help. And because a government has acted, one to which she feels connected by her vote.

Mariia does not complain of her own fate. She cries when she speaks of the difficult challenges faced by her president.

The Ukrainian word de-occupation, which she and Synder used in conversation, is more precise than the conventional term ‘liberation’.  De-occupation, the removal of harm, was just a necessary condition for freedom, not the thing itself.  That’s what you build on after the Russians go home.

Freedom requires social cohesion and action – and is truly different from a Republican understanding of ‘freedom’.  A Republican gloms onto the concept of freedom to carry a gun; society sees freedom as the right to move around without being in danger of being shot by some maniac with an assault rifle.

This condensed version of his book looks at his extensive travels, his knowledge of history, his life in Europe, and his contacts with the citizens of Ukraine. His book is conservative, in that it draws from tradition; but radical, in that it proposes something new.

Freedom is not just an absence of evil, he says, but a presence of good.

A soldier in a rehabilitation center told Synder that freedom was about everyone having a chance to fulfill their own purposes after the war.

Freedom means a future when some things are the same and others are better. It is life expanding and growing.

If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create.

No larger force makes us free, nor does the absence of such a larger force. Nature gives us a chance to be free, nothing less, nothing more.

In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values.

The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety.

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. He focusses on the inner “Leib” - a Leib can feel, and a Leib has its own center.  It is more than a body (korpus).  It has values, dreams and feelings.  This is transformative for today’s conversations; an economy is about more than market efficiency – it is about human values and their promotion.

There are five forms of freedom . The forms create a world where people act on the basis of values.

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.

Freedom justifies government. The forms of freedom show us how.

The first three forms of freedom pertain to different phases of life: sovereignty to childhood; unpredictability to youth; mobility to young adulthood. Factuality and solidarity are the mature forms of freedom, enabling the others.

Fear can help manufacture negative freedom. The obsession with the superpowers’ destructive capacity was a way to ignore the people who suffered directly in the Cold War, such as the Latin Americans we kept invading and the east Europeans the Soviets kept invading.

During the Cold War, American and Soviet propaganda relentlessly associated the other side with the Nazis; the decades of mutual accusation perhaps hardened everyone to the actual risk, which was that fascism might arise at home.

Synder says that he did have the idea, as a teenager, that fear was making the country less free. He was absolutely right.

He had a sense that the Wise Heads in Washington and Moscow had developed a consensus about the world, and were comfortable living it out.  But, awkwardly, in late 1989 the Soviet Union began to dissolve, and finally collapsed in late 1991. Very few of the Wise Heads expected either. The George HW Bush administration supported Gorbachev to the very last moment. U.S . policy was to hold the Soviet Union together. President Bush went to Kyiv on August 1, 1991, but only to urge Ukrainians not to declare independence.

If freedom is only negative, then politics becomes the practical work of clearing away the junk of the past: in the jargon of the 1980s and 1990s: deregulation, privatization, welfare reform. Nothing further would be needed, in a pro-active sense.

But the attacks of 9/11 were presented as something unprecedented, the dawn of a new world in which it seemed that freedom must be sacrificed for safety. A provocation works when a less powerful entity turns a more powerful actor against itself. The attack of 9/11 was one of the most successful provocations of all time.  After 9/11 , Americans were told that the attackers “hate freedom,” but our response suggested that we misunderstood it. The ostensible exchange of freedom for security meant less of each.

Surveillance became normal . So did military suppression: The 2003 invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left the United States poorer, less secure, and less trusted. That war was an adventure in negative freedom, waged to create an absence.

Considered in their totality, Russia’s claims about Ukraine were also contradictory: there was no Ukrainian language, but the Ukrainian state was making everyone speak it; the Ukrainian state did not exist but was repressive; Ukrainians were all Nazis, but they were also gays and Jews…

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