Timothy Snyder: ‘Our Problem Is Us’

• On Freedom
• Timothy Snyder
• Crown (Penguin Random House) (2024)

In the conclusion to his new book On Freedom, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder writes: “Our problem is not the world; our problem is us. And so we can solve it. We can be free, if we see what freedom is.”

Defining freedom is more complicated than most of us think, but after the second election of Donald Trump, it’s critical to make the effort. Snyder draws on his experience as a kid growing up in the 1970s and ’80s and as a student in eastern Europe in the post-Soviet 1990s, as well as on philosophers from Plato to Edith Stein, a German Jew who converted to Catholicism and who died in the Birkenau concentration camp.

Snyder has also published many other books; I found Bloodlands a harrowing account of the struggle between Russia and Germany for control of Poland and Ukraine. In On Freedom, he combines philosophy, history and personal experience in exploring his subject, so the book rarely bogs down in abstraction.

“Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.”

In other words, we are not born free; we are born helpless. Many others are involved in making us free, including our parents, the builders of our playgrounds, our fellow citizens and the caregivers of our old age. “We need structures,” Snyder says, “just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.”

He sees five “forms of freedom” that create free individuals within society. There’s sovereignty, which Snyder defines as “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.”

So a child on the way to sovereignty becomes familiar with both their own body and a world containing other people and objects, and can imagine how to change the world. By choosing a mix of values in dealing with the world and choosing a future, the sovereign person becomes unpredictable.

Having become sovereign, unpredictable persons, we break away from the structures that made us so, and seek mobility. Like Huck Finn fleeing “sivilization” for “the territories,” we may move geographically. Or we may move socially, rising or falling in status.

Factuality gives us a reliable knowledge of the world and practicable ways we might change it, rather than merely fantasizing.

And solidarity means recognizing that “no individual achieves freedom alone. Practically and ethically,” Snyder says. The rugged individualist is never free. “Freedom for you means freedom for me.”

Freedom: marked not by absence, but by presence

He draws these lessons from concrete experience, whether as a boy growing up in Ohio or as a Yale professor talking with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And he quietly brags about correctly predicting that Zelenskyy would stay in Kyiv after the Russians invaded in 2022, when American intelligence experts and diplomats were sure he would leave Ukraine.

Snyder’s explanation is critical to his definition of freedom:

“Americans had told themselves for decades that freedom was negative, that it represented a clearing-away of barriers by larger forces. If you believe in the primacy of the larger forces, then you have no choice when they seem to turn against you: you run. And you cannot imagine that others would behave any differently.”

Negative freedom, as Snyder makes abundantly clear, blames some outside barrier that must be removed if we are to be free: an oppressive government, high taxation, Big Pharma. Sweep away the barrier, according to negative freedom, and all will be well.

Snyder wryly points out that both Lenin’s communists and Bill Clinton’s capitalists made the same mistake: Get rid of the capitalists, thought Lenin, and communism would spring up spontaneously. It didn’t.

With the communists gone, Clinton’s capitalists believed, Russian democracy and capitalism would spontaneously arise in its place.

Instead, Vladimir Putin and his weird brand of fascism arose.

‘Freedom from’ is no freedom at all

Snyder returns again and again to the idea of negative freedom. Perhaps he’s thinking of Rousseau’s famous claim “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.” Snyder refutes this, showing that babies, born helpless, acquire only the freedom that their family and society can instil.

But many children chafe at the limits put on them and imagine themselves happier if only they didn’t have to obey their parents and teachers. Some never grow out of that attitude. Negative freedom is, according to Snyder, “freedom from” some external barrier — freedom from government on our backs, from tedious regulation and red tape, from expensive groceries and unwanted immigrants and refugees.

But negative freedom has consequences. When we think we’ve freed ourselves from our imagined burdens, we soon miss them. We feel the absence of government services; if our groceries are cheaper because they’re no longer inspected, they may also infect us with listeria. Or the groceries may be more expensive than ever because the immigrants and refugees who grew them, packed them, shipped them and put them on our supermarket shelves are now gone forever.

Snyder cites Freedom House, an organization that ranks over 200 countries by their people’s access to political rights, civil liberties and internet freedom. It ranks the United States as “free” with a score of 83, like Romania and South Korea.

Canada’s score is 97, just behind Sweden’s 99 and Finland’s 100.

“The countries where people think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from,” Snyder writes.

He goes on: “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.”

Privatizing our problems, not solving them

Snyder renders a painfully timely judgment on Russia and the United States: “Russia has become a genocidal fascist empire for many reasons, but one of them is negative freedom. This concept made it hard to see that its oligarchy was the antithesis of freedom (rather than a side effect) or that Putin was a fascist (rather than just a technocrat seeking wealth). And America has become a flawed republic threatened by oligarchy and fascism for many reasons, but negative freedom is among them. It leads us to think that we have solved our problems when we have privatized them, when in fact all we have achieved is separating ourselves from one another.”

That separation is a critical failure to Snyder: Free people, he argues, recognize others as equally human, not merely objects or barriers.

We recognize that equality when we interact face to face — and unpredictably — with one another.

Social media, he warns, “predictifies” us, prompting us to stick to one position and to reject all others while remaining physically inert as we stare at our screens. This hinders our capacity to recognize the humanity in each other that Snyder notes is so crucial to real freedom.

Snyder traces the effect of social media to five “brain hacks” that erode our freedom:

• Experimental isolation creates an “artificial loneliness” in front of our screens in which we can be manipulated.
• Intermittent reinforcement rewards our efforts — sometimes — until we’re addicted to those efforts.
• Confirmation bias gives us evidence that we’re right, and lets us ignore contrary evidence.
• Social conformity encourages us to believe the people and social media, and to be led by them.
• Cognitive dissonance makes us shun our imagined adversaries and cling ever closer to our imagined friends.

Part of getting free from the stultifying effects of social media lies in understanding how it traps us, according to Snyder.

“When we see how the brain hacks work,” he writes, “we can escape predictification. That will involve changing the internet, but it will also require doing other things with our bodies than staring at screens. It is our move.”

The lure of ‘sadopopulism’

Snyder offers one brilliant word for the system that is now about to take over the United States: “sadopopulism.”

“Populism offers some redistribution,” Snyder says, “something to the people from the state; sadopopulism offers only the spectacle of others being still more deprived. Sadopopulism salves the pain of immobility by directing attention to others who suffer more.”

So we are to take consolation from the fact that “I am trapped in my social class, but you are trapped in a ghetto.” Or a concentration camp before being deported.

Sadopopulism relies on three attitudes to maintain itself: “(1) a politics of inevitability after the end of communism; (2) a politics of eternity in the early 21st century; and (3) a politics of catastrophe emerging now.”

So after the fall of the Soviets, the triumph of capitalism seemed inevitable; but as Snyder observes, “freedom cannot be inevitable, because in a world governed by inevitability there can be no freedom.”

Inevitability leads to the politics of eternity, “in which values and the future vanish entirely. Fake cheerfulness and real determinism give way to nostalgia and resentment. This happened in the U.S.S.R. and in Russia, then in the United States.” Vladimir Putin looks back on the glorious days of the Soviet Union; Donald Trump wants to make America great again.

And now we have the politics of catastrophe: “Oligarchs fiddle, the world burns. A Trump mocks science; a Putin invades Ukraine with an army funded by fossil fuels; a Musk opens Twitter to a flood of lies about both Russian fascism and global warming.”

Immobilized and demoralized, we can hardly call ourselves free. But Snyder says: “We know the way back toward freedom: a reclamation of the future. We must restore social mobility and prevent the coming catastrophe. Both can be done, but only through the conscious activity of sovereign, unpredictable people. Fear is not enough. It will not get us where we need to go. From the most basic facts we can build a scaffolding of hope. We need to ground ourselves in history and science to take a turn toward a better future.”

Snyder’s blunt clarity is attracting more attention now that Trump has been elected. We can expect countless Americans and many Canadians to consult On Freedom and his other books for guidance over the next four years.

I hope his readers can read fast, and act fast, to thwart the oligarchs now descending upon us.