Understanding On Freedom

Chapter leaders planning our sessions on Defying Tyranny.

During electoral off-seasons, OFA Westside LA holds monthly training sessions on critical ideas. In 2025, we are holding sessions on Defying Tyranny. We started by reading Prof. Timothy Snyder's popular pamphlet On Tyranny, and then went on to read and discuss Prof. Snyder's book On Freedom. Here's where we ran into a snag, as the book is quite challenging. Below is a recap and some notes on the chapters of On Freedom. These notes contain many quotes from the professor's book.

Our "off-season" training sessions are designed to educate and enlighten us so that we are in a better position to persuade (i) when we talk to voters in intimate conversations with friends and family and phonebank conversations with strangers; (ii) in our calls to our electeds; and (iii) in the mike at a townhall. As a group, we are primarily oriented towards voter contact, and our training sessions are designed to help us find effective ways of talking through education, discussion, and practice. The first two chapters of the On Freedom book were so challenging and in some respects counter-intuitive that several of us had trouble connecting Prof. Snyder's ideas with our quest for the compelling arguments we need to win. He is asking us to rethink how we understand what freedom is, because the United States is not as free as we'd like to believe. He wrote about our ways of being unfree before the American people shocked us all by voting for hate and bullying authoritarianism (while bleating that they were really voting for cheap eggs). We are a lot more demonstrably unfree now. Here are a few of the thoughts that might help us tie it together as we move forward:

NOTES FROM 1ST 4 CHAPTERS

• It takes collective work to build structures to support freedom. We must work together.

• Freedom is about everyone having a chance to fulfill their own purposes.

• Freedom and security work together. The preamble to the Constitution tells us that "the blessings of liberty" must be pursued alongside "the general welfare" and "the common defense."

• We enable freedom not by rejecting government but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.

• Freedom is for everyone. We are in this together and rely on each other for our freedom.

• Empathy is the start of the knowledge we need for freedom. The non-empathetic are and will be unfree.

• Positive freedom involves thinking about who we want to become.

• The 5 brain hacks of social media (isolation, intermittent reinforcement, confirmation bias, social conformity, and cognitive dissonance) make us vulnerable to targeted propaganda. Our emotions can and are being automated by the ceaseless propagation of data about us. This makes us easily led and subject to the fantasies and whimsies of oligarchs. Believing someone else's lie puts you in that person's thrall.

• We all need some help. It's just a matter of degree. The American Dream meant social mobility (buttressed and enabled by social policies to aid mobility). It lasted until capitalism itself was enthroned as the sole source of freedom in the 1980s. The word freedom has come to mean the privilege of a few wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.

• Poles now live longer than Americans. Ukranian trains are incomparably more functional than American ones.

• Since the 1980s, new wealth generated by the US economy has remained in the hands of an almost invisibly miniscule fraction of the population. This is not the 1 percent, but the .01 percent. This concentration of wealth leads to policies and practices that leave almost everyone less mobile and less free.

NOTES FROM CHAPTER ON FACTUALITY

The idea of negative freedom is that the root of our discontent is simply an obstacle that can be removed. Historically Marx said eliminate private property. Hitler blamed Jews. Anti-colonialists said to remove the imperialists. Americans say eliminate government. (Also eliminate immigrants, LGBTQ+, DEI, feminist women, etc...)

Snyder spoke of our needing to turn to science to create new clean energy to ween us off the fossil fuels that are us burning up our past and destroying our future with global warming. We are in an extinction spiral. Hitler's was based in racism to remove science. Ours is similar, and global warming isn't real la-la-laaa-laaaa-laaaaaa!

Noted that AI searches add to global warming with computer networks being housed in "information farms" that use fossil fuels to be power up and constantly cool the digital farms.

Snyder talks about how we challenge facts that used to be rooted in truth. If facts no longer exist, what Founding Father James Madison called "clamor and combinations" will always win, which means that tyrants and oligarchs (who own the media now) will always win. Think of the Roman "bread and circuses."

Snyder uses George Orwell's 1984 and "doublethink" to explain gaslighting and "the big lie." Our recent big lie was DJT's lies about winning the 2020 election. Then tyrants and oligarchs pass "memory laws" purging books, institutions, laws....to rid DEI or reasoning why so many Black men and POC's are jailed.

That we've had a serious massive decline in independent journalism, specifically since the 2008 crisis, when we lost many independent voices calling for accountability.

Without that pushback of rigorous thought, the nation drifts into conversations of us vs. them. Real reporters need protection to be free, to speak truth to power.

Free speech isn't really a thing: It's free SPEAKERS, as only people can take risks and really be free.

NOTES FROM CHAPTER ON SOLIDARITY

Big picture takeaways

Solidarity is presented as the fifth and culminating form of freedom, emphasizing that individual liberty is intrinsically linked to the freedom of others. True freedom is not solely about personal autonomy but is deeply rooted in our collective responsibility to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to live freely. This concept is most likely the root of the push back seen in the Abrego Garcia deportation case. We see his unlawful detention and deportation as a threat to all of our freedom. If they can do it to him, then they can do it to anyone.

We learn about the concept of negative freedom, which focuses on the absence of constraints, suggesting that this perspective often benefits the privileged few while neglecting the needs of the broader community. He posits that without solidarity, freedom becomes a hollow privilege rather than a shared right. Examples: The myth of the free market and libertarianism.

We learned how societal structures, such as healthcare, education, and social services, things that benefit the masses, are essential for fostering solidarity. Because when these systems are undermined, it not only erodes the social fabric but also diminishes the collective freedom of society.

We learn that the dangers of escapism among the elite are potentially catastrophic because they may seek to isolate themselves from societal issues rather than choose to address them collectively (privilege). True freedom requires engagement, empathy, and a commitment to the common good. Examples of escapism include space travel (living on Mars) as well as the pursuit of immortality—exploits of well-known billionaires.

The chapter calls for a redefinition of freedom—one that transcends individualism and embraces our interconnectedness, advocating for a society where freedom is a collective endeavor and responsibility. The lessons learned in this chapter are especially important today as we are all experiencing the encroachment of our freedoms by this administration. How we respond will determine just how far this administration will be allowed to go.

NOTES FROM CHAPTER ON CONCLUSION: GOVERNMENT

Freedom reaches back into the past and forward into the future. It encompasses millennia of human effort and solidarity. The small virtues of everyday life are crucial. We can build the structures that support freedom with the help of values.

As free peoples, we decide which values to affirm, in what combination, for what reasons, and at what time. Then we try again (p. 231).

Freedom never just means government leaving us alone; nor does it mean our leaving government alone. The forms of freedom that we have been discussing in this book (SOVEREIGNTY, UNPREDICTABILITY, MOBILITY, FACTUALITY, SOLIDARITY) legitimate government.

Children need support to gain the capacity to flourish in freedom (this is SOVEREIGNTY). This cannot be done without government guided by individuals. There is much that individuals can do (p. 212):

• Learn about others

• Support a school

• Help raise a child who is not yours

• Volunteer

• Read aloud at a library

• Coach a team

• Vote for candidates who favor parental leave

UNPREDICTABILITY also demands structures. We can be free only if we reimagine and restructure social media. This has to be a policy matter. Yet we can all do something (p.212):

• Affirm our own combination of values rather than conform.

• Do not obey in advance.

• Meet people

• Buy or borrow books

• Staring at screens makes you easier to handle; listening to people makes you less so.

We need structures for MOBILITY. We need government to build the architecture of the American Dream.

Free adults must support the institutions that helped them, with their voices, votes, and time.

FACTUALITY requires institutions, such as local reporting. This is a policy matter. It also requires ethical commitment, which is the work of individuals.

• Say that we believe in truth.

• Treat facts as a worthy pursuit.

• Recognize reporters as heroes.

• Pay for newspaper subscriptions.

• Subscribe to media that offer investigative reporting.

• Post to social media items that are reported by a human.

• Support campaigns to tax social media companies in order to fund local reporting.

Choose a way to express SOLIDARITY. This makes us freer and helps us to resist frustration and demoralization.

• Deliberate in organized settings.

• Pick a civil society organization to join and another to support financially.

• Try to listen.

• Remember that neighbors might have had worse luck.

• Help others vote.

• Listen to those whose family history is very different from your own.

• Find organizations that allow you to help others.

• Pay off someone else's medical debt.

• Support a project in a war-torn country that empowers those affected.

• Take care of the Earth (plant a tree, eat less meat, insulate your home, get solar panels, use and agitate for public transportation).

• Mention climate change every day.

• Do not vote for a party that denies climate change.

Our political divisions have been hardened by the collapse of local news, the rise of oligarchy, and the reach of social media. The algorithms push us toward mindless controversy and away from mindful discussion of priorities.

The choice of no government means groundless faith that some larger force will organize matters for us. It just brings bad government, tyranny by the ruthless and the rich.

To regard freedom as central is liberal. The conviction that freedom is about virtues is conservative. The belief that structures gird values is socialist. These three approaches to politics are perfectly justified and complementary. (p. 236)

A democracy will depend upon laws that enable participation. Some American laws are deliberate instruments of disenfranchisement.

American laws also allow the very richest to avoid paying taxes and to influence elections and policy by spending money. Such laws disenfranchise all non-billionaires by granting to the few electoral power not enjoyed by the many. A country with oligarchical elections and voter suppression is not a land of the free.

DC and PR should be states. Voting should not be denied to any citizen.

Citizens in Washington, D.C. are not allowed to elect representatives to Congress. There are more people in DC than in WY or VT. Citizens who live in Puerto Rico cannot vote for president. PR has more people than 21 of the 50 states.

A democracy cannot be formed from people whose first thought is how to disable it. If we wish to be free, our own first thoughts have to be for the predicaments of others. Voter suppression reflects the racism of the past and projects racism into the future.

If white Americans do not care that others' votes are at risk, they take for granted that the country belongs to them as a tribe or a mob and thereby partake in the decline of democracy.

Everyone who speaks of democracy is logically committed to the proposition that all adult citizens have the right to vote.

In a land of the free, we would take pride in how many of us vote, and how easily.

Getting law and practice behind voter suppression is simply a way to exclude people without having to say that they are not equal to others.

People who are taught to fear divisive concepts cannot be sovereign, because they are afraid to learn from others.

Republics die from wealth inequality.

We can have positive freedom for everyone, in a democratic republic that allows a good government. The future could be so much better than the present.

• Ukraine must win its war against Russia.

• America will need presidential candidates who believe in counting votes rather than starting coups.

• We have to set aside imperial immobility and sadopopulism and address racial and wealth inequality.

• Climate disaster will have to be mitigated.

• We need to stop treating the interests of the fossil-fuel oligarchs as more important than the freedom and security of everyone else. All American subsidies of oil and gas drilling, including access to federal land, should cease.

• We need the right to vote, the right to one's mind, and the right to healthcare.

• All American children should have access to clean air, food, and shelter.

• Families need public school, health care, and retirement pensions.

• Americans should be using public transportation within and between cities (something that is generally unavailable in the US).

• The government should break up monopolies.

• Private prisons should be banned. Money should not be made by detaining human bodies. When the government pays companies to imprison, it creates a lobby for locking people up. It is wrong to incentivize incarceration.

Americans lose about $1 trillion every year to tax fraud and evasion by the very wealthy.

If we had a top rate of 75%, most Americans would likely pay less tax. (During the Eisenhower years, the top rate was 91%).

If very wealthy Americans paid taxes, we could give ourselves the chance to become a land of the free.

The American budgetary problem is not that the government spends too much but that wealthy people do not pay their taxes.

We have consented to being predictified by social media.

• 7 hours a day of screen time is too much.

• Do some physical exercise every day before you reach for your phone.

• When you are not at work, try to spend no more than an hour per day in front of a screen.

• Write and post one paper letter a month to a loved one.

• Read books in physical form.

• Make sure you know your own purposes before you open your computer. Close the screen when you have fulfilled your purposes.

• Resist the impulse you feel when your eyes are on pixels. They are not really your impulses; they are engineered through you. When you act on them, you leave a record of your predictability.

• Take a breath; be pleasant and reasonable.

• Try not to respond directly to stimuli; try to change the game or direct people's attention to their offline capacities.

• In the real world, speak to people. Make small talk, find common subjects.

• Every moment of eye contact is two bodies that are safe from screens and available for the flicker of an unpredictable encounter.

• In the fake world, energize others for action in the real world.

• The most productive examples of comms through social media involve people urging public action.

Because government did too little, the internet brought unelected and unchosen manipulators into our homes, lives, and minds.

We need rich and vibrant public schools and a thriving system of public universities that do not leave graduates with crippling debt.

Social media must be altered to enable liberty.

Most of American territory is a news desert, and a news desert is no land of the free.