Ideas - Do you truly live in a ‘free’ society? It’s complicated.

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

There's no universal definition for the word freedom, according to American historian Timothy Snyder. He divides the word into two categories for people — the freedom "from" and the freedom "to" various things. In the U.S., Snyder calls oligarchs like Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump "heroes of negative freedom,” focused on being against things. But the author of On Freedom says it's a trap, because once you’re against one thing, it builds into an endless loop of the next thing. True freedom, he says, is to thrive for the sake of our common future.

When they predict we'll fall, we rise to the challenge. When they say we're not a country, we stand on guard. This land taught us to be brave and caring, to protect our values, to leave no one behind. Canada is on the line, and it's time to vote as though our country depends on it, because like never before, it does. I'm Jonathan Pedneau, co-leader of the Green Party of Canada.

This election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the Registeredleader of the Green Party of Canada. This election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the registered agent of the Green Party of Canada. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. And now I would like to introduce our moderator, Nala Ayed. CBC Ideas, which she hosts, of course, is one of the most... Yes. That's Gregory McCormick introducing me at the Toronto Public Library.

CBC Ideas is one of the most intellectual forums in Canada. And I mean intellectual in the best sense of the word. It's complicated, it's layered, it's appealing, it's so diverse. That generous introduction preceded the on-stage interview I was about to do with American historian Timothy Snyder, whose formal title is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. But there's been a development. Dr. Snyder was recently named Director of public history, lab, and professor of the

Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. And is that a mouthful? And of course, it goes without saying that we'd like to welcome him to Canada. Welcome to Canada. Timothy Snyder has been on ideas a few times, in early 2018, for example, when his book On Tyranny became the rarest of publishing phenomena, an academic success and a popular bestseller, which it still is. As a scholar, he's conversant in 10 languages and is fluent in five. With a specialty in Eastern Europe, nationalism, and authoritarianism.

As a public intellectual, he publishes and speaks widely. In fact, more than 600 people showed up to hear him in conversation with me about his most recent book, On Freedom. So please join me in welcoming Nala Ayad and Timothy Schneider. Thank you very much for a beautiful introduction. Thank you all for being here. And may I call you Tim? Please.

You've been welcomed multiple times to Canada. Let me add one more. Welcome to Toronto. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. When your book was published last fall, you wrote the following words, by no meaningful index are Americans today among the freest people in the world. That was before Donald Trump became president,

and it was before he declared Liberation Day. How would you describe the state of freedom in the land of the free today? Okay. First of all, thanks for the kind introductions. I'm really pleased that we're going to have the chance to talk about this and have a dialogue. I mean, to be clear about that,

I first have to say something about what I mean by freedom, because Americans immediately begin talking about freedom and we generally mean nothing by it, or we mean something that I think that doesn't actually make sense. So my notion of freedom is a positive one, know freedom is about flourishing developing becoming the kind of person that you want to be that freedom is about Affirming values in the world in the sense of believing in them affirming them to yourself But also affirming them in the sense of making them real in the world So freedom is a state in which we can make our own choices about what is good and have some amount of power to realize those things. And then freedom is also positive in the sense that to become free in that way, we need other

people's help. You can't become free on your own. So in the passages that you cited from the book, or the thing that I said, the irony is that Freedom House judges freedom in a pretty narrow way. It judges it in a very American way, political freedoms, civic freedoms. It's not about the welfare state or the quality of roads or anything, or health insurance or things that I also think count towards freedom. And nevertheless, we scored about 50.

And the reason for that, in my view, is that if you want to get to negative freedom, you know, our view of just the government staying away and people having dignity, you have to have positive freedom first rather than the other way around. And that's the thing that Americans basically tend to get wrong. So sorry, I had to do that long prelude because I didn't... That's okay, that was my second question, so you've answered it. That's fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we're gonna do the odd numbered questions from here on out. So... So we're gonna do the odd numbered questions from here on out. So how would you characterize the state of, now that you've defined, freedom? Well, I mean, coming from that, the people who are in charge in the US now, Musk and Trump, are heroes of negative freedom. They are people who tell you that freedom is about being against things. And it starts by being against the government. And this is a trap, of course, because if you think freedom is being

you against the government, then you help make the government smaller, and then the government becomes so small it's dysfunctional. And then the government can't do the basic things it needs to do to allow you have a free life. Like, for example, make sure there's no pollution in the water or make sure that there aren't measles outbreaks. The kinds of things that are now starting to happen in the United States. So there is actually an intellectual mistake at the beginning of Musk and Trump. The reason why Musk can say this is about efficiency and Americans for the first six or seven weeks nod their heads and say, oh yes, this might be about efficiency,

is that we deeply believe that freedom is about making government smaller. And so if somebody comes and says, I'm going to make government smaller, we think, oh yes, that's probably acceptable in its own right. Whereas in fact, if you make government smaller so that it's dysfunctional, then the oligarchs remain, right? It's like you have a beautiful... You have a beautiful... You start down in the analogy and then you just have to keep going. So watch this. You have a beautiful swimming pool, but there are ugly, dark children's toys on the bottom

of it that fell down there years and years ago. But then you drain the swimming pool and you see that they're the ugly dark, anyway. That's, no, so the, okay, the ugly dark children's swimming toys are the oligarchs in this analogy, and they're there, right, but there's a swimming pool, right, there's something nice around them. But if you get rid of the government, the oligarchs are still there,

and they're relatively much more powerful than they were before. And that's where we're going, right? So and Trump is a hero of negative freedom too. He says you don't need government, but then he uses government to oppress you or uses government to oppress other countries. And we go for it. So obviously we're much less free. I mean the universities are under attack.

They're staging these spectacular kidnappings of people on the street to terrify the rest of us. They're sending people to a foreign gulag on the basis of tattoos that they have, including autism awareness tattoos or I love my mother tattoos. And people are self-censoring in a very large way. But also the positive things that are necessary for freedom, like our welfare state, as you might have heard, is a little bit less well developed than yours in general.

And such as it is, it's now being dismantled. And so if you're an older person and you're gonna be denied social security and Medicaid, which is coming, you're also less free. So can I just back up and ask you about this idea of negative freedom or freedom from? At the face of it or on the face of it, it appears to be a great thing. Freedom from oppression, freedom from. At the face of it or on the face of it, it appears to be a great thing.

Freedom from oppression, freedom from danger, freedom from tyranny all seem like positive things. What's the problem with negative freedom? Yeah, the problem is that it's question begging because freedom, and I agree with you, it sounds good and of course it also is good. You don't wanna be oppressed, you don't wanna be subject to a tyrant, but to make it really simple barbed wire isn't bad if there are no people around

It it's just barbed wire the essential thing is the person and not the barrier and the problem with negative freedom is it puts all the emotional and moral and psychological attention onto the barrier. And so you think freedom is just a matter of liberating us from this bad thing. But if you think about freedom that way, you end up being caught in a moral trap. Because if freedom is just about liberating yourself from some bad thing, you've never really asked what the good thing is. You've never really asked what you are. You've never really asked what it means for you to be free.

And then your next move is immediately to turn against your neighbors. Because your notion is that freedom means being against something. And once you're against one thing, your next move will be to be against something else. That's the problem with negative freedoms. You get caught in this loop. It was really striking to me and certainly not surprising to people here in this audience, I'm sure, that this book that you've written

begins with a vignette in Ukraine, where you're having a conversation with someone whose village is liberated, in the language that I might use as a reporter. But you use a word that is, in Ukrainian, deoccupied. Could you talk about what the word deoccupied does that the word liberation doesn't? Yeah, thank you. That's very helpful.

And thank you for also, for referring to Ukraine because I took this book on the road with me in various places and I took it to various audiences because the premise is, if you believe that freedom is positive, then the premise can't't be I know what freedom is on my own it has to be it has to involve listening to other people so I tried to listen to other people I was really a lot of it in Ukraine yeah I wrote a fair amount of in Ukraine revised it in Ukraine quite significantly and Ukrainians helped me to clarify the basic some of the basic arguments including this this business of positive freedom so I'm gonna start somewhere else and I'm going to land in Ukraine.

The concentration camps are the classical example of where a Canadian or an American or a British person would feel very comfortable using the word liberated. We were very comfortable saying that we liberated those camps. And I want to say that even in that case, it's not appropriate, that it disguises something and it misleads something. And when I say that, I'm leaning into the primary sources left behind by doctors and nurses and other people who arrived after the 8th of May or the 9th of May, 1945, who pretty regularly said something along the lines of

liberation is not the word. And what they meant by that was here you have these traumatized, sick people. And we can't just imagine that because we've lifted the evil that we've solved the entire problem. And if you accept that replacing the SS with British or American or Canadian or whatever soldiers is not liberation, then I think all the other examples then fall into place pretty easily. So the Ukrainians say deokupatsiya, the noun deokupovane, as an adjective, and I'm trying to bring that word into English and there are a bunch of you here so you can help,

but deoccupy, and deoccupied is a very helpful notion because it helpfully removes some of the glamour and reminds us that in the case where I begin the book, if there's a village where there's an old lady, she's now 86, she was 85 at the time I talked to her. No, she's 87 now. Maria's 87 now. But if there's an elderly person and her village has been quote unquote liberated, but she has a bit of a handicap and she uses a walker and there's rubble between the aluminum shack, the corrugated metal shack she lives in and the road, she's not free, right? From a great distance, maybe. And of course it's good that she's no longer being bombed,

but until the buses are running and she can get to the grocery store, until she can walk to the bus stop, she's not free. But is that implicit in the word or are you reading that into the word? I mean, because also you talk about, for example, villages or villagers who say, well, our place isn't free unless, as you say, the trains are running again.

I mean, there are probably like 150 Ukrainians out here who will then jump in in Q&A. Now... See? See? Yaznov, Yaznov. But yes, it is implicit in the word. It is implicit yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, sort of ambition from defending it? Is there any sense in which it's actually a higher ambition in this moment that we're living in? Oh that's such a wonderful question. It really is because I've come to the view that you can't defend it without defining it. So in my own little political or intellectual journey, on freedom is the it's the antipode to, or the answer to On Tyranny. And On Tyranny, it's a little political pamphlet I wrote in late 2016, and it's very useful. It's, I think, for a lot of people, it's been very helpful. I mean, it's the book that's the bestseller in the United States right now, I mean, sadly. But I realized, so as I was like, I gave like a hundred, a hundred and fifty talks

about on tyranny in the early days of the first Trump administration, trying to get people to understand that what was going on and how to behave. But a very reasonable question at that point was a question that you're asking. So if we're defending against tyranny, what is the thing that you're defending? And I think ultimately the answer is that you're not defending it, you're creating it. And so politically, that was what I was trying to answer. But then also intellectually, it's just much more interesting to try to figure out what freedom actually is. And I don't think we can do without a bigger notion of freedom. I don't think we can, like, the concepts that we use are things like democracy and institutions and rule of law. And that's all very important, but I think there has to be something

which is bigger and more capacious and more human and more vibrant than that. So if you didn't actually have a landing place when you started the process, and it was a process, how close do you think you have actually gotten to the true meaning of freedom? Well, of course I've gotten it 100% correct. Is there a moment that you can look back at and-

Come on, you can't let me get away with that. Well, go ahead. Are you happy with the definition that you've come up with? Come on, you can't let me get away with that. Well, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. Are you happy with the definition that you've come up with? No. I'm very happy with it. I'm very happy with it. But I think the nature of freedom is that it's a little bit about the factual world,

but it's also a little bit on the other side in the metaphysical world. Freedom is about not just the way things are are but about the way things ought to be and What makes us special is that we to live on both sides we live where things are but we also live in the way things might be ought to be should be and Freedom means being good at that. I mean that means having various notions of how things might be better And so you can't like I take a stab at various points in the book in characterizing freedom, but I don't think you can actually define it because it's a state in which many good things are possible.

It's a jumble. It's a bunch of combinations. Yeah, the value of values, thank you. That's, yeah, yeah, that's how I think about it. Are you able to pinpoint a moment in the history of the US where you think that negative freedom became kind of the dominant aspiration of politics? Is there a moment that you can look back at?

Well, I mean, I'm allowed to give two? Absolutely. Okay. Yes. Because I think it's important also to looking at the US today to understand the connection between negative freedom and the history of slavery I

Enjoy having these arguments, but that these arguments are also rooted in history the reason why negative freedom is Plausible okay. This is another critique of negative freedom, but if you think the only problem is the government, what kind of life are you leading if the only problem for you is the government? If that's really the only problem. You yourself are a feudal land holder or a slave holder. You yourself must have behind you serfs, slaves, women. You have a whole pyramid at which you're the top if the central government is really the only problem for you. And in our history, that was the position, of course, of the plantation owners in the South where they defined freedom as the ability to have slaves

working their property and that's negative freedom because the central government the federal government is the only instance that can take that Away from you right and so so one moment is the foundation of the United States the second moment would be 1981 January 1981 the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president. Because he very persuasively and charismatically and intelligently made the argument that governments, never the solution, it's always the problem. I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Yeah, exactly. Like that was supposed to be a joke, right? The scariest words in the English language, I think he said. And

that was very persuasive. But it was also connected, by the way, to the history of slavery and the history of race, because the undertone of all of that was a phrase which Reagan probably didn't coin, but which he made popular. The idea of welfare cheats, welfare mothers, welfare queens, was the phrase. And that, you may not hear that with your Canadian ears, but that means black women. And so the notion is that the welfare state, I'm sure you hear, I'm sure like Canadian ears means

you hear every American thing plus, so I promise I'll do that again. But in the US that would be obviously racially coded, and the notion is that you don't need the welfare state because you're white people and you're very hardy, and if you're sick or whatever, you're just gonna get through it. But those black people, they will abuse the welfare state, they'll take everything, they'll take your tax dollars, and then they'll just use them. And so the notion that the government can't help you is bound in even at that late date and

today it's bound in with the idea that some people are hardy individuals and true and other people are just going to abuse the government. So that's on the domestic front. I'm curious on the international front, the foreign policy front, when it became, when negative freedom became kind of the dominant aspiration in US foreign policy. There's the Soviet Union, there's the, as you call it, the adventure in Iraq. Could you speak to that? Yeah, that's also a wonderful question.

I think both 1989 and 2003 are very important. There was a historical coincidence, which is that the Reagan era and the Thatcher era corresponded with the end of communism in Eastern Europe. And that coincidence led many people to believe that the end of communism discredited government action as such, or the social welfare state as such. Whereas the end of communism discredited the one party state, it discredited central planning perhaps, it discredited many things, but it didn't discredit all government action. And that's the way it got read, especially in the UK and in the US, less so in Canada

interestingly, but in the UK and the US. And you see then from that point on, you see a pretty sharp divergence between American and Canadian policies, interestingly. And you guys start living longer, so bless you, from that point forward. Know that, well, I'm not sure how to understand that laughter. It's like, is he gonna make it, like is he to make it through this whole discussion?

Look at that frail person. But 1989 was, I think, misunderstood in this way. And in an odd way, it's kind of a Hegelian irony, but in an odd way, we took over historical determinism from the Soviets because we started saying, like many Americans, many people speak in English, we started to say, well, of course, the economy determines everything, but the economy is going to take care of democracy for us. And that means you don't need government. It means that government should just get out of the way.

But of course, it also means that is actually very anti-democratic and anti-freedom because if you think Economics is going to take care of things for you. Then you're not really a free person 2003 the invasion of Iraq was an example of how far you can go with this with this notion And I was again I was against at the time by the way, and I was like in a minority It was like one of the one of the few times that I couldn't get my op-eds published Was around the the war in Iraq But the people there were many things wrong with it But I'm just gonna focus on this one thing the people who made that war really did think that if you knocked over a

Government then freedom and every capitalism and stuff would just kind of sprout up and that is what if you really believe in negative freedom That's what you think like you think the good things just kind of sprout up. And that is what, if you really believe in negative freedom, that's what you think. Like you think the good things just kind of come along automatically. And so the notion that we were going to dismantle the army, dismantle the Ba'ath Party, make Iraq kind of start from the beginning, or to put it in a slightly more malicious mode, you're not harming a country by destroying everything,

because if you destroy everything, then they can just start again and that's freedom We'll get to the association of negative freedom with the left a little bit later But why is it that negative freedom in the West is particularly associated with the political, right? Well part of it is that the left has ceded the ground The left has ceded the ground that the left doesn'teded the ground. That the left doesn't talk about freedom, which I think is not enough, which I think is a terrible mistake.

Freedom at large. Yeah, as the right has claimed the word, the left has, at least in my country and in countries I know well in Europe, part of the problem is that the term has been granted to the right. But the second reason is that the libertarianism to fascism transmission belt, where if you believe, like you can believe that the government should be weak,

but if you're saying the government should be weak, what you're really meaning is either oligarchs should be strong, or in the oligarchs you might have noticed are not particularly benevolent in general. I mean, I'm sure there are some nice ones out there. But I'm sure they're nicer here like everyone, you know, but... We're going to get into the oligarchs. Okay. But the ones that really matter, at least in the United States, are fascists. I mean, the ones who matter right now. But there's the logic that we talked about earlier, which is that you make the government small, you create chaos, you create anger,

and then you mobilize that. You also connect negative freedom with a negative view of the human body. Can you explain that? Yeah, yeah. So a lot of the discussion that we have of freedom brackets all the things that are important. And this also bears on the right-wing question a little bit. Because when we start talking about freedom, at least in English, what we're usually doing is we're assuming, okay, there's already a rational person, and that person knows his interests. I'm using the pronoun advisedly. That person knows his interests. And so that person, knowing his interests and being perfectly rational, is looking out

at the world. And so for freedom, all we need to do is make sure that person can pursue his interests. That is, in my view, completely logically bankrupt. I mean, it's historically bankrupt because it doesn't ask how did you get to that ideal typical situation where that one person actually had that power. But it's philosophically bankrupt because it takes a huge amount of investment, collective investment, political, social, familial, amicable investment to create a person who's actually like that, right? And the way that we do it has to do with the body. So if you're doing negative freedom, then it can all be very abstract.

You don't have to think about the body. There's just a mind, right? There's just a mind. There's a disembodied mind. There's a mind in a jar. It's also a 50-year-old male, but it's a mind in a jar. And it reacts rationally to the out to stimuli and so on, all that nonsense. But the truth is that you have to create, and once you know that you have to create, you ask how? Like how do you get from the neurological to the moral, right? And how do you do that? And early childhood development has answers to these questions. We know that the first five years are really important, the first 18 months even more important, and that children,

this is for me the most obvious bodily example, children need stimulation, they need attention, they need time, they need all kinds of physical attention, and that's relevant to freedom because in giving them those things, they're developing the capacities that they would need later on to make moral choices. And so that's the most basic way. And so in my view, if books about freedom don't talk about childbirth, you don't have to read them. And that rules out almost all of them. Okay. You're listening to my conversation with historian Timothy Snyder about his latest

book On Freedom recorded on stage at the Toronto Public Library. Ideas is both a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca. ideas. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts or on the CBC News app. I'm Nala Ayed. When they predict we'll fall, we rise to the challenge. When they say we're not a country, we stand on guard. This land taught us to be brave and caring, to protect our values, to leave no one behind. Canada is on the line, and it's time to vote

as though our country depends on it, because like never before, it does. I'm Jonathan Pedneau, co-leader of the Green Party of Canada. This election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the Registered Agent of the Green Party of Canada. I've just been to Specsavers and upgraded my lenses to extra thin and light with 50% off. Now, what else can I upgrade? My cat?

Meow! Pfff! Wow! My scooter? Pfff! Oh yeah! Get 50% off lens upgrades in the Specsavers Spring Sale! Hey, I can upgrade my kids!

You chill, Mom. I'll load the dishwasher. Awesome! Exclusions apply. See Specsavers.ca for details. Offer ends soon. Timothy Snyder makes a crucial distinction in his book On Freedom between what he calls positive freedom, freedom to, calls positive freedom, freedom to,

and negative freedom, freedom from. Up to this point, we'd been talking about the political rights obsession with negative freedom, freedom from regulation, freedom from big government, and so on. And now I wanna switch gears in the conversation to look at negative freedom through a different lens. So let's just turn the page and talk about negative freedom from the left.

And I want to take you as far back because you mentioned it in the book as Karl Marx. Could you talk about what you saw in terms of negative freedom in the thinking of Karl Marx? Okay. So in the way that I'm talking about positive freedom and negative freedom. I should stress is my own My view of Marx is that it's not in fact positive freedom at all I think positive freedom involves value pluralism the notion that there are many good values Marx does not so I don't think Marx actually is an advocate of positive freedom

I think he's in fact an advocate of negative freedom Because he takes the view that all we need to be free is the removal of one thing Marx's view is that private property is essentially the original sin of modern human civilization And that if you could get rid of that thing then we would return to ourselves and all would and all would be well I think that's wrong. I mean, I think it's turned out not to be true empirically, but I also think it's conceptually wrong. I think all views that say all we have to do is get rid of some external factor X and we will be free are going to turn out to be wrong.

Whether they're right-wing, left-wing, whatever. Like, for example, I don't think it's true that just getting rid of colonialism means that you're free. Getting rid of colonialism would be a very good thing, but if you then immediately found a new colonial state on a smaller scale, which is not unheard of in the history of post-colonialism, that's not freedom. So the main kind of negative freedom we have to contend with is the American destroy the government kind. But in my case for freedom, I'm trying to point out that any view which says the problem's on the outside, there's just one problem, you have to eliminate it, that should arouse suspicion as an account of freedom. Better dead than red was a Cold War slogan on the American right. In 2025, there are t-shirts that actually say, I'd rather

be Russian than Democrat. I'm sure you remember, of course, in 2018 when Donald Trump indicated that he trusted Vladimir Putin more than the American intelligence sources, and in February he called the Ukrainian president a, quote, dictator without elections. What accounts for this tectonic shift in attitude? I mean, in the defense of people who are on the far right, Russia is no longer a communist state. I mean, Russia is a fascist state. So if you're inconsistent

for liking Russia. I think that is, I think within their own framework, they are correct to like Russia, and Russia is correct to like them, and the feeling is mutual. So I understand the question, but I think the historical irony is not really there because Russia really is, it's, I mean it's the fascism of the third decade of the 20th century so naturally our fascists like Russia. With the Trump people it's the notion which is Russian like this is a success of Russian imperial propaganda that Russia is real and Ukraine's not really real and they they have this

They have this kind of fetish for what they think of as strong men in strong countries Which has had the alarming consequence and maybe we'll talk more about this But it's had the alarming consequence of taking Russia and making it much stronger than it would have been Otherwise, I mean all of American foreign policy is now oriented towards making our enemies strong and our friends weak taking Russia and making it much stronger than it would have been otherwise. I mean, all of American foreign policy is now oriented towards making our enemies strong and our friends weak. But... There's a whole other alliance that you talk about in your book that I found very striking,

very different than what we're talking about here. And I found kind of surprising. You're talking about teaching classes in prison. And you're talking about one conversation where your students were talking about watching what's going on in Ukraine and feeling some common cause. The students felt that this sort of connection with the Ukrainians as a people who are being colonized, I wonder what that tells you about the understanding of freedom on two very different landscapes.

What does that tell you about the moment that we're in today? Okay, that's an interesting one. I mean, just to take a step back, the reason why I was in prison was methodologically the same as the reason why I was in Ukraine. That is to say, I wanted to listen to people who talk about freedom, but whose entrance into the discussion was very different than my own. And prison was terrific for that. I mean prison is really good as a place to teach for a lot of reasons, but one is that they have a lot of time to do the reading. And they do the reading.

It's really, like it's really, no, if you're a professor, like when they do the reading, like it's just incredibly charming. They do the reading. And they had a lot of time to talk about it, you know, and they were really well prepared for seminar. I mean, it was the best seminar that I've ever taught. But the other, I mean, but the other thing about it is that they, like in the US,

where we imprison such a big percentage of our population, we have a huge amount of talent that's incarcerated. And so the class I was teaching was an incredibly competitive class. It's very, very hard to get into this program. It's harder than getting into an elite university. And so the guys who were in the class were actually very gifted. So they were coming from a different place.

They were in prison. They were looking at me. From their point of view, they're looking at me as rich, privileged, white guy. So they helped me to find a language which would be rich. And so positive freedom for them, it has to mean creating the conditions which would have been very mean creating the conditions

which would have been very different from the conditions of their childhoods. Creating conditions where things wouldn't have been so rough on their parents. And so the connection between that and Ukraine is that I'm looking for a different standpoint, but the thing they focused on is like, who is the colonizer and who's the colonized?

Like that's what they wanted to know. And at the beginning, I mean, to get this this right they assumed that the Americans were the colonizers because that's where they start from I mean understandably frankly but they assumed that in the Russian Ukrainian war the Americans were the colonizers and so therefore the Ukrainians must be the bad guys and We we we we worked on that and we and we read on that it was like actually in a weird way they were sort of my support group because the prison teaching started right when the invasion of Ukraine started and they wanted to know about it and some of them had been in

the US military and they wanted to know what's going on in this war and so I ended up like doing a lot of chalkboard work about about the war and they wanted to know about like how my friends were doing and they wanted to know these things and they and so there was a human way in which they were able to identify with the people who were being attacked. Well, the end result is empathy. Yeah. I mean, that's so beautiful.

That's so true. Like, I mean, they ended up empathizing with the Ukrainians, which was, I found incredibly touching because it's like it's many, it's not just many miles, but there's so much difference between their position and the Ukrainian position. And they ended up empathizing with Ukrainians. And some of them ended up writing about Ukrainian history. Some of them ended up writing about the Ukrainian famine.

They empathized. And then, it was a very touching moment later on, because some of these students in prison became characters in the book because their interventions and the argument were important. And so then I was taking that book to Ukraine and having Ukrainian philosophers and so on read it. And then they would be like, this argument by this young man, Alpha, is very interesting. And like Alpha is like a 23-year-old guy in a maximum security facility in central Connecticut.

So you put them in conversation. Yeah, exactly right right and then I talked to Alpha about that you know and so he's out now happily and so that so then you know a little bit of empathy was going back the other direction too. The other interesting thing just to stay on this for a moment that I found fascinating was the testimony of one of these men upon being released after decades of being in prison, talking about that he's never seen more unfree people in his life. But he was actually referring to the little screens we're all looking at all day. Yeah, so I mean as you all know,

people serve really long terms in the US. We have more people, we have about as many, maybe more, we have about as many people serving life sentences now as we had in prison in 1970. We have a lot of lifers, and we have a lot of people serving really long sentences, just catastrophically long sentences. And yeah, I mean, a guy that I taught,

or a guy that I knew, guy that I knew came out after 38 years, was it? And so he missed, he missed not just, you know, social media, but he missed the internet. And so it was like time travel for him, because of course, they're not really allowed to have much screen time in prison. And he came out and he looked at the way we behave and that's what he said and it's really striking how right he is I've got to say it like you seem to agree with him I do yeah I do agree with him I mean first of all we are less free and so we have to ask the question right like is are we less free because of social media I think the answer is yes but we're more directly

less free to social media right like our Like our impulses, our habits, our addictions, our way of living life has been drawn towards this box. And the thing that his view helps with is that we kind of all did this together, right? So we've all become, I don't know, I mean we've all become these fleshy algorithms together and I mean, we've all become these fleshy algorithms together. And because we've done it together, we haven't really noticed it. But if somebody drops in from outer space and looks around,

and they could say, what are you people doing? There's a beautiful breeze blowing outside. And that was his perspective. Yeah. And then, of course, the other thing which happens, of course, is that guys come out of prison, and they immediately get addicted to it. You use a particular term, sadopopulism, combining sadism with populism.

Where do you see that at work exactly? Yeah. So, a lot of people are very critical of populism. I don't know exactly what it means in Canadian English, but I don't think populism is really the problem. I mean, populism is people promising stuff to other people that maybe they can't deliver and, okay, that's bad, but it seems like it's not nearly as bad as other things like, I don't know, like totalitarianism or fascism or

the destruction of your own government or invading other countries. But populism at least has, you know, populism may be, it may be mendacious, it may be demagogic, but at least contains within it the promise of I'm gonna do something for the people. Whereas what I mean by sadopopulism is something else, that I'm gonna say the government doesn't really work, but I can make sure that, and everybody's gonna hurt, which you might have noticed is something

that Mr. Trump is saying a lot now, everybody's gonna hurt, but I can make sure that some people hurt more than others. And so rather than promising that everybody's going to do a little bit better, what I can do is I can say, you guys get to watch. You're going to hurt, but it's going to be okay because you get to watch as these guys get hurt

much, much more. I want to talk about dissidents for a moment, because you spent some time talking about them. You've spoken and written about several, Václav Havel, who didn't like the term dissident, as well as a number of figures in Eastern Europe, poets, thinkers, and Ukrainian President Zelensky himself. What do you believe is the most effective form of dissidents right now? Yeah, I mean, the dissidents were very good, I think, at conceptualizing what was actually

going on around them. And that's why there weren't that many of them, and that's why it was easy to characterize them as eccentric, as oddballs, as not in touch, which is what happened to them. But they were very good, Havel's a good example, they were very good at conceptualizing what was actually happening. And I do think that is very important. So it's hard to resist in the US at least,

because so much of our reporting, or what passes for reporting, is just stenography. So you accept the concepts, right? of our reporting or what passes for reporting is just stenography. So you accept the concepts, right? So for example, the notion that the Trump administration is punishing American universities for their anti-Semitism. That is absurd, okay? That is not what is happening.

The people who are in charge of the American government, I hope this is not a big bulletin, but they are not friends of the Jews. And they, in a very obvious way, and what they are doing is that they are trying, they're saying, okay, we're going to punish universities. Think of a historical example where the people who went after universities did it on behalf of the Jews. That does not happen. Columbia was 22, 23% Jewish. Taking the federal funding away from Columbia

is not the thing you would do if you were a friend of the Jews. Deporting Muslims without trial is also not a thing you would do if you're a friend of the Jews, right? Because it's a provocation. And pretending that it's all about anti-Semitism is feeding the notion that the Jews are actually in charge of everything, right, also anti-Semitic.

So in this, like the things I'm saying, that's like politics 101. That should be obvious. The American federal government has a policy of fomenting anti-Semitism, but they say it's combating and because they say it's combating then our reporters feel like they have to frame it in terms Of that right but we have to get that one thing dissidents are very good at is that conceptual? work like Klemper in the in the 30s hovel in the 80s and 70s, but then Opposition has to go beyond dissidents like dissidents for me at least is about clarifying the concepts, setting an example, making sure people don't normalize, giving them the words, the examples so they don't normalize. But then opposition has to involve organization, everyday activity, friends, palpable goals,

doing things together, being in a good mood. Dissidence is important, but not everybody has to be a dissident. You just need a few of them and then you can have opposition. Of the ones you've met and written about, is there one that has had a lasting impact on you? Oh, many of them. I mean, many of them.

But for me, like the idea that you're... So I was partly educated in Eastern Europe and one of my doctoral supervisors was an East European who was Both the Holocaust survivor and someone who was put in a camp under communism So this is why Havel didn't like the word dissident because what Havel said is if you want to be a good Anything engineers school teacher his example was actually brewer of beer if you read power the powerless That's his example If you want to be a good brewer of beer, that means you have values, right? You care about the quality you care about doing things, right?

And if you care about doing things right, you're always going to run up against a system, which is cynical Technocratic about consolidating power and so on and so that like that notion that the thing that you care about like for example Being a historian is Going to make you run up against things But that happened to my advisor that happened to many people in Poland where I did my doctoral work And so that that I take as normal. I just that just sociologically. I think that's that's that's how you behave You're still associated with Yale University, but you are one of three Yale professors who are currently at the University of Toronto.

And I'm curious whether you would describe that decision to come here as an act of freedom from or freedom to. Well, I mean, the funny thing is you could ask all three of us and you get three different answers. One of them being Marcy, who's your wife. Well, can I just sound off about this? The whole idea, like anybody who's been in a marriage, like the whole idea that you and your wife have to have a common position on the things that you do. Tell us more.

I just want to undermine that. That's ridiculous. I don't like, see the actual married couples in the front row are like, yeah. They're like, preach, preach. No, but I'd like this whole media idea that your wife, you walk in front of the cameras and your wife holds your hands. I'm like, you say something and she nods. That's ridiculous.

I really don't like that. you walk in front of the cameras and your wife holds your hands, I'm like, you say something and she nods. Like, that's ridiculous. I really don't like that. Things that couples do happen because there happens to be an overlap. So I'm really hoping to interview Marcy, actually, separately, but I'd like to know your view. Is it a freedom from or a freedom to? In all seriousness then, I would really, really not want it. So it's like, I'm leaving Yale for the University of Toronto, and Yale is a wonderful, wonderful university which allows its undergraduates to flourish, and it's a terrific place.

I mean, you don't have to send your kids to America, I get it, but it's a, so I wouldn't wanna say like leaving Yale is somehow, you know, Yale does a very good, an extraordinary job of the things that it does. And I'm leaving for another university which does similar things on a much bigger scale in a different way, it's a big public university.

And I think, you know, the way, there's a way in which I can be more free here, which has to do with the overall structure, which is that American universities are facing an attempt to destroy them, essentially. The policy of the US federal government now is not, it's not about anti-Semitism. It's about destroying universities. It's about destroying the concept of the humanities.

It's about turning people into drones. It's about ending universities. It's about destroying the concept of the humanities. It's about turning people into drones. It's about ending social mobility as such. So in that sense, there's work up here that I can do, I'll be more free to do. But that wasn't my, I mean, I gotta say that wasn't really the reason why I came. I mean, the reasons why I came had to do with change in life and family and attractions to the University of Toronto.

But I really, I'm gonna resist the notion that things that I do are necessarily of like philosophical, let alone world historical quality. Here's maybe a more direct question. I'm curious whether given all that's happened in the US, do you still feel at home in the US? Yeah of course, of course I feel at home in the US, do you still feel at home in the US? Yeah, of course. Of course I feel at home in the US. Of course, and I would assume that no matter how big bad things got in Canada, you would feel at home in Canada.

But, I mean, at the end of On Tyranny, I try to make a distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and as different ways of loving, right? Like, so if you love your country, regardless of what it does so if you love your country Regardless of what it does and you feel compelled to love everything the government does your nationalist But if you love your country because you wanted to live up to its values, then you're a patriot I think so I think of myself as as a patriot so I feel all of these things in terms of what I understand to be violations of our best selves or

or violations or eliminations of future American futures that might have been and that touches me very deeply as an American. So I don't feel alienated from the United States. I feel sad for Americans who are being hurt and for people who are in America who are being hurt. And I feel very worried that the trajectory of our present government involves a self-destructiveness. I mean, in the end, a destructiveness of the United States. I'm very concerned that the people who run my country don't care at all about its people or its interests and I care about that in a special way because I am American. Last question on empathy. In the book On Freedom, you write about empathy not as an emotional act,

but as a kind of political principle and you go further and you say empathy is the only way to become a reasonable person. Can you explain to us how? I think so. So the again it goes if I can just circle back to the discussion about positive and negative freedom. In negative freedom if I think it's just a matter of liberating myself from this outside problem or breaking through this barrier, then we're assuming that like everything is fine with me.

There's just the barrier. There's just the problem. But I'm free except for that external thing. I know who I am. I know what I want. I know my values are, but I probably don't. And I may need to break that barrier, but breaking the barrier isn't going to answer those questions for me. That image of that lonely person who's already free and already knows everything about himself or herself is deeply rooted in the word and in my culture. And it's incorrect. You cannot know.

You can't be reasonable without the help of other people. And if we go back to childbirth, that becomes obvious. You can't raise human beings to be reasonable by leaving them alone. We need a huge amount of attention to have any chance of having a child turn out to be reasonable. You can't, it doesn't happen on its own.

And that is actually true for all of us all of the time. We make huge mistakes about ourselves all of the time. All the time, yeah. We make, yes, thank you. Others are like, I just wanna note there's only one person nodding, which is a bad sign when I'm like doing this riff about self-awareness. So the only way to know yourself is to be able to listen to other people.

And you can't listen to other people unless you actually believe that they are other people, which is easy to say, but hard to do. So empathy, like I borrow from a German philosopher called Edith Stein on this, but empathy has to do, going back to your earlier question, it has to do with the body. It has to do with understanding that this person was also born. They're also going to die. They're also frail. They could also be weak They could also be sick They're in space in a way that similar the way I'm in space, right? So actually accepting that which is pretty hard like try it, you know with your friends on the way home

It's it's it's it's pretty hard but when if you can do it that means you might actually learn about yourself. Just like you can't see your own back, there are things you can't see about the way you are in the world, and those things you can't see are often the things that make you less free. Or they're the things that make you vulnerable to other people's lies, and you need help in that situation. So empathy is not a kind of bonus that's on the side to freedom

It's a prerequisite to being a free person. Can it be something that's more than aspirational? Do you have any hope that that is actually that can become the norm? I really do and it goes I mean you gave you gave the lovely example of the Ukrainians receiving empathy from people in this very, very different position far away. Yes, I very much do. I very much do. We are capable of this. This whole programming that we've had that we are meant to be isolated, atomized individuals locked away in our cars or locked away staring

at screens. That's programming. Like, we're capable of being that way. But we're also capable of being other ways. We are very capable, most of us, of learning to be empathetic. And I just want to land on this point that it's not something that goes beyond us. It's something that we really are capable of and actually have to be trained out of. And the negative, I mean, one of the things which the negative freedom idea does is that

it presents itself as being natural. Like it says, it's natural that you're alone, that you have your own interests, right? But there's nothing natural about that. I mean, it's actually more natural to say, we're all born, we're all going to die, in some sense we're in this together, and if we wanna be free at all, we're gonna have to try to understand one another.

And I know it's possible because I've seen it. I know it's possible because I've seen it. I know it's possible because I've seen it. And I've seen it work politically as well. Thank you so much for taking my questions. Oh, thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

What a pleasure. Thanks very much. Thanks. Thank you. You've been listening to my conversation with American historian, Timothy Snyder about his book On Freedom, recorded at the Toronto Public Library. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and was recently

appointed Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly with extra production help by Lisa Godfrey. Special thanks to Gregory McCormick and Sergio Elmir at the Toronto Public Library. Ideas is both a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts or on the CBC News app.

Danielle Duval is the technical producer of Ideas. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Nikola Lukcic is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Nikola Lukcic is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.