The Current - Timothy Snyder on avoiding the trap of ‘negative freedom’

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Historian Timothy Snyder says thinking about freedom as “me against the system” is actually a trap that stops people from being truly free. The best-selling author of On Tyranny spoke with Matt Galloway at the Vancouver Writers Fest about his new book On Freedom, and why he’s now “100 per cent convinced” that there will be violence around the looming U.S. election.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Today we are bringing you Matt Galloway's conversation with author and historian Timothy Snyder. It was recorded last night at the Vancouver Writers' Fest. Timothy Snyder's new book is called On Freedom. Here are Matt Galloway and Timothy Snyder. Hi, everybody. How are you doing?

We live in difficult and extraordinary, intense and bizarre, peculiar times, and I can't think of a better person to help us try to understand what's happening now and where we may go than our guest this evening. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He is an expert in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. His books include Bloodlands, Black Earth, The Road to Unfreedom, and many of you may, of course, have read his book On Tyranny. It was a New York Times number one bestseller. It inspired a rap song. His new book is, in many

ways, a follow-up or, at the very least, a companion piece to this. It's called On Freedom. I'm not sure if it will inspire a hip-hop song or not, but it does quote the great Gillian Welch, which we may talk about over the course of our conversation. Please welcome, if you would, on stage, Timothy Snyder. Thank you for being here. Glad to be with you. So the election is a week away. How are you feeling about everything? We'll talk about some specifics, but how are you feeling a week out? I mean, one always worries about the progressive Americanization of Canada and asking how you feel at the beginning of a conversation.

This is a time of big feelings. Strikes, I mean, this just strikes me as itself a little bit disturbing, so I'm going to, how do I feel, though? Like, I feel good, because I've been doing things, and that's, like, it's a tough time. It's a tough time in the U.S.

There are tougher times other places, but I've been out there doing the things that I think I can do, and so I personally feel good. You've been on the road quite a bit over the last little while talking about this book. I just came back from the United States. We were down in Arizona and in Michigan speaking with a lot of people, trying to gauge the mood of the country. I mean, you talk about what you're doing and the fact that you feel good. How would, how do you understand the mood of your country based on what you've seen over the last few weeks? There isn't one mood is the thing, right?

There isn't one mood, and also there aren't really exactly two camps either. It's a big, you know this, it's a big, diverse, confusing country, and the way that people come to the elections is often very different from how we would think they would come, as you know from talking to folks yourself. So that said, a lot of Democrats are terrified by the national polling and by the closeness of the swing states, which is understandable. of the swing states, which is understandable.

A lot of Trump folks are gearing up to say that the outcome is a lie, regardless of what the outcome turns out to be. And there's still that fringe of people, and I belong to that fringe, who thinks that the outcome could be very good and we may actually turn a corner. But you can't really summarize it in one thing because even though i

feel generally good i'm also pretty much 100 convinced that there will be violence around election day and that we'll just that we're just going to have to deal with that why is this thing so close do you think i think poll i mean i don't want to be too meta and constructivist about it, but I think polling itself is a reality. Like, I don't think it measures a reality. I think it is a reality. And that if we could just do what the British do, or I don't know, maybe they don't do this anymore, but if we could just have a couple of months off without polling before the elections, it would be really good, not just for our moods, but I actually think for the elections, because I think the poll, it would be really good, not just for our moods, but I actually think for the elections,

because I think the poll, that form of polling, where I don't ask you what you care about, and I don't ask you what policies you want or approve of, I just say, here are two people, how do you think? Or how do you feel? Which is really what it comes down to. In the moment, how do you feel? And I think that

creates this reality. And I think it itself creates this sense that like it has to kind of close in, or as everybody wants to say, tighten up towards the end. And everybody loves the polls because the polls give you something to constantly write about in an era of journalism, honorable exceptions aside, where it's so much easier to just talk about the mood, you know, than, and to comment on the numbers than to actually dig in on what policies people want. Because that is a deep problem with these elections. And I mean, that's something I feel bad about, that there are so many policy problems, which don't really get discussed or investigated, because we do so much of this, like, horse race back and forth, him or her. What are the strategies?

What are the gimmicks? You know, rather than thinking, well, actually, you know, most people, which is true, by the way, most people, the vast majority actually prefer Kamala Harris's policies. But that's not reported in America, like let alone in the rest of the world, because we're stuck on the polls. Why is it so close, though? I mean, the two-party system is part of it, right? That you can reliably get an us and them out of any two-party system. The entire way that Trump has dealt with,

Kamala Harris has basically tried to run an honorable campaign, which has mostly been about policy, you know, bless her heart. And Trump has done nothing, except, literally nothing, except look for attack lines. And unfortunately, that's enough to get close,. And unfortunately, that's enough to get close, right?

Unfortunately, that's enough to get close. How do you understand why so many tens of millions of Americans see him as the person that will lead them out of the position that they're in or lead them to something? How do you understand that? Or can you understand that? Well, first of all, I don't think it's i mean americans here or there it's people um people are vulnerable to this kind of thing um as they were you know the germans were just probably more sophisticated than 1920s than we are in the 2020s but

you know they went for something um it's not so much americans i think one has to kind of put give credit where credit is due he is a charism i mean this probably he's probably not your kind of politician i'm going to hazard a guess but he is a charismatic and charisma is very subjective i know but he is a charismatic intelligent tactically sophisticated politician that is part of it he knows he knows what he's doing. The image that he's like constantly off message or he's demented or whatever is like, that's just, that's people coping with the reality.

He is a intelligent politician. He's willing to do, he's willing to get into that special place where he's the person who breaks all the rules. And that's attractive for some people. And then we do have this deep there there are because of the way america has sorted itself out since the 1980s since the reagan administration there is a deep sense of grievance among people who think they should be doing better let's put it like that um by which i mainly mean white males there is a deep sense of grievance

among people who think they should be doing better. And that's a combination of two things. One is the breakdown of the welfare state and the breakdown of American wages, so that objectively folks are doing less well than they might expect or than their parents are doing, plus a deep racial history where some people are going to be more upset and react in certain ways when social mobility breaks down and Trump picks up on all of that and then finally one one has to say social media I mean there was you know your stray remark in your introduction Americans spend seven hours a day in front of social media that is much more time they spend with other people and like if I could only characterize social media in one adjective, it would be fascist. Social media makes people much more prone to a politics

of us and them than they would have been otherwise. And Trump knows how to use that. He is in large measure, a kind of social media creation, a creation of the era of social media. So this week, two newspapers, two large newspapers refused, or the owners of the newspapers refused to put out endorsements ostensibly for Kamala Harris, the LA Times, and then the Washington Post. The story with the Washington Post and the Times is that the editorial boards had cooked up and written up an endorsement and that the owners of those papers in some fashion pulled the chute on that and said that this endorsement will not go forward. The Washington Post has said that we now don't do, their word, we don't do endorsements. We didn't do them before. There was a break in

which we did, and now we're not doing them again. We want the readers to make up their own minds. Marty Barron, the legendary editor of the Washington Post, called this cowardice and disturbing spinelessness. How do you read the decision by, and I focus on the Post because of its history and tradition and the influence that it has. How do you understand that and characterize that? Yeah. So let me start with sort of the structural

and end on the moral. Anybody out there who thought the oligarchs were going to save us? I mean, if they can't even get us to a presidential endorsement, it's pretty unlikely they're going to get us to Mars or immortality or whatever it is that you were expecting them to do like I think like the first quarter of the 21st century has been in large measure like it's been imagination conquered and made puerile by a few billionaires such that we've lost the future and then when these guys are confronted by any actual challenge in the actual real world, they present themselves, this is my second point,

the least vulnerable present themselves as the most vulnerable. And the people who are the least vulnerable, the people with these huge fortunes who really can't lose, no matter what happens, they act as though they were the ones who had the right to move first. And meanwhile, the people who are going to win, who are going to hold back Trump, the people who are going to do this are the ones taking actual risks, right? The two men who held back those endorsements are among the people taking the least risk in the world, but they're acting as though somehow we're really at stake. And that's the sad thing. This is a business decision. They think of it as a business decision. Like they're thinking,

oh, well, I have other holdings and, you know, therefore I can't put my, I can't put Amazon at risk or whatever. But if, but it's not, it's, it's even as a business decision, it's stupid because you're showing power that you're going to fold even before the power is in office, right? You're showing that you can be pushed around. But the sad thing about presenting that as a business decision, of course, is that it is eminently political. You can't just do something that you think of as a business decision and then write a rationalization trying to explain to the rest of the country that, oh, this doesn't mean anything to you politically because to me it was just a business decision. What it means politically, and this is where it becomes a moral thing because in the final analysis, politics has an inevitably moral component. What it means is what, you know, Marty Baron said. It is, it's cowardice and it's politically meaningful cowardice.

The chapter one of On Tyranny, which you kindly mentioned, is entitled Don't Obey in Advance. And not obeying in advance, not taking part in anticipatory obedience, is, in my view, one of the main lessons of the 20th century. Anticipatory obedience. Yeah. So it's a normal human pattern. You see power shifting, and you adjust to where the power is. And if you do that, though, without thinking,

then you're not going to live in a democratic society because you'll be caving in preemptively to the aspiring tyrant. But the key thing is it's not just your failure, it's a change in the political equation because you're giving your power away, often without thinking about it. And judging by the drivel that was given to us as an explanation for why this happened,

these people were not thinking in these political terms at all. So, I mean, it's hard, it's honestly, this is so cartoonishly bad that it's hard to find the proper terms to condemn it, although I'm trying. But you don't sound surprised. I got to say that even I was a little surprised by this. I was a little surprised by this because it's not only cowardly,

it's also just dumb. But there is an up, not that those two things are necessarily in opposition, but I want to add a positive to this, though, which is that the reaction has been meaningful. The reaction has been meaningful. From people within the papers themselves well yeah i mean of course like then like i'm fielding calls from news from from reporters you know who are inside those news organizations who are covering the story themselves right and from reporters all over the world as well um will bunch of the philadelphia inquirer wrote a really good opinion

piece about this um the guardian is writing about it. The New York Times, I mean, maybe they had already planned this, but the New York Times just published page after page after page of front quotations, which amounts to a very strong condemnation. But what it really meant was among people. Like, people can think, oh, wait a minute, like, we are being betrayed now. We're watching a betrayal before our eyes and in nine or ten days we have a chance to do something about that so politically i think it's actually hurting trump is what i'm trying to say can i go back to something that you said earlier and i you when you said it i think a lot of people would have taken a breath in which is that you almost certainly believe that violence will follow the 5th of November.

When I was down in the States, one of the things I heard from people on both sides of this political divide is that they were worried about violence after the election. It's going to happen, but I don't particularly think we should be all panicking about it. I just think it's baked into the setup. For three reasons, I mean, the first is that when you practice a politics like Trump practices, where violence is sometimes just under the surface and sometimes above the surface, when you encourage people to carry out acts of violence, you know, this is, I mean, this is a guy who urged the assassination of Hillary Clinton, as we may have forgotten.

This is a person who encouraged people to rid him of his vice president after the vice president failed to take part in his coup. This is a person who encouraged a violent attempt to overthrow the entire American constitutional system. This is a person who, in his rallies, urges people to take violent action against other people. When you do that kind of stuff, people are going to be violent around you and also incidentally towards you. I mean that you're, because you're telling them that violence is the answer to problems. And so then your own people will eventually become dissatisfied with you. And, you know, and that that's the story of Trump's assassination attempts, by the way, like these are, these are disappointed people of his own, of his own group. So one of it is that like, he's just created this atmosphere. And the second is he's had so long to do this that they're just, you know, among the, you know, among the 250 million American adults,

there just have to be some people out there who are thinking, well, when Trump says that he wants, cause he, he's, he's, he's going to lose when Trump says that he won't, because he's going to lose the popular vote almost certainly. But he's going to declare, I mean, it's going to be really surprising if he doesn't declare victory on night one, right? Because that's what he did last time, and he's not going to be able to help himself. I mean, he is intelligent, like I said, but he also has weaknesses, and one of them is that he just can't stand the thought of losing. And so he's going to declare victory on night one. And then there's going to be data which suggests he hasn't won on night one. And then it's going to look like, well, the conspiracy against Trump is underway. And that's, so for a

lot of people who believe in Trump's big lie that he won last time, that's going to seem like license to do something, right? That's the second reason. And the third reason why I think it's so likely is that we've seen violence on other occasions before by his people. So I think it will be early November rather than January because Trump's not in power. He's out of power. Oh, there's another thing, which is the Russian factor. The Russians are trying to get us to do crazy things around November 5th. Although it might seem implausible, there are examples of Russian trolls getting real Americans to do things in the real world, unfortunately. What was the question that you wanted to answer with this book? Because in some ways, after On Tyranny came out, people were asking you questions.

And that leads to you thinking about how this book might come around. What were the questions that people were asking? So On Tyranny is about how to play defense. It's called 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. And when I wrote On Tyranny, I was a historian who'd written Bloodlands and Black Earth and books about the worst things that can happen. And I was in the middle of a book called Rodan Freedom, which was about the emergence of what I think of as the new fascism. It was a kind of history of the 2010s. I think of as the new fascism. It was a kind of history of the 2010s. And jumping out of that,

at the time of Trump's victory, I was trying to condense 20 lessons that people could follow as guidance at a time when I thought that Americans needed guidance. And that's been really helpful. I mean, even now with the Washington Post, LA Times thing, folks immediately jumped on lesson one, which is don't obey in advance. And I was really glad. I was glad that was out there as guidance because it's needed. But even so, no matter how well you're playing defense, you have to be able to go on offense or to jump out of the sports metaphor. When you are trying to defend something, eventually you have to know what that something is. And so a question from On Tyranny which got me towards On Freedom is, you know, Professor Snyder,

what is this thing that we're trying to defend? If we get over this crisis, what would a better United States look like? What would a better republic look like? If this is the threat of tyranny, what would freedom mean? And so the questions I was trying to answer were, what would a better republic look like? If this is the threat of tyranny, what would freedom mean? And so the questions I was trying to answer were, what would a better America or a better future look like? But also, what is freedom? What is freedom, this thing that Americans think they know what it is, but it's actually quite difficult to answer. And I think getting that answer right turns the conversation away from what's wrong now to what could be right in the future.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. But there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

There are a few things that you write about in the book that help inform the definitions that you come up with on freedom. One is what happened to you in 2019 when your appendix burst. What did you learn about freedom when you almost died? I'm going to start that in a lighthearted way, and then I'll move towards the more serious. So my lighthearted remark would be, when you're dead you're not free and that's something that honestly I think at least Americans need to hear

I was in Dallas Texas last night eating brisket and so I'm kind of still making my cultural adjustment here the meat is churning through you it was good brisket I'm kind of still making my cultural adjustment here. The meat is churning through you. It was a good brisket. But, you know, like the motto of New Hampshire is live free or die. Whereas, like, I'm in favor of live free and die. Like, you know, like as late as possible, right? Like, put that off. So a couple of things.

I mean, one way that I got in trouble was that when my appendix burst, I ignored the pain. I didn't pay attention to it. And I was unable to tell doctors and nurses how much I hurt. And partly as a result of that, I was misdiagnosed at the beginning and wasn't treated. And so I got peritonitis and then I got sepsis and that led to the almost dying part. You were very close to death. Yeah. Yeah. And so, but that not like, one way to think about freedom is freedom from. And freedom from is important. Like it's a part of freedom, not being able to resist is very important. But there's also the question of in the name of what are you resisting?

So in this very simple example, having a high pain tolerance can be good, but in the name of what, right? Like ultimately it has to be in the name of my thriving or helping other people. It's not necessarily good in itself. Like only on its own, having high pain tolerance can be kind of dangerous. The second thing which came in was race. So when I was sick, I was in a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. It was the third hospital I was in, but it was the place where I almost died. And a friend of mine very kindly came and spent the night with me, like, in the emergency room. And that, you know, I was really happy that she did. But the tragic thing about it is that her presence might have made things worse, which is weird. I mean, very strange because she's a physician and her intuitions

about what was happening were better than those of the physicians in the emergency room. So how could it possibly be that her presence made things worse? This is the horrible part because she was black. And because she was black, when she said something, I could see how the doctors then wanted to think the opposite thing. You know, like they were reacting against what she said for straight up American racial reasons. And racism having to do with her almost killed me, which of course, and that's like, and of course, there's something ridiculous telling the story about like these white adjacent stories, right? Because in that moment, I was just getting a taste of what her like a tiny taste of what her life is like just a tiny taste but it's like a little tiny taste can almost kill you then it's a sense you know you just it gives you at

least a way to think about what it does to other people and then that's connected to the lack of American health care in general because we we won't have national healthcare because we, and this is now like my white person, we think that other people will exploit it somehow. And we are taught to think that we are hardy, self-sufficient pioneer types who don't really ever need doctors. And then those other people, right, those immigrants and those black people, they're going to somehow abuse the whole system. And that's not fair. They're going to abuse it.

They're going to take our tax money and somehow abuse healthcare. And on that understanding, we cut ourselves off, right? Trying to punish other people for what we imagine they're going to do, we cut ourselves off from healthcare and everyone ends up being worse off. In a world of negative freedom, where you think freedom is just about yourself and you against

the world and your impulses, you don't identify with other people and their predicaments. And as you don't identify with other people and their predicaments, you end up making yourself less free because you don't see the things that you could do together, right? You can clap i want to ask you about ukraine um but you mentioned covid and one that it feels like that sense of empathy was tested in such an obvious way um during the pandemic with people who were yelling at each other because they did or didn't want to wear a mask or get a vaccine or what have you. What do you think that that did

to how we understand the idea of freedom, that thing that we lived through? Yeah, that's such a good question and gets to the heart of how I'm thinking about freedom in the book. What I'm concerned with is the American habit, which, and you've got some of this here in some of your politics too, the american habit which and you've got some of this here in some of your

politics too the american habit of thinking freedom of freedom is negative so it's it's me against the world it's me against the system me against the government and there are a lot of problems with that i mean there's a logical problem which is if if it's just freedom from, then for what purpose, right? And then there's sort of the psychological problem, which is that if you grow up thinking that freedom is just you against somebody or against a barrier or against the government, then you don't ask who you are. You never find out who you are. And then you can't be free, right? And so like negative freedom in day-to-day practice is a trap. Like, it actually prevents you from being free. And there are other problems with negative freedom, too. Like, you shrink the government so

much that you can't then create the conditions for freedom. And this one is very apropos your earlier question about violence. If you're in the habit of thinking of freedom as you against the government, it's a very small shift, and a lot of Americans have made it now, to thinking that freedom is me against my fellow citizens. So with the masks and such, like it's an absence of empathy, I agree, but I think it's also a misunderstanding of freedom.

If you think of freedom as just like me against stuff, then naturally you're going to rebel against the masks and against the vaccines and stuff. But if you think of freedom instead as what kind of person you want to be, or if you think of freedom in terms of something that has to be created together, then you get off on a completely different foot. We don't know who we are unless we have other people in our lives. And if we don't know who we are, then we can't be free. You have five forms of freedom, and one of them is sovereignty. In the context of Ukraine, partially just because you wrote so much of the book there,

but you have such great affection for Ukraine, what does that word mean to you now? So Ukrainians are the only people I know of. Maybe there are others who talk about freedom more than Americans. And they were talking about it in a way which was very interesting to me. In the book, I privilege conversations with President Zelensky, but there were a number of other conversations, hundreds of them, in fact,

where I just asked people, like, you know, people on the front, people in towns that had been deoccupied, what do you think about freedom? And interestingly, like, the way they came down really helped me with the argument I was trying to make because it was always positive. I have yet to run into a Ukrainian who says,

all we need to do is get the Russians out to be free. And of course, if negative freedom were ever understandable, it would be then. Because of course, you could say, the Russian occupiers, they're kidnapping our children, they're killing our local elites, they're torturing a very considerable portion of the population.

So surely when you get rid of that, that's a liberation. But Ukrainians tend to use the word deoccupation, which I think is very helpful because deoccupation reminds you that getting rid of the evil is only the first part and you still have to bring back the good. I start the book with a conversation that I had with an older woman called Maria, whose town was completely physically destroyed by the war, and then the ruins were deoccupied

by the Ukrainian army, and we're talking in front of her metal corrugated shack. And of course, it's better that she's alive, and it's better that her town's no longer and of course it's better that she's alive and it's better that her town's no longer occupied and it's better that she has the shack than that she doesn't but then you know it would still be better if the ruins were cleared and if the buses were running again and so forth like that would be something more like a liberation and so the conceptual part and the experience and then also the moral part where with like February, I'm kind of haunted as an American by February, 2022. In that moment, the Biden administration was actually correctly telling the world

what was going to happen. The Russians were going to invade Ukraine. They did. But the thing that haunts me about that moment was that we assumed the Ukrainians would immediately collapse, fail. They would be over in three days. That was the official wisdom inside the Washington Beltway,

just as it was the official wisdom inside the Kremlin. The Ukrainians, of course, didn't flee. Zelensky stayed. They fought much, much better than was anticipated. What haunts me is us. Why did we think they would flee why did we think that exactly and i think that has to do with with negative freedom that this makes americans uncomfortable but i i think it's because we just actually couldn't imagine that people in fact would fight for freedom

much as we talk about it what do you mean mean? Look, if you're, so like, I mean this negative positive freedom thing very deeply. Like for me, it's not just some kind of linguistic game that I'm playing it. I think it goes very deep to using the word freedom to bring yourself to a mental world where in fact you're not free. And so if you're, if you're in a negative freedom world, free. And so if you're in a negative freedom world, then what you think is like, it's just me and the barriers, right? You think, I'm fine, right? It's the barriers that are the problem. I'm okay. I'm great. And you never really have to ask yourself, what do you stand for? Like, what would you take a risk for? And then the moment comes when it turns out the barriers are too much for you.

And what do you do? For you, freedom is impulse. You run like hell. And I don't think we could imagine them doing anything differently because I don't think we could imagine ourselves doing anything differently. And that's what haunts me. Because one of the reasons that the Ukrainians did resist was that they thought it was worthwhile doing so. They weren't thinking that freedom was something

which is just an absence. They were thinking it's about the things that you do. There's a connection to the American mistakes that followed because... I'm going to rack up points with the Canadian audience for this stuff, but when we are, we are not a people who quickly admit our mistakes and after February 2022, we needed to quickly admit our mistake. So the Ukrainians didn't flee, they did fight.

They were incredibly effective. And we weren't ready for that because in our mind, the Ukrainians were going to lose. And we weren't able to move quickly enough to think, okay, actually, somebody's going to lose, but it doesn't have to be the Ukrainians. And fall 2022 was the best chance for the Ukrainians to actually, for the war to end in the right way. But we were just not moving quickly, quickly enough at that point. You write about factuality and the importance of a shared sense of ideas and truths. And you say that without factuality, every form of freedom is menaced. But you also say that facts are not what we want or what we expect. They do not follow

our prejudices, but they knock holes in them. Why is it, I mean, it sounds obvious, but why is a shared understanding of what's true important to freedom? And do we actually want that? Do we, I mean, do we actually want that sense of facts that challenge us? I'm going to say a segue here because in my writing on Ukraine and Russia, very important to me were the handful of Russian journalists, ever fewer now, and the larger group of Ukrainian journalists who actually covered the war beginning in 2014. The people who, sometimes at great physical risk to themselves, went to the territories that Russia was invading and actually covered that war. Those people, they enabled me to actually have some understanding

of what was happening in Russia and Ukraine rather than always reacting to the disinformation. Because so much of what we do is we react to the disinformation and we try to provide a counter story to some story which is meant to disable us. But the more important thing is to actually know what's going on, like that the Russians are using this type of artillery at this range and they've destroyed this village. And I know because this reporter was there and she filed this report. And that's why Rodan Freedom was dedicated to the reporters as the heroes of our time.

And I still have a very strong intuition that what we need are the human truths. So, factuality isn't the same thing as information, right? Like, we're bombarded with information based upon what a profit-making entity thinks will attract our attention. But the things that are given to us to attract our attention are not the things we need to know. And to make a kind of blunt force point that I feel morally compelled to make, we actually know less than we used to. We know a lot less, and we think a lot more slowly, and we remember a lot more poorly than we did before social media.

And if you don't know that, okay. And there is no other shoe to drop. That was the only shoe that was going to drop. Okay. And so, whereas factuality has to involve, in my view, local circumstances, local conditions. You know, is this stream polluted? Is this elected representative corrupt? It's all about local things which are reported by local people.

And on the basis of that, we can build forward to the idea that there are other reliable reporters, like national reporters or scientists or historians, other human beings who have their own methods that generate factuality. Contrary to what libertarians want us to think, there is no free market. There's no free market in general. It's an idiotic idea, but there's no free market of ideas. The best ideas do not rise to the top. That's just insane. And the truth certainly doesn't rise to the top, right? Factuality has to be garnered, worked at. It takes a lot of effort. Humans have to go places. And then it's not what we want to hear necessarily, but that's part of freedom, right? Like freedom isn't easy. Empathizing with other people isn't necessarily easy. Hearing the things that aren't what you want to hear isn't easy.

That's why it's so easy to have an authoritarian regime. I mean, that's easy, right? I mean, that's easy. The hard part is not having an authoritarian regime. And, and the point of the point about freedom is that it requires collective work, but it also requires each of us to have a little bit of, of, of, of an edge in my view of freedom, where I really think the virtues are real. Like I sincerely believe that there is such a thing as integrity and grace and beauty and loyalty. I think those things are as real as this carpet or this stage or the stairs. They're not real in the same way, but they're just as real. And freedom is the condition in which we can value what we value, balance our values, create unique combinations of values as we live, realize some of these things, that freedom is that thing. Like it's the value of values because it's the

condition in which we can realize all the other values, and that's good. And so different values are good, like that's fine. But if we have different values and we have different facts, then we can't do anything together. Like if I say there's water pollution and you say there's not water pollution, we're not going to go anywhere, right? Or if there's no factuality, we're not going to go anywhere. So like if I say there's water pollution and you say, well, what is water pollution anyway? Then we're also not going to get anywhere, right? Oh, and one more little thing that like facts are hard but they're also unpredictable like what is what turns out to be the case is often unanticipated

and so pursuing facts is one way to be an unpredictable person yourself and being unpredictable is essential to being free you have an audience full of people here who presumably value freedom and and and want to know what they can do to enhance not just their own freedom, but work for freedom in a broader context. What would you say to them? I mean, there are a couple of points of advice that you have for people. One is volunteer to coach a team to help raise a child that's not yours. Pay for a newspaper subscription, although maybe that's been questioned given the lack of endorsements. Do physical exercise

before you look at a screen in the morning. What are some of the things that people could think about that could help inform their daily practice of creating and enhancing freedom? Yeah. Before I answer that, I just want to say that

there is a kind of dialectic to all this because I don't want it to be understood as a sort of self-help book where I say, the only thing which is wrong with you is that you need to sleep seven and a half hours and not seven hours. With freedom, two

things are always true at once. It's always true that the conditions have to be right. So if the world outside is too unpredictable because climate change or because bad roads or because tyrannical leaders or because massive income inequality or whatever, if the outside world is too unpredictable,

then we're going to be too predictable. We're going to be frightened. We're going to be herded. So we need to have a certain level of predictability in the outside world so that we can become unpredictable ourselves so you we can't you we can't be free just by kind of following my my list of things we also have to be free by doing the things together that create the conditions for for freedom like if we think of an infant, like I can't give an infant my self-help lessons, right? That doesn't make any sense. But what we can do together is create conditions whereby parents and caregivers can raise children

more easily and therefore give a child a better chance of growing up with a capacity to be free. So I just, I need to push a little bit on the institutional side before I move on to the individual side, because the individual side is also indispensable. Like, they're the practical things, but they just lie there, unless we think some things are good in the world, and I'm going to try to figure out what those things are. So really striking to me was the idea of freedom

that my friends, people I admired, the anti-communist dissidents had. Because their idea of freedom, although many of them ended up in prison or in the gulag or in psychiatric prison, their idea of freedom was not this grand thing. It wasn't me against the whole Soviet state. It was more like, I want to live a normal life. I want to do the things I actually love. I want to speak the language I want to speak. But in Václav Havel's case, you know, his example was literally, good beer is better than bad beer. Like, that you actually care about things. I mean,

when Havel went to prison, it was because of a rock and roll band. And when I asked Zelensky, like, what do you think freedom is he said learn to play the guitar join a band and that was at a moment when his army was as we would say quote unquote liberating most of Harjikiv region that was September 2022 and so like freedom

has to mean it has to mean loving things and it has to mean admitting that you love things and that's why it always requires a little tiny bit of courage because it's so much easier to look around and see oh how's everybody else reacting and what do other people think is okay and like and it's so hard to say well I actually love this sport or actually love collecting this thing or I love this hobby I love this kind of music right that's. Like freedom is being

the weird person who you actually are, owning up to it and finding other people to do those things with. And then when there is any pressure on being that eccentric, weird person that you are, then you resist, right? Because you have your own sense of what's normal. And it's my firm conviction, not only because of moral reasoning, but mainly because of historical experience or historical research, among other things, on the dissidents and on Holocaust rescuers too, that the people who end up doing the extraordinary things and the extraordinary moments are the ones who were doing the kind of invisible work of freedom the whole time. Like they had their little principles that, which they didn't make a big deal about, but they had their norms, they had their values. And then when things changed, they didn't change. And that's the trick, right? That's the whole trick. Like in our, in our Hollywood movies, when there's a fight for freedom, I mean, the scene, it's basically like this, right? You're just like ironing your clothes or something. Like you're just having a normal life. And then, you know, an invasion comes from space and you rally and it turns out like you love freedom and you go out

there and you defeat the aliens and like that's the negative freedom fantasy right like that you're fine and then the threat came from outside and you rallied because you love freedom but that's not what freedom is like at all like freedom is about having a whole bunch of little values that are personal and taking little tiny risks, like the risk of admitting you love something. Like that's a risk, right? Like it's hard to do multiple good things at once, but if you practice, you get better at it.

Doing that, like that's being free. And then realizing like the last form of freedom is solidarity, realizing that this is true of you, it's true of everybody else. And we have to create the conditions where we can all become these experimental leaning forward, you know, um, slightly vulnerable people. And so I do have a list of things, you know, and I'll, I'll just mention one of them. The greatest source of unpredictability is a thing that brought us here together for this conversation, which is books. Books are a huge store of unpredictability

because books give you access to a whole range of values from the past and from the imagination of people in the present, which you could never get to on your own, right? So whereas like computer screens tend to make us more predictable, books tend to make us less predictable, and books are a good example of that funny thing, which I guess since you're here, you had enough courage to admit that you sort of love. Timothy Snyder, really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much. That was Matt Galloway speaking with author and historian Timothy Snyder. Snyder's new book is called On Freedom. Their conversation was recorded on stage last night at the Vancouver Writers' Fest. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.