Timothy Snyder, professor at Yale and the Vienna Institute of Human Sciences, begins his book entitled ‘On Freedom’ by telling us about his journey through war-torn Ukraine. There he dedicated himself to conducting a kind of survey among citizens to find out what their idea of freedom was. “By not fleeing, we fight for freedom,” some told him. While others told him that freedom was liberation from oppression; the absence of evil; collaborate for something positive and not against something; the absence of repression; the support of moral and political virtues; the condition in which all good things can flow within us and between us; and, finally, although the book provides many other opinions, the commitment to helping others. ESSAY ‘On freedom’ Author Timothy Snyder Publisher Galaxia Gutenberg Year 2024 Pages 441 Price 21 euros 5From what we deduce, the majority of those surveyed think that freedom, perhaps the most precious good for Don Quixote, is not a gift emanating from heaven and innate to each person, but it is something that must be earned at every moment. In Ukraine at war with Russia, freedom equals security, while its deprivation means insecurity. The insecurity in which they live is being deprived of freedom. Freedom can be positive, something you have; but it can also be negative, an absence. For example, saying that we do not need any state to govern us. Freedom is individual and the work of many generations. Sovereignty: the power to make decisions. Unpredictability: adapting and deciding about the unknown. Mobility: the possibility of moving without limits. Objectivity: understanding the world and trying to improve it. And finally, solidarity: the freedom of one for all. All these elements make up the essence of freedom. Throughout this magnificent book of great theoretical and narrative capacity, the author relies many times on authors such as Fanon, Havel, Kolakovski, Edith Stein and Simone Weil. Although the book fundamentally revolves around North American democracy, it wants to pay tribute to these thinkers who were not his compatriots, not well known in the United States, who did not reside in this country and never wrote about it. In reality, they are the bridge between Europe and the USA. Snyder criticizes the serious mistakes that Western democracy made in these fifty years: the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia; the little help that was provided to the former USSR, origin of Putin’s dictatorship; the destruction of Iraq from which Iran benefited; the arab springs; and, now, the new old wars in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria… Without a doubt, the greatest danger to freedom is seen in Putin’s Russia with the alliances of China, North Korea and other satellite states. Snyder insists a lot on the German word ‘LEIB’, it means body. Freedom as sovereignty over our own body. See others as subjects equal to usRussia, a fascist or neo-Stalinist empire where negative freedom prevented us from seeing that oligarchy was the antithesis of freedom and not a technocracy that only wanted to get rich. Snyder is also very critical of the political situation in his country taken over by the oligarchy and far-right populism “in many cases promoted by the leftism of the Democrats.” Negative freedom makes us think that privatized problems are less problems. But that separates us more from each other. Snyder insists a lot on the German word ‘LEIB’, it means body. He takes it from the philosopher and saint, Edith Stein. Freedom as sovereignty over our own body. See others as subjects equal to us. An isolated individual when he tries to contemplate the world alone has no chance of understanding it. School is the best place to recognize the ‘leib’ of others, respect it and live with it. Negative freedom is the self-deception of people who, in reality, do not want to be free. Negative freedom is a repressive idea, an intellectual and moral barrier. It prevents us from contemplating what we would need to be free. Those who do not want us to be free create physical and psychological barriers. Positive freedom involves thinking about what we want to become. And freedom is also a right to achieve happiness. T he absence of freedom is a threat to life, just as threats to life undermine freedom. Technologies Snyder shows his concern about the separation of bodies that technologies produce, «the screen has the ability to separate people. people even when they are in the same place. And he adds this other comment about algorithms: «They identify our most predictable traits and feed them until they suppress our character. They carry out what the mathematician Ada Lovelace long ago called a calculation of the nervous system. Its terrifying superpower consists of dominating people, making them predictable as individuals and classifiable in groups…” And to quote Arundhati Roy, “the danger is not that chatbots will replace us, but that we ourselves become chatbots.” Freedom needs human, sovereign and unpredictable thinkers. Non-freedom needs complacent and predictable creatures. Modern tyrannies, and there are more of them, make anguish seem normal. «They foist a threat on a group (blacks, for example) from which there is really nothing to fear, and then they presume to protect them from that supposed threat. They exchange relief from fear for freedom. Quite a manipulation,” Snyder writes. He also adds that Trump has replaced the American dream with sado-populism that normalizes oligarchy. So all your voters are masochists? It is becoming increasingly clear that freedom is no longer the meaning of politics. That politics is done against the ethical justification of a certain government. Freedom is on its way to being dispensable and the worst thing is that citizens do not feel threatened by its nonexistence.
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