The Difference Between Freedom and “Unfreedom”

I've gotta kind of drag you back out of the vortex of inattention and make you realize the difference between freedom and unfreedom. A lot of people don't understand this, there's a great deal of confusion, this has been true for at least the last five years. And one of the category errors that drives me as an historian up the wall is the category error that leads people to compare a populist president with a fascist dictator.

I want to try and explain to you why this is not a helpful comparison, why it's the reverse of applied history, it's misapplied history. And my favorite exhibit, the respectable form of this category error, is a book that was published a few years ago by Timothy Snyder of Yale.

And this book is called On Tyranny, and it sold quite a few copies and is widely praised for reasons that strike me as puzzling. On Tyranny offers 20 recommendations for how you should behave if you should happen to find yourself in a tyranny.

Just one day you wake up,

And it's like, God, it's a tyranny, what should I do? And you reach for Tim Snyder's book.

You were perspiring slightly because you weren't expecting it to be a tyranny, but now you have to get ready. And so you read, number one, do not obey in advance, okay?

How does that work?

How can I obey in advance? I don't know what to do to defend institutions, which ones?

Beware the one party state, okay? I don't think we have that yet, take responsibility for the face of the fate, I think it should be of the world.

Remember, professional ethics, I know, you were kinda forgetting those.

Be wary of paramilitaries, I found this very useful cuz I've always been rather casual about paramilitaries.

So I'll be wary, okay, paramilitaries, whoa.

Be reflective if you must be armed, okay?

Hmm, let me just take a moment.

Stand out, someone has to, so I'll put on my red shirt today. Be kind to our language, okay, no cursing. Believe in truth, that would make a change. Investigate,

I'll read the New York Times twice today. Make eye contact and small talk, all right, how are you doing?

Lovely weather we're having, isn't it? Take that tyranny.

Practice corporeal politics, well, I went to private school in Britain. There was quite a lot of corporeal politics at that school, but I'm not sure that's what he means. Establish a private life, it's time I had one of those, I've been thinking about doing it for a while, now that it's tyranny, I'll have one.

Contribute to good causes, that's an idea, I never thought of that before. Learn from peers in other countries. Hello, Vladimir? What do you do when you're in a tyranny? Listen for dangerous words,

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Okay, I'm gonna stay calm. There's a tyranny here, but it's gonna be okay cuz I got Tim Snyder's handbook to cope.

Be a patriot,

It may be a tyranny, but I still love it. No, that's not what he means. And be as courageous as you can. In academic life, courageousness looks like this.

All of this, I'm gonna try and persuade you, is about as useless a set of recommendations for dealing with tyranny as you could possibly come up with, even if you had 1000 research assistants in ten years to think about it.

Why do I think these pieces of advice are useless? Because I think they misunderstand how profoundly different the world of 2022, or for that matter, 2016, is from the world of, let's say, 1933. And if all we ever do in political discussion is talk about the 1930s, we're going to misunderstand completely the predicament that we're in.

On the left, a typical crowd of cinema goers in the 1930s, on the right, a typical group of Americans. But it could equally well they be Britons, or indeed chinese suffering from chronic attention deficit disorder due to the fact that you have three devices going at once.

The idea I want to convey to you is that we can't learn that much from the era of highly centralized communications technology if we are trying to navigate the politics of the post-Internet society.

I also wanna try and persuade you that if you really were in a tyranny, that the 20 things that Tim Snyder recommends you do would be useless.

And in order to convince you of that, having recommended a bad book that you probably shouldn't read, other than for the cheap laughs I gave you. I'm gonna recommend a good book that you really must read. The square in the tower makes a relatively straightforward argument about the nature of history.

It says, for most of history, hierarchical structures dominated relatively decentralized networks. And that's really the story up until the relatively recent past. There are exceptions to this, by and large, most of recorded history is the history of states and particularly of empires, very hierarchically ordered structures. And that's partly because of the primacy of defense it's extremely hard to organize any defensive system if it's not relatively centralized in its command structure.

The printing press is one of the things that fundamentally changed that, or at least temporarily changed it. And in the book, I try to show how the Advent of the printing press and the suddenly dramatically reduced cost of communication led to a series of revolutions of upheavals, beginning with the Reformation, about which there's no time to talk today, and producing in the 18th century, the Enlightenment.

And Enlightenment we can think of as a pre-decentralized intellectual network in which people all over the western world, for example, in my native Scotland, which Scott was nice enough to mention, sent out their ideas either in published form or in letters. And there was a completely disorganized network of ideas of thinkers, some of whom were at universities and some of whom weren't, who were able to share their ideas, much as we share ideas on some social media platforms today.

So there's no necessary connection between that kind of network and a democracy. The Enlightenment flourished in the Prussia of Frederick the Great. Koenigsberg was one of its great centers. So I'm not saying that every network is necessarily a democratic force, but I am saying that the Enlightenment network had an important role in the american revolution.

And we can see that the people who made the revolution against royal rule in Britain's colonies were part of a network. This is a graph of the network. If you're interested in this kind of thing, there's more of it in the book. There was a network of people who made this revolution.

And it's ultimately, I think, possible to understand the American revolution as the success of a relatively decentralized network against a hierarchical imperial structure of rule. One of the ways in which the revolutionaries networked was as Freemasons. A surprisingly large number of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were Masons.

This is a picture of George Washington in his masonic garb. And this is a part of the story that tends to get left out of the textbooks, not least because for a time, it was really quite a controversial subject. It isn't anymore, but it was for a time.

There was a revolutionary network at work in France in the 18th century, too. But the problem with that revolutionary network was that instead of building a relatively stable democracy, it produced with extraordinary speed a bloodthirsty tyranny, just as Edmund Burke predicted. And Burke's prediction in his reflections on the revolution in France is one of the most amazing bits of prescience of all time, because he saw that the revolution in France would end in terror.

He'd been, in fact, favorable towards the american revolution, but he saw that it would end in terror very early on, almost within a year of the revolution's beginning, and long before the terror had begun. One can think of the 19th century as the restoration of hierarchical order after the great upheaval of the revolution.

It sort of begins in France itself, with the rise of Napoleon, who imposes a personal and imperial rule over the chaos. And then when Napoleon challenges the established institutions of Europe, ultimately in 1815, he's defeated. And the old system of inherited monarchies is reimposed, as illustrated in this cartoon here.

In the book I argue that hierarchical structures prevailed in the 19th century because the technology of the industrial revolution lent itself to centralized control. London became a superhub from which a variety of technologies radiated, including the telegraph, the steamship, the railway. And these technologies allowed a vast empire to be governed with a remarkably small staff.

The striking thing about Britain's empire in India is that fewer than 1000 british civil servants run the entire subcontinent. So the technologies of the 19th century lent themselves to centralized control and communication. Are you with me? I've counted three yawns so far, which is quite good because I don't have imperial power.

I wish I did. I long for it. It's well known that I'm nostalgic for it. That's irony.

I shouldn't have to say that here, really, but better safe than sorry. So this hierarchical world in which empires run the world, basically most of the world is under some form of imperial control, blows itself up in 1914 because the empires decide to fight one another.

And this is a critical turning point, maybe the critical turning point in modern history, because in the maelstrom of 1914 to 1918, certain revolutionary ideas go viral. They spread with amazing speed. The idea of nationalism spreads to places it had never really manifested itself before, like the arab world.

Here's Lawrence of Arabia saying, have you thought about nationalism? And that's a way of disrupting the Ottoman Empire. You see, the empires are fighting one another. How do you dissolve an empire? Unleash a viral ideology that's anti imperial. The Germans tried to do the same thing. They tried to unleash a jihad against British imperial rule in Britain's muslim colonies.

But the Germans have an even better idea. It's too good an idea. They send Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, in a sealed train to Russia with a ton of money, and they say, go blow up the Russian empire. And he proceeds to do it. Remember, the Russian revolution is a German military intelligence plot, perhaps the most successful in history.

Too successful. It's like that scene in whichever movie it is where they use too much explosives. When you study networks, you realize they're shapeshifters. You start out with something that claims to be a movement of the people that mobilizes the workers, and the peasants, and the soldiers, and the sailors against hereditary privilege.

And within barely a decade, the thing turns into an even more hierarchical, autocratic structure than any of the previous royal regimes could achieve. Stalin builds a far more centralized, far more controlling regime than any tsar had been able to build. Hitler has far more power over Germans than any Kaiser or Prussian king.

Hitler reveals that what had supposedly been a very powerful network, the network of jewish financiers, wasn't powerful at all. It couldn't in any way constrain him from rising to power, taking control of Germany, and then launching another world war.

To understand what an unfree society is like, it's worth reading Jeder stirbt fur sich allein, an extraordinary book, which I think was translated as Alone in Berlin.

Which is based, Hans Fallada wrote it shortly after the war, it's based on a true story of this couple here. Who naively, innocently thought that if they wrote little postcards saying what they thought about the Third Reich and just left them lying around in Berlin, they would encourage dissidence against the regime.

This was because their son had been killed in France in the fighting in 1940. They were, of course, arrested, because anybody who found one of the postcards immediately handed it to the police. And the book describes the utter futility of their protest and the inexorable path that it led them to death.

So total was the control of a totalitarian regime that when the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin had a late night meeting with the poet Anna Akhmatova, Stalin immediately found out about it. Two intellectuals met in Leningrad and talked late into the night about philosophy and poetry. And it led to the arrest, repeated arrest, of her son.

It led to the persecution of her family, because Stalin's control was so total, his paranoia so pervasive, that he could not even tolerate a conversation like that between two individuals. That is what an unfree society is like. You dare not even have such a meeting. An unfree society is a place where an act of subversion as laughable as writing postcards saying what you really think leads to your execution.

This is a good illustration of how a totalitarian regime, at least in theory, is structured. It's a hierarchy, this is the control or governance of culture. In the Soviet system, it's a hierarchical org chart.

The propaganda says that it looks like this. Thank you, dear Stalin, for a happy childhood.

Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more cheerful. Mid 1930s Soviet propaganda. This is the reality. A vast network of labor and, effectively, death camps, because conditions were so harsh that mortality was very high. Camps of which there are very few photographs. Camps where unimaginable physical discomfort and hunger were inflicted on people who had fallen foul of the system.

Read Solzhenitsyn's Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to get a sense of the relentless misery of life in the gulag.