{"id":293606,"date":"2025-04-21T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=293606"},"modified":"2025-04-21T13:32:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T12:32:30","slug":"on-freedom-the-vision-of-a-contemporary-north-american-political-thinker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/04\/on-freedom-the-vision-of-a-contemporary-north-american-political-thinker\/","title":{"rendered":"On Freedom: The Vision of a Contemporary North American Political Thinker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

15 Apr 2025\u00a0<\/em>– There is an ideology among the extreme right wing in US politics claiming that the source of all our major problems is \u201cbig government.\u201d It is well known that the first three months of Donald Trump\u2019s administration (shared with Elon Musk) has been devoted to tearing down \u201cbig government\u201d in the USA, slashing and burning all the departments, regulatory, and research agencies developed over many decades of USA administrations and congressional legislative acts, regardless of their purpose. Yale University political historian Timothy Synder has emerged as a person of great interest in understanding and resisting this onslaught.<\/p>\n

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During the first Trump administration, in 2017, Synder had put together a very small book called \u201cOn Tyranny.\u201d The book itemized 21 indicators of tyranny that people should be aware of and outlined ways that incipient tyranny might be resisted. In a recent interview Synder related that in 2017 (after Trump\u2019s first inauguration), he had copies of this small book printed himself, and he went about handing them out to people for free. There was little interest. Today, in 2025, the book has gone viral and found a wide audience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Synder\u2019s 2024 book On Freedom<\/em>, on the other hand, is much longer, more detailed, and interestingly autobiographical concerning his philosophical, political, and real life-experiences. It attempts to unpack the meaning and dimensions of a free society, the very possibility of which is currently in great danger in the USA. He endeavors to elaborate the concept of freedom through identifying five dimensions of freedom, all of which must work together to become the foundation of a truly democratic society. These are (1) sovereignty, (2) unpredictability, (3) mobility, (4) factuality, and (5) solidarity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe enable freedom,\u201d Synder declares, \u201cnot by rejecting government but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.\u201d This is why it is so important to be clear about freedom, and freedom is both a feature of individual persons and society, including government. There are no free people without a social order and good government to actualize and empower the freedom of each and all.<\/p>\n

The raising of children, itself a social as well as parental responsibility, is essential to forming adults characterized by sovereignty. <\/em>\u201cSovereignty,\u201d here, does not mean independence from the law or the social order. It means adults \u201cwho know themselves sufficiently and the world\u201d to make informed choices or \u201cjudgments\u201d from within a life guided by authentic values. Some writers have called this level of maturity \u201cautonomy.\u201d In the 18th<\/sup> century, Immanuel Kant called it \u201cenlightenment,\u201d that is, the \u201ccapacity to use one\u2019s understanding without guidance from another.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the 1980s, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified several levels of cognitive and moral growth, and his contemporary Carol Gilligan had confirmed these levels for women and girls even as they express themselves in \u201ca different voice.\u201d From the immature egoism<\/em> of youth, people normally grow into an ethnocentrism<\/em> in which they believe their own culture, religion, language, nation, or race represents the truth about our human situation\u2014and hence that all others in their different perspectives are deluded. Maturity or \u201csovereignty\u201d of personhood normally manifests when a person grows beyond ethnocentrism to develop an autonomy <\/em>capable of appreciating multiple perspectives and making informed judgments according to his or her own emerging sense of values.<\/p>\n

Synder goes out of his way to connect sovereignty with our bodily selves, with our sense that each of us lives as a body-mind unity requiring social solidarity and cooperation to protect and respect our bodies. Again, child nurturing becomes fundamental, the child\u2019s body and mind must develop together toward the adult sovereignty that is fundamental to freedom, which he calls \u201cthe value of values.\u201d The USA culture of imprisonment, locking up millions in privately run prisons, does not respect nor encourage the development of body-mind sovereignty in its citizens. Synder also regularly draws his insights from European freedom thinkers, such as Simone Weil and V\u00e1clav Havel.<\/p>\n

When people become sovereign individuals, they become creative. They encounter circumstances and situations that they transform according to their values. Hence, they are \u201cunpredictable.\u201d This is the second dimension of freedom. Havel struggled with the \u201cnormalization\u201d imposed by the Soviet Union on Czechoslovakia, a normalization that no longer believed in Marxism, but required a deep social conformity in the population. He countered this with human autonomy as the \u201cnormalcy\u201d of a free person acting with creativity and unpredictability. Unpredictability does not mean choices made by whim, it means that sovereign persons are forever bringing something new into their lives and to society. Such people recognize one another and can work together to promote the freedom and well-being of all.<\/p>\n

Here Synder introduces a concept that is close to my heart, having deep resonance with my recent book Human Dignity and World Order <\/em>(2024). He calls our human value-capacity \u201cthe fifth dimension,\u201d beyond the first three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time. This is why freedom, sovereignty, and unpredictability are utterly fundamental and exist against tyranny. The evolution of life on Earth has introduced a fifth dimension, a new reality beyond the first four dimensions, one arising from temporality itself. Human beings freely embrace and pursue values, bringing to the world what Havel calls a \u201crestlessness of transcendence,\u201d an idea, Synder says, that also resonates with the thought of Simone Weil.<\/p>\n

We are also intimating here the proper role of government. The \u201cnegative freedom\u201d of the current Trump administration thinking that freedom will come \u201cif the government is small and weak\u201d is the opposite of good government, which can give assistance to families and children in preventing poverty (poverty hinders the development of sovereignty in people). Government can provide insurance so that freedom can develop and flourish without people having to fear getting sick or some accident that will ruin them financially, and it can provide many dimensions of public infrastructure (libraries, public health research, climate information) that makes freedom possible and more likely. Positive freedom includes and promotes creative unpredictability.<\/p>\n

The third dimension of freedom is mobility. <\/em>We need not only the ability to move our bodies in free travel, and social mobility providing a range of possible futures for persons, but also the ability to evolve and vary the course of our lives according to our maturing values. Mobility includes \u201caccess to food, water, hygiene, health care, parks and paths, roads and railways.\u201d Again, we see that mobility is a socially constructed reality requiring a major role for good government.<\/p>\n

If we are free to move, and if movement is supported and empowered, then we are more likely to \u201cencounter one another\u201d in the sense that we will grow beyond ethnocentric narrowness toward a capacity to appreciate the wonderful world of differing perspectives, cultures, races, and religions. To become pluralistic in this way does not mean becoming relativistic, paralyzed by multiplicity and incapable of choosing what appears as the better path. Sovereign people grow and change, but they have accessed that \u201cfifth dimension\u201d of values in which precious human freedom and its multiple aspects are realized in daily life.<\/p>\n

Whatever the flaws and errors of US history may have been, it is this positive vision of freedom that has led to the abolition of slavery, the New Deal emphasizing social equality and justice, the relatively successful struggle for universal civil liberties, the voting rights act, and the more recent emphasis on diversity, equality, and inclusion. \u201cMobility is about the free movement of individuals toward their own individual futures.\u201d Freedom is about persons, but it takes an entire community to produce a person, so freedom is also about the way communities and governments are organized and conducted.<\/p>\n

By contrast, tyranny (unfreedom) is about immobility\u2014the compartmentalizing of Jews by the Nazis, the \u201cmass mobilizations\u201d of the Soviets that denied individual freedoms, systems of segregation in South Africa, Israel, and the USA, the mass incarceration of blacks and minorities in the US prison system, and the vast inequalities of wealth everywhere. \u201cIn conditions of extreme inequality, the word freedom, <\/em>which should belong to everyone, attaches instead to abstractions that suit the oligarchs. When we speak of \u2018free markets\u2019 instead of \u2018free people,\u2019 we are in trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mobility depends on a sense of the past, on the dynamic present in which choices are made according to values, and on the future, which must be open to the unpredictable, to the possibility of transcendence, and to the mature realizations of freedom. In my own terminology, human beings are gifted with \u201cutopian horizons\u201d that continually beckon us to act in the service of an envisioned world of peace, justice, freedom, and sustainability for all humankind as well as the precious living Earth that has given birth to us. Synder makes an argument in this book for freedom within all nations. I argue that freedom can only be truly realized under a world system predicated from the very beginning on freedom and dignity.<\/p>\n

The fourth dimension of freedom he calls factuality. <\/em>We live in a digital age when the very notion of factuality is under assault. The oligarchs and the big corporations have used their power to promote the denial of the climate crisis. The so called \u201cfree speech\u201d of most internet platforms allows unlimited nonsense and untruth to colonize people\u2019s minds. This is a huge assault on freedom that may lead to human extinction and the death of most of the Earth\u2019s living species. A society of freedom that limited those extremes of wealth that engender oligarchy would be a society that affirms factuality, that is, the credible claims of science and history. Here \u201ctruthfulness\u201d as well\u2026is a necessity for life and a source of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf <\/em>that a \u201cbig lie\u201d can be so huge that one\u2019s followers cannot imagine that the leader could lie on that scale, so Trump\u2019s \u201cbig lie\u201d about the 2020 election followed the same playbook of tyrants. The lie enables such serious crimes that followers who are invested in the lie must deceive themselves all the more convincingly in order to avoid feeling guilt for those crimes. For example, the January 6, 2021, assault on the US capital by a violent mob. In the US, the general breakdown of a culture of factualness enabled such big lies and the disintegration of any real sense of a \u201cshared reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the institutions now being dismantled by Donald Trump have been dedicated to various dimensions of factuality: the Center for Disease Control, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Smithsonian Institute and its museums. For Synder, it is science and history that can solidify for us \u201csome shared sense of reality,\u201d and \u201cwe cannot enable freedom without institutions\u201d that ground factuality and make this possible. Nevertheless, I want to ask, is it factuality alone that is essential to freedom or is it a more holistic orientation that encompasses the facts within a nexus of insights and evolutionary understandings, putting the facts in their proper place in relation to freedom, evolution, growth, and their attendant values?<\/p>\n

The fifth and last dimension of freedom is solidarity. <\/em>Like each of the above dimensions of freedom, solidarity also involves all the others. It simply makes this mutual involvement explicit. \u201cNone of the things that we need to become free, including knowledge, can we produce by ourselves.\u201d This means not only that others make possible our freedom, but it also implies \u201cthe self-conscious labor of making freedom possible for others.\u201d Freedom implies our radical equality and our mutual affirmation that we all need one another, as well as good government, to protect, preserve, and promote freedom.<\/p>\n

Freedom and solidarity are destroyed by the oligarchs, by the advocates of a \u201cfree market,\u201d and by an \u201cescapism\u201d in which the rich believe they can \u201celude the tragedy unfolding around them.\u201d Likewise, libertarianism<\/em> is an anti-solidarity philosophy that is antithetical to the solidarity needed for authentic freedom. Markets may be useful for certain forms of production and distribution, but clearly they are not useful for providing healthcare, nor for providing insurance that really protects our lives, nor for giving us any real \u201cefficiency\u201d in many areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cLibertarianism is incompatible with every from of freedom.\u201d It refuses to examine and recognize the radical interdependence required for people to become free. It treats freedom as the right of individuals to act on senseless impulses, rather than on reasonably grounded and social empowered actions directed toward aims that we consider to be right and good. Similarly, \u201cthe \u2018free market\u2019 is directed against social mobility.\u201d This ideology considers welfare provisions or redistribution schemes as \u201cforbidden\u201d interference with the workings of the market (while at the same time using government interventions in their favor). Both these orientations are in \u201copposition to solidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of these features of freedom intersect with the distinction between \u201cpositive freedom\u201d and merely \u201cnegative freedom.\u201d Negative freedom imagines that freedom comes from getting rid of something. Marxists wanted to get rid of \u201cbourgeois values.\u201d Nazis wanted to get rid of Jews and other undesirables. American right-wing ideologues want to get rid of big government.<\/p>\n

Such ideologues tell people they must choose between mutually exclusive values, for example, between entrepreneurship and social justice, or between individual freedom and greater social security, or between the tyranny of big government (along with a bloated bureaucracy) and the personal well-being of individuals and communities. But all of these \u201cmutually exclusive\u201d false alternatives are forms of negative freedom, whereas positive freedom can make room for creative syntheses empowering people through multiple dimensions, all deriving from good government. Solidarity means real democracy directed toward real positive freedom, in which neither oligarchs or ideologues are in charge.<\/p>\n

At the end of this book, Synder returns to the \u201cfifth-dimension\u201d of values. The quest for freedom is not an easy burden for persons to shoulder, but this dimension is precisely where our minds, bodies, and the significance of human life itself can be found. It takes work, patience, and courage. He declares: \u201cThere is no escape from judgment, the choice of values,\u201d and continues: \u201cThe space between what is<\/em> and what ought to be<\/em> is where we roam as free people, extending the borderland of the unpredictable. We decide which values to affirm, in what combination, for what reasons, and at what time. Then we try again. With practice, we attain our own human form of grace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like his small book On Tyranny, <\/em>this book On Freedom <\/em>is directly relevant to the current American context. However, in spite of the fact that Synder is widely travelled, his thinking seems deeply caught in the miasma of sovereign nation-state assumptions that is rapidly leading our planet into total disaster. He fails to discern that all five of his aspects of freedom are defeated, not only by economic oligarchies, but also by the lawless system of sovereign nation-states itself.<\/p>\n

Freedom is being defeated in the USA not only because of its internal history of failure to discern and protect these five aspects of freedom, but also because the US is part of a fragmented world system that structurally defeats\u00a0Personal Sovereignty<\/em>, Creative Unpredictability, Mobility, Factuality<\/em> and Truth-telling<\/em>, as well as Human Solidarity<\/em>. That is why we need to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. That is why the 16th<\/sup> session of the Provisional World Parliament is scheduled for December 2025. Freedom is either a common human phenomenon, a self-realization of humanity, a \u201cfifth dimension\u201d of human existence, or it is nothing. This excellent little book on freedom needs to be generalized to the human project as a whole. It is time to focus on the Earth Constitution.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Dr. Glen T. Martin:
\n– Member, <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>
\n– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
\n– Founder\/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
\n– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
\n– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
\n– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
\n<\/em>www.earthconstitution.world<\/em><\/a> \u2013 Email: <\/em>gmartin@radford.edu<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Freedom is being defeated in the USA for failure to discern and protect these five aspects of freedom and because it is part of a fragmented world system that structurally defeats Personal Sovereignty, Creative Unpredictability, Mobility, Factuality and Truth-telling, as well as Human Solidarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":283893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[328,70],"class_list":["post-293606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-freedom","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293606"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":293974,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293606\/revisions\/293974"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}