Michael: Most of us think freedom is about being left alone. Less government, fewer rules. But what if the biggest threat to your freedom isn't the government, but your smartphone? Kevin: Whoa, okay. And what if the key to real liberty isn't breaking away from everyone, but actually connecting more deeply with other people? That feels completely backward from everything we're taught. Michael: It's a radical thought, and it’s the provocative heart of On Freedom by Timothy Snyder. Kevin: And Snyder is the perfect person to tackle this. He's a renowned Yale historian, famous for his work on tyranny and political collapse. He’s not just an academic; this book is deeply personal, drawing on everything from his near-death experience with sepsis to teaching philosophy in a maximum-security prison. It’s why the book has been so widely acclaimed, but also why some readers find it so challenging. Michael: Exactly. He argues that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood freedom, especially in America, and that misunderstanding is costing us dearly. He believes we're chasing a hollow version of liberty while the real thing slips through our fingers. Kevin: Okay, so if freedom isn't just 'freedom from' government or rules, what on earth is it? Where do we even start? Michael: We start with the body. With the simple, profound fact that we are living, breathing, feeling beings. And that, according to Snyder, changes everything.

Kevin: The body? I thought we were talking about political philosophy. That sounds more like a yoga class. How does my physical body have anything to do with my political freedom? Michael: It’s the absolute core of his argument. Snyder introduces this crucial distinction from German philosophy between two words for the body. The first is 'Körper,' which is the body as a physical object. A corpse is a Körper. A rock is a Körper. It’s just matter that obeys the laws of physics. Kevin: Right, a thing. An object. Got it. Michael: But then there's 'Leib.' And 'Leib' is the living, feeling, experiencing body. It's your body, with its own history, its pains, its pleasures, its unique perspective on the world. You can't have a 'Leib' without a 'you' inside it. It’s the body as a subject, not an object. Kevin: Okay, 'Leib'. It sounds a bit abstract, but I think I'm following. It’s the difference between a mannequin in a store window and an actual person. So why does this matter for freedom? Michael: Because Snyder argues, drawing on the philosopher Edith Stein, that we can only truly understand ourselves and the world—and thus become free, sovereign individuals—when we learn to see the 'Leib' in other people. Kevin: You’re going to have to give me an example, because that’s a big leap. Michael: This is where Edith Stein's own story becomes so powerful. She was a brilliant German-Jewish philosopher. But during World War I, she put her academic work on hold and volunteered as a nurse in a field hospital for infectious diseases. Kevin: Wow, that's intense. She went from the ivory tower straight to the front lines of suffering. Michael: Exactly. And there, she wasn't just theorizing about empathy; she was living it. She was tending to wounded, dying soldiers. She was cleaning their wounds, holding their hands, witnessing their physical and emotional pain up close. She wrote that you need the "mediation of the body to assure ourselves of the existence of another person." It was in that hospital, seeing the shared vulnerability of the human 'Leib,' that she solidified her philosophy: we gain knowledge of ourselves by acknowledging the full, subjective humanity of others. Kevin: That’s incredible. So her argument is that empathy isn't just some vague, nice feeling. It's a way of knowing. You see another person's pain, their 'Leib,' and in doing so, you get a more objective sense of your own place in the world. You see your own 'Leib' more clearly. Michael: Precisely. It’s the foundation of what Snyder calls positive freedom—the freedom to act, to create, to connect, to build a life based on values. It’s not just about being left alone in a void. It’s about being a sovereign person in a world of other sovereign people. Kevin: Okay, but what happens when you get it wrong? What's the opposite of seeing the 'Leib' in others? That feels like where the real danger lies. Michael: And that is the darkest part of this story. Because the opposite of seeing the 'Leib' is turning people into 'Körper'—into objects. And this is exactly what the Nazis did. It’s no coincidence that Edith Stein, who championed this philosophy of empathy, was later murdered at Auschwitz. Kevin: Oh, man. Michael: The Nazi ideology was built on this perversion. Hitler talked about the German people as a single, healthy organism, a 'Volkskörper'—a national body. And who were the Jews? They were labeled 'Fremdkörper'—foreign bodies. They were described as a virus, a parasite, an infestation. They were systematically stripped of their 'Leib' and reduced to mere 'Körper'—objects to be removed. Kevin: Dehumanization as a political strategy. You turn a person into a thing, and then you can do anything you want to it. That's absolutely terrifying. Michael: It is. And Snyder's point is that this isn't just ancient history. The moment we stop seeing the 'Leib' in others—whether it's a political opponent, an immigrant, or someone from a different race—we start down a very dangerous road. We lose a fundamental kind of knowledge about the world, and in doing so, we lose our own freedom. Because a world of objects is a world without meaning, and a world where we, too, can be made into objects. Kevin: So, real freedom, according to Snyder, is this radical act of empathy. It’s a constant, active effort to see the humanity, the 'Leib,' in everyone else. It’s not a right you’re given; it’s a capacity you have to build. Michael: You’ve got it. It's a practice. And that practice is constantly under threat, not just from totalitarian regimes, but from forces in our own society that are designed to make us predictable, isolated, and ultimately, unfree.

Michael: And that same mechanism of turning people into predictable objects is something Snyder sees happening today, just in a different, more subtle form. Kevin: Okay, so we're moving from 1940s Germany to the 21st century. How does this play out now? It's not like we have state propaganda telling us to see our neighbors as 'foreign bodies.' Or do we? Michael: It's less overt, but maybe more insidious. Snyder draws on the work of Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright who later became president. Havel lived through a period in communist Czechoslovakia called 'normalization.' Kevin: Normalization. That sounds harmless. Michael: That's the point. It wasn't about brutal, overt terror. It was about creating a system where everyone just goes along to get along. Where conformity becomes the easiest path. Havel wrote a famous play about this, where a dissident intellectual is working in a brewery, and his boss, the brewmaster, has to file reports on him for the secret police. Kevin: I can see where this is going. The brewmaster is a true believer in the cause? Michael: Not at all! He's just a guy who wants a quiet life. He's a terrible writer, so he makes the dissident a proposal: "Why don't you just write the reports on yourself? I'll sign them, the secret police will file them, and we can all just get on with it." At the end, they both agree, "Everything is shit." Kevin: Wow. That's a soul-crushing kind of unfreedom. It's not about being in chains; it's about being so worn down that you participate in your own surveillance just to avoid a hassle. You become predictable. Michael: Exactly. And that brings us to today. Snyder asks: what is the most powerful force for normalization and predictability in our lives right now? Kevin: My phone. It has to be. The algorithms. Is he saying that social media is the new secret police, making us predictable for profit and control? Michael: That's a perfect way to put it. He talks about the old behaviorist experiments with rats in a cage. You give a rat a lever. If it pushes the lever and gets a food pellet every time, it learns the system and moves on. But if it only gets a pellet sometimes—intermittent reinforcement—the rat will just push that lever obsessively, forgetting everything else. Kevin: That is literally the notification system on every app. The 'like,' the comment, the message. It might be there, it might not. So we just keep pushing the lever. We keep scrolling. Michael: We become predictable. We're herded into categories, fed content that confirms our biases, and kept in a state of low-grade anxiety and distraction. Snyder tells this incredible story about a man who was released from prison after 26 years. He got out and was just baffled by the world. He told one of the prison educators, "I’ve seen more unfree people out here than I ever saw inside." Because everyone was just staring at these little screens, trapped. Kevin: That gives me chills. The idea that a man in a maximum-security prison felt more free than the average person on the street. But this isn't just about tech addiction, is it? Snyder connects this to our politics, to the decline of the American Dream. Michael: He does, with a concept he calls 'sadopopulism.' Kevin: Sadopopulism. That sounds... unpleasant. Break it down for me. Michael: For a long time, the American promise was mobility. You could start poor and, through hard work, move up. But since the 1980s, that mobility has stalled for most people. Wealth has concentrated at the very top. So, what do you offer a population that feels stuck? Kevin: You can't offer them real upward mobility, because the system is rigged. So you offer them something else. Michael: You offer them the spectacle of someone else's suffering. Sadopopulism, Snyder argues, is a political strategy that salves the pain of your own immobility by directing your attention to people who are suffering even more. The politician says, "You may be struggling, but look at them—the immigrants, the minorities, the people on welfare. They are the problem. Be angry at them." Kevin: It's political junk food. It doesn't actually nourish you or improve your life, but it gives you a cheap, angry buzz by pointing at someone who has it worse. It keeps you distracted from the oligarchs who are actually holding all the cards. Michael: And it keeps everyone immobile. It normalizes a system of extreme inequality. Freedom, in this warped view, becomes not the ability to rise, but the relief of knowing you haven't sunk as low as someone else. It's a politics of resentment, not aspiration. Kevin: So it all connects. The philosophical idea of turning people into objects, the technological systems that make us predictable, and the political rhetoric that feeds on our immobility. It's a massive architecture of unfreedom.

Kevin: So what's the big takeaway here? It feels like we're trapped between our own psychology, these powerful technological systems, and a broken political culture. It sounds pretty bleak. Michael: It is bleak, but Snyder's message is ultimately one of agency. His ultimate point is that freedom is a choice and a practice. It's not a thing we have, but something we do. It’s not a passive state of being left alone; it’s the active, difficult, and beautiful work of building a life and a world. Kevin: So how do we do it? How do we fight back against this architecture of unfreedom? Michael: It starts with the small, unpredictable acts. He talks about Havel and other dissidents risking everything just to meet on a mountaintop and have a real conversation. That was an act of freedom. He talks about the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, who faced down violent mobs simply to assert their right to sit anywhere on a bus. Their mobility was an act of freedom. Kevin: They were refusing to be predictable. They were asserting their 'Leib,' their full humanity, in the face of a system that wanted to treat them as 'Körper,' as objects. Michael: Exactly. And for us, today, it means recognizing the 'Leib' in the person you disagree with online. It means choosing to have a difficult conversation in person instead of sending a tweet. It means supporting policies that promote real mobility and solidarity for everyone, not just a select few. It means reclaiming our time and attention from the algorithms that want to consume them. Kevin: So the antidote to predictability is to be... unpredictable. To choose to connect in real life, to read a book instead of scrolling. To do the hard thing instead of the easy thing. Michael: Yes. And Snyder leaves us with a powerful question to reflect on, one that comes from the philosopher Simone Weil. She said we can either be resisted by nature or we can use its resistance. Freedom is neither the lack of constraints nor the passive acceptance of them. It's the use of them. Kevin: That’s a powerful reframe. Are we using our constraints—our bodies, our societies, our technologies—to create something new and free? Or are we just letting them define us? Michael: That's the choice. It’s a choice we all have to make, every single day. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.