Narrator: What does a leader do when a superpower invades his country, and foreign advisors offer him a safe escape? Does he accept the "freedom" of personal safety, or does he choose a different path? In February 2022, as Russian forces advanced on Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi was faced with this exact choice. His response, delivered in a defiant video from the streets of the capital, was simple and world-changing: "The president is here." This single act of staying, of choosing solidarity over survival, embodies the central question of Timothy Snyder’s profound work, Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary. While the book begins with Snyder's personal health crisis, it expands into a sweeping philosophical and historical examination of what it truly means to be free. Snyder argues that freedom is not, as many believe, simply the absence of constraint, but the active, collective, and often difficult presence of the conditions that allow us to live lives of value.

Narrator: The common understanding of freedom is often negative: freedom from government, from oppression, from rules. Snyder challenges this notion from the outset, using the stark reality of de-occupied Ukraine to illustrate its shortcomings. He tells the story of Mariia, an 85-year-old woman in the village of Posad Pokrovs’ke. Her home was destroyed by Russian bombs, and while the soldiers are gone, she lives in a temporary shelter. She is "de-occupied," but is she truly free?

Snyder argues that removing the evil of occupation is only the first step. True freedom requires the presence of good: a home, security, community, and the opportunity to rebuild a dignified life. Mariia’s situation, and that of the survivors from the Yahidne school basement who were held captive for a month, reveals a crucial truth. De-occupation, or the removal of a negative force, is necessary but insufficient. Freedom is not a vacuum; it is a positive condition that must be built and sustained. It is the presence of moral and political structures that allow individuals to thrive. As one Ukrainian told Snyder during the war, "When we say freedom, we do not mean ‘freedom from something.’" They meant the freedom to be, to act, and to pursue a life of value.

Narrator: Snyder introduces the first form of freedom as sovereignty: the learned capacity to make choices based on values. But how do we learn this? He turns to the philosophy of Edith Stein, a German-Jewish philosopher who volunteered as a nurse in World War I. Tending to wounded soldiers, Stein developed a profound understanding of empathy. She distinguished between the body as a physical object, which she called Körper, and the body as a living, feeling, subjective being, which she called Leib.

A corpse is a Körper, but a living person is a Leib. Stein argued that we can only truly know ourselves and the world by recognizing the Leib in others—by understanding that they are subjects with their own inner lives, just like us. This empathy, Snyder explains, is not a vague kindness; it is a precondition for knowledge. When a regime, like the Nazis who murdered Stein at Auschwitz, reduces people to mere objects—Fremdkörper, or "foreign bodies"—it loses essential knowledge about the world and itself, paving the way for atrocity. True sovereignty, therefore, is not an isolated state of power. It is a social achievement, born from the act of seeing others as fully human, which in turn allows us to see ourselves clearly and make choices grounded in reality.

Narrator: In a system of total control, human beings become predictable. Snyder explores this through the experience of communist Czechoslovakia and the concept of "normalization" described by the dissident playwright Václav Havel. In his play Audience, a dissident intellectual is working in a brewery when his boss, the brewmaster, asks him to write his own surveillance reports for the secret police. It’s a soul-crushing request that perfectly captures the logic of normalization: a system where people conform not out of belief, but out of a cynical desire to get by. The predictable outcome is a loss of dignity, summed up by the play’s recurring line: "Everything is shit."

The antidote to this predictability is what Havel called "living in truth." It is the choice to act on one's values, even in small ways, which introduces an element of unpredictability into the system. When Havel and other dissidents formed Charter 77 to defend a rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe, they were making an unpredictable choice. They were asserting that the freedom to play rock music was a human freedom, linking their cause to a universal world of values. A free person, Snyder argues, is one who can act in ways that are not determined by the system, who can make choices based on their own unique combination of values, thus enchanting the world with their unpredictability.

Narrator: While physical prisons are an obvious form of unfreedom, Snyder warns of a new, more insidious type of confinement: the digital world. He recounts the story of a man released from prison after 26 years who was shocked by the world outside. He observed people staring at their phones and concluded, "I’ve seen more unfree people out here than I ever saw inside." His observation points to a profound truth about modern technology.

Social media algorithms, Snyder explains, function like a digital Skinner box, using techniques like experimental isolation and intermittent reinforcement to make our behavior predictable and profitable. We are fed a diet of what we already like (confirmation bias) and what others like (social conformity), which isolates us in echo chambers and erodes our ability to think critically. This digital environment constantly asks "how" questions—how to be more efficient, how to get more likes—while distracting us from the "why" questions about our values and purpose. Like Odysseus tempted by the Sirens' personalized song, we are lured by algorithms that know our weaknesses. Without tying ourselves to the mast of our own values and real-world connections, we risk becoming things to be manipulated, losing our grip on factuality and our own autonomy.

Narrator: The final form of freedom Snyder discusses is mobility—not just physical movement, but the ability to move through life, to improve one's station, and to follow one's values. This idea is at the heart of the American Dream. Yet, Snyder argues, this dream has been systematically dismantled, particularly for Black Americans. He points to the historic Freedom Rides of 1961, where activists like John Lewis risked their lives to challenge segregation on interstate buses. Their fight was for the simple freedom of mobility, a right that was denied based on race.

This struggle highlights a deeper problem: the belief that freedom is a zero-sum game. Snyder contends that policies promoting social mobility have been undermined by "sadopopulism"—a political strategy that distracts from rising inequality by offering the spectacle of others suffering more. Mass incarceration, for example, not only immobilizes millions of Black Americans but also creates a false sense of superiority and safety for some white Americans, trapping them in a stagnant and resentful politics. Snyder concludes that genuine freedom and mobility are not individual achievements. They depend on solidarity: the recognition that freedom is for everyone and that we have a collective responsibility to build a society with structures—like universal healthcare, quality education, and a just legal system—that allow everyone the chance to move forward.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Timothy Snyder's work is that freedom is not a gift of nature or a prize to be won individually. It is a demanding, collective project that requires constant effort and, crucially, good government. A society that prioritizes "free markets" over "free people" will inevitably see liberty erode. The five freedoms—sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and solidarity—are not abstract ideals; they are practical conditions that must be actively created and defended through policy and civic engagement.

The book leaves us with a powerful challenge. It asks us to abandon the comfortable but hollow idea of freedom as merely being left alone. Instead, we are called to embrace the more difficult, more meaningful work of building a society where every person has the real, tangible capacity to live a life guided by their own values. The ultimate question is not what we are free from, but what we are willing to do with the freedom we have, together.