In his novel The Schirmer Inheritance (New York: Knopf, 1953), Eric Ambler writes that “the sadness of evil men is that they can believe no truth that does not paint the world in their colours.”

It is perverse to celebrate a past fight for freedom while accepting tyranny in the present. Each epoch demands a courage specific to its challenges.

Though freedom is a quality of a single life, it is the work of generations. The bell is an object of sentiment for me,

Factuality is an indispensable form of freedom.

Specialists in public relations now outnumber journalists by about six to one. Let us imagine a country where the ratio was even.

We cannot get free of the internet, but we can assert human values upon it. It is not freedom to be continuously nudged in the direction of prejudices and vulnerabilities shared by a class of people we neither see nor choose. It is freedom to make an evaluation and realize it. The brain hacks push us toward alienation and powerlessness. This is not

A touchscreen is no prison wall, but we are surrounded and surveilled and nudged and controlled. We have consented to a grim behavioralist grid of stimulation. We are being predictified.

The American budgetary problem is not that the government spends too much but that wealthy people do not pay their taxes. Allowing people to hoard wealth—and bend government to enable their hoarding—is not only wrong in the sense of contrary to freedom, it is also very inefficient.

The creation of capabilities belongs to freedom, as Edith Stein said. Prehabilitation is much better than rehabilitation, for everyone. Young people should be given a chance at a life in freedom. Keeping people out of prison is a matter of giving them, as children, chances to develop the capacities for freedom, and the opportunity, as young adults,