On Freedom

Government by bootlick bureaucracy cannot work.

When we choose not to recognize other bodies as human, we create specific social situations, which we then define as the state of nature.

If our concept of freedom is negative, then the truth seems frustrating, just one more barrier to our impulses. If we lose track of the difference between “it is true” and “it feels right,” we are not free; forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right.

Tyrannies make anxiety seem normal.

Declaring and accommodating are the basic capacities of a sovereign person. Exercised alongside other sovereign people, declarations and accommodations generate an unforeseen realm, a land of the free. Coming to know other people, we know the world and ourselves better. Our values, our sense of what is right and what is wrong, are tested along with

The politics of inevitability sucks the life from values as well as facts, then presses the dry shells together. It abolishes the difference between what is and what should be: the world as it is supposedly brings the world as it should be.

We cannot be free unless our truths can be greeted by others, which means that we and they must share a common human understanding that there is such a thing as truth, that someone else’s bodily experience has a dignity that I can understand even if the experience was not mine.

Anyone (or anything) that caresses your naked anxieties will also be arousing those of the legion of cowards in which you have enlisted. The more people there are who fear the same things, the easier tyranny becomes.

It is worth being very attentive when oligarchs talk about free speech. The issue is not just that they are insincere or hypocritical. It is that they seek to traduce freedom of speech by making it seem senseless.