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. The pursuit of truth is the first bulwark in a defense of the self.

free cannot be mass incarceration. The numbers are shocking. About 1.7 million Americans are now in prison, roughly as many as live in West Virginia. It is as though we have an entire state imprisoned. No land that cages so many humans looks free from the outside, or feels free from the inside.

We say that a symbol stands for something, but all too often a symbol merely stands in for something. The American flag is supposed to stand for freedom, but it can very easily stand in for freedom. In singing the anthem, we treat its values as permanent, or as if they were enacted by song. But praise is not practice.

The very phrase free speech, though we say it all the time, gets us on the wrong track. It suggests that speech is what is oppressed and what is to be liberated. That is incorrect. There is no speech without a Leib, without a person. Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so

A nation built on fear of conversation will be too fragile and porous for solidarity. The toughness needed to face the past is the same toughness needed to face the future.

believe that there had been systemic injustice. When communism came to an end in eastern Europe, roughly the same percentage of the Czechoslovak population was behind bars as the American. The American percentage kept increasing.

When there is only one vision of the future, the moral muscles grow limp. If there are no alternatives, why imagine them?

Social mobility into the middle class was a matter of positive freedom, a mixture of values and institutions, the notion that each life might have a unique trajectory thanks to enabling structures.

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.