During the first Trump administration, in 2017, Synder had put together a very small book called “On Tyranny.” The book itemized 21 indicators of tyranny that people should be aware of and outlined ways that incipient tyranny might be resisted. In a recent interview Synder related that in 2017 (after Trump’s first inauguration), he had copies of this small book printed himself, and he went about handing them out to people for free. There was little interest. Today, in 2025, the book has gone viral and found a wide audience.
On Freedom: The Vision of a Contemporary North American Political Thinker
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Apr 2025
Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
15 Apr 2025 – There is an ideology among the extreme right wing in US politics claiming that the source of all our major problems is “big government.” It is well known that the first three months of Donald Trump’s administration (shared with Elon Musk) has been devoted to tearing down “big government” in the USA, slashing and burning all the departments, regulatory, and research agencies developed over many decades of USA administrations and congressional legislative acts, regardless of their purpose. Yale University political historian Timothy Synder has emerged as a person of great interest in understanding and resisting this onslaught.
Synder’s 2024 book On Freedom, on the other hand, is much longer, more detailed, and interestingly autobiographical concerning his philosophical, political, and real life-experiences. It attempts to unpack the meaning and dimensions of a free society, the very possibility of which is currently in great danger in the USA. He endeavors to elaborate the concept of freedom through identifying five dimensions of freedom, all of which must work together to become the foundation of a truly democratic society. These are (1) sovereignty, (2) unpredictability, (3) mobility, (4) factuality, and (5) solidarity.
“We enable freedom,” Synder declares, “not by rejecting government but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.” This is why it is so important to be clear about freedom, and freedom is both a feature of individual persons and society, including government. There are no free people without a social order and good government to actualize and empower the freedom of each and all.
The raising of children, itself a social as well as parental responsibility, is essential to forming adults characterized by sovereignty. “Sovereignty,” here, does not mean independence from the law or the social order. It means adults “who know themselves sufficiently and the world” to make informed choices or “judgments” from within a life guided by authentic values. Some writers have called this level of maturity “autonomy.” In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant called it “enlightenment,” that is, the “capacity to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”
During the 1980s, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified several levels of cognitive and moral growth, and his contemporary Carol Gilligan had confirmed these levels for women and girls even as they express themselves in “a different voice.” From the immature egoism of youth, people normally grow into an ethnocentrism in which they believe their own culture, religion, language, nation, or race represents the truth about our human situation—and hence that all others in their different perspectives are deluded. Maturity or “sovereignty” of personhood normally manifests when a person grows beyond ethnocentrism to develop an autonomy capable of appreciating multiple perspectives and making informed judgments according to his or her own emerging sense of values.
Synder goes out of his way to connect sovereignty with our bodily selves, with our sense that each of us lives as a body-mind unity requiring social solidarity and cooperation to protect and respect our bodies. Again, child nurturing becomes fundamental, the child’s body and mind must develop together toward the adult sovereignty that is fundamental to freedom, which he calls “the value of values.” The USA culture of imprisonment, locking up millions in privately run prisons, does not respect nor encourage the development of body-mind sovereignty in its citizens. Synder also regularly draws his insights from European freedom thinkers, such as Simone Weil and Václav Havel.
When people become sovereign individuals, they become creative. They encounter circumstances and situations that they transform according to their values. Hence, they are “unpredictable.” This is the second dimension of freedom. Havel struggled with the “normalization” imposed by the Soviet Union on Czechoslovakia, a normalization that no longer believed in Marxism, but required a deep social conformity in the population. He countered this with human autonomy as the “normalcy” of a free person acting with creativity and unpredictability. Unpredictability does not mean choices made by whim, it means that sovereign persons are forever bringing something new into their lives and to society. Such people recognize one another and can work together to promote the freedom and well-being of all.
Here Synder introduces a concept that is close to my heart, having deep resonance with my recent book Human Dignity and World Order (2024). He calls our human value-capacity “the fifth dimension,” beyond the first three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time. This is why freedom, sovereignty, and unpredictability are utterly fundamental and exist against tyranny. The evolution of life on Earth has introduced a fifth dimension, a new reality beyond the first four dimensions, one arising from temporality itself. Human beings freely embrace and pursue values, bringing to the world what Havel calls a “restlessness of transcendence,” an idea, Synder says, that also resonates with the thought of Simone Weil.
We are also intimating here the proper role of government. The “negative freedom” of the current Trump administration thinking that freedom will come “if the government is small and weak” is the opposite of good government, which can give assistance to families and children in preventing poverty (poverty hinders the development of sovereignty in people). Government can provide insurance so that freedom can develop and flourish without people having to fear getting sick or some accident that will ruin them financially, and it can provide many dimensions of public infrastructure (libraries, public health research, climate information) that makes freedom possible and more likely. Positive freedom includes and promotes creative unpredictability.
The third dimension of freedom is mobility. We need not only the ability to move our bodies in free travel, and social mobility providing a range of possible futures for persons, but also the ability to evolve and vary the course of our lives according to our maturing values. Mobility includes “access to food, water, hygiene, health care, parks and paths, roads and railways.” Again, we see that mobility is a socially constructed reality requiring a major role for good government.
If we are free to move, and if movement is supported and empowered, then we are more likely to “encounter one another” in the sense that we will grow beyond ethnocentric narrowness toward a capacity to appreciate the wonderful world of differing perspectives, cultures, races, and religions. To become pluralistic in this way does not mean becoming relativistic, paralyzed by multiplicity and incapable of choosing what appears as the better path. Sovereign people grow and change, but they have accessed that “fifth dimension” of values in which precious human freedom and its multiple aspects are realized in daily life.
Whatever the flaws and errors of US history may have been, it is this positive vision of freedom that has led to the abolition of slavery, the New Deal emphasizing social equality and justice, the relatively successful struggle for universal civil liberties, the voting rights act, and the more recent emphasis on diversity, equality, and inclusion. “Mobility is about the free movement of individuals toward their own individual futures.” Freedom is about persons, but it takes an entire community to produce a person, so freedom is also about the way communities and governments are organized and conducted.
By contrast, tyranny (unfreedom) is about immobility—the compartmentalizing of Jews by the Nazis, the “mass mobilizations” of the Soviets that denied individual freedoms, systems of segregation in South Africa, Israel, and the USA, the mass incarceration of blacks and minorities in the US prison system, and the vast inequalities of wealth everywhere. “In conditions of extreme inequality, the word freedom, which should belong to everyone, attaches instead to abstractions that suit the oligarchs. When we speak of ‘free markets’ instead of ‘free people,’ we are in trouble.”
Mobility depends on a sense of the past, on the dynamic present in which choices are made according to values, and on the future, which must be open to the unpredictable, to the possibility of transcendence, and to the mature realizations of freedom. In my own terminology, human beings are gifted with “utopian horizons” that continually beckon us to act in the service of an envisioned world of peace, justice, freedom, and sustainability for all humankind as well as the precious living Earth that has given birth to us. Synder makes an argument in this book for freedom within all nations. I argue that freedom can only be truly realized under a world system predicated from the very beginning on freedom and dignity.
The fourth dimension of freedom he calls factuality. We live in a digital age when the very notion of factuality is under assault. The oligarchs and the big corporations have used their power to promote the denial of the climate crisis. The so called “free speech” of most internet platforms allows unlimited nonsense and untruth to colonize people’s minds. This is a huge assault on freedom that may lead to human extinction and the death of most of the Earth’s living species. A society of freedom that limited those extremes of wealth that engender oligarchy would be a society that affirms factuality, that is, the credible claims of science and history. Here “truthfulness” as well…is a necessity for life and a source of freedom.”
Just as Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf that a “big lie” can be so huge that one’s followers cannot imagine that the leader could lie on that scale, so Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election followed the same playbook of tyrants. The lie enables such serious crimes that followers who are invested in the lie must deceive themselves all the more convincingly in order to avoid feeling guilt for those crimes. For example, the January 6, 2021, assault on the US capital by a violent mob. In the US, the general breakdown of a culture of factualness enabled such big lies and the disintegration of any real sense of a “shared reality.”
Many of the institutions now being dismantled by Donald Trump have been dedicated to various dimensions of factuality: the Center for Disease Control, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Smithsonian Institute and its museums. For Synder, it is science and history that can solidify for us “some shared sense of reality,” and “we cannot enable freedom without institutions” that ground factuality and make this possible. Nevertheless, I want to ask, is it factuality alone that is essential to freedom or is it a more holistic orientation that encompasses the facts within a nexus of insights and evolutionary understandings, putting the facts in their proper place in relation to freedom, evolution, growth, and their attendant values?
The fifth and last dimension of freedom is solidarity. Like each of the above dimensions of freedom, solidarity also involves all the others. It simply makes this mutual involvement explicit. “None of the things that we need to become free, including knowledge, can we produce by ourselves.” This means not only that others make possible our freedom, but it also implies “the self-conscious labor of making freedom possible for others.” Freedom implies our radical equality and our mutual affirmation that we all need one another, as well as good government, to protect, preserve, and promote freedom.
Freedom and solidarity are destroyed by the oligarchs, by the advocates of a “free market,” and by an “escapism” in which the rich believe they can “elude the tragedy unfolding around them.” Likewise, libertarianism is an anti-solidarity philosophy that is antithetical to the solidarity needed for authentic freedom. Markets may be useful for certain forms of production and distribution, but clearly they are not useful for providing healthcare, nor for providing insurance that really protects our lives, nor for giving us any real “efficiency” in many areas.
“Libertarianism is incompatible with every from of freedom.” It refuses to examine and recognize the radical interdependence required for people to become free. It treats freedom as the right of individuals to act on senseless impulses, rather than on reasonably grounded and social empowered actions directed toward aims that we consider to be right and good. Similarly, “the ‘free market’ is directed against social mobility.” This ideology considers welfare provisions or redistribution schemes as “forbidden” interference with the workings of the market (while at the same time using government interventions in their favor). Both these orientations are in “opposition to solidarity.”
All of these features of freedom intersect with the distinction between “positive freedom” and merely “negative freedom.” Negative freedom imagines that freedom comes from getting rid of something. Marxists wanted to get rid of “bourgeois values.” Nazis wanted to get rid of Jews and other undesirables. American right-wing ideologues want to get rid of big government.
Such ideologues tell people they must choose between mutually exclusive values, for example, between entrepreneurship and social justice, or between individual freedom and greater social security, or between the tyranny of big government (along with a bloated bureaucracy) and the personal well-being of individuals and communities. But all of these “mutually exclusive” false alternatives are forms of negative freedom, whereas positive freedom can make room for creative syntheses empowering people through multiple dimensions, all deriving from good government. Solidarity means real democracy directed toward real positive freedom, in which neither oligarchs or ideologues are in charge.
At the end of this book, Synder returns to the “fifth-dimension” of values. The quest for freedom is not an easy burden for persons to shoulder, but this dimension is precisely where our minds, bodies, and the significance of human life itself can be found. It takes work, patience, and courage. He declares: “There is no escape from judgment, the choice of values,” and continues: “The space between what is and what ought to be is where we roam as free people, extending the borderland of the unpredictable. We decide which values to affirm, in what combination, for what reasons, and at what time. Then we try again. With practice, we attain our own human form of grace.”
Like his small book On Tyranny, this book On Freedom is directly relevant to the current American context. However, in spite of the fact that Synder is widely travelled, his thinking seems deeply caught in the miasma of sovereign nation-state assumptions that is rapidly leading our planet into total disaster. He fails to discern that all five of his aspects of freedom are defeated, not only by economic oligarchies, but also by the lawless system of sovereign nation-states itself.
Freedom is being defeated in the USA not only because of its internal history of failure to discern and protect these five aspects of freedom, but also because the US is part of a fragmented world system that structurally defeats Personal Sovereignty, Creative Unpredictability, Mobility, Factuality and Truth-telling, as well as Human Solidarity. That is why we need to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. That is why the 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament is scheduled for December 2025. Freedom is either a common human phenomenon, a self-realization of humanity, a “fifth dimension” of human existence, or it is nothing. This excellent little book on freedom needs to be generalized to the human project as a whole. It is time to focus on the Earth Constitution.
______________________________________
Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu
Tags: Freedom, USA
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Apr 2025.
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