"Every hour, moreover, countless billions are spent on propaganda, advertising and other mystifications to sustain the delusion that the crisis-strewn society we live in today is the best and only one possible.
What is most important to grasp is that work is at the center of all these problems. It is work that keeps the whole miserabilist system going. Without work, the death-dealing juggernaut that proclaims itself the “free market” would grind to a halt. “Free market” means freedom for Capital, and unfreedom for those who work. Until the problem of work is solved — that is, until work is abolished — all other problems will not only remain, but will keep getting worse...In a world too busy to live, work itself has become toxic, a form of “digging your own grave”.
Renewed scarcities and engineered economic crises notwithstanding, society today has the capacity to reduce work to a tiny fraction of what it is now, while continuing to meet all human needs. It is obvious that if people really want paradise on Earth, they can have it — practically overnight. Of course, they will have to overcome the immense and multinational “false consciousness” industry, which works very hard to make sure that very few working people know what they really want..."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/penelope-rosemont-the-psychopathology-of-work
Regardless of nuanced philosophical debates about the nature of freedom, I am certain that I do not feel very free.
I am, in fact, haunted by a persisting sense of unfreedom - the moments in my life where I feel truly free are very VERY rare, fleeting and - in the last year or so - have been made completely inaccessible. Even in normal times: feeling free is a rare luxury.
I think, actually, most perfectly normal human being never actually experience real, intense, freedom: we are born into unfreedom and become so accustomed to it that it's just normal.
We are born into a workhouse: most people have little real choice when it comes to whether or not they work or the amount of time they spend working. Most people spend most of their lives being paid to do things they wouldn't do for free: being paid to do things they don't want to do, in a place they don't want to be, pretending to be someone they are not.
It's the horror of the slavery-spectrum. A spectrum on which the true slaves (forced to work under threat of violence without pay) are merely one extreme of unfreedom but we all (almost all) fall on to some degree.
As I age I realise that no political or economic system can necessarily save us from unfreedom: it's possible that there just is no cure for cancer and it's possible that unfreedom and a pervasive sense of unfreedom is an inalienable part of the human condition (like cancer).
Sometimes I wonder if ANYONE is truly free, even the child of a Saudi Oil baron who never has to work has his own unfreedoms to bare I suspect: not least of all because even if we could dispense with the unfreedoms implied by property/economic/social relations - nature is there to crack her whip.
Looking at the history of extreme and literal slavery it's clear that (sometimes by force, sometimes by choice, sometimes by accident) slaves kept making more slaves. The system depended on it actually.
When I see a baby I see a human being who will spend decades of their life working in shops, in offices, in factories: they have no real choice - other than to choose the details of their unfreedom.
Wage slaves making new wage slaves, debt slaves making new debt slaves. They think they are free, they believe they are free, even as they wake up to their alarms at 6AM to go serve and enrich someone richer than them - do they really feel free? All I know is that I don't.
I respect those who refuse to force this unfreedom on new humans. In choosing not to reproduce we can, t
... keep reading on reddit ➡I am Timothy Snyder, the author The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Now available in paperback, The Road to Unfreedom, is about global oligarchy and American politics, post-modern authoritarianism from Russia to Europe to us, and the ways that cyber can make us less free. It's a history of the present grounded in the hope that knowing our predicament is the first step to resolving it. It tells the "Russia story" from beginning to end – all of it. Ask me anything!
Read an excerpt of The Road to Unfreedom here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-russia-politics-of-eternity-timothy-snyder
And a review of The Road to Unfreedom here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/15/the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-europe-america-timothy-snyder-review-tim-adams
Watch a video on how inequality destroys the future by focusing on the past here: https://bigthink.com/videos/what-reasons-american-income-inequality
Find out more about my work here: http://timothysnyder.org
Follow me on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmY71FGkk5kMwde_TP3KbnQ/videos
And on twitter: https://twitter.com/timothydsnyder?lang=en
Proof: https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1128656712603447296
I was reading through a Halsall article on Early Medieval warfare and one of the points he makes is that Early Medieval monarchs and aristocrats sought pitched battle more often than they would in later times, which he attributes to more fluid social relations requiring warlords and military aristocrats to more forcefully assert their status and values through conspicuous display such as set-piece battles. Why did Medieval society become more tolerant of aristocrats and monarchs holing up in their castles and denying battle to wait out enemies ravaging their lands, instead of doing like their earlier counterparts did and depose more cautious leaders in favor of more aggressive ones?
"A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress."
This is the opening line of "One-dimensional man" by Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse thought that contemporary democracy and capitalism need a one-dimensional society to exist ... and a one-dimensional society is not free...
Do you agree with that?
https://lb.ua/culture/2020/09/26/466511_timoti_snayder_reanimuvati.html (some fragment of the text in Ukrainian)
https://choven.org/books/peredprodazh-shlyah-do-nesvobody-rosiya-yevropa-ameryka/ - publisher's website
I am Timothy Snyder, the author The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. My new book, The Road to Unfreedom, is about global oligarchy and American politics, post-modern authoritarianism from Russia to Europe to us, and the ways that cyber can make us less free. It's a history of the present grounded in the hope that knowing our predicament is the first step to resolving it. It tells the "Russia story" from beginning to end – all of it. Ask me anything!
Read an excerpt of The Road to Unfreedom here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-russia-politics-of-eternity-timothy-snyder
And a review of The Road to Unfreedom here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/15/the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-europe-america-timothy-snyder-review-tim-adams And here: https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21739941-fascist-admiring-monarchist-and-believer-cosmic-rays-source-national
Find out more about my work here: http://timothysnyder.org
Follow me on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmY71FGkk5kMwde_TP3KbnQ/videos
And on twitter: https://twitter.com/timothydsnyder
Proof: https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/994314368115531778
