About
The stimulus for this illustrated poem was Tim Snyder’s new book ‘On Freedom‘ and some of the media interviews he gave about it. In summary, some of his keypoints appear to be:
- Freedom should be source of happiness not anger
- Freedom is not the absence of state power
- Freedom is about values not impulses. With values comes commitments that suppresses the impulses.
- Free speech and religious liberty have been coopted by groups wishing to impose their view of the world on everyone else
- Freedom has been degraded to the right, by some, those with money, guns, or power, to give into every impulse
- The concept of freedom has been turned into a psychological tool of manipulation where other people are always a barrier. Consequently, those who buy into this end up inside someone else’s story of ‘us against them’. People are being herded and manipulated and so end up being discontented sad, and vulnerable.
- Subverting freedom of speech removes protection from people without power. Free speech is about the risk a human being takes speaking truth to power. Particularly the least fortunate. If you are protecting them from power then you are creating free speakers. Yet it is the powerful who set out to exploit them by proclaiming their protection of the peoples’ freedoms whilst actually eroding them.
- The concept of free speech is being degraded also by unseen oligarchs with multiple social platforms having the ability to algorithmically transmit trillions of messages to the ‘free speech’ silos their platforms have created. These silos only reinforce and amplify echoes but yet pass themselves off as news and views. Social media is set up for disinformation and to drive us into emotional states that are fundamentally anti democratic.
- Social media has stripped the world of facts and put fact-finders out of business. We need to support the institutions that find and report the facts if democracy is to survive. Local news is an essential element of free speech. The death of local journalism forces people to gravitate up and away from local contexts and so the greater the distance for local information/views and community the more polarising the pull particularly of social media and the more tribal thinking becomes. As a consequence there are no longer discussions about local news but instead there are arguments generated by some conspiracy theory on social media.
- Wrapped in the cloak of being ‘free speech’ warriors people with money, power and growing political or commercial influence have progressively perverted the concept. They are what free speech is meant to protect us against. For they will strip the freedoms and the bodies created to defend us.
- Internet media needs regulation so that conventions of communication and behaviour are not just decided by whatever tech firm got there first and established a market domination.
Freedom is a slippery concept. At a surface level everyone just ‘knows’ it is a good thing and so on that basis, some would argue, you can never have too much of it. The challenge of course comes from the differing interpretations of what freedom is and what degrees of freedom are appropriate in modern complex, crowded and, increasingly, unequal societies. Societies with at times radically different histories, cultures, traditions, economic/military reserves, and value sets.
Divergent views on freedom and degrees of freedom between different nations is nothing new. Such views have always been a potent source of tension, and sometimes physical conflict. The penetration of modern communication technologies and devices into the most granular aspect of our everyday lives, however, can now amplify and magnify any divergence of views within a nation particularly when such divergence flies under a flag of convenience where alternative views are presented as being an imminent threat to freedom. The inevitable response to such perceived threats is to identify convenient targets (individuals or bodies) who are then designated ‘enemies of the people’. Identifying the free press as such is the hallmark of all would-be dictators and when they succeed the first thing that disappears is truth, then accountability, and then ultimately freedom itself.
Snyder would undoubtedly be considered an ‘enemy of the people’ by those he is implicitly and explicitly criticising but, even in their labelling of him as such, they would perhaps be spotlighting the very point he is making. The really challenging (and interesting) thing with Snyder’s viewpoint is that mutation of the concept of freedom-of-speech into a psychological tool of manipulation, or as I put into a ‘fetish of freedom’. Such a fetish amplifies and magnifies certain aspects of the concept of freedom to the potential detriment of other aspects. For example, consider Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of negative and positive freedom. In Berlin’s negative freedom there is freedom from outside influence or interference. Amplify and magnify this to an extreme degree, however, creates the conditions for a mutation of what was once a ‘small state’ political ethos to a ‘no state’ ethos where either tribal, individualistic or now unconstrained commercial interests and impulses move into the vacuum. Berlin’s other concept is of positive freedom, i.e. the freedom to achieve, by creating the conditions for and providing the opportunities to progress. A harmonious society requires an acceptance by its citizens that there a reasonable balance of freedom from and freedom to but, as I suggested earlier, freedom is a slippery concept and those freedom from and freedom to’s are always targets for exploitation by wordsmiths always willing to point out that their constituencies deserve more or less of each. Whether that be the freedom to openly carry weapons of war in their communities and have freedom from penalties for doing so. Or to have the freedom to encourage their constituencies to storm their seat of government and destabalise a nation because their concept of freedom to is driven by child-like impulse, not restraining underlying values.
The other issue with Snyder’s assertion of mutation and exploitation of free speech is that the target of said manipulations are unlikely to recognise (or acknowledge) that they have been so deceived and will certainly not embrace being labelled as such. The recent Covid pandemic experience and the political turbulences in what have been relatively harmonious western societies, both, however, highlight one very terrifying aspect of human nature which is that there are an awful lot of us who can become ‘receptive to the deceptive‘. Such inclinations arise by dint of our innate psychology or because deterioration of economic and social conditions create the necessary feelings of threat and insecurity. In such conditions manipulative wordsmiths or ‘warlords of freedom’ find it easier to march.
The logistics of said marching used to depend on physical messengers, local speeches and much effort to convince the multitudes. Now the click of a social media button by an ‘influencer’ (or their flunky) can reach millions whose eyeballs or ears are permanenly connected to their personal chosen silo of righteous thought. A silo likely to be managed by an algorithm sucking in contentious content, for that is what the eyeballs and ears prefer. A silo controlled by oligarchs determined to protect their freedom of speech rights, and of course their profits and their ability to pull the digital strings of those who don’t or won’t recognise they have been coralled and transformed to puppet status. Including, sometimes, the politicians who mistakenly think that is they who are the puppet masters. A silo plugged into a world network where the ‘influencers’ may be a construction of hostile states or non-state actors and sometimes even be an automated AI chatbot. All mining a gold seam of influence dependent on identifying their own constituencies of the receptive to the deceptive. A process much aided by self-recruitment to digital silos of belief and outrage maintained by echoes and algorithm.
So maybe Snyder has a point and, if so, that is very depressing because to fix this problem will require consensus and unity. It is the very absence of such consensus and unity that has sowed the crop we are now cultivating. What the final harvest will be is a story still being written.
There are a few other musical or poetic postings exploring our human propensity for receptivity to deceptivity, e.g. Just Tell Me a Story or Sauron’s Gaze or Freedom’s Dark Mirror or Articulate Shark or In Their Minds v2 or In Their Minds v1 or Truth Dies or The Beast of Expectation. I invite you to read/listen to them as well.
About the Images
The surreal images supporting this article are the product of my interactions with ChatGPT4 and DALL-E 3 both AI products of AI.com. The verse was written by me and then sections were used to construct text prompts for ChatGPT to draft an image specification which was then implemented by DALL-E 3.
Want to share this post?
