Reflecting Upon Timothy Snyder’s "On Freedom"

Prelude to the Reflections

I am beginning a discussion here of probably six parts due to the length of this discussion on the concepts of freedom and tyranny. I begin these articles with Dr.Timothy Snyder’s little book On Freedom. To be frank, I am not as interested in these articles in reflecting on his earlier work, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century quite as much because if we have no clue about the meaning of freedom,if it remains an illusion that the government alone is responsible for granting freedom then tyranny exists within all forms of government; or can potentially exist.

Tyranny exists as a mindset when we view freedom and tyranny as operative rulesets in opposition to each other. Tyranny,as such, gives rise to the concept of freedom, which,were there no tyranny, no declaration of freedom would need be. Freedom cannot be overcome by tyranny but is a declaration against existing tyranny.

We must recognize that freedom itself exists as a unified, or community effort that doesn’t permit itself to be tyrannized. But my perspective here is to delve into the psychological oppression that drives towards tyrannous relationships, the double-speak of Orwell that is the very essence of tyranny, which exists only because of psychological malfeasance driven by a complex of learning right thoughts and wrong thoughts as if any thoughts can be right or wrong if they are not subject to thought-falsification, which, in general,the manner we learn is not the normative process in which we have learned.
But unless we can learn to subject our own thoughts to verification and run through them the ringer of not being always right, we subject ourselves to the inner tyranny of non-comprehension because we have been trained into learning what we have learned must be right because it is what we have learned.

Let me make an (possibly incorrect) assumption that most of my readers believe there is scientific ideologies subject to falsification through experimentation and observation. In such a manner, we learn about the external existence.

Exactly what entails pseudo-science, or unverifiable learning, is our primary learning model which has nothing to do with what we call schooling, or our educational learning model. One “science” that many criticize as pseudo-science is psychology. I could agree to a great extent, based on my first academic pursuit in studying psychology; and by my lifelong commitment in attempting to keep up with all aspects of this field.

And if anyone is interested, my book, the first volume of which is now available, essentially examines the competition between attempts at psychologically scientific theories that are based on experimentation and observation and those based on the theoretical presumptions of the “medical disease” model. (Thoughts and Essays on Developing Personalities available from the Barnes & Noble bookstore online—it’s not going to be available in Barnes & Noble bookstores unless you go to the clerk and ask them to order it for you.)

Theoretical psychology can be based on experimentation and observation, what we usually call behaviorism. Or it can assume that it it is an illness that can somehow be “cured” with soma of some sort. Just last week was a new article about having found the genetic markers that determine psychological illness and yet those same markers have been repeatedly tested and there is no correlation that can be definitely defined because even if there are many markers in common amongst those who may be classified as mentally ill, it can also be shown many more who are not so defined mentally ill have the same genetic markers than are so defined as markers of mental illness.

It is not to say there are not those who are mentally malfunctioning in our society. But my book is about the process of our learning from behavioral studies of infants and children and from brain studies on how people learn to learn. We learn how we will learn individually from our earliest experiences and observations that then enable us to learn what we will learn. And minus mental malfunction the brain develops genetically the same for everyone and the only thing that intelligence measurements (quotients) or grades determine is how the brain the brain has learned what it will learn. That is determined in the first six months of life to a great degree, and the methodology that any individual will utilize towards what he learns thereafter is pretty well formulated, at the latest, by age four.

Now what I mean by the methodology the brain will use to determine what it learns has nothing to do with what the brain will learn in the future or whether one will ever be able to alter one’s conceptions. The medical psychological community is largely interested in finding genetic markers of illness or predetermined intellectual capacity as if there were one determinant like eye color.

But that is false to begin with; even skin color is not determined as eye color; there are several genetic markers that determine melanin levels of different parts of the body. Here is a bit of mystery to me, though some may have researched it. Melanesians were thought genetically odd because of their dark skin and blue eyes. There was a great attempt to connect that to somehow denisovan inheritance due to a strong percentile of denisovan genes. But in the last year (I believe) genetic discovery of early inhabitants of Ireland show they were very dark-skinned (black) and that they had a high predisposition towards blue eyes. No known denisovan linkage as far as I am aware. But the other thing the genetic roots of the Irish female remained aligned to the same haplogroup but of course the women are not black because of y-chromosomed genes from the steppes and the near obliteration of the original male genetic inheritance.

And while I haven't actually seen any support for this concept, nevertheless if we review the male steppe infiltrators into other parts of Europe, Mesopotamia, even much of northern Asia, and perhaps can be attributed to the ब्राह्मण, (brāhmaṇa) caste that probably moved from the steppes into the Indus Valley and then the rest of the subcontinent because in early Hindi writings the “ब्राह्मण are the golden color of the gods from which they emerged.”

That should soon (I hope) put to rest the notion there was somehow a genetic advantage to lighter skin in certain regions and lead us to the genetic explanation that wherever women were ravaged and the male line obliterated, lighter skin begins to appear.

Perhaps we might eventually conceive of the genetic marker that might indicate psychological malfunctioning might also be related to melanin. (Poor attempt at humor, perhaps?)

But what we can genetic determines that both skin color and brain operation are combinations of genetic alleles and that both can be to a certain extent “acted upon”. (For skin color, sun exposure and access to natural or artificially induced vitamin D can effect the melanin and the skin can darken or lighten.) Most genetic-psychiatrists believe that in the earliest parts of a human’s life these markers that are intertwined upon multiple other linkages are activated or remain dormant in forming the human personality.

But again, this does not mean the child is mental development wends; and one of the strongest indicators that there are no stand alone genetic markers of mental illness is that mental illness can arise at any stage in life,and I again, I go into some detail in the book on these studies that more demonstrably aid us in understanding intelligence.

If we combine these studies with behavioral studies carried out on animals and humans, we discover how behavioral modification is possible and of course, we can easily discern in domesticated animals how relatively easy it is for us to modify animal behavior (potty train a dog, break a horse);and behaviorists continue to illustrate this by the premise of falsification. This premise is that to be true it must be able to be proven to be not false.

Medical psychology has continually failed this verification but still commands a huge market of attention while we generally ignore the studies that disprove the medical theory that remain on the backpages and aren’t very “sexy”.

But there is good reason for this. Mental malfunctioning can definitely affect the overall physical health of a being; especially in humanity. And mental malfunctioning also obviously is the author of much of social disturbances of all sorts, from trivial occurrences to mass shootings.

So my conception for these articles is to begin with Dr.Snyder’s perceptions about freedom and tyranny from the perspective of how we have learned to believe in the conceptions of tyranny and learning. Dr. Snyder suggests you cannot have freedom from which is a negating, more of less,of tyranny by freedom; and that that negation of tyranny is the common conception of tyranny. What I am going to attempt to show is that we are taught in 1984’ish riddles that confuse us into believing what we think is granting us freedom is in actually becoming our psychological tormentation. And the degree of that is often a consequence not of the intelligence measured by what capacity a human has to learn; but a methodology our early brains adopt to adjust themselves in the most favorable manner to their early caregivers.

Once again, however, that most favorable manner doesn’t mean most like or agreeable with the early caregivers. The early caregivers might seem to the child to be menacing and the methodology of the mind could become a methodology that believes the self is unwanted and might become withdrawn;or over-flamboyant.

So while these articles will begin and end with Dr.Snyder’s brilliant analysis, I am, along the way, going to discuss an amazing substack column I have discovered entitled Monica’s Dark Corner.

Monica’s Dark Corner is primarily about the American Uncivil War. She illustrates why the psychology of their loss became interred in its past of heroism. I don’t believe she promotes the past of slavery or even the southern romanticism of its own past, but she shows us it a very matter of fact way the southern perspective (not necessarily limited to the southern perspective) that has never healed the sectional wounds, why Heather Cox Richardson wrote a book called How the South Won the Civil War.

In the final article in this series of essays, I will return to Dr. Snyder’s conception of being free with and not being free from, because the coming days will determine if enough of us can be free with each other in order to combat the tyranny that we are yelling about as the Trumpist (Muskist) oppression of “democracy”.

There is too much talk already about how the democrats need to unite to free us from the tyranny in two years. Tyrannous estates don’t usually offer that opportunity. Instead we will need to learn how to modify our expectations of freedom to a recognition it is our hands power only with the hands of those we link. To become united with each other to establish daily enclaves of preventing our neighbors from harm.

Freedom with; not freedom from, must be a psychologically transformative learning, because right now what everyone is expecting is the lone ranger riding in to save us in the guise of the next election or the courts…or anyone else standing up for us.
But if it goes as tyrannies generally do, the rubble will bury the lone rangers and the voices of the opponents will continually weaken until the whisper itself is too hoarse to be heard.

Now, if we can, we learn from Dr.Snyder, and oppose the tyranny not by expecting the return of the Messiah of Liberty—he stands as Trump, or more likely, Musk. There can not be another Messiah even though some os us won’t concede he is the Messiah, eventually, the Savior wears down the non-believers into becoming primitive pagans.

So the first step into not being buried in this graveyard of Salvation Through Tyranny , is to understand that even America has longed had its Tiananmen Squares—from the Servant’s Plot before nationhood to Gabriel’s Rebellion shortly thereafter—and in the last century from MacArthur’s thrashing of the Veteran’s in the 1920’s to the killings at Jackson State by the National Guard on May 15, 1970.

Protestors can be shot.

Possibly a thousand were shot at Amritsar Temple Bridge and the only reason the British didn’t slaughter even more appears to be they ran out of ammunition.

And so…you will have to prevent the tyranny against your neighbor by joining with your neighbor in opposition to those coming into your neighborhood, not in protest, hoping to scare them from coming for your neighbor.

We either link hands against them to prevent them from harming others (and be willing to die for each other) or we are the nameless unmartyred slaughtered throughout the ages.

But I can’t tell you only a few sacrifices will occur by joining with your neighbor. Amritsar didn’t save the Indians or grant them independence. Another hundred thousand or so would die in Gandhi’s “peaceful” revolution over the next twenty-nine years.

What I wish I could say is that when the trump-musk era is over we will have learned to relearn as we could learn.

But that is the hope of this series of articles I intend to post in the coming days. Of course I don’t expect to impact anything. But if we do learn to find our altruism in the coming months and years as if we were finding it in a hurricane or any disaster that brings out the best in some…maybe we could learn to pay the unsung heroism of each other into a future where “Tyranny is Freedom” is no longer what we are weaned on.