Good afternoon , welcome. It is likely my great pleasure to kick off the Tayl o e Ross lecture today and I'm incredibly excited that Willie hear from lecturer and scholar Dr. Timothy Snyder. has an a hand in shaping and improving our democracy more than three centuries. The university has witnessed multiple wars, pandemics and every presidential transfer of power. Our community has served the nation in countless ways recorded and unrecorded. As a campus survey indicated, 97% of William&Ma ry undergraduates plan to vote in the 2020 election. Something to be very proud of. As a public university our mission is to educate public professionals and engaged global citizens. Last year our nation conducted a deeply contested election, , that the outcome was stolen. Timothy Snyder is a scholar who has worked to put the phrase in active service circulation at the right moment and call for ways to address such breaches and principles actions, as so many of us have start to understand the unimaginable scenes of violence at our nations capital ol. His work can bring solace, it can stiffen our spines . The volume, his volume on tyranny , 20 lessons for the 21st century from the 21st century is what I have turned to repeatedly , memorized passages and bought nearly 100 copies of have given away because it is a beautiful little chapbook and gives a great gift so it's fair to say I'm a serious fan. And if you will indulge me am going to read the 20 chapter titles. To give you a sense of why this book is so important. They are structured as short impaired statements. imperative statements. Do not obey in advance. Defend institutions. Beware the one-party state. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Remember professional ethics. Be wary of paramilitaries. Be reflective if you must be armed. Stand out. Be kind to our language. Believe in truth. Investigate. Make eye contact and Smalltalk. Practice corporeal politics. Establish your private life. Contribute to good causes. Learn from peers and other countries. Listen for dangerous words. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Be a patriot. As we call ourselves back together again institutions of higher education are well placed to model and teach civil discourse. We have a responsibility to prepare the next generation of public servants, community organizers, jurists, advocates, diplomats, scientists and more. These will be the leaders who carry forward the work to ensure that we the people of the United States are continuously , continually forming a more perfect, a more equitable and more just union. It is a patriotic commitment. With that in mind tonight's lecture launches a new Neubert University wide democracy initiative. Our approach is three-pronged first together experts and resources from across the university to elevate democratic theory and practice. Second, to engage are in the outrr community through the collateral rich and --- that bolster democratic values and affirm meaningful civil debate. I am so grateful to the Dean of University libraries, Carrie Cooper and vice Provost for international affairs, Steve Hansennon for leading this effort. With us we are charting a more inclusive future for our university and for our university. William&Mary So without further ado it is my pleasure to welcome vice Provost Hanson to introduce tonight's lecture. Steve Hanson n: R ow e . Snyder and I go back a way in Soviet and Eastern and Slavic studies I am more on the Soviet side and it's a wonderful moment to welcome him virtually to William and&Mary R eve s Center for international affairs I should tell you that it's home of the vice Provost the global education office opposite of student scholars and program in the global engagement team at William&Mary and together we work to advance internationalization in all its forms across the university. The Reves in honor of her late husband Emery who was a Holocaust survivor who wrote a book at the end of World War II called the anatomy of peace and I think very much in the tradition this lecture continues that tradition. Let me tell you about the annual George Tayloe Ross series on international peace it which is what we are doing today, it was explored to investigate topics of current interest to reflect our nations ranging from international political matters with questions. So very broad. Previous speakers in the series have included Ta Nehisi Coates Dr. Anne-Marie slaughter, Celeste Allender Prof. James Goldgeier and Amb. Ryan Crocker among others but let me read the biography which I can read the whole thing but it's truly stunning. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C Levin Prof. Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for human sciences in fee and Vienna. He speaks five and reads 10 European linkages he's has written 10 books, I wish I could read all the titles they are fantastic and wide ranging but just to give you a taste the reconstruction of Nations Poland Lou Crane Ukraine Lithuania and Belarus from 1569 2099 it was published in 2003. As you heard before, blood lands, Europe between Hitler and Stalin, which really was a game changer in the field of genocide studies and that. 20th century history. That was came out in 2010. Thinking the 20th century, co-authored with the late Tony Juddt in 2012, and black --- in 2015, the book you heard from Pres. Rowe earlier 20 lessons and the most recent book Hospital diary in 2020 he has co-edited three further books and written is numerous articles and opposites, his work is translated in 40 languages and received a number of prizes including the Emerson prize in humanities, the bustle of Hubble foundation price, the foundation for Polish science prize in the social sciences, and many others. Snyder was a Marshall scholar at Oxford. He has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships and he holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. As I think most people here know, he has appeared numerous times on documentaries , on network television and in major films. And his books have inspired poster campaigns, exhibitions, films, sculpture, a punk rock song, rap song, planned an opera. And is quoted around the world including most recently in protests in Hong Kong. His current projects include a family history of nationalism and he's finishing up a new philosophical book about the nature of freedom. And I think some of that may show up in the talk today. Just a couple of housekeeping notes before we begin. Please submit your questions in the chat box today went which I will monitor and we will return to at the end and I want everyone to know as well that we are recording today's lecture and will send the link to the video when it is available. So without further ado please join me at least virtually in a warm William&Mary welcome to Prof. Timothy Snyder whose talk today is entitled can America be a free country. Tim Snyder: all right. Thank you very much Pres. Rowe . Thank you very much Steve. It is a great pleasure to be with all of you in this format, the foreman is a tough one. I appreciate the kind introductions putting all of this in context. It's a pleasure to be introduced by Steve Hanson who is one of the piece people who introduce the theme of time back into social studies and the has been very important for me in the decade since then. I am going to do my best in this format. I'm counting on your attention and I'm counting on your questions. We usually sit down when we do these zoom things. This evening I'm standing up. I just had this impression that a free person should be standing up and also after a year of this I'm just tired of sitting down. And so I hope this works for you. So as you have heard in the introduction I am coming to this subject of freedom from a history of un- freedom. I have written a number of history books as Steve Hanson was kind enough to mission and president Rowe was kind enough to mention about Tierney in the past, about the Holocaust and about Soviet atrocity. More recently I have written a couple of books, our malady, on tyranny, the road to un- freedom which are about authoritarian terms in the world and in the US. What all of these books raise though is a question and it is the question that I am now trying to face head-on in my work and it is a question which I'm going to try to address in this lecture tonight. Namely, if you can chronicle the collapse of the rule of law, democracy and so on, if you can explain why things have gone wrong in the US and other countries in the 21st century, then logically you should also be able to say something about how things should get better. And that is the turn I'm trying to make here. I'm trying to make the turn towards programmatic normative, more philosophical thinking about the future and in particular about how the future could be better. So our question is, can America be a free country. So for some of you this might seem like an odd way to put the question. Of course isn't America already a free country. So why don't we start right there. The answer is basically not. I mean if you look at our country from the outside, it is clearly a place that has problems. When you have coup attempts by outgoing presidents who have lost elections you are in a category which really is not the upper class of democracy. At another level if your discussions about freedom are about things like wearing masks, then I'm sorry to say it, but your discussions as a nation are also not had a very high level. I mean comedy is the issue of mask is an issue of self-indulgence really. Nobody has the right to breathe viruses into someone else's lungs. The Freeman if Rita makes is for one person it exists for another person. Or if we think about very recent events, the storming of the capital, or the big lie which was behind the storming of the capital, these are symptoms of rather deep problems. The people who stormed the capital did so not on the basis of anything they experience themselves. But on the basis of a gigantic fiction. And if the early 20th century, the first half of the 20th century teaches us anything it is the big fictions or big lies are incompatible with a democratic system. But if all of these arguments aren't convincing I would suggest that you check the quantitative measures that are so nicely gathered up by freedom House. Freedom House has is now in a category which I mean, to be slightly euphemistic about it is sort of free countries. There are a lot of countries who are rated more highly than we are. And if we take into account that freedom House is after all an American institution and there's a certain amount of home-field advantage probably with all due respect we are really not doing very well compared to the rest of the world. So this is the problem. The problem is that we are not a very free country. And yet we talk about freedom all the time. We use the word all the time. We over use the word. We where the word in the ground. Without really defining it. So the next thing I would like to try to do, the next place I would like you to think about, the next subject I would like you to think about is just what freedom is. I mean freedom is one of these things like time, let's say, or like thought itself. You think you know what it is until you think hard about it. I think one of our problems in the US is that freedom is a kind of speech habit as opposed to a kind of thought have it. habit. And so the second thing I would like to talk about is just what freedom is. So for my money this is a long discussion, but for my money freedom has to do with the development of a confident individual, capable of apprehending the world around herself or himself, capable of making informed choices based upon a set of individually developed values. So freedom has to do with the existence of an individual , the development of an individual, the capacity of an individual, the ability of an individual to judge the world as it is but also the world as it should be. Now in the US we have a certain tenancy, and this is ironic again because we talk about freedom so much. We have a certain tenancy to narrow that definition rather erratically. We tend to think of freedom only in terms of what some people like to call negative freedom. That is, you're free if you are not being oppressed. Of course not being oppressed is very important. But not being oppressed is only part of being free. Being oppressed is one way that you are not free. It is being prevented from being free by an outside actor. And of course it is easiest to see un- freedom when it involves barbed wire in a concentration camp or bars in a prison. But it's easiest to see. That's not the only source of un- freedom becoming a free person to put it a different way is not as easy as not being behind bars. It requires much more than that. Freedom is not a negative concept. Freedom is a positive concept. Being liberated from oppression is not the same thing as becoming a free person. It's unnecessary but not a sufficient condition. What I want to suggest throughout this talk, this is where I'm going to begin and where I'm going to and is freedom has two sides. In in the US we lean very hard on one side. The two sides of freedom are solitude and solidarity. We lean very hard on the solitude side. We tend to think of freedom as being something that a lonely individual does. And that is the plot of all of our movies and much of our literature. One person is cut off from everyone else and at a crucial moment, does the right thing and saves the world. Of course that's not how the world works and also not how freedom works. Freedom also requires solidarity. In order to create an individual we need the help of others. This is the paradox of freedom. It is wonderful to be a free person, but no one can become a free person by himself. Let me try to make this more concrete on the basis of a couple of examples. One of them, which was brought home recently to me is the example of health. Thomas Jefferson for example thought that health was a precondition to freedom. And I think this is a perfectly reasonable view. If you have been very ill, then you are aware that without the ability to move your body or without the physical capacity to speak , you are simply not free. Your freedom is abstracted to the point of being nonexistent. But in the contemporary US , at this point can be pushed a little bit further. If you are anxious about your health all the time , if you are anxious about the future of your self and your children because you don't know that you can have health care or you are worried that you can't afford healthcare, then you are substantially less free person then you would be otherwise. In the US, we take for granted. We almost treat as normal that lots of us are not insured. That almost half of us have trouble treating basic medical needs for financial reasons. This is not normal. This is a source of un- freedom. If you are in a country where you can just walk into a doctor's office you are simply a much freer person than in the US. Another example and this one is the fundamental one for me, has to do with children. So think about this just logically. If you want to think that freedom is negative, that freedom is just a matter of not being oppressed, if you want to think freedom is just about solitude then consider the example of children. It is registered ridiculous to think of it is grotesque to think that children can grow up to be free if they are left alone. Any amount of common sense or basic experience tells us that is just not true. For children to grow up well in any way including growing up to be someone who might be free there has to be an awful lot of social energy thrown into the picture, beginning with, but not limited to the family itself. And so from the very beginning, from the very beginning of life, freedom is clearly not just negative. It's also positive. It involves solidarity. And thanks to science I mean thanks to the last five decades or so of research and the child development we can also push this point further. It's not just logically and obviously the case that children require solidarity, require help to grow up into people who might be free. We also know a great deal now about the specificities of the first five years of child development. Without going too deeply into this, some of the things that we learn or don't learn in the first five years have to do with naming emotions. Taking responsibility. Differing gratification. The mental and emotional capacities which you need to be a free person because of course a free person is, an un- free person is someone easily manipulated who gives into emotions who is unable to discern exactly what is being done to him or her. So we can say very specifically now on the basis of what we know about the first five years of life that if you want to build a free people you have to start with investing a great deal in children. Now I'm giving that here as an example although I think it's a very powerful one of this basic point that freedom has two sides. On the one side we want to have individuals. We want to have people who can take responsibility. We want to have people who can act alone. We want people who are proud. We want people who are confident. We can want people who can tell the difference between what is real and what is fake. On the other hand if you're going to create those people, if you're going to have those people in your society you have to invest. You have to have institutions. You have to have other people who are involved in this project. That is the paradox of freedom. The paradox of freedom is that it is a collective project with individuals as the outcomes. Now this has of course a political implication. At least an implication for the way that we talk about politics in this country. The way we talk about freedom in this country. And I would like to spell that out now. In our country it is generally the case, not entirely, but generally the case that the language of liberty and freedom is the language of the right. Fine. It's also generally the case that the language of solidarity and institutions and the future is the language of the left. Okay. That's fine. But what if it is the case that in order to be serious about freedom, in order to have a rich and realistic idea about freedom you have to have the solidarity and the institutions. And what if it is the case that the point of having the solidarity and the institutions is to create free individuals. What if this discourse and this discourse actually fit together or to put it in a negative way, what if when separated they don't make any sense? So what I'm trying to do in this talk, in this project is to make the point that freedom is a way of bringing together something we are used to talking about, some of us with some things that we would like to do. Often others of us. And it just might be that there's a way to reconcile this discourse with these projects and that way is freedom. Okay but how would we get there. First there are couple of things that we have to be able to avoid. I'm going to talk about a couple of wrong turns here that we make every day I believe. And that we will have to resolve. And then I will close by talking about what I think are the right terms. Some of the things that we should be able to do and could be able to do. So the first wrong turn, the first big mistake I think we make in practice every day is a displacement. A displacement of the word freedom, a displacement of the adjective free. This might not seem like a big deal, why does it matter how we talk. Of course it matters how we talk. Look at the language of the Declaration of Independence. Look at the language of the Constitution. It is very clear that the people who were thinking about the future of this country cared deeply about just how the language was used, just how we articulate ourselves in the present and into the future. So the way we speak enables and disables politically and morally and that is why this displacement I want to talk about is so important. And again it's going to seem, the thing I'm about to criticize is going to see natural because people do it all the time. But of course the fact that people do something all the time is no sign that it is correct and justified. So what is this displacement? This displacement is talking about a free market. If I could wave a wand and get people to stop talking about a free market I would do it right now. Why is that? Well there is a logical reason which is kind of superficial which is there's no such thing as a free market it is an internally contradictory market condition. Markets only exist when there is the law. If there is no law the free market is I still yourself or you steal my stuff. That is the free market without law. The market only exists thanks to law. And once you realize that, the question is exactly what sort of law should there be and that is a question of balance as so many things are. But that's not for me, the fact that it's logically impossible that is not for me the deepest problem. The deepest problem is what the language does to us. Because you see when we say that something else is free what we are doing is we are not talking about freedom for people. We are ceding the language of freedom to abstractions. And this has costs. So for example think about our elections. Since 2010, and of general principle corporations have the right to take part in our elections. Corporations actually have more right in our elections than individual human beings should be, should have. And when you think about it of course that is absurd. But it is very much the case. Or think about the example that I just gave, which is health. In the health sphere, the private equity firms who own the hospitals enjoy human rights in a way that patients do not. Patients do not have the human right health which I believe is a mistake. Or look for example at conflicts in Michigan, which shows the future of the United States in many ways about water. If you seed cede something as basic to human in survival or existence as water to corporations you are seeing corporations right to be free is more important than human right for example to have air or water or something basic like that. But the problem with talking about the free market goes even deeper than that. When people talk about the free market they usually have the idea that the free market is something which brings about democracy. That capitalism and democracy somehow go together. This is a dangerous idea. It's basically an authoritarian idea because if you think that freedom and democracy are brought to you by some instance, by some institution, by some abstraction by something which is not a human, then you are basically saying I'm just along for the ride. And if you are saying I'm just along for the ride, you are saying I'm not a free person. I'm not demanding my freedom. I have delegated my freedom to this other thing. This market which is going to bring across my democracy. Now, as an empirical question the relationship between capitalism and democracy is very vexed. Look at China for example. That's not really what I have in mind. What I have in mind is something more basic and more moral which is that if you want to be a free person that means you are the one who is bringing about your own freedom, not the free market, not anything else. There is no magic out there. There's no invisible hand which is going to bring you these things. It has to be your visible hands to bring you these things. And one more point. If we treat the free market as a substitute for human freedom we end up with consequences, which tend to undo human freedom. For example radical inequality. Which block social mobility and social mobility of course is another word for the American dream and the American dream is a way of being free. Namely, you think you can see a future which is better than the present. You think your own choices can bring it about. If we allow severe inequality in our country as we have done the last 40 years or so that blocks the American dream. It blocks freedom and the sense of mobility. Okay let me try to point to a second displacement. A second way that we talk about freedom or use the word free, which I think is a mistake. And by these critiques I am of course meaning to go deep into our everyday practice. Deep into our every date sinking deep into our everyday way of speaking because if we are not a free country there is something wrong with the way we are contorting ourselves. There's something wrong with the way we are talking something wrong with the way we are thinking. And the way to get at this is by way of critique. Not by humoring us, not by talking about how wonderful we are and so on. But by critique. And critique means noticing the habits, noticing the things we take for granted. And so I think the second one might be more radical than the first one. The second one I want to go after is free speech. So just to be clear I believe in freedom of speech. That is essential to me. And absolutely uncontested before me. But the phrase that I worry about here is that phrase free speech. And the reason why I worry about free speech is that it is not the speech that is free. It is speaker that's free. Now this might seem like a subtle distinction but it has in our current world , in our 21st century world this distinction has huge consequences. Why ? Because the vast vast majority of utterances in our world are not human at all. The percentage of communication which takes place now in our world which is human as opposed to digital is tiny. Which means that when we talk about free speech and don't talk about free speakers we very quickly find ourselves in disputes that are not really about human beings. But are really about venue for algorithms. So the question about whether for example Mr. Trump should be on twitter or not is not really a free-speech question it is a question about what algorithms are doing, which is not the same thing at all. And this is worth thinking about. There is a deep value question under this which I want to stress. Often when we talk about free speech, and this is a sign of our decay and our problems. When we talk about free speech we mean that my ability to annoy you your ability to annoy me. My right to have some kind of emotional or guttural reaction to things and my right to make you hear it. But that's not really what free speech is about. I mean free-speech of course includes that. But free-speech has a human purpose. It really has to human purposes. Purposes by the way which were understood by the framers when they wrote the First Amendment. The two purposes, the two values are truth and risk. The essence of free-speech is telling a risky truth. The essence of a citizen performing free-speech is putting himself or herself at risk by telling the truth, which of course is what the Declaration of Independence was. It was an example of risky truth. Or to appeal to a different intuition, when we think about free speech and we remember free speakers who do we remember? We don't remember the people who are momentarily annoying. We don't remember the people who came to a campus or came to some other venue to say something provocative. Those people are going to be quickly forgotten. The people we remember are the Solzhenitsyn the people we remember are the Havel'ss the people who spoke truth to power are the people we remember and the reason I stress this is that we should remember , the machines, the algorithms do not have any values. Truth does not have any value meaning to them, they don't take any risks. The concept of risk does not mean anything. And so the risk is that if we just talk about free speech and forget about the free speaker we then end up de ceding ourselves and become less free creatures than we might have been otherwise. Now once again I want to push this argument a little bit further. Because the question of whether we can become a free country has a lot to do, has deeply to do with the question of how we comport ourselves, where we spend our time, how much time we spend in front of the screen and what we are doing in front of the screen. The average American depending upon which study look at spends more than 10 hours a day sometimes much more than 10 hours a day depending on the study looking at a screen. And the screens or at least certain parts of what we see on screens are deliberately designed to make us less free. As human beings. Again, that is , I am running against our intuitions, we want to think that when I'm moving the mouse or clicking the mic or taking part in some AV test I am free. I mean certainly Facebook would like for you to believe that. But the thing about this is that reduces freedom down to our immediate impulses. It reduces our freedom down to like the smallest possible dividend of attention which can be extremely extracted from us. So let me say a word about this before, this is the last thing I'm going to say before I move on to some recommendations about how we might make matters better. And so when we spend time on social media as we have done so much since 20 as we have done so much since 2010 and especially as we did in 2020 we are subjecting ourselves to a preciousocessr which is still liberally designed to make us less free and this is less free true for everyone around the world of course the particular true for Americans because we have been at this longer than everyone else and we have the ideology which makes it seem like staring at the screen at social media is actually free. We have the deepest problem. Or to put it slightly more drastically when it comes to social media the rest of the world looks at us as laboratory rats. And I want to stay with that metaphor for a minute because it is quite appropriate. What social media does to us has four steps. There are four steps of our deliberate disablement by way of social media and the first of them is precisely making lab rats of us. It is putting us in a state of experimental isolation. When we are on social media we are separated physically since orale, we are separated in every possible way from other human beings. And this is important because what the behaviorists know, what people who organize these kinds of experience no know, what the people who organize interrogations know is that once you get somebody along they are very vulnerable to something which is called intermittent reinforcement. Intermittent reinforcement is when over and over again you are giving something that you like but then randomly you are giving something that you don't like. Which is the experience of social media. You are giving given the stuff that makes you feel good but every once in a while you are given something that makes you feel afraid or anxious and that is deliberate. That is baked in. That's part of the package. That's not an accident. The intermittent reinforcement is meant to keep you online for as long as possible. As a result of this experience you find yourself, you find your own views confirmed. The things that you think and the things that you fear are repeated back to you. You are subject to something which the specialists call confirmation bias. You become more of yourself to the point of becoming a caricature of yourself. And then at a certain point you do something in the real world based upon the things that have happened to you online. So for example you vote on the basis of things that you think you know or feel you know because of social media. You repeat a lie or a big lie. That has nothing to do with your personal experience or your own thoughts. You do something more dramatic, use on the capital building of the United States. Again not on the basis of anything you think or know but on the basis of how you have been played by the algorithms. Now, to repeat, these tricks which I have recited to you are designed to make you less free. There the tricks used in advertising, the same tricks used in interrogation. But they are now used on a titanic scale by nonhuman entities, by algorithms. Why does that seem normal to us, why does the fracturing of our attention span, why does this polarization of us, why does the beast utilization of us, It only seems normal because of our own ideology about the free market. The evolution of us as citizens into viewers of targeted advertisements is only really possible because of the notion of the free market. Because we have accepted that freedom should be attached to the market and not to ourselves. So these two displacements that I'm talking about quote unquote free market" unquote free speech come together in a particular way. So this then defines a challenge. And it's a very basic challenge. The challenge is that humans, citizens have to claim freedom for themselves. Freedom is for citizens. Freedom is for humans. And to repeat what I said at the beginning , saying this is very important. Claiming freedom for humans, not allowing freedom to slip by way of our mental habits and our verbal habits toward abstractions, towards nonhuman entities , speaking articulately and clearly about to what freedom attaches or to whom freedom attaches, to humans is itself very important. That is how we use the language determines what we claim freedom, don't claim freedom but instead by way of how we talk, except that freedom is a matter, that freedom is a matter of abstractions right? Then we are submitting. And I think it is important to insist on that. That then we are submitting. If we say that it is not us who are free but it is the market, it is speech, it is another abstraction . When we talk like that we are beginning to submit. Freedom only really belongs to people or to thinking creatures. It does not belong to other entities or algorithms or firms. And this of course brings me to the title of my talk which is that okay if that is true we couldn't really say that America could be a free country because freedom only attaches to people. But what we could have is a country which creates the conditions for free people. We could have a country if we believe in freedom, if we claim freedom we could have a country which creates the conditions much better than it does now for the development of freedom among people. Okay so what then would those structures be, what then would the structures feel like and look like. I'm going to give five examples. And then give a very brief order of conclusion then we will have time to talk about this. So the first level of structure we have already talked about. And I've done what I can about it this afternoon with you. The first level of structure is normative. The first level of structure is insisting that freedom is highest human value. And it's not something we just have to exist upon. It is something we can. pretty easily reason our way forward to. And it goes like this. I have values. You have values. We all have different values. Not only do we have different values, our values contradict. They have to contradict. Not just my values with your values but my values with my values. And your values with your values. So you probably think that loyalty is a good thing. That is a value. You probably think honesty is a good thing. That's the value. Nevertheless you probably wayeigh That is what a free person does. And the reason why freedom is highest value is that what freedom is is the ability to adjudicate among values. It is the ability to see yourself as one person among other people. The ability to see your values in their relationship to one another and in the relationship to the values of others. So it is not that hard to reason our way to the idea that freedom should be the highest value. That is one kind of structure. A second kind of structure is what I would call sovereignty. Becoming a sovereign human being. By which I mean the education in the broadest sense of children and young people so that as best as we can we allow them to develop the capacities which enable them to be as free as possible. So this is an argument for investing more in young people but not just in the financial sense. Also in a moral and political sense. The first five years of life I think are absolutely crucial for whether you end up having free citizens. Free people in your country. By sovereignty I mean that when someone grows up it's not just a matter of attaining a certain age. It is a matter of having learned things in the right way at the right time so that they are the best adjudicator they can possibly be, the best evaluator they can possibly be. So they feel themselves to be confident in a way that we would like people to be. A third structure that we need for freedom is mobility. In the broadest sense. And of course that means simple things like a mobile workforce, like the ability to get a job coming out of college. The ability not to have too much debt coming out of college. But it also means something broader. It means something like the American dream. And here I just have to say a word about history. The American dream has two sides. One of them is unsustainable and one of them is possible. One version of the American dream would be the West young man. One version of the American dream is the frontier of one version of the American dream is when you wear out one place you can go to another place. And that of course has its attractions. It is a very central part of our history but it is now unsustainable. Not just physically unsustainable also morally unsustainable. And so the question then, the hard question is if you want to be a democracy now what do you do after the kind of frontier experience and there is an answer to that question and the answer to the question is, social mobility. The American dream can also be social mobility. It can be the idea that my children's lives will be more interesting than my life. My children will have opportunities that I didn't have. Rather than the other way around. That's a version of the American dream that's possible but it requires the future. Which is the other thing I would say about mobility. Mobility in the American dream involves not just place but time, it involves a future. So the future cannot be filled with catastrophe. In order for there to be mobility, to have a sense of the future, to have an American dream you have to get your mind around and your policy tools around global warming. Global warming is not just about ecology. It's not just about the world although of course it is about the world. It's also about the ability of humans, Americans to look out into the decades and centuries ahead and think yeah, things could be different and also better. Insofar as there is a catastrophe which is closing down on us it makes it very hard for us to have that sense of mobility. A final structure, and all of these structures I hope I've already hinted at in the body of the lecture, with truth that you can challenge those who are more powerful than you are. If you don't believe in truth and have access to sexuality you will always lose out to spectacle. Even the Greeks understood this. That means that we not only have to value truth but we also have to support the institutions which produce truth, which means above all supporting investigative journalism and local reporting. The final structure is the one that Steve and Pres. R o we started out by mentioning which is democracy, again a word that we use an awful lot, but a structure that very much can stand for improving in this country. But if we had a much more democratic democracy, one with less money, less gerrymandering, shorter political seasons and so on, one with no voter suppression, a democracy embodies a number of these values that I have insisted have to do with freedom, a democracy is a place where he make decisions on the basis of facts. A democracy is a place where we make decisions in time. Based upon the past looking toward the future. Voting is the act of a sovereign person, a person who is interested to adjudicate values. One's own and those of others. All right, so those are the basic structures that I think America would need in order to become a free country or more articulately or accurately put, country which favors the development of its own people and in making this argument I'm going to close where I began I'm aware that I'm trying to bring some things together but the things I'm trying to bring together I believe belong together. The paradox of freedom, that it is about individuals but individuals have to be created thanks to others is built into freedom. There is no way around them. And if that is true we have to accept and we should accept it because it is a nice idea we should accept that we need a little bit less solitude and a little bit more solidarity. And if we can accept that we might also see that as I said at the very beginning some of the ways that we like to talk about freedom might be much more easily reconcilable than we have thought to some of the things that we want to to ensure that we have a better future. Thank you very much for your attention. Steve Hansenon: The first one is says hello there Prof. how do we move away from the catastrophe we seem to be headed toward which is you tackle this before you concluded which I think he anticipated the election with Biden will not fix the problems of Trump and the influence of Russia's cyber war continues to wreak havoc. The cult of Trump and that conspiracy mindset is here to stay for a while I believe so how do we break the cycle? Tim Snyder: okay it seems the catastrophe Alex has in mind is the political one there are a lot of things we could be cataloguing through. I want to appreciate the challenge rather than pretend there is an easy answer to it. I mean because I think contained in the question is basically the right approach. Namely that we have to see this as a question not of years, but of decades. So it is correct that the election of, let me put it this way. It is good that the person who one won the office of the United States is the president of the United States. That is a good thing. That is a start. I agree with Alex that is not automatically going to solve everything but it lets at least accept that it's much better than other possible outcomes. I think as president Rowe was kind enough to say I think the way to define the problem Alex was referring to is as a big lie and we know something about big lies. We know that big lies can survive the person who articulated them. So the famous example is Germany. The big lie in Germany was that it was a stab in the back of the first world war the idea that Germany didn't lose the war but Jews and socialists stabbed us in the back on the home front. It is a lie. They really lost the war. But the people who articulated the lie were Germany's high commanders in 1918 and some other people the person who rode the lie to power with Hitler 15 years later. Right, so what I worry about is the durability of the lie. And I think the lie is actually more important than Trump at this point. So I think part of what has to be done is to treat the lie itself as unacceptable. And I think it's very possible positive that the term the big lie has caught on and it puts the stigma in the right place. At the level of the individuals I think it is very important to calmly talk about these presidential elections with conviction for a very long time. At the level of institutions I'm just going to point to something I said towards the end. With the love of institutions we need to redirect very considerable resources from social media towards a local news. Not because that will immediately get people not to believe in the things they believe in but because that is the only way to rebuild a kind of fabric of everyday reality and trust. And it is the absence of everyday reality and trust which makes conspiracies like all kinds of distant thinking more attractive. So I am accepting that this is a challenge which is going to take a lot which has to be approached by a number of different angles and it is not easy and it is important. Thank you. Steve Hanson: I think that leads neatly into the next question from the Indians which social media has led into our --- but today social media strengthens tribalism by reinforcing quote unquote alternative facts within the in group so how can we have a unified America that embraces the value of freedom for all he writes, with social media constantly dividing us into the competing tribes. Tim Snyder: Yeah, I get I think the premise is very much to end the word tribalism is quite appropriate. There is a fundamental, there is a fundamental I mean you know, Steve will remember this from Weverber, there's a fundamental difference between clan-based and rule-based societies and the clan-based society does not depend upon sexuality. It depends upon charisma. The leader is going to make the weather. The leader is going to have some kind of success and maybe he's going to share the booty with you or maybe he's not. He's an unpredictable leader. Who knows. There is the kind of society and then there is, then there are I'm not afraid of the war, there's the online form of politics which says we can't all be reasonable but there are limits to our reasonability. Our reasonability has to be sometimes talk.ghtught, , fax around us. That is the starting point and I realize it is the starting point of the question I'm going to put it in a slightly different way. I think it's normal that we have different values in good. And it is torn totally normal that we have different emotional reactions to things it is when we don't have the common set of facts that a republic becomes impossible I mean a Republic literally means a common thing and if there is not a common set of factual knowledge and not the common belief that there are facts I think the Republican becomes impossible. So part of the answer for me is moral. And this is partly challenged to the left. Some of the things, not everything on the right which has gone wrong has but there are some things where I do think a certain amount of rethinking is in order and one of them is the idea of factuality I think the notion on some parts of the left did that we liberate ourselves by constantly finding different ways to run away from the horizon of truth , I think that has proven to be simply incorrect. I think it has proven to be wrong frankly. And so I think the first thing we have to do is say it sounds naïve it is one of the things that sounds naïve. We say look I believe in the horizon of truth and I believe in pursuing horizon of truth. I'm never going to get there but I believe that is the right pursuit that is the correct pursuit. You have to be willing to say things like that and then there is the institutional answer and this is one thing going back to Alex's question which I think is missing in the Biden approach so far. I mean there have actually been some pretty impressive moon shots so far from the Biden administration but this has been missing, this question of factuality we actually need a factuality moonshot. We need something that takes huge amounts of money and uses it to restore local news in the US. Most of the US territorially right now is a news desert. Most counties in the US do not have a reporter writing about basic things like his everybody corrupt . you don't have that level of checks you can't have a democracy. And when you don't have the level of checks also this is the point of the questions in a way if you don't have the checks it's must much easier to be tribal because you might be Republican and I might be a Democrat whatever we might have different opinions about Washington but if we don't have the facts about whether there is Mercury in our water than we really have nothing in common. There's nothing to talk about. So the fact production I think is the next political big project that we need. Steve Hanson: the next question is from Maia who asks in your opinion how does the prevalence of solitude as opposed to solidarity in the American concept of freedom influenced the American body politic as well as the American notion of the nationstate, on the notion of solidarity which we emphasize. And I think how you rebuild the conception of American identity when solidarity is absent from the freedom lexicon. Tim Snyder: Yeah. That is a really wonderful question because it gets precisely to this tension which I think is unavoidable. I mean look, it is a practical matter in the US we are not going to be able to formulate big projects that on any other basis and the basis of freedom and I also happen to think I happen to think that that's also ethically right. I believe the argument that I made about it being the highest value. That is one side of the issue and the other side of the issue is what you do about the solitude. What do you do. When people are lonely, and this goes back to tribalism, it is not that they just stay by themselves. It is that they lurch toward different kinds of collectivities. They lurch towards the things which seem to be most elemental. A classic example of this is union membership and racism. When you break down unions, talking about labor unions now, when you break down labor unions you are breaking down one form of human association, and in the US historical setting one form of association which got white people and black people together. If you break down unions, and there's a bunch of research about this you end up with people who are lonelier but you also end up with people who are more likely to express racist attitudes. And so that is an example of how it is not that you give up on collectivity it is that you fall into a different kind of collectivity. A more abstract one. Because the racial one is pretty abstract. As opposed to like these are the people I work with these are the people I bargained with. They are in some sense on my side. I mean so racism and alienation I mean there are very strong historical roots of American racism of course as well but the alienation in front of the computer to racism. Because the social media I'm afraid I mean, it is sad but they pick out when you are a racist. You may not know you are a racist. You may deny you are a racist. America is in a funny point where we admit there is racism but we have trouble seeing actual racists. There is racism but no racists. Social media is ruthless in this way and can tell if you are racist and it picks and pulls on that and that's another way that being alone with the computer in this artificial laboratory setting leads to less solidarity. Part of the argument for me, Maia, is making the argument that like solidarity is not the opposite of freedom, that solidarity actually has to do with freedom. And there is a powerful historical example of this in Poland in the 1980 1981. That might be worth resuscitating. And another way to think about it is that once you start getting a little bit of momentum going, like if you can get labor union membership up from 6% to 12%, if you can get healthcare in this country into a situation where everybody has access, then the argument starts to make more sense because then people realize, aha, I actually feel better in this setting than I did before. Steve Hanson: that's perfect there were a couple people asking questions about racism and I think you have answer that as well intended to ask about the person who asked with the phones of Chicago ski has on your thinking that maybe we can keep it in mind if you want to sneak it in somewhere because it is not actually the next one in line. So here is Scott maybe he relate, how do you explain the phenomenon and expanse of right-wing Christian America has embrace as Vladimir Putin and Russia as a seeming avatar of white rule and white superiority and saviors of quote unquote freedom when both stand almost preeminent as symbols of oppression to the rest of the Western world I will leave it at that. That goes on but I think that is the crux of the question. Tim Snyder: okay I will start with Putin. I mean, there is a very necessary condition here which is that putting himself is white. Putin is white. I mean race in Russia is not the same thing as race in Russia. America, but to make the obvious point that if Putin were an African leader this would not be happening. From a distance there are a lot of American racists who look at Putin and see him as another great white chief and that's not only only because of the way he looks racists in America do not realize how close a number of Muslims are to the center of power in Russia or they don't realize to what extent Russia is a Muslim country. These things just get next nixed Russian state reaches out to the far right not just in the US, but in all of Europe with various degrees of success . But it is a general campaign. And then I think a part of it is, I mean part of it is a style. I mean not Russia, Russia I mean you know it would be great if we could have some kind of exchange program where you know we could send 1 million volunteer American white racists to Russia for a year and see how they like it. But from a distance like Putin himself has a kind of charisma and this way he's like Trump. It's all about him and he can do whatever he wants and he is a cowboy and he can lie if he wants and that has a certain appeal. It has an appeal to a certain kind of I would call fragile masculinity where you can't do it yourself but you kind of like the idea that somebody out there can do it. In some going to try to keep it short so we can get to [Shakovsky] Steve Hanson: here is a question that other than algorithms are there traditional ways that you can have deception instead of freedom. For example battered journals or bad newspapers can also deceive people, so with that necessarily be a solution to expand those more traditional outlets. Tim Snyder: Yeah, So let me try to be more specific. What I have in mind is investigation. I don't have in mind paper. I don't even have in mind it's location is local. What I have in mind is the job of the human being who goes out and investigates. So it is reporting if a human being gets up out of the chair and goes out and finds things out. Right that is the minimal definition of reporting. And by the minimal definition of reporting almost none of what we call media in the US is actual reporting. We have a tiny amount of fact production which is then shortened into a kind of post American cotton candy every day. By way of the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle. And what we need is more of the facts and less of the turning. And so I agree the newspaper itself, but investigation is. And we need to tilt the rules of the market so that, or just tack social media companies so that local news becomes profitable or to be more specific so that becoming a journalist, an investigative journalist can be an attractive way of life because right now it is only people who are willing to make sacrifices who do this. And that is not what you want. You want this to be a profession. Because civil society depends on this being a profession where you can make a decent living where you have some kind of professional status. Steve Hanson: I'm going to put things together because the same person who asked about Kolokovsky --- - -- hopes and fears but social media tends to be aware of when I'm about to be in public and I get more controversial feeds. And so governments are handing even more power to Google and Apple for contact tracing in the pandemic. What would be the best way to fight against all of this. The question from the anonymous attendee was is your point about adjudication of values influenced at all by Kolokovsky that was the specific question I'm sure it all fits together very logically. Tim Snyder: okay I will make it so. Number one, we are not, this is the great thing about being a historian is you can always say the historian situation you are in is not unprecedented. I think the situation we are in now is not unprecedented. The US in the late 19th and early 20th century also faced a situation where the federal government look like a joke even more than now. It looked like a joke. I mean the face of the trusts, it looked like a joke. But nevertheless we passed laws which... We passed the antitrust laws which allowed us to make our capitalism more sensible and competitive and the funny thing about those laws is that they are still on the books and the funny thing about those laws is that pretty much if you just read those laws in black-and-white it is pretty clear that all of the big software companies are violating them. So I mean part of the answer is really simple, the government actually not only has the power it has the legal authority to break these things up. And for us I mean part of making that possible is for us to recognize that it is possible. The only possible and desirable but historically it has a precedent and the precedent is generally regarded as good. And if you want to go into the theory Friedrich Hayek that I reread for this project and has written a number of things of course but he says in very strong terms that you have to break up companies like this. And he says specifically that there is no difference between monopoly capitalism and Soviet central planning. And if you are against one you should be against the other. That is Hayek. That's not some crazy leftist. Those are words to be heated.eded. The second thing is like the question of choice, I mean, social media does is it reduces choice to impulse. And so if you ask people do you want your social media feed to give you accurate local journalism, people will say yes. That does not mean that in practice they will go for it. Right, but who is the person, who has the authority, the person who is answering the question or the person who cannot stay away from the dessert buffet. I would vote against the dessert buffet. I would say people want actually to have, so I think we take that seriously. Most people would like to have Facebook behave differently than it does and I think we should take that seriously. Okay Kolokovsky yes, I think I don't realize still how fortunate I was to study as a graduate student in a university where Isaiah Berlin and Kolokovsky necessarily of the kind of familiar Anglo-Saxon type which means that our minds are tabula rasa and we are individuals reacting to stimuli and so on but a liberalism which is based upon the inherent pluralism of values, that there are multiple values that cannot be reconciled. Kolokovsky as the anonymous questioner who seems to know in articles in the 1970s is very beautifully articulate about this. And he was of course my teacher and I continue to read him and I regard him as a great and neglected thinker and of course as the anonymous, as the anonymous questioner might also note Kolokovsky wrote a famous or locally famous article in Eastern studies one page article really kind of a dissident manifesto called how to be a conservative liberal socialist. In which he makes the point that I think, which I think is a valuable point not just politically but also in a way socially that the values that we think of as conservative and socialist and liberal, it's not just the same values but it is that sometimes they can't work one without the other. Incoherent without the other. And so I mean, that is, that idea of Koloko vsky has stayed with me. Yes. Steve Han son: we are getting toward the end and we have way too many questions to get to. I'm going to group some together and Prof. Snyder are you okay to go a little bit longer? Some of these are from colleagues who will be less likely to forgive me if I don't ask the questions. So Prof.g Chris Howard asks how do we find common ground with individuals who embrace freedoms but only if they do not conflict with core religious beliefs. And then Prof. --- in the Russian Soviet program asks how can we talk in simple words to someone who believes it is their fundamental right through freedom of speech to yell at someone who is different. So I think these get a similar kind of problem which is what a specific approach to those who are not buying into this particular program and that will leave use the language of freedom to defend their position. Tim Snyder: Yeah, But how do I preach enough to the choir and I'm a big believer in preaching to the choir. There is a reason why you preach to the carpet if you don't preach to the choir they do not come to church. You have got to preach to the choir. Preaching to the choir is essential but how do you get beyond the choir? So I guess one point I would make is that we keep [ ]--- common sense this is the one of things I write in on tyranny but we have to keep up contact on other people with a certain amount of credibility. I think we have to flip the freedom you know, because it is not freedom but, but if you , if you if you are acting on the basis of something which is not true you are not actually free. I mean you know, we are all Soviet scholars here, so I will save Bahktin I believe, if you believe act on the basis of someone else's truth you are a creature of that person not free if you are a believer in the big lot you are not for you might think you are but you are just not. I think we have to flip the argument. If someone is yelling at someone else because they are different they are not being free. I think you're not actually free to be a racist I think if you are a racist you are not free. If you are a racist you have been duped. You are somebody else's dupe. And so it's not easy but I think that is a different place to start the conversation from. Not from like oh well we clearly both believe in freedom but your views on freedom but hey you might not actually be a free person, not that you are messing with somebody else's freedom but you might not actually be a free person you might be wrong in thinking you are a free person. The other thing to remember is that you never convince anybody. You never convince anybody. If you remember that you can stay a lot,. You never convince anybody. All you do is plant a seed. And maybe the rain comes at the right time and maybe other good things happen and maybe the seed grows but all you ever do is plant a seed. Steve Hanson: is from very direct from Hudson Fortney how can we achieve America freedom in a two-party system in a populous ineffective party and a--- Tim Snyder: I would put it more directly than that. I think we have not just populist, we have a Republican Party which I think has an addiction problem. And I use this metaphor very seriously. As somebody who has seen addiction and thought about it. I think voter suppression is an addiction. I think once you start it and you do a little bit of it you get used to it and before long you can do anything else. Before long it dominates everything. Before long you have forgotten all the other things you used to know how to do. And that is where the Republican Party is right now. It is all about gaming the system. I mean it's all about gaming it. Some people have gone beyond gaming it like Mr. Trump himself or Sen. Hawley or Sen. Cruise have gone beyond gaming it and are talking about nondemocratic outcomes but once you treat it all as a game you can no longer think about substance. You no longer have policy. The Republicans have this policy that they don't have policy. All of their positions are parodies of democratic positions. All of them. The Democrats talk about race, the Republicans talk about race in a different way. The Democrats talk about authenticity, the Republicans talk about being able to say what they want. Basically right down the line everything Republicans do is a kind of reaction. And as people in Ohio put it to me it's all about owning the libs but that is a reaction. You are just reacting to the other side. So I don't think it's not that they are populist. It is that our system enables voter suppression and voter suppression is an addiction and it is incompatible ultimately with democracy and we have seen how close we can come because January 2021 or the second half of 2020, early 21 is all about voter suppression. I mean it is Trump trying to make the case that more votes should be more suppressed so the right people can stay on top and of course the votes you suppress are the ones in Milwaukee in Philadelphia and Detroit i.e. the black people which is the deep American tradition same fraud you mean black people. And so the Democrats, the Democrats I think that the Democrats are then thrown into the uncomfortable position that they have to be both a party of the status quo and the party of change. They are in the position that --- was in interwar Germany they are supposed to be the left but actually they have to be the center and that is an unfair position. And that is how you get to look boring because you have to defend you have to be so normally have to defend the status quo because the other side has become an anti system party so you have to be boring and normal and defend the system and at this time you have to try to offer a vision. And you can feel the tension in the Democrats right now they are not a centerleft party they are a center party and a centerleft party it would be much easier for them if they could be a centerleft party but for that they need the Republicans to be a center-right party which they are not. So this all points to, I'm trying not to be personal about this. I think it is a systematic problem. I think it would be, I can say this until the cows come home and it won't make any difference but I think Republican could win national elections in this country if they did not suppress the vote. But since they suppress the vote they're going to be seen as racist because suppressing the boat is racist. Not just in its consequences but usually in its intentions. But if they did not suppress the vote they would start thinking more about policy and if they start thinking more about policy they could win elections. But just telling them that is not going to work. What we have to be able to do is put the bits and pieces together to make voter suppression and untenable strategy in this country. That at least would be a start. Steve Hanson: fascinating. There are a number of questions about social mobility and how to achieve it. I want to be able to ask them. My apologies to the themes for those who did not get to ask what they would like I did want to ask this because team it strikes me that it is similar to what we face at institutions like William&Mary faces because we want to stand up as part of our democratic mission as the president said at the beginning and yet we also cannot be top-down in Dr. Nader's of our students.And we won't do that. And so the balance is tricky, and so the question is you don't mention the role of science and in particular that facts are based on skepticism. So factuality does not come automatically, so there's all sorts of ways one test and does experience calls into question the results of the experiment so can you speak to the aspect of the theme fitted with the argument Tim Snyder: it is wonderful question and I'm a big believer in science and if I ever get around to writing the book that I'm talking about now for one of the first times there's going to be a good deal about science and especially for this reason. And of course it is not that science, agreeing with the premise of the question it is not that science gives us a kind of, it does not give us, it's not like the dramaturgy of reality. It does not give you this fixed reality against which you then out act out your own lives based on your emotions and values. Science brings us closer to , reality closer closer but always been by gradations and never actually reaching it, and there are lots of examples which are really cool but which we don't have time to talk about about how this is true from physics from physics to microbiology. I want to take the premise of the question and run with it because the premise of the question is about method. Facts do not grow from the ground. Facts only come into being by way of some kind of, let's call it controversy. The controversy which is based on method. So the word controversy is now almost unusable because controversy means you say something I disagree and I talk louder than you. But what I mean is a method, and skepticism is a good word here, method which forces Goet he had a great phrase for this, significant roughness, he called it, things have to get beaten around before you know that they are right. Significant roughness. In the scientific method is one form of significant roughness. You have a hypothesis that's probably wrong. You have got to admit it's wrong in front of graduate students. You know you blew it, do it again, do it again, do it again. You publish the critique and you run the same experiment you can't get the same result but nevertheless nevertheless nevertheless at the end of the day we can make a vaccine. At the end of the day, like with Covid for example there's been all kind of nonsense along the way and lots of people got things wrong but a year into it we actually know more than we did a year ago. And so I would push the point about method into different realms. So I am a historian and also have hypotheses that are usually wrong. I only know they are wrong because I go into the archives and let the sources come to me. I let myself or formulate another question that will be turned out to be wrong and until you get to a question allows me to come to some kind of answer. It's not the same as a laboratory but not entirely different either. And again I publish and colleagues disagree, and some of it turns out to be justified and I reformulate the question again and maybe I write a different book. And this is true about journalism. So I do not count as a method that Prof. Hansen goes out and does investigative reporting and somebody immediately copies it on some other site. That is not a method. The investigation is a method. Investigative reporters do have methods of talking to people, ways of checking sources, they then go back and read history. They situate it. And so that's also a method. I'm agreeing with the premise of the question I just want to extend it because Hannah going back to the way Steve phrased the question it is not that we need to have a magic wand and say the scientist is authority and the historian is an authority and a journalist is an authority. It is we have to appreciate that they have methods. There's a reason we use the word discipline. That they have methods that they go through and the methods are productive of actuality, not in a magical way but in a measurable way and a meaningful way. And so I appreciate this. I mean, we really can't do without the science. I did not talk about global warming that much but global warming is a wonderful example a lot of the theses I was trying to introduce here. It is an example of how we need a sense of ability to be free. I think global warming is crushing as even the people who pretend not to believe in it. I think it is crushing them. It is crushing all of us. But it's also an example of how inequality crushes actuality because in 1959 Edward Teller was talking about melting ice caps. In 1962 the American petroleum Institute was warning of the dangers of global warming. Right? In 1988 George Bush talked about turning the White House affect against the greenhouse effect. This stuff has been known for half a century. The only reason there is controversy, again using the terrible word about global warming is that a few very wealthy people have chosen to make it controversial. That should not be able to happen. Right, and so the only way, so global warming is an example of how you can't do without the science, but the science does not defend itself. There has to be an ethic of actuality an active defense of factuality, e t , you need the methods but you also have to have a way of talking about it, you have to have the ethic because you run up against people who are flat outliers. lairiars And what they will do, their method, and this is true of tobacco as you know better than me, what they do is they try to undermine the signs in general. Just like it is an opinion like other opinions like you think it causes cancer but I don't think it causes cancer. You think it causes global warming but I don't. Everything becomes an opinion. So you have to have the method but also have to have the kind of edge like the moral defense of the method where you say look this is a method but a method that actually gets us to something and that something is truth. It gets us closer to truth. And so I think it has to be encased in that as well. So thank you. I agree very much. Steve Hanson: that's a terrific answer and I agree very much I wanted to mention that Maia who asked the question is actually in Europe with some classmates and faculty and was there at the Institute for humane sciences in Vienna when you were there so she wants to pass along her greetings and president Rowe wanted to thank you very much she had of course as president of the university to go to something right afterward but everyone I know has benefited so much, 10, from this talk. I personally have benefited a lot from it. We really appreciate your contributions right now. It is so important you are welcome at any time at William&Mary. thanks for Tim Snyder's great talk and that will
