3 “LADY FREEDOM AMONG US”

don’t lower your eyes

or stare straight ahead to where

you think you ought to be going

don’t mutter oh no

not another one

get a job fly a kite

go bury a bone

with her oldfashioned sandals

with her leaden skirts

with her stained cheeks and whiskers and heaped up trinkets

she has risen among us in blunt reproach

she has fitted her hair under a hand-me-down cap

and spruced it up with feathers and stars

slung over her shoulder she bears

the rainbowed layers of charity and murmurs

all of you even the least of you

don’t cross to the other side of the square

don’t think another item to fit on a tourist’s agenda

consider her drenched gaze her shining brow

she who has brought mercy back into the streets

and will not retire politely to the potter’s field

having assumed the thick skin of this town

its gritted exhaust its sunscorch and blear

she rests in her weathered plumage

bigboned resolute

don’t think you can forget her

don’t even try

she’s not going to budge

no choice but to grant her space

crown her with sky

for she is one of the many

and she is each of us

—RITA DOVE

Reflecting on your ethical tradition, or the moral framework you’ve developed for yourself and that you try to embody in your everyday life, what is your responsibility to a proximate stranger in distress?

— REFLECTION THREE: SOCIAL FREEDOM/INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY —

The dazzling poet Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former US poet laureate, was visiting Battery Park, where tourists gather every day for picnics and bike rides and ferry excursions to the Statue of Liberty. The statue, a gift from France meant to celebrate the abolition of slavery, resides in the middle of New York harbor, standing tall with her torch held high, and with the words of the socialist poet Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” inscribed:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, / With conquering limbs astride from land to land; / Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand / A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name / Mother of Exiles. From her beaconhand / Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. / “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she / With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”¹

You may not be aware that the poet named the statue the “Mother of Exiles,” but every American schoolchild learned those last few lines; Rita Dove knew the whole poem, as well as the poet’s socialist-activist legacy. The mighty statue was encased in scaffolding and in the process of being restored on the day of Rita Dove’s visit, but right in front of the poet, unobscured and clear as day, sat a homeless woman, “big boned” and “resolute.” Rita Dove doesn’t miss the dazzling symmetry or the aching conflict—echoes and reverberations, traces and shadows inform every line.

The poet effectively reworks Emma Lazarus’s lofty inscription into a powerful reflection on the contradiction: the Mother of Exiles, that mighty woman lifting the torch of freedom, welcoming the immigrant, the asylum seeker, and the homeless masses yearning to breathe free, is ridiculed by the presence of that other woman, “Lady Freedom among us,” who is unhoused, unfed, and unfree. The unhoused woman in front of our eyes makes a mockery of the statue’s aspirational legend.

The subject of Rita Dove’s poem with her “old fashioned sandals” and her “leaden skirts” is “one of the many and she is each of us.” Here the poet illuminates a fundamental contradiction at the heart of our examination of the dense and layered concept of freedom as well as at the center of the human condition: we are each fully the one of one—full stop; we are each merely one of the many—again, full stop.

Freedom struggles and social justice movements throughout history (and to this day) have fought for individual liberties—the right to vote, to access public goods and resources, to speak one’s truth, to participate in the full life of society, to receive equal pay for equal work, to live and eat and sit and drink water where one wished—always embedded within a larger vision of collective freedom for an entire community or a whole people. “Black liberation,” “women’s liberation,” “disability rights,” “worker’s rights,” “gay liberation”—each movement brought a community into being through the process of first naming themselves, designating the oppression, discrimination, ill-treatment, or abuse one faced based on membership in that specific group and then rising up to fight back. In the act of collectively naming themselves in resistance to a common oppression, individuals forged themselves into a community and created an identifiable public.

Barriers to freedom and liberation arise on the level of personal liberty and on the level of collective freedom; the resistance exists on both levels, and the test of success can be measured on each level as well. But it’s easy in America to default to the individual—my rights and my freedom—and to ignore or remain ignorant of the commons.

To take one central and electrifying example, the US—its wealth and power, its culture and customs, its laws and government—was built on an elaborate architecture of white supremacy that includes the system of slavery and the practice of conquest, war, and genocide, the defeat of Reconstruction, and more. Everyday bigotry and racist ideas bloom in the nourishing shade of those structures of inequality based on color. For many well-intentioned liberals, the path to repairing past harms is to be found exclusively in individuals, one by one, “unlearning racism” or embracing “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The definition of the problem leads to a specific theory of action: if the problem is merely a bad idea inside some people’s heads, the solution is in psychology and persuasion. But if instead the problem is structural, then action must involve dismantling those structures. “Unlearning racism” is a doomed project precisely because a collective catastrophe—vast structural inequities never repaired, centuries of exploitation and oppression and generational trauma caused by our laws and backed by armed agents of the state—demands a collective response. The harm was instituted by the government and embraced by the dominant society; any authentic repair must be social and shared as well, borne by the collective, and also at the highest levels. Reparations would include, then, institutional transformations and structural rearrangement in every area of social life. Individual attitudes matter, but they cannot drive that kind of repair.

The word “racism” can implicate a singular person or the collective, and in our hyper-individualistic culture, the word most commonly devolves to a singular individual who did something obviously prejudiced: “He’s a racist”; “She’s being racist”; “I’m not a racist.” It’s about this or that person or particular act or behavior, and it means “bigoted, backward, stupid, and offensive.” People like Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who staged an armed standoff with the federal government over grazing rights and said in an interview in 2014 that African Americans were better off under slavery, is clearly making a racist statement.² Amy Cooper, too, was acting on a racist assumption in 2020 when she called 911 because a bird-watcher asked her to keep her dog on a leash; she famously said, “There is an African American man . . . threatening myself and my dog. Please, send the cops immediately!” But since I’m not backward and bigoted and stupid like them, “I’m not racist.”³ Convenient for white liberals, but not helpful in repairing the real harm.

We live in a society—a collective social order—built upon white supremacy through law and custom, history and culture. Our collective life is structured on perpetuating racial oppression. So, wherever and whoever you are, you can close your eyes to reality and simply go along, or you can keep an eye on policy or law, you can do the work of searching out, opposing, and dismantling the institutional and structural expressions of white supremacy, privilege and oppression based on color, which is structural racism.

Health disparities, criminal legal exposure, educational access, housing imbalances—all of these arrangements and frameworks express a white supremacist reality. You don’t say the N-word? Good for you. You’re still living in a racist society and breathing the toxic fumes of racial oppression. Any whole-hearted anti-racist response must include struggling against those sturdy, embedded frames of white supremacy.

The wellspring of bigotry and racial prejudice is, after all, the structure of inequality itself, not the other way around. That is, the reality of inequality baked into law and economic condition as well as history, custom, and culture generates racist thoughts and feelings as justification. Those racist ideas keep regenerating as long as the structures of white supremacy and Black oppression are in place. Race itself is, of course, both everywhere and nowhere—a social construction, a massive fiction, and, at the same time, the hardest of hard-edged realities.

The simplistic reduction to the individual not only allows people to dodge any social responsibility whatsoever themselves, but it also blinds us to the egregious activities of Donald Sterling, for example, who became rich and powerful as a real estate magnate dealing in segregated and slum housing, but only got called out as racist and lost his NBA franchise when he disparaged African Americans in a taped phone call made public. Slumlording didn’t warrant any sanction whatsoever. The list goes on: a Chicago mayor shuttered more than fifty public schools in predominantly Black communities while he militarized a bloated and aggressive police force, covered up police murders in Black communities, but never used the N-word, so, “not a racist”; a slick and charming president pushed harsh legislation that resulted in escalating incarceration and the overrepresentation of Black people in prisons but loved Black music, so, “not racist.” But each of these cases—and zillions more—are examples of white supremacy and racist structures in practice and social reality.

I am the one and only human being just like me who ever walked this earth, and the only one who ever was or ever will be just like me—there can be no other. And the same is true of you. We are induplicable. So when I die or when you die, the world will go on without us, and at the same time a singular universe will collapse, and all the webs of significance I’ve strung between the films I’ve seen and the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve been, the people I’ve loved, the incidents and episodes I’ve experienced, and all the knowledge I’ve gathered, will vanish in a flash. The unique interaction of emotions, desires, loves, insights, perceptions, practices, thoughts and feelings that are mine and mine alone—my hikes in the city, long swims in the lake and the ocean, shooting through the rapids, making love, walking the Inca Trail, fighting the police, going to jail, biking in Beijing and Hong Kong and Chicago and along the Pacific Coast Highway, attending concerts, experimenting with this and that, going to classes, reading Oluale Kossola and Black Elk and Toni Morrison, listening to John Coltrane and Pharoh Sanders and Nina Simone and Bob Dylan, working in the shipyards, seizing (and wasting) my time, becoming a merchant sailor, stopping traffic, disrupting army recruiters, organizing a community union, engaging with comrades, talking with strangers, studying revolution, practicing my everyday anarchist calisthenics, raising three kids, teaching preschool as well as graduate school, eating on the streets of Hanoi, making bread, taking grandchildren to the parks and the museums, racing in a panic to the ER—all of it will black out and disappear with me. Even though I always knew this was true (stars are exploding all around us, worlds are disintegrating, and those not busy being born are surely busy dying), it’s all still a bit sad for me to think about that vast and seemingly endless landscape erased. Again, the same is true of you, all of you—as Rita Dove says, even the least of you.

I am at the same time, like the proximate stranger in Rita Dove’s poem, simply one of the many, exactly like you (and all others) in so many important ways. I was born; if I’m cut, I bleed; and someday I will die. I’m a human being, and I share a human culture and a human fate with all other human beings; we share, as well, these specific few moments in time. Just like Dove’s Lady Freedom (“she is one of the many / and she is each of us”) just like you. What doesn’t die, what’s not snuffed out, is the social organism—the ongoing community and culture—that we build and rebuild in every generation—if, and how, we choose.

My friend Lisa Lee, a passionate student of Theodor Adorno, argues alongside him that we become free human beings only when we go outside of ourselves and enter into relationship with others. It’s impossible to be free as an isolated individual; we are only free when we acknowledge ourselves in others, and others in ourselves. When we hand ourselves over to others, we achieve our freedom in community.

Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno tells the story of a New England sealing ship operating off the coast of Chile in 1805 that comes upon a Spanish frigate drifting aimlessly with tattered sails, a distressed crew, and a figurehead oddly shrouded in canvas bearing the painted slogan “Follow Your Leader.” A small party led by Captain Amasa Delano boards the ship to assess the situation and assist if possible. There they encounter a skeleton crew and a diminished cargo of enslaved people as well as Captain Benito Cereno, who explains the troubles that had brought them to this point: terrible storms, he claims, ill fate and bad luck, disease and fevers that had taken the lives of several, including the slave master Alexandro Aranda.⁴

Captain Delano spends hours aboard the ship talking with Benito Cereno, who is always in the company of his loyal enslaved servant, Babo. Delano notes a series of strange events: urgent whispering among crew and cargo, a few Africans carrying knives, and an occasional physical confrontation with Spanish crew members. Benito Cereno is pale and weak, often near fainting, always insisting that Babo stay close. As Delano prepares to return to his own ship, a desperate Benito Cereno leaps from the deck onto the departing long boat and the truth becomes clear: Babo is running the ship and Benito Cereno is his prisoner; insurgent rebels have freed themselves, taken control of the ship, and are demanding a return to Africa; the shrouded figurehead is the bones of Alexandro Aranda, the painted slogan a targeted threat to the crew.

The entire day had been a complex dramatic performance put on by the Africans under the directorial brilliance of Babo to deceive the visitors. But in order to see the reality of the drama produced on his behalf—which is bursting with hints and clues and full-blown illumination—Captain Delano, a good liberal Republican from New England, would have needed the one quality he lacked: a sincere belief that Babo and the other enslaved cargo were full human beings like himself, people capable of intricate planning, complex intelligence, wild imagination, and historical memory, as well as an acute sense of their own agency. Delano couldn’t see it because to see it he would have had to escape the anesthetizing effect of his blinding privilege and assumed not that Babo was less than human, but that Babo was exactly as human as himself: the one of one, and one of the many. Privilege, that easily available and highly addictive hard drug (widely available today), had anesthetized them and knocked them out—they were sleeping the deep, deep American sleep.

When I was first teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a large urban campus in the heart of the city, my classes all met at night to accommodate adult students who worked. I was there for several months before I began to notice that the male students (and I) quickly scattered for home after class, while the women students seemed to gather together in order to go as a group to the parking lot or the train. When I asked one woman about it, she smiled a kind of pitying smile and said that yes, it was true, of course—the women were banding together for safety. She practically said, “Duh!” and I was embarrassed. Male privilege allowed me, and encouraged all of us men, not to notice. We coordinated our after-class routine from then on, and we learned a lesson: effectively wrestling with privilege is not about grappling with guilt or shame. It’s about contending with a deadly addictive drug that you didn’t necessarily ask for, embrace or even recognize, but that is on offer for free, and that will, once you become an addict, drive you blind. Resisting privilege is a portal opening toward a larger humanity.

Benito Cereno illuminates a vibrant world that white people—sightless and sleep-walking—could not begin to perceive through the dark cloud of slavery and its evil spawn, the ideology of white supremacy. Because they could not see themselves in Babo and his comrades, because they could not see Babo in them, they were both sightless and mindless: blind people who thought they could see, seeing people who were in fact blind. Reality eluded them, and they could not be free. This is our continuing challenge.

In his 1968 hit song “Everyday People,” Sylvester Stewart, better known with his group Sly and the Family Stone, says: “I am no better, and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do.”⁵ Yes, yes, there we are, each and all of us: singular everyday people. And we’d do better if we saw one another—deeply, truly, fully.

Holding on to the truth embodied in the contradiction is a struggle, and naming the challenge can help: I automatically see the world through my own narcissistic eyes—my eyes, after all, are the only eyes I’ve got—and yet I have a mind that tells me that my entire being depends on the love and the care and the labor of others, both historically and right now. Food, water, shelter, work, sanitation—there’s a vast collective propping me up and keeping me alive. But if I get too “Kumbaya, My Lord,” and Sly Stone about it, I fall into an opposite trap: I homogenize humanity and miss the essential learning only to be found in our profound differences. “Common ground” can become counterproductive, even reactionary, if it normalizes dominance, dogma, or suffocating doctrine; we also need to embrace uncommon ground as a space of dynamic learning and the possibility of forward-looking change. A worthwhile practice is to notice the dialectic, followed by a helpful mantra to recite: all individuals are like no others; all individuals are like some others; all individuals are like all others.

The ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, author of the “Golden Rule,” famously asked, “If I’m not for myself, who will be? If I’m for myself alone, what am I?”⁶ Those paired and penetrating questions have troubled and guided people in every age and society, every classroom or community—selfish/selfless, thoughtless/considerate, oneness/separateness, grasping/generous. Both/and. There is no easy resolution; we ride the contradiction, loving our own lives fully and honoring the lives of others fully—seeing them, hearing them, embracing them. Diving into the contradiction, surfing the maelstrom, has illuminated vast social, cultural, philosophical, and political spaces for millennia.

I can’t be free unless we are free; we can’t be free if you are not free. The dialectic—the tension—between individuals and society. We have a choice when it comes to freedom, and in stark terms, it’s this: the freedom to exploit and destroy, the freedom of the market, or the freedom to live in harmony with one another by making provision for mutual security, including food and housing, income, healthcare, and education. This second choice would move beyond “freedom from” and toward “freedom with.”

The contradiction broke down in the United States when the country’s elite rejected any sense of community and lurched violently toward an exclusive “me” in politics and policies with the self-proclaimed “Reagan Revolution.” This meant fierce opposition to any concept of collectivity or the “public,” weaponized individualism, and a peculiarly anemic, libertarian definition of “freedom.” “Public safety” became “own a gun”; “public education” became a product to be bought exclusively at the market place; “public health” was reduced to a commodity sold over the counter accompanied by a warning: “Take care of yourself, by yourself.” The word “public” became a racist dog whistle in several contexts: public welfare was not a term hurled at corporate tax write-offs or Delaware tax shelters or so-called public/private partnerships; public housing didn’t refer to tax breaks for real estate developers; public aid never meant farm subsidies. The word “freedom” surrendered to the rising worship of the individual and became a bloodless husk: my freedom to sell flavored vaping products, or to graze my cattle in a national park, or to carry my assault weapon into the grocery store—the public be damned.

Ronald Reagan famously campaigned for the presidency defending “freedom” and “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, a short distance from the lynching site of civil rights martyrs Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Micky Schwerner. He later said at his inauguration in 1981: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”⁷ Britain’s Margaret Thatcher provided an addendum to Reagan’s proclamation in 1987: “Too many . . . have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ . . . They are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing!”⁸

These ideological pillars—there is no society, and government is the problem—became fused into a single orthodoxy that came to be called neoliberalism: the “free” market rules everything, unencumbered by government programs that, no matter how well intended, only stifle or stall the market, the only true source of wisdom, and the engine of every sensible solution to people’s needs. Each self-interested individual is “free,” standing alone, unaided, and radically responsible for himself and his family (the “family” being the only legitimate arrangement of collective living), and anything that bends toward the communal or the collective must be sniffed out and destroyed. This helps explain the reduction or disappearance of checks on or regulatory action against corporate greed, as well as the sustained attacks on Social Security, Amtrak, and the US Postal Service—assaults that seem silly at times, but, in this larger ideological struggle, make a certain perverse sense.

Americans are renowned the world around for our individualism, and here we stand: no public health system, grinding labor and galloping poverty for the many and escalating opulence for the few, chronic insecurity, massive homelessness and hunger, the dramatic unraveling of social programs, the disappearance of public education, and the collapse of infrastructure, including city water systems. This state of affairs is justified with an anemic set of rationalizations: poor people made poor decisions or they wouldn’t be poor; unhoused people should have paid their rent; unemployed people should get jobs; people with mental illnesses should cheer up and straighten up; people in prison did bad things and must live in cages, possibly forever. In short, the US can’t look after its own people, so, buck up, trust God, and love capitalism—pretty much the same thing.

We’re suspended in a cruel contradiction: our government is rich enough and powerful enough to conduct several wars simultaneously all over the world, but it cannot guarantee its people the most basic human rights like food or shelter, education or health care, without which freedom is a farce. The country calls itself a democracy but allows some people to hoard so much wealth that they effectively own and control the government; there are enough resources in the world to fulfil human needs, but not enough to fulfill capitalist greed.

This signature national trademark resembles what political scientist Norman Geras called “the contract of mutual indifference”: a sense of doomed loneliness, of abandonment, a powerful realization that because I am not responsible for anyone else, I’m on my own if I should be faced with any difficulties.⁹ “I won’t help you when you’re in distress,” the featured ethic dictates. “And I guess—woe is me—that when I’m in need, you won’t help me either.” We are free, and we are entirely alone. Of course, it’s completely human to be inconsistent, so, while you’re on your own, when I need the ER, I expect it to be fully staffed and generously funded; every reactionary politician in Texas is a self-reliant lone star right up until the next hurricane hits and he cleverly transforms before your eyes into an enthusiastic member of the national collective.

This ideology didn’t suddenly fall from the sky; it was years in the making, constructed on a powerful base, and held together with iron-tough props and sturdy struts that are baked deep into our American DNA. The rugged individual Indian-killer Davey Crockett, the Marlboro Man, John Wayne, and the frontiersman, the fabled humble origins of every politician who “succeeded” by his own wit and grit, the self-made man, the Lone Ranger—this is toxic individualism, weaponized and ready to rumble.

Our culture of extreme individualism has the familiar stench of common sense. It’s sold to us as “human nature,” and it has the effect of disarming people in the face of collective problems—a pandemic, for example, or catastrophic climate collapse. We’re accustomed to hearing nonsensical statements like “Only you can prevent forest fires,” and we nod dully instead of screaming, “What about climate change, the timber industry, forest maintenance policy, real estate developers given free rein to build residential tracts in fire (or flood) plains?” We heard a politician recently say in all seriousness that Tampa faces different environmental problems than Miami, and that each community should work to solve the climate crisis on its own. Good luck, Miami. And an item on the nightly news recently featured a chilling report about the dying ocean that included a long interview with a leader of a well-meaning liberal environmental group. When asked if there was anything individuals could do, she offered a long list of possibilities (eat lower on the food chain, recycle plastic) without pointing to any acts that would build collective opposition and power or address structural issues. Facing imminent destruction, our rich and powerful society seems willing to commit suicide rather than link arms and face reality collectively. In this landscape, freedom is always personal and individual, and anything social or shared is an infringement on my freedom. How lonely, how sad, and how blazingly self-destructive.

Extreme individualism locates problems and searches for solutions in the narrowest terms. Consider a familiar phenomenon in modern American life: the unremarkable weight-loss diet. It’s an individual issue, right? An issue as ordinary as mud. Look at the diet news coverage, the diet industry, or the national diet obsession and you’ll see overwhelmingly the focus is on YOU or YOU, or on some other individual who wants or needs to lose weight. It’s your problem or challenge or responsibility, and there is barely a nod in the direction of a social element. Fat people are lazy or undisciplined; serial dieters have a character flaw or a psychological problem. That’s “common sense”—and there’s nothing shriller and more insistent than common sense, especially when it’s entirely wrong.

Big Food, like the tobacco and drug industries before it, has created an entire system—huge marketing budgets that target young people, fraudulent studies to confuse the impact of lethal products, massive PR campaigns to resist attempts to force them to take any responsibility whatsoever—designed to maximize profits while poisoning masses of people. “Shouldn’t I be free to market a product people want?” they ask. Shouldn’t people be free to buy the sodas and snacks of their choice? And, like the gambling industry, the house is stacked mercilessly against the individual. The food advertising budget is $14 billion a year—mostly pushing sugary drinks, fast food, candy and highly processed snacks—compared to less than $1 billion a year for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focused on “health promotion and chronic disease prevention.”¹⁰

There are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in our country, and they’re most likely found in poorer areas; 12 percent of Americans go hungry, and their options are often ultraprocessed food or no food at all; more than half of our total calories now come from ultraprocessed food, stripped of nutrients and filled with sugar, and the result is that most of us are overweight, and chronic diseases linked to diet are through the roof.¹¹ So, diet if you like, but, as Mark Bittman puts it, our real “weight problem” is the “dead weight of the profiteers who poison us and of the plutocrats who abet them.”¹² All in the name of freedom.

Or consider the automobile, the ultimate symbol of freedom within the American dream. Imagine! Every individual tooling around in their massive steel unit, free to turn left or right, to speed or stop, grinding up the environment, glorying in the chaos. We might have put that massive industrial capacity, that brilliant engineering knowledge, that labor, and all that money into creating public transit: bullet trains for long distance, interlocking electric shuttles to every desired point. We could do that now. Instead, all the money and excitement go to—what?—self-driving cars and expanding Uber and Lyft. Another iteration of individualism in which each unit is attended by its own robot. A nightmare of anti-community and a disaster for the environment, but, in the individualist ideology, striking a blow for freedom.

In our collapsed culture we lean toward an exclusive me-ness and tend to talk about moral behavior and ethical action in individualistic terms, ignoring or eliminating any social dimension, although a collective element is always there. After all, most Spartans act like Spartans, most Athenians act like Athenians, and, for better and for worse, most Americans act like Americans. Almost everyone would agree that individuals should not lie, steal, or assault others. That’s conventional—but being conventional and embodying personal virtues is not the same thing as being moral. Being a moral person in an immoral society takes courage, consciousness, and the will to act. Moreover, establishing a just society is the essential path toward creating the conditions that will allow people who are acting conventionally—just doing what’s normal and expected—to also be acting ethically. Case in point: during the days of chattel slavery, going along with everyday life meant participating (explicitly or implicitly) in evil. Once slavery was abolished, doing everyday things no longer carried the stench of kidnapping, human trafficking, and forced labor.

Mark Twain wrote a lovely essay called “Free Speech Is for the Grave” in which he outlined the power of conventional thinking and behavior, the desire to be liked and accepted, and the seeming rudeness of speaking out. His killer example was, of course, slavery—every acquaintance he knew opposed it; none spoke out against it, or even about it because that might be discourteous and create discomfort; better to just go along and get along.¹³

Let’s return to that difficult but necessary tension between “me” and “we.” The story of your life starts in the same place every day and spools forward with a familiar ring and rhythm: you wake up, and there you are in your bed, facing the day, constructing an entire world through your own thinking as you get dressed. You’re a good person (pretty much—well, most of the time), you work hard (OK, hard enough), and you’re mostly trying to do your best. Mostly. You’re hungry, and you head to the kitchen for toast and your coffee or tea or miso soup. Let’s go!

Everyone does that. It’s natural and entirely common.

You head to your little isolated box on wheels, start the car, and steer onto the roadway toward your job. Why so much traffic—commuters are such a pain! You’re in a hurry for an important meeting, and there are only a few cars in the ride-share lane, so you pull over there and speed up. Suddenly a woman veers in front of you and she’s alone in her car—what an asshole! This is for ride-shares! You blast your horn and give her the finger because she’s terrible. Of course, it’s hard to take into account that all those other people on the road have things to do that are important to them, and it’s impossible to gauge the relative importance of each, or to know, for example, that the asshole who cut you off was on her way to the ER where her son had been taken an hour earlier after crashing his motorcycle into a tree. Not your problem!

Each of us necessarily and naturally thinks, sees, feels, and hears in a severely limited and tightly restricted range. We don’t see or hear or think everything that can be seen or heard or thought. How could we? We’d go insane if it were otherwise, and, in fact, one of the charming qualities of tiny infants is that they inhabit (and are protected by) a veil of unconsciousness—in the first days, while their eyes may be wide open, all they can take in is shadow and light and blurry shapes; they’re all but deaf and blind, and they only awaken slowly, bit by bit. Their awakening is delightful: they smile with recognition; later they parallel play with other toddlers; then they make friends; much later we participate in class and group activities, becoming more and more effective and decent social beings; we even fall in love. But our awakenings are always contingent and partial, and our range of seeing and thinking and feeling naturally restricted. We each take a sweeping unitary wholeness—the universe—select a microscopic speck (me), and tell our stories, day after day, from that tiny point of view. That speck (ME!) (YOU!) becomes hyperreal and is perceived (by me or by you) to be the center of the universe. The story is not only about me; it’s also for me. I’m the star of the movie, author, director, and lead actor in my life, and what’s good for me is, well, good; and what’s bad for me is, of course, bad. Everyone else in my life—family, colleagues, proximate strangers, the crowd—is a supporting actor or a bit player. Or just some annoying background noise, like those commuters.

When I think about everyday egoism this way, it seems a miracle that we can reach even tentative agreements with one another about the shape and scale of things, let alone achieve solid common understandings, or even intimacy with a partner. There’s a lot of talk today about how we all live in self- and socially-constructed silos—political, cultural, national—but the first and primary silo is that initial theater for one. When you step back a bit, you realize that we are all deeply unreliable narrators, authors of a string of myths and tall tales.

Narcissism is our default. Listen to the language: my car, my son, my partner. Think about a seminar you might have attended with me (I like to call it my class), your dazzling (or irrelevant or slightly nutty) teacher—the class was real, we attended the same seminar, and yet you and I had markedly different experiences of seminar. If I said to my partner, “Seminar was great this morning,” and you said to a friend, “Class was so boring that I kept nodding off,” who’s right?

Or, for example, a brief story about my birth family, narrated by me: My mom was a Pollyanna, my dad a workaholic, one of my brothers was out of touch with his feelings, another drank too much, and . . . I’ll stop there. Note who is narrating this family story; note how impossible it is to imagine that my brother would tell the story this way: “Hi, I’m Bill’s brother, my name’s not important, and I’m quite out of touch with my feelings, but deeply impressed by Bill’s insights, perceptions, and judgments.” Unthinkable. And we all do this all the time: this colleague is boring, that friend takes up too much space, my next-door neighbor is a know-it-all. Judgments, judgments, judgments, always according to me, the central character in the carnival of my life.

So, we ought to note the massive rift between the world as it is and the world as each one of us thinks it is—mistaking our self-constructed little world for the whole wide world. And there is a potentially serious downside: if you believe emphatically enough that the world of your construction is in fact the whole wide world, filled with a lot of “assholes,” and not a “construction” at all, then the we/me dialectic disappears, and you’re drowning in selfishness. If you’re willing to act with full force upon that misperception, arrogance and self-righteousness, bossiness and obnoxiousness, authoritarianism, autocracy, fascism, and more are sure to follow.

The writer George Saunders, arguing persuasively for the power of fiction and literature to rescue us from our myopic obsessions, asks us to think for a minute about Chicago, his and my hometown.¹⁴ What comes immediately to mind? Lake Michigan? Wrigley Field? Deep-dish pizza? The Second City actors? Or the grid as you fly above the city landing at Midway? Perhaps Al Capone once upon a time, maybe Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey now. You’re missing a lot, naturally. But say you had for a moment the magic powers to take in all of Chicago, to swallow it whole—every smell and taste and alley and closet and cafe conversation and dresser drawer and shop and factory and pet and person and perspective. As soon as you did that, it would shift and time would move on, and the Chicago you magically grasped a moment ago would be gone. So what? Well, it’s not a big problem, I guess, until one of my out-of-town friends says to me, “Chicago—wow! What should be done about Chicago?” Now I’m supposed to judge Chicago—guns, gangs, homelessness, failing schools, whatever stereotype or generalization is on offer at the moment—and do something about it. But the Chicago I or my friend or the mayor or the city council understand or imagine it to be is a shadowy palimpsest next to the pulsing, chaotic, throbbing, tumultuous, bubbling bedlam that is the real city on the lake.

And yet this is too often what we do with one another and with other people (those we know well, like family, as well as the proximate strangers we see on the street): we deploy our anemic projections, and then we enact our too-certain judgments. It’s a problem, because that delusional gulf between the world as it is and the world as we construct it rears its weird and sometimes nasty head, and with it the return of arrogance and self-righteousness, bossiness and obnoxiousness, bullying, authoritarianism, and all the rest.

This aporia, the conflict, is ultimately unresolved and unresolvable, but you can read lots of imaginative literatures, putting yourself in the shoes of others, as George Saunders advises, or at least acknowledge the trap—and then leap fully into the contradiction, struggling to stay awake and aware, with your head above the rising water.

In Boots Riley’s dazzling 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, a corporation called “Worry Free” promises customers free food and housing, and freedom from the stress of paying bills.¹⁵ Wow!—no rent, no balancing budgets, no calculating taxes. Sounds terrific! People are rushing to sign up. But there’s a catch: “Worry Free” requires participants to sign a lifetime work contract, and, before long, happy contractors are reduced to miserable beasts of burden—literally. Boots Riley’s vivid imagination conjures up a modern-day system of slavery cleverly marketed to folks bathed in the blood of toxic individualism and our pervasive consumer culture. Slavery in this case comes wearing the congenial mask of freedom. And suddenly you wonder, Am I free, or how free am I, really? Do I have a kind of lifetime contract that says, in effect, work or starve?

Remember that freedom was the banner of the Union forces during the Civil War fighting to end the “peculiar institution” and free a people, but it was also the motto of the Confederacy—those organized traitors willing to burn down the whole house in pursuit of a single, exalted “freedom”: their freedom to own other human beings. The freedom of 1776 was purchased by theft and captivity. And it’s noteworthy that “freedom” is the cry of every carbon extractor, exploiter, invader, occupier, and sweatshop operator today. So, while the Confederacy was willing to destroy the nation for the proclaimed right to own people, the capitalist class has always lived off a system of wage slavery. They’re now willing to destroy the ability of human beings and millions of other species to survive on Earth for their supposed freedom to exploit resources and people, hoarding their extravagant, ever-multiplying super-profits. All me, and never we.

What to do? We can start by applying the sensibilities of art to the way we live. We have imaginations that we can nurture, experiences we can map out and engage, and we have the capacity to wonder, reflect, discuss, debate, reach out, and keep on reaching. We can remind ourselves that we are but one of the many, and that every other ones-of-the-many is a vast universe in itself; if you follow any human being into their lived life for two minutes all categorical assumptions evaporate, and all one-dimensional stereotypes collapse. We can challenge ourselves to learn to live with empathy, ambiguity, doubt, skepticism, agnosticism, and uncertainty—always willing to question, and question, and then question some more. Always seeking to see ourselves in others, and others in ourselves, always nourishing a little humility.

The contradiction of life as it’s lived, the unity of humanity, of everyone and everything is that you are an individual, of course, but that doesn’t automatically enlist you as a soldier in the ideological cause of bitter, one-sided individualism. That’s a choice. We can reject individualism in its poisonous form—romanticized, codified, and always at bottom an exercise in selective humanization. We can think of freedom in its collective/social shape and frame. We can choose to embrace humanity whole, to accept the rackety ruckus, to ride the wild, unruly tempest in the direction of our common and collective freedom dreams.