No One Free Alone

In Camus’s play The Just Assassins, a group of young Russian revolutionaries argue over whether they can be free while their countrymen are in chains. One of them, the hardest of the group, puts it bluntly.

There is deep truth in this. Camus never lets freedom become purely private. A liberty that stays content while others are crushed is not as clean as it pretends. The man who has arranged a free and pleasant life by carefully not looking at the unfree lives around him has bought his comfort, not his freedom. Part of him is still in the cell, because he has to keep working to hold the door shut on it.

So the line is worth hearing. Your freedom is not finished while you are surrounded by people who have none. It implicates you. It asks something of you.

But notice who says it in the play. The speaker is the one willing to do anything, kill anyone, for the cause, and Camus is uneasy with him. The truth that no one is free alone can curdle into an excuse for trampling actual people in the name of universal freedom. We will sit with that danger in a few days. For now, keep the better half.

Your liberty is not diminished by being spent. Find one person whose options are narrower than yours and spend a little of it widening theirs. Real freedom does not hoard. It spreads.