Out of Isolation

We close the freedom month where it has quietly been heading all along. In a lecture called Create Dangerously, Camus sets down a single sentence that turns freedom toward other people. Liberty alone, he says, draws men from their isolation. But slavery dominates a crowd of solitudes.

Read the second half first, because it is the warning. A crowd of solitudes. That is what oppression produces, not a community but a mass of people who are each alone, afraid to speak, unable to trust, packed together and yet utterly separate. Tyranny does not only take your freedom. It takes your neighbors, by making everyone too frightened and too watched to truly meet. The unfree world is crowded and lonely at the same time.

Freedom does the opposite. Only liberty, Camus says, can actually draw people out of their isolation and join them to one another. When you are free, you can finally be honest with another person, take their side, make a real promise, belong to them by choice rather than by fear. Freedom is not the end of needing others. It is the very thing that makes genuine company possible. We spent the month learning to stand on our own ground. It turns out that ground was never meant to be stood on alone.

And so this chapter opens into the next. Tomorrow the book turns to solidarity, to the bond between people who share the same fate, and we arrive there carrying everything June has taught us. A free person is not a solitary one. Freedom was always the road out of isolation and toward each other.

Today, on the last day of the freedom month, use your liberty to close one distance. Reach toward one person, plainly and without fear. Step out of the crowd of solitudes. That is where everything we have practiced was always pointing.