Free, by Lea Ypi

Memoir of growing up in Albania under communism... then not-under communism.

This was a great book – it was pretty trendy/popular for a while, I'm not the first to say that, but those other people are right too. (It's not crucial, but this is a book where it's probably better to go in without knowing too much about the narrative).

One thing it deals with is a weirdness I'd never thought about: the weirdness of raising children under a system like Albanian communism, where there are certain views they absolutely can't say in school/public, so you have to raise them with the right beliefs even if those differ from your own. It's kind of like Vaclav Havel's greengrocer or whathaveyou, and I feel like there must be other Art that talks about this, but I don't personally remember reading a description like this of how it feels to be a child in these circumstances.

Another big theme of the book is how certain words – like Freedom – were part of the national self-perception under communism, and later part of the national self-perception under capitalism, even though everything had changed. I think Ypi does an unusually good job of showing how our idea of what it means to be (for example) Free are shaped by the society and administration we live under, and that part of the reason we think we are More Free than people under rival systems is that the metrics we choose for Freedom are determined by the system we live under and what it does/doesn't provide people.

This isn't the only thing going on – governments also lie to their populations about how well they're doing by their own metrics – but I think we more-often fail to notice the first step, which is how deeply and hard-to-avoidably our society shapes our idea of The Good in the first place. We're just all absolutely infested with the ideas we grew up with, and our tools for examining our infestation are themselves infested, and it feels almost impossible to shake off that infestation sufficiently to understand anything.

In my own case, one (minor) thing the book left me feeling is how utterly lucky I am – there but for the grace of God, etc – that I never became a World Bank Expert telling countries to neoliberalise. I'm pretty sure that if I'd been born a few years earlier this would have been my life, and that I would have been a true believer, and that I would have caused (or at least been the instrument of) a lot of suffering, and that the only things that stopped me were luck and timing. (One of my college professors used to say of a certain famous economist that he had "spent the last decade trying to make amends for what he did to Russia", and I think of that every so often these days). For all the times I feel disappointed that I haven't done much (on the larger scale) in my life, I probably just as often feel lucky that I haven't done much with my life, because so many of the people who Did Something ultimately found that they'd done something bad.