What if We’ll Never Truly Be Free?
About this episode
Maggie Nelson, author of 'On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint,' joins Klein to interrogate one of America's most overloaded words: freedom. They discuss how the concept gets invoked across politics — from Covid lockdown protests to debates over art and cancel culture — and why Nelson treats freedom not as the absence of limits but as something bound up with care, obligation, and constraint. The conversation moves through addiction and 12-step philosophy, the ethics of judging art by artists' morals, sexual freedom and its discontents, and the peculiar anxiety that open-ended choice can produce. Nelson argues that acknowledging our dependencies, rather than fantasizing about total autonomy, is the more honest — and more freeing — way to live.