Freedom is not the absence of rules – freedom is judgment

This text really got me thinking. Because what do all these ever-growing questions, rules and tools actually do to us? We believe that every new tool lets us decide more freely and better – but does it really? Or are we unlearning something essential in the process: real closeness, direct conversation, immediate contact? Instead of truly meeting one another, we send WhatsApps and emails. And what I find especially interesting is the link Hartmut Rosa draws to religion. Not to yoga, sport or some kind of esoteric spirituality – but really to religion, understood as a school of trust and genuine relationship. My reading tip: take the time to keep thinking freely as you read – and ask yourself where you've traded real contact for mere reach.

Freedom is not the absence of rules. Freedom is judgment.

The more complex the world becomes, the louder the call for rules, processes and controls. The wish behind it is understandable: prevent mistakes, secure justice, reduce risk. But at some point the whole thing tips into its opposite.

Where people only work through instructions, something crucial withers: the ability to grasp a situation, weigh it up, and act responsibly.

This is exactly the dilemma the sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes in the SRF interview "Vanishing room to manoeuvre". The sense of powerlessness within rigid systems makes radical promises attractive: "Take back control." To finally act again – instead of being slowed down by rules, courts or treaties.

But here lies the decisive point: using room to manoeuvre responsibly is something entirely different from tearing down the frame itself.

That is why Rosa reads Donald Trump's politics not as a clever use of freedoms, but as the destruction of the very conditions under which responsible action is possible at all. When courts are weakened, agreements made arbitrary and institutions delegitimised, trust disappears. And without trust there is no freedom – only arbitrariness.

Perhaps it is like Lego: the bricks and a solid base plate are indispensable. But the best ideas rarely come from a page-long instruction manual. They emerge in freestyle – when people build creatively and with judgment within a stable frame. Take away the base plate, or throw the bricks around wildly, and you don't get freedom, but chaos.

This is also where Rosa's book „Demokratie braucht Religion – gerade jetzt!" ("Democracy Needs Religion") comes in. He understands religion not as a set of rules, but as a school of trust: we learn responsibility not through regulations, but through relationships – and through the willingness to recognise what is good in the concrete moment.

His classic „Resonanz" ("Resonance") goes one step further. Freedom lives on genuine relationship – on moments in which we truly connect with people and the world. Where mere reach takes its place – many contacts instead of real closeness – the very thing that carries a good life withers: the capacity to be touched and to respond ourselves.

Perhaps this is one of the most important tasks of our time: less distrust, more trust. Fewer rigid manuals – but also no smashing of the whole set. Rather, people we trust to act freely and responsibly within a good frame.

Because both endanger freedom: too many rules suffocate it – but the attack on constitutional and democratic institutions destroys the entire frame in which freedom can be lived at all. Otherwise we will end up in a brave new world of perfectly arranged Lego bricks, in which every original thought, every crooked brick, is sorted out.