30 beyond wishful thinkingthe market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened
to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements
favorable to the gradual supersession of eco nom ical ly dependent wage
work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination
of cooperation and self- employment. We can so arrange the relation
between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time
for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and conse-
quently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world po liti cal
and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods
of po liti cal security and economic openness depend upon submission
to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the
experiments required to move, by many diff erent paths, in such a
direction.
Th e aim guiding and unifying all these initiatives is the cumulative
reformation of the institutions and practices of society in the ser vice of
the ideal that was ever paramount for the progressives and left ists: not
equality, whether of outcomes or of opportunity, but greatness, the great-
ness of the ordinary man and woman, the discovery of light in the shad-
owy world of the commonplace, which is the defi ning faith of democ-
rac y. To t h is ma r r iage of t he eff ort to lift up the ordinary lives of ordinary
people with the method of institutional experimentation and recon-
struction I give the name deep freedom.
Deep freedom, rather than the romance of the ascent of humanity, is
the collective answer to the problem of belittlement. Because it is within
our power to move in the direction of deep freedom, we must never
mistake our susceptibility to belittlement for an irreparable defect in
human existence, alongside our mortality, our groundlessness, and our
insatiability.
Deep freedom off ers a legitimate and eff ective antidote to belittle-
ment. It is also an incomplete one. It has the present, as well as the fu-
ture, for its terrain. It builds in the penumbra of the adjacent possible,
and demands down payments on its dreams. However, like every social
construction, it calls on many minds and many wills. It evolves in his-
torical, not in biographical, time. It is not within the purview of the in-
dividual, no matter how powerful, to direct. It cannot replace a change
in the conduct of life: a change of heart, a change of consciousness, a
change in the orientation of existence.