No one is born alone

Each of us is born distinct. No one is born alone.

The first sentence is true of every body: a name, a breath, a border of skin that belongs to no one else. The second is true of every life. Before we could say "I", someone fed us, called us by name, held us. They handed us a language we did not invent and an order of rules we did not choose. Freedom does not find us finished. It reaches us through other people's hands.

We are used to dividing it. The freedom of being left alone. The freedom of being one's own master. And a third, newer in name and older in substance: having no master at all. Three words, three schools, three flags. But look at them in a living body rather than on a dissecting table. Whoever is left alone, yet depends on another's whim, is at peace only for as long as it suits the other: their quiet is a favour that can be withdrawn. Whoever is master of themselves, yet has a master above them, rules a room to which someone else holds the key. The first two stand only if the third keeps watch over them. Apart, none of them holds. That is why I prefer to speak of one freedom with three faces, one of which stands guard over the others.

This freedom is not owned. It is received, and it is received in circles. The first is the family, where brillio begins – the capacity to see that a form could be otherwise. The word is Italian and I leave it so: it means a flicker, a glint, a light that is not yet a flame, and English has no single word for it. In the family, brillio begins as play and as question. The second circle is the community: the school, the street, the library, the hospital, everything someone built before we arrived and gave us without asking whether we had earned it. Each circle lends to the next. None of us is the first link in the chain; each of us is a link.

A loan, by its nature, is returned. But what is returned? This is where we stumble, and precision matters. Freedom is not what we give back: freedom does not shrink by being given. What we give up is something else – power over the freedom of others. Everyday language hides the difference by calling both by the same name: I am free to buy, to fire, to close, to decide. Life tells them apart without hesitation. To dispose of oneself is freedom. To dispose of others is domination. The first grows only where the second meets a limit.

"I give it up in order to be free." It sounds like a paradox; it is a description. Whoever renounces the chance to tighten a chain around someone else's neck loses nothing that makes them free. They lose only the possibility of being free against others, rather than with them.

Hence a threshold. Each of us keeps the fruit of our own brillio – and rightly – up to the point where that fruit begins to turn into power over other lives. Beyond that point, the surplus returns to the circuit it came from. The threshold applies to everyone. Those who live it well would set it for themselves, but the rule does not rest on their virtue: their virtue is the reason the rule can be loved, not the reason it is just.

Some will call it theft. But only one principle here is inalienable: that no one be anyone's master. From it follows what every civilisation has recognised – do not kill, do not steal – together with the rules that keep everything else open to correction. Return beyond the threshold takes from no one what is theirs. It takes from what is theirs the chance to become lordship over what belongs to others. Everything else – where exactly the line falls, how much, by what means – can be improved, and must remain so.

Who guarantees such rules? Not a single guardian: a single guardian would be one more master. They are guaranteed by a multitude – distributed, yet finite – of trustees, institutions and counterweights. Distributed, so that no one can seize them. Finite, so that each can be named, held to account, replaced. A system like this is strong not because someone defends it by force, but because no one can make it their own.

And the act of returning? It is a single act with two faces. Whoever returns ceases to be able to dominate, and in the same instant the other is freer. There is no before and after: both happen at once, as whoever feeds a lamp gives light to themselves and to others with the same hand. Whether what returns then kindles brillio in others is a different matter. That unfolds in time, and must be tested, not promised.

What returns is, in the end, one thing seen at two distances. Up close, it is one person's freedom, their brillio, their chance to try. From afar, it is a school, a hospital, a common good. Like a monad that mirrors the whole – though unlike the philosophers' monad, this one has its windows open. Like a cloud that, seen up close, becomes a particle.

One question remains that I cannot yet settle, and I would rather leave it open than close it badly: where does the loan stop? Does it return to the circle we received it from – this family, this town, this country – or is there a last circle, humanity itself, to which every smaller circle is in turn indebted? I know only that it is the right question, because the freedom we received had no borders when it was given to us.

Each of us is born distinct. No one is born alone. That is why no one should be able to become another's master.

Also in Italian: Nessuno nasce da solo.