Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb. A weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an

engaging and accessible way, with the hope of inspiring these kinds of conversations in your own

life. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this episode

with a legendary figure in both music and activism, Billy Bragg.

You probably know Billy Bragg from his decades spanning career in music,

and also you may know him as a social, labor, political activist. His

new effort, his newest effort is a book called The Three Dimensions of Freedom. And we spend

a lot of time talking about that book and talking about his concepts of liberty, equality, and accountability. I ask him,

why not fraternity instead of accountability. We go into what each of those concepts mean to him.

The problems with the freedom of speech, which is a pretty interesting angle, I think, for someone whose

artistic expression depends on freedom of speech, and for me, whose life really has depended

on the freedom of speech, where the limits of that are and where the problems of that might be.

We also talk about compassion, why a break from the language of Marxism might be

needed. So that might be surprising to some of you because Billy often talks in very socialist

terms and things about unions and socialism and all that kind of stuff. For me, this has a very

personal aspect to it, too, which I talk about

in the show because of the way some of Billy's music has woven into my life in a rather

actually sorrowful way as much as I enjoy it. And in some ways, this episode and this conversation

I got to have with him redeemed all of that for me.

And so it was almost kind of a healing act.

So I'm very excited to have Billy on the show.

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