What if individual rights and the common good were actually one and the same? What if

Independence Day was really more about interdependence? Welcome to the Commune podcast. My name

is Jeff Krasno. In light of the Fourth of July

weekend, I want to visit a piece I wrote about Independence Day and what freedom really means. Is freedom

really an individual condition, the dogged pursuit of personal achievement and the shedding of

collective responsibility? Or are we

truly free when we build communal bonds and strive for justice and prosperity together? And this piece

I touch on the tension between rugged individualism and the common good, how our founding

ideals of equality, often excluded

large swaths of people, and how honoring our interconnectedness may be the real key to patriotism.

But before we dive in, I want to let you know about our commune course platform that contains over

3,000 lessons and practices from the world's preeminent

integrative medicine doctors, health experts, and fitness, yoga, and mindfulness teachers.

It's a repository of recipes for holistic wellness. And you can check it out for free

for 14 days at one commune.com slash try commune and for more of my weekly musings like today's

episode on health and culture ad-free episodes of this show and live streamed conversations head

over to my substack at jeffcrasnow.substack.com. Okay, let's get into it.

So did you know that July 2nd marks the day that the Second Continental Congress declared that the 13 colonies were no longer subject to King George III.

That's right, July 2nd.

Now, Congress subsequently revised the wording of the declaration, removing Jefferson's vigorous denunciation of the British

monarch for importing the slave trade, and finally approved it two days later on July 4th.

John Adams, one of the documents signatories, scrawled a letter to his wife, Abigail.

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