The Bait Is the Dream

Prosperity, the bulldozer, and the freedom that compels

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

A trap needs jaws, and we have watched two of them close: the constitution that taught each people to arm against the others, the milestone that taught the state to trust its instruments over its people. But a trap also needs bait — something desired, something reached for, something that draws the creature onto the mechanism of its own accord. The cruelty Curtis wants us to feel is that no one is dragged into the trap of freedom. We walk in. And what draws us is the most beautiful thing we have: the dream itself.

Here we arrive at the idea on which his whole film is built, and it is worth stating with precision, for it is the hinge of everything. In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” his 1958 lecture at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin drew the distinction that has organised this series from the start. Negative liberty is freedom from — the absence of interference, the space in which a person is left alone to live as she chooses. Positive liberty is freedom to — self-mastery, self-realisation, the freedom to become one’s higher, truer, fully realised self. Berlin’s warning, delivered at the height of the Cold War and aimed at the totalitarianisms of his century, was that the second concept is by far the more perilous. For the moment I claim to know your true self — the self you would be if only you were wiser, freer of false consciousness, delivered from your own confusion — I have granted myself permission to override the self you actually are. I may coerce the empirical you, the you standing inconveniently before me, in the name of the real you I have decided to liberate. Oppression is transfigured into rescue. The boot on the neck becomes an act of care.

Berlin knew exactly where this idea was born, and so does Curtis. Its purest source is Rousseau, and the sentence in The Social Contract (1762) that ought to chill every citizen who hears it: that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body, which means “nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” From that phrase, Curtis argues, runs a line to Robespierre and the Terror — the Committee of Public Safety guillotining in the name of virtue, killing the people to deliver the People — and onward through every revolutionary vanguard that found itself, sincerely, demolishing in order to redeem. His third episode, from which this part takes its title, follows the line into our own age, through the neoconservative dream of imposing freedom on Iraq at the point of a gun. The paradox he leaves ringing is total: even the attempt to spread negative liberty — freedom-from — when pursued by force and vanguard and plan, becomes a positive-liberty project of the most violent kind. The men who would free you cannot help but force you.

Now hold that lecture-hall abstraction in one hand, and in the other hold the ruling party of Ethiopia, and read its name. Prosperity. ብልጽግና. In 2019 the EPRDF dissolved itself and reconstituted its heirs as the Prosperity Party — and in doing so named itself, with an honesty it perhaps did not intend, after a destination. Not a party of process, of deliberation, of the patient negotiation of competing goods, but a party of arrival: the vehicle that will deliver the Ethiopian people to a prosperous, dignified, glorious future already envisioned on their behalf. Its guiding philosophy, መደመር — medemer, “coming together,” “synergy,” “addition,” given book-length form by the prime minister in 2019 — is, whatever its considerable poetry, a doctrine of the citizen’s true collective self: the self that would set aside its narrow, divisive, zero-sum attachments and add itself into a greater whole. In Berlin’s precise taxonomy it is a positive-liberty philosophy. It knows what Ethiopians ought to become. And a movement that knows what you ought to become has already, in embryo, granted itself the right to make you become it.

The man who opened the prison doors in 2018 did not betray the dream when he took up the bulldozer. He was serving it. That is the horror Berlin tried to warn us of: it is the same dream.

Watch the dream, then, become the bulldozer — literally, concretely, in the streets of the capital. The Corridor Development projects, driven across Addis Ababa from 2022 and extended through 2024 and 2025 into Adama, Hawassa, Dire Dawa and other cities, are the positive-liberty state made visible in asphalt and demolition. The vision is genuinely seductive: a clean, modern, world-class city of broad boulevards, fountains, cycle lanes and gleaming towers, a capital worthy of a great nation and a great continent. And to build it, homes are marked, cleared and reduced to rubble. Human-rights organisations and international media have reported the displacement of large numbers of residents — rights monitors have put the figure in the tens of thousands — with many relocated to the periphery and compensation that, by those same accounts, has ranged from inadequate to absent. The neighbourhood that overflows the plan, the informal life that cannot be entered into the rendering, is not consulted. It is removed. And the people who lived there are told — and I do not doubt that many of those doing the telling believe it — that this is being done for them, for their prosperity, their dignity, the beautiful Ethiopia their grandchildren will inherit. They are being forced, in the exact sense Rousseau and Berlin could have wished, to be free.

The aesthetic ascends from the boulevard to the palace. The vast, secretive project reported on the Entoto heights — a new national palace whose cost has been reported, on figures the prime minister himself has referred to, at around ten billion US dollars, complete with artificial lakes and imperial landscaping — is the dream in its most naked form: national greatness as a thing to be built, a destiny rendered in stone and water while the birr collapses in the valley below. One recognises the grammar. It is the grammar of every vanguard that has ever known the people’s future better than the people did — the monument, the five-year plan, the model village, the shining city on the hill. The scale of the vision is precisely proportioned to the scale of what may be sacrificed to it.

At the largest scale of all, the wars can be read in the same grammar — though here one must tread with the greatest care in this entire series. It is possible to see in the campaigns in Tigray, in Amhara, in Oromia the positive-liberty logic in its ultimate register: the conviction that a unified, orderly, prosperous Ethiopia is a good so great, so self-evidently the people’s true destiny, that resistance to it may legitimately be broken. The dream of the whole licenses the breaking of the part. But I will not reduce those wars to a philosophy lecture, and neither should the reader. Hundreds of thousands are dead. To fold that into a tidy genealogy of an idea would be to commit, on the page, the very abstraction this series condemns — the mistaking of the model for the reality, the number for the mouth. Let the frame illuminate the logic, and let the dead remain, insistently, dead. Some things must not be made elegant.

Which returns us, once more, to the discipline. The reading offered here carries a seduction of its own, and it is the seduction of the villain’s origin story — Abiy Ahmed as the man who was always going to become the coercer, the liberator with the bulldozer already idling in his heart. Resist it. The truer and more frightening account, the properly Curtisian one, the one Berlin actually wrote, is that there need be no villain at all. The dream does not require a cynic to become a cage. It requires only a sincere believer with power and a vision of who the people ought to be. It is entirely possible that the man meant every word in 2018 and means every word now, and cannot see — because the structure of positive liberty makes it almost impossible to see — that the freedom he now imposes and the freedom he once released are, philosophically, the same act turned inside out. That is not an exoneration. A sincere coercer is still a coercer, and the displaced are no less displaced for the purity of the intention that displaced them. It is something harder: an explanation that denies us the comfort of a monster, and hands us instead the far more disquieting possibility that the trap is built into the dream, and that any of us, holding that dream and that power, might have sprung it.

One need not reach for the grand scale to see the logic at work; the small scale, this very week, will do. On the morning of Saturday 16 Nehase 2018 in the Ethiopian calendar — 22 August 2026 — according to a video report by the outlet Bisrat Media, which the Tribune has not been able to corroborate elsewhere, a lone man walked into Megenagna, one of the busiest junctions in Addis Ababa, propped a placard naming the prime minister against a metal railing, and began, entirely by himself, to protest. He carried no weapon and led no movement. He was, in the most literal sense, a single empirical citizen declining to be added into the collective dream. Within minutes, by the same account, police who were in the area seized him and took him to a station; no official explanation had been offered by the time the footage circulated. The Tribune records the episode as reported by a single outlet, not independently confirmed. But mark its grammar: in a polity organised around a vision of who the people ought to be, the man who stands in public and says I am not well, and you have failed me is not answered and is not argued with. He is cleared, like rubble, from the frame.

The two jaws have closed. The bait has done its work. And so we come to the only question that finally matters, the one Curtis asks and, with characteristic bleakness, refuses to answer. Is there a way out of the trap? Is there any idea of freedom left to us that is not modelled on suspicion, not delivered by vanguard, not counted by the state or imposed by the dream? To answer — or at least to refuse despair honestly — we must leave the British filmmaker behind, and turn to two men he never mentions: an Indian economist who spent his life measuring freedom differently, and an Ethiopian novelist who was murdered for telling the truth about a dream.

Sources

The two freedoms. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762); Adam Curtis, The Trap, Part 3, We Will Force You To Be Free (BBC, 2007).

The dream in office. Dissolution of the EPRDF and formation of the Prosperity Party (2019); Abiy Ahmed, Medemer (2019).

The bulldozer. The Corridor Development programme (Addis Ababa from 2022; later phases in Adama, Hawassa, Dire Dawa and elsewhere). Displacement and compensation as reported by human-rights organisations and international media; figures stated here as reported, not as independently confirmed by the Tribune, and to be attributed to named monitors at production. The Entoto national-palace project and its reported c. US$10bn cost likewise to be attributed as reported.

A necessary caution. References to the conflicts in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia are illustrative of a political logic and are deliberately not quantified here; casualty and displacement figures, where used, must be sourced individually. The reported lone protest at Megenagna (16 Nehase 2018 / 22 August 2026) is sourced to a single video report by Bisrat Media; the Tribune found no corroborating report and no official police statement, and presents it as reported by a single outlet, not independently confirmed.

THE TRAP · PART IV OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE