While political, economic, and intellectual freedom is a precious gift to humans, our long history shows that we are ready to give it away. Why is that? One answer might be given from the Nobel-Prize-winning Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008): when people don’t understand and use the freedom they have, they will throw it away to the detriment of themselves and their loved ones. This lecture will give a brief introduction to the life and career of Solzhenitsyn and then outline four enemies to freedom he identified, along with ways to rightly understand it, preserve it, and to flourish as individuals and societies.