Philosophy ⋆ Page 13 of 47 ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Living Everywhere in a Carceral Surveillance State

Bert Olivier / December 11, 2023 / History, Philosophy, Psychology / 11 minute read

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If you live in a Chinese city, or even in London, you are probably so used to surveillance cameras all around you – on lamp posts, the corners of buildings, and so on – that you would hardly bat an eyelid. Yet what contemporary city-denizens take for granted was not always the case, and most people would be surprised to know that surveillance has a long history, and was linked to modes of punishment from early on.

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The Grateful Dead Succumbed to Coronamania, but We Didn't Follow

The Grateful Dead Succumbed to Coronamania, but We Didn’t Conform

Mark Oshinskie / December 8, 2023 / Philosophy, Psychology, Society / 8 minute read

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Throughout, my unimpaired eyes and ears told me that the Covid response was an extreme overreaction that was causing widespread harm. Instead of following a gullibly unhinged crowd, I found new friends who knew bad Scamdemic music when they heard it. Instead of “staying safe,” buying the hysteria and flailing their arms, my new tribe stayed sane and moved, vitally and on-time, to their own, unmistakable beat of reality.

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The Historian of Decline: Ludwig von Mises’s Relevance Today

Jeffrey A. Tucker / December 6, 2023 / Economics, History, Philosophy / 22 minute read

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The mistake we made was in believing that there is logic to history. There isn’t. There is only the march of good ideas and bad, and the forever competition between the two. And this is a central message of Mises’s 1954 overlooked masterwork Theory and History. Here he offers a devastating rebuttal to determinism of all sorts, whether from old liberals or Hegel or Fukuyama.

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The Hypnotic Rhythm of Dependence

Thomas Buckley / December 5, 2023 / Censorship, Philosophy, Society / 4 minute read

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There was a rhythm to the pandemic. It was a rhythm of nothingness, a blend of day into day. It was a rhythm detached from time, a metronome of stay in, click on, stay in, stay afraid. What information that was available was tailored to create unsettled obedience, a state of wide-awake nervous exhaustion that feedback fed the rhythm itself.

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Slave or Master of Technology: The Choice is Ours

Bert Olivier / December 4, 2023 / Philosophy, Psychology, Technology / 10 minute read

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The agencies promoting the hegemony of digital technology – which is also what makes AI possible today – would like nothing better than to neutralise your ability to think independently. This is even more true today than when Stiegler wrote his texts. But by using this technology anyway, for your own critical purposes, you would be defusing their attempts at undermining human intelligence.

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In Praise of Semantic Warfare

Thomas Harrington / December 1, 2023 / History, Philosophy, Society / 7 minute read

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Could it be that most of us, in fact, are pre-programmed to surrender our agency at the first sign of a canceling putdown or threat of ostracism, however absurd, emanating from someone presented to us as being authoritative, even when that “authoritative” figure issuing the “conspiracy theorist” or “disinformation” fatwa these days is often nothing more a 26-year-old twit with an overly-expensive diploma working in a Silicon Valley cubicle or a Brooklyn coffee shop?

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Lessons Learned from the West African Slave Trade

Forgive but Never Forget: Lessons from the West African Slave Trade

Scott Sturman / November 30, 2023 / History, Philosophy, Society / 5 minute read

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West Africans endured slavery for 400 years, when 15 million human beings were forcibly captured and sold into bondage. During this era, the world’s major secular and sectarian institutions regarded slaves as no better than animals, but modern West Africans look to the future, adopting a philosophy of forgiving but never forgetting.

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What Heidegger Can Teach Us About Our Technological Moment

Bert Olivier / November 29, 2023 / Pharma, Philosophy, Vaccines / 10 minute read

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The manufacturers of these bioweapons disguised as vaccines have come up with something that directs the evolution of our body cells. They are guilty of the greatest hubris imaginable, arrogating for themselves the role of gods, if not the Creator. Heidegger would turn in his grave.

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If He Was Alive Today, Socrates Would be Banned

If He Were Alive Today, Socrates Would be Banned

Bill Rice / November 29, 2023 / Censorship, History, Philosophy / 8 minute read

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It recently occurred to me that if Socrates was alive today, he would be censored, de-platformed, smeared, cancelled and labeled a grave threat to society. In short, he would be charged with spreading disinformation and would no doubt be Target No. 1 of the massive Censorship Industrial Complex.

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Join the Resistance

Brownstone Institute / November 28, 2023 / Government, Philosophy, Policy, Society / 8 minute read

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The challenges of our time are completely different from the past. We must counter ruling-class opinion on empirical, legal, and practical grounds. We need all hands on deck to make it clear: we will not relent, no matter how many strange edicts are issued from above, no matter how many big shots tell us otherwise, no matter how many tricks and ploys come our way.

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Freedom and Virtue: Friends or Enemies?

Bruce Pardy / November 26, 2023 / Law, Philosophy, Society / 5 minute read

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Across the West, Virtue People, and Freedom People have been working together. At conferences, in think tanks, at school boards, on email lists, in living rooms, on X, and sometimes marching in the streets, they coalesce. These two groups constitute the rebel alliance against authoritarian woke globalism. But their political philosophies conflict.

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Can Thanksgiving Traditions Survive a Four-Year Pause?

Mark Oshinskie / November 23, 2023 / Philosophy, Psychology, Society / 6 minute read

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On Thanksgiving, we’re supposed to disregard that which hasn’t gone well and focus on that which has; even if the list of what has gone well is much shorter than that which hasn’t. If you’re sitting in a warm place, forking tasty food into your own mouth, and are surrounded by people whose names you remember, you’re comparatively blessed.

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