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Brownstone » Philosophy » Page 27

Philosophy

Philosophy articles feature reflection and analysis about public life, values, ethics, and morals.

All philosophy articles at Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages.

Proxy “Evidence” and the Manipulation of Human Perceptions

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The elites’ ability to flood our consciousness with fragmentary and undigested information has increased exponentially. And they are well aware of, and quite satisfied by, the sense of disorientation this information overload causes in the majority of citizens. Why? Because they know that a disoriented or overwhelmed person is much more likely to grasp at simplistic “solutions” when they are directed this way.

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Now We Know What It’s like To Live Among Lunatics

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Day after day, week after week, month after month for 28 months, I heard people invoke the shibboleth, and parrot the mantra: “Pandemic!” Uttering this magic word was intended to justify any disruption of normal life, to excuse the failure to fulfill a wide range of personal responsibilities and to foreclose any reasonable discussion/dissent that might support the conclusion that the orchestrated, opportunistic overreaction to a respiratory virus was a complete, avoidable, government and media-made meltdown. 

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dictator chic

Dictatorship Chic 

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The great debate between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and despotism, between a government by the people and a government imposed upon the people is here at last. I’m glad for the clarification of terms. They are saying the quiet part out loud: they want dictatorship. All partisans of freedom should similarly stand up and say the loud part even louder: we tried life without freedom and found it intolerable. We are never going back. 

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Why Do We Adore Dogs and Despise People? 

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Our culture’s current obsession with the allegedly “human” qualities of dog, has a lot to do with our generalized retreat from the difficulties of finding enduring comfort and wisdom—and the foundational key to both, dialogue—with the always complex humans around us. That this widespread retreat from what Sara Schulman calls “normative conflict” had an awful lot to do with enabling the assaults on human dignity and freedom committed in the name of controlling Covid. 

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Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State 

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While the story is fiction, the moral drama here is real and affects the whole of history. Every highly productive person – we don’t even have to speak of geniuses here – often ends up surrounded by resentful and mediocre people who have too much time on their hands. They use whatever limited talents they have to plot, confound, confuse, and ultimately wreck their betters. The demand to “comply” is always the watchword: it’s a tool of destruction. 

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Are We Free By Right or Not?

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Fundamentally, human rights cannot be dependent on compliance with public health officials. Or politicians. Or the whims of philanthropists and their favorite corporations. These rights must be an intrinsic part of being human, irrespective of the circumstance, irrespective of age, gender, parentage, wealth, or health status. Or we are, indeed, just complex chemical constructs with no real intrinsic value. Society, and each individual, must decide.

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The Rise and Fall of the Human Rights Industry

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A partnership of mutual benefit has developed over the past two decades, blurring the dichotomy between wealthy oppressors and those whose oppression often enriched them. With public-private partnerships, human rights and humanitarianism became a fashion statement, allowing corporations and their celebrities to demonstrate that inequality can be veiled with empathy.

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The Crash and Burn of Credentialism 

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Whatever it is that the World Economic Forum is promising does not look especially impressive by comparison to the normal freedoms we took for granted. Indeed, we let the experts have a go at it and they created a monstrous experience for billions of people the world over. This will not be soon forgotten. 

The Crash and Burn of Credentialism  Read More »

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