Psychology

Psychology articles feature analysis about public health, policy, ethics, and society.

All psychology articles at Brownstone Institute are translated automatically into multiple languages.

The Moral Cruelty of the Pandemic Response

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Beyond empathy, to combat a psychic epidemic we need meaning in our lives. Not an ersatz top-down solidarity, dreamt up by technocratic communications experts, but genuine, socially meaningful relationships, purpose and values. Lockdowns and restrictions squashed exactly what we need to flourish as human beings in order to counteract a psychic epidemic. For the good of the collective, we must recapture meaning and values as individuals. 

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The Nudge: Ethically Dubious and Ineffective

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By going with the grain of how we think and act, the state-employed ‘nudgers’ can covertly shape our behaviour in a direction deemed desirable by the regime of the day – an appealing prospect for any government. The ubiquitous deployment of these behavioural strategies – which frequently rely on inflating emotional distress to change behaviour – raises profound moral questions.

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Some People Will Follow Authority – “The Science” – to Their Doom 

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And, even after the most cataclysmic events predicted by “The Science” have not come to pass, there remains a core group of true believers who are convinced “The Science” had simply gotten the date or the variant wrong and that the End of Days are still to come unless we all remain vigilant by forever being ready to mask up and lock down when “The Science” says it’s time.

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the-joker

The Joker – A Premonition

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The Joker is not just one man, not just a crazy person, but the instantiation of the insane and morbid dangers associated with persistent personal failure backed by a conviction that when there is a fundamental conflict between a vision and reality, it can only be solved by the creation of chaos and suffering. As unpleasant as it is, The Joker is the movie we needed to see to understand and then prepare for the horrors that this unchecked mentality can and did unleash on the world. 

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A Partial List of the Myriad Abuses That Facemasks Inflict on Our Children

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Facemasks are a radical and unnatural impingement on normal physical, mental and emotional functioning. Over time, this can change your personality – such as making you less social, less outgoing, more suspicious, decreased tendency or desire to be kind and so on.

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Five Ways That People Refused to be Fooled by Lockdown Madness

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Various kinds of people stood apart from the herd at the outset, while some escaped it after it formed. Here we try to describe the main pathways to escape from the madness. We do this only partly out of intellectual curiosity: such an exercise also provides clues as to which of those still in thrall to lockdown orthodoxy might be close to liberating themselves, and what is needed to complete their unshackling.

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The Antisocialization of Our Nation

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We antisocialized ourselves, fully withdrew from random commingling, and in a way filtered ourselves from society. Life lost its luster when expected to test or inoculate oneself with something with no longitudinal safety assessments in order to live a life anything close to what we once took for granted.

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The Psychological Cruelty of Denying Natural immunity

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Take away the knowledge of natural immunity, and thus the realization that there can be a better life on the other side of sickness, and you leave people with existential emptiness and a lasting sense of despair. No one can live that way. No one should have to. 

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masks don't work study

More than 170 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms

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It is not unreasonable to conclude that surgical and cloth masks, used as they currently are being used (without other forms of PPE protection), have no impact on controlling the transmission of Covid-19 virus. Current evidence implies that face masks can be actually harmful. The body of evidence indicates that face masks are largely ineffective. 

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The Medical Objectification of the Human Person

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The pandemic has turbocharged this process of medical objectification. We are no longer individuals, with unique desires, responses, wishes and drives, but rather are primarily considered by policy makers to be infection risks. Once we are primarily objects, rather than diverse human beings, it then becomes legitimate for medical procedures to be mandated, mask wearing to be forced, or our movements to be tracked and traced.

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The Violence of the Mandate Intensifies the Psychology of Trauma: A View from New Zealand

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New Zealanders find themselves caught within a vicious dynamic—two heavily polarised threat responses, with each group seeing the ‘other’ as a selfish and threatening enemy that must somehow be neutralised, and with many members on each side feeling as though they are in a fight for their life.

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Why Are So Many Choosing a Life in a Cage? ~ Dr. Julie Ponesse

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“Today, we face substantial rewards for compliance; if we comply with the government’s pandemic response measures (masking, distancing, lockdowns, and now the ever-increasing and nebulous vaccine rollout), we are granted the conditional privilege of reentrance into society; and the penalties for failing to comply? being bullied, shamed, excluded, cancelled, even fined or arrested.”

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