Psychology

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

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

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Clean vs. Dirty: A Way to Understand Everything

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The clean vs. dirty distinction was once an indicator of class, perhaps a desiderata of germaphobic pathology, even a harmless eccentricity. But in 2020, the obsession became extreme, an aesthetic priority that overrode all morality and truth. It then became a fundamental threat to liberty, self-government, and human rights.Today this demarcation has invaded the whole of our lives, and it threatens to create a horrifying caste system consisting of those who enjoy rights and privileges vs those who do not and serve (at a distance) the elites. 

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models

Models Do Not and Cannot Reveal All Truth

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Whenever a politician, or an authority, or even a friend tells you that all is known, that there is a model which defines the truth, and that by following the model the future will be known, be skeptical. There are mysteries beyond human understanding that escape even the deepest logical reasoning of man. 

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social isolation

Social Isolation Bad For Social Mammals – Who Knew?

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What were the cumulative health effects of encouraging, coercing, and forcing large populations into states of prolonged social isolation while simultaneously instilling in them intense fear and inflicting upon them economic uncertainty and hardship? What will the long-term effects of this be? And how could our public health experts not have considered that doing this to a social mammal might have been bad for their health? 

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Psyops Are Not New, Just More Dangerous

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As the terrifying totalitarian regimes used it against their people to foment murderous rage, the same could be in store for us. It’s going to take people who understand they are being manipulated, who understand they are being used, who understand they want their independence and freedom, to engender a peaceful and meaningful life for all.

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do you matter

Do You Matter?

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Do facts matter? Of course they do. But facts, alone, will not answer the questions we really care about. The real ammunition of the COVID war is not information. It’s not a battle over what is true, what counts as misinformation, what it means to #followthescience. It’s a battle over what our lives mean and, ultimately, whether we matter.

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brainwashing japan

Brainwashing Versus Critical Thinking in Japan

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The overwhelming majority in all age groups in Japan got caught up in the panic generated by government officials, mainstream news media, and the medical community. For three years now masks have been worn continuously everywhere, including mountain trails and public parks. The widespread use of brainwashing here has been especially disheartening to me, since I have spent much of my time and effort over the last thirty years teaching, researching, and writing about critical thinking education in Japan.

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the unforgivable sin

The Unforgivable Sin

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We must judge the authorities all over the world who relentlessly pumped out panic-laden, often knowingly false propaganda during the past three years, in order to provoke fear and despair, while deliberately silencing and censoring all attempts at promoting a more balanced and healthy view; how they stifled critical thinking. And it is in this light that we must view the disastrous consequences of this conduct, and how it first and foremost harmed the young, the poor; our smallest brethren. 

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mandated jab

Superego, Id, and the Mandated Jab 

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Vaccine mandates hit hard in the late summer and fall of 2021. Get the jab or lose your job. Health care workers and public sector employees had it especially bad. Somehow it seemed right. If you are interacting with the public in a health capacity, you need to be sure you won’t infect anyone. If you are a government employee, surely the government should be able to tell you what you have to take to make everyone else safe. 

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Desmet book burned

My Book Is Being Burned

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On January 25, 2023, Ghent University banned the use of my book The Psychology of Totalitarianism in the course “Critique of Society and Culture”. That happened in the aftermath of a media storm that erupted in September 2022 following my interviews with Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. I already wrote about that in a previous essay.  

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political became personal

The Political Became Very Personal

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The scars that have been left on all of us by the response to COVID are incomprehensibly varied and deep. For most, there hasn’t been enough time to mentally process the significance of the initial lockdowns, let alone the years-long slog of mandates, terror, propaganda, social stigmatization and censorship that followed. And this psychological trauma affects us in myriad ways that leave us wondering what it is about life that just feels so off versus how it felt in 2019.

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