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Society

We critically examine pressing issues like the erosion of intellectual courage and dissidence, betrayal by institutions (including churches), declining quality in entertainment and movies, harms from lockdown policies exceeding pandemic effects, rising totalitarianism as an assault on the soul, dangers of universal basic income as modern control, autism societal understanding, fear-based societal nightmares, and pathways to reclaim human nature through community support, personal freedoms, and nobler alternatives to past ideologies.

Brownstone provides alternative perspectives on restoring truth, dignity, and healthy society amid institutional failures and technocratic threats.

Levers of Control - Brownstone Institute

Levers of Control: Accept or Flee?

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They could always, of course, decide to opt out of the ‘system,’ if they are willing to be ‘excluded from society,’ as Bill Gates infamously said about those who would refuse the digital prison that the neo-fascists have built for the rest of humanity. I certainly would, but my guess is that most people are too immersed in social media and the technical means to sojourn there – usually a smartphone, and of course the internet – to take that drastic step.

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Life After Lockdown - by Jeffrey A. Tucker - Brownstone Institute

Life after Lockdown: Foreword by Rand Paul

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In Life after Lockdown, Jeffrey Tucker paints a picture of the living hell that was the government lockdown and outlines a roadmap for never again allowing such a police state to occur. During the multiple winters of the Covid lockdown, I discovered Brownstone Institute. On the pages of Brownstone, I found not only the incisive critique of the pseudoscience put forward by Fauci and others, I also routinely came across scientists with the intellectual rigor to disassemble the unsupported scientific platitudes of the state.

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Brownstone Institute - Make Beauty Beautiful Again

The Cartelization of Beauty

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Keeping it real thus also means making a conscious effort to find those spaces where the mediating practices of the elites are few and the chances for direct esthetic pleasure are many. And finally, and most importantly, keeping it real means ensuring that such mediation-free sanctuaries are readily available to children so that their personally constructed sense of beauty, with its wonderfully generative fantasies, is not canceled before it even has time to take flight. 

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Brownstone Institute - Schumpeter on How Higher Education Wrecks Freedom

Schumpeter on How Higher Education Wrecks Freedom

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The push to force everyone into higher education has proven to be a massive diversion of financial and human energy, and, just like Schumpeter predicted, it did the cause of freedom no favors. It has only ended up breeding debt, resentment, and an imbalance of human resources such that the people with real power are the same people least likely to possess the necessary skills to make life better. Indeed they are making it worse. 

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Brownstone Institute - The Great Reset Didn’t Work: The Case of EVs 

The Great Reset Didn’t Work: The Case of EVs 

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It turns out that the entire bit, including the fake prosperity of the lockdown economy, made possible by money printing and grotesque levels of government spending, was unsustainable. Even sophisticated car companies bought into the nonsense. Now they are paying a very heavy price. The new market depended on a panic of buying that turned out to be temporary. 

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Brownstone Institute - Our Last Innocent Moment

Foxes and Hedgehogs

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The philosopher Isaiah Berlin starts his 1953 essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” with this perplexing proverb attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus. Berlin goes on to explain that there are two types of thinkers: hedgehogs, who see the world through the lens of a “single central vision,” and foxes, who pursue many different ideas, seizing upon a variety of experiences and explanations simultaneously. 

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Brownstone Institute - Intellectuals for Sale

Intellectuals for Sale

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We’ve lived through this and seen too much to have the same level of trust we once had. What can we do? We can rebuild the ideal as it existed in the old world. The kind of genius we know was on display in a place like Salamanca, or in interwar Vienna, or even in the coffee houses of London in the 18th century, can return, even if on a small level. They have to, simply because the shape of the world around us depends fundamentally on the ideas we hold about ourselves and the world around us. Those should not be for sale to the highest bidder.

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