Society

Society articles offer in-depth analysis and opinion on social policy, ethics, entertainment, philosophy, and broader cultural dynamics — exploring their impacts on individual liberty, community, family, faith, human dignity, open dialogue, and everyday social life.

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.

All society articles from Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages to reach a global audience, encourage international discussion, and inspire readers worldwide to defend cultural values, ethical principles, and human connections.

adults gone

Where Have the Adults Gone?

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The last three years show us what happens when specialists are in charge. If you want to know whether it is a good idea to lock down a whole city, it helps if you can quickly see the many effects lockdowns will have among many different parts of the city’s population and economy. Only with a broad view of many factors do you have hope of making a reasonable judgment. 

Where Have the Adults Gone? Continue Reading

planned culture

What Kind of Culture Are They Planning for you?

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Those who in this very moment are seeking to radically change our core conceptions of liberty and our relationships to our own bodies though their aggressive culture-planning have, so far, faced relatively little serious intellectual opposition to their efforts. This is mostly because the salaried inhabitants of universities and key institutions of culture, who under the implied rules of democratic liberalism are supposed to act as a critical check upon such efforts, have mostly failed to do so. 

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Washington DC

My Visit to the Artificial Land of Lies

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Typically, government dysfunction and corruption have occurred behind the scenes. The effects of these failings have usually been sufficiently diffuse, and daily life was challenging enough, that such chicanery went unnoticed. But given American governments’ open, audacious dishonesty and crassly abusive actions during the past three years—after all of the propaganda, censorship, blatantly unconstitutional and life-wrecking lockdowns, closures, restrictions and mandates—trust is irretrievably broken for anyone who has paid attention. Any residual American reverence for their government and their capital is delusional and child-like.

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schools of thought

Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend 

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The establishment consensus on COVID-19 is built on sand and should be challenged. It arose from premature closure of the scientific debate, followed by suppression of contrarian evidence-based analysis. Dissidents include scientists, who are clearly not anti-science but are opposed to flawed science based on ‘low cognitive ability’ and confirmation bias in favour of establishment ideas. They are pushing for better science.

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The Covid Crisis Was Man-Made

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If we had not locked down for “just two weeks,” we wouldn’t have facilitated many more months of closed public spaces, including 18 months of school closures. Letting the Lockdown camel stick its nose under the tent created enduring, creeping momentum for the broader disruption that has dragged on for three years. “Flattening the curve” seemed, to many, temporary, scientific and clever.

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Open Letter to an Emotionally Abused World

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There has been a fundamental shift in our relationship with the people and organizations who make policies and direct how the world is run. They laid the groundwork during Covid and are busy planning the next pandemic, and a whole host of initiatives, calling for drastic changes to how we live. The first step in healing from emotional abuse is to recognize the abuse. The next step is to make a change so the abuse does not continue.

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essential and nonessential

What They Meant by Essential and Nonessential

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Think of totalitarian societies like in The Hunger Games, with a District One and everyone else, or perhaps the old Soviet Union in which the party elites dined in luxury and everyone else stood in bread lines, or perhaps a scene from Oliver! in which the owners of the orphanage got fat while the kids in the workhouse lived on gruel until they could escape to live in the underground economy. It appears that the pandemic planners think of society the same way.

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fear of a microbial planet

Society at Peak Shared Misery

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If a permanent government employee broke a regulation, they could not be fired. There was no real way to punish them. But what could be done was make a new regulation that was more burdensome than the last. Punishing an individual is hard. Punishing everyone for an individual’s behavior is much easier.

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Coronamania and the End of the World

Coronamania and the End of the World

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Too many Americans are gullible and fearful. Many blindly believe what the media presents and thus, suffer from mass delusion and anxiety. The media feels no obligation to tell the truth. To the contrary, news managers deliberately distort and sensationalize information to create alarm and audience/readership. No institution will punish them for their chicanery. Thus, they continually, routinely misrepresent. 

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