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.

This Is Not Normal and No One Should Accept It

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Our ruling class saw in Covid an opportunity to radically revolutionize society: recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the first weeks of the pandemic. In the first month Anthony Fauci made the absurd suggestion that perhaps never again would we go back to shaking hands. Never again?

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The Urge to Shame, Purge, and Exclude Diminishes Ourselves

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In these times of summarily rejecting people we disagree with or treating those with differing opinions as dangerous or diseased, I have felt led to remember what I would have missed if I had rejected certain people with whom I disagreed on significant issues but from whom I had also received wonderful gifts.

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The Expendables: The Biopolitics of Human Sacrifice

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If you are one of those who supported the separation of the unvaccinated from society, it is worth considering how your own life was diminished during the pandemic. The range of the homo sacer, those deemed expendable, has been broadened over time from traditional groups such as the homeless, up through the working classes in recent decades, and now large swathes of middle classes during Covid.

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The German Faith in Authority

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Not only do media commentaries and politicians casually discuss discriminatory measures against unvaccinated people without being attacked for it by their peers, but ‘normal’ citizens, including highly accomplished academics, are doing so as well. The sudden switch of the political agenda from Covid-19 to the Ukraine illustrates that this is not Covid-exclusive behaviour.

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The Specter of Asymptomatic Spread

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A society grounded on “social distancing” is a contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society. Consider what happened to us, consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead.

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Not Every Health Problem Needs a Social Solution

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According to public-health paternalists, almost no decisions that affect individuals’ health are truly ‘individual.’ Nearly all such decisions are either heavily determined by the actions of third parties, or themselves affect the choices of unsuspecting third parties.

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Covid Prediction: January 2020

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Government power is not necessary. It is not likely to be effective, either. And when it is not effective, the tendency is to overreact in the opposite direction, clamping down and abusing, exactly as we’ve seen with the war on terror and China’s response to this virus, which might be as serious as bad seasonal flu outbreaks. Still, people assume that government is doing its job, government fails, and then government gets more power and does awful things with it. It’s the same story again and again.

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