Society

Society articles feature analysis about social policy, ethics, entertainment, and philosophy.

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

What Can the Stanford Prison Experiment Tell Us

What Can the Stanford Prison Experiment Tell Us about Life in the Pandemic Era?

By / / , , , / 11 minute read / Articles
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Given the world in which we have been living for the past two years, despite the numerous flaws critics have found in both Zimbardo’s work, it would seem that both he and other members of social psychology’s golden age can still tell us a lot about how social roles, oppressive environments and powerful authorities can alter the psyches and actions of normal people in pathological ways.

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Why Did Politicians Choose Economic Contraction Over Virus Mitigation?

Why Did Politicians Choose Economic Contraction Over Virus Mitigation?

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Poverty has always been mankind’s most brutal killer, while prosperity that’s produced the resources necessary for cures has been death’s greatest foe. Politicians chose economic contraction as a virus-mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel…

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Time for Honesty about Diminishment and Death

Time for Honesty about Diminishment and Death 

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The elderly were once seen as a precious resource, providing us all with much-needed wisdom and emotional ballast as we navigated life difficulties. Now, however, we lock them and their encroaching decrepitude away so that they do not impinge upon our frenzied, self-directed pep talks about the importance of staying forever young and highly productive.

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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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digital-brownshirts

Digital Brownshirts and Their Masters

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Digital Brownshirts are just the most visible and forward-leaning elements of a much broader effort to install the logic of the algorithm—a providential and vertically-imposed concept of truth that vitiates traditional fact-finding and admits neither human intelligence nor scientific debate—as a cornerstone of our human interactions and cognitive processes.

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Public Health Erred on the Side of Catastrophe

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Overreaching public health officials and politicians—and the journalists-in-name-only who served as their mindless, unquestioning megaphones—have fully earned our withering condemnation. Indeed, holding them accountable is essential to sparing ourselves and future generations from repeating this dystopian chapter of human history.

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A New Age of Barbarism

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The last two years have revealed to us what we would rather not have discovered, namely that freedom and rights, along with enlightened ideals and good science, are extraordinarily fragile. They are only guaranteed by a public that believes in them and is willing to stand up for them. When the cultural consensus in favor of liberty decays, terrible beasts are unleashed on the world. 

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What Has Happened to My Beloved Canada?

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The shameful part, besides the politicians and Canadian media, has been seeing the Canadian police in action. Are they really Canadian? Or are these “thugs” that have been imported by Trudeau? I really have a hard time believing that the faces that are being hidden behind the black Gestapo-like masks really are Canadian. 

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