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.

young adult books

How Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults

By / / , / 9 minute read / Articles

Post-Covid, the crusades of our polarized country continue to play out in the area of children’s literature. Why? Because adults have co-opted the art that used to be a sanctuary for the readers and seekers and thinkers of a new generation. By using school libraries as a battering ram for their political positions, grown people continue stealing from the experiences of children. There is no privacy, or autonomy, for teens in America. Their stories are nothing but cannon fodder for the culture wars.

How Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults Continue Reading

never again

Never Again

By / / , , / 3 minute read / Articles

During what government deems crisis, it’s those most willing and eager to flout convention and expert opinion who produce crucial information for the rest of us. If living freely results in sickness and death, then we all know what not to do. But if as was the case with the coronavirus that living freely wasn’t much of a risk at all except for the already very old and already very sick, then those who didn’t flout convention and expert opinion have the information necessary to alter their lifestyles with the information created by the rebellious.  

Never Again Continue Reading

informed consent

Whatever Happened to Informed Consent?

By / / , , / 5 minute read / Articles

Every American is a sovereign individual with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not a sack of meat to be treated as a profit opportunity.  Informed consent must be revived from the grave if Americans are to have a fighting chance against powerful financial interests allied against them.

Whatever Happened to Informed Consent? Continue Reading

UFOs or Covid

Why Are They Talking about UFOs Instead of Covid Fascism?

By / / , / 4 minute read / Articles

The lesson of the muted response to COVID from the so-called right is that clearly things have not gotten bad enough. The sad and terrifying thing is that whatever they must throw at us to elicit a righteous and unified policy response will now have to be so devastating that we will likely never have the political ability to fight it even if we wanted to. Meanwhile, the vanity and political circus will continue unabated.

Why Are They Talking about UFOs Instead of Covid Fascism? Continue Reading

lets pretend

The Great Game of Let’s Pretend

By / / , , / 7 minute read / Articles

It’s a very strange time in American political history, no doubt. We have one line of thinking sweeping through the population – which is based on mass incredulity and fury – and then another which is a veneer of normalcy that is slathered on top of our anger by all official institutions, which work hard to keep all these topics out of respectable conversations. Meanwhile, the whole of academic, mainstream social media, major mainstream media, and all of government seems to agree that all these obvious topics are too incendiary to be raised in polite company. 

The Great Game of Let’s Pretend Continue Reading

totalitarians

The Positive Feedback Loop: How Totalitarians Instill Fear and Restrict Human Rights

By / / , / 4 minute read / Articles

We are informed that free speech is dangerous and that it leads to hate, instability, and mayhem. But this disingenuous argument is the argument of tyrants, who gaslight and use words as weapons to disable a free people. Free speech is the salvation of an open, prosperous, and civil society and the embodiment of the sustaining benefits of negative feedback loops.  

The Positive Feedback Loop: How Totalitarians Instill Fear and Restrict Human Rights Continue Reading

censorship

The Dangers of Self Censorship During the Covid Pandemic

By / / , , / 19 minute read / Articles

To compound this any expert or publication that dared raise a challenge would be investigated by fact-checkers and predictably labeled as misinformation and subsequently censored. Everyday citizens, on the receiving end of this distorted information machine, were left without any previously respected outlet for any well-founded skepticism. A few spoke out and were virtually ostracized from mainstream society. Many others saw the writing on the wall and, wishing to maintain their relationships and avoid uncomfortable situations, kept their opinions to themselves.

The Dangers of Self Censorship During the Covid Pandemic Continue Reading

russia

Letter from the Forbidden Land 

By / / / 12 minute read / Articles

Covid Hysteria was not an isolated incident. We, my friends, are at war, not against nations or ideology but against fascism. The old enemy has returned to the world, after decades of slumber. It is an existential threat. The one thing it hates is freedom. I used to think that there was no hope, but standing in Russia looking at all the companies that have rejected directives from the Imperium, maybe I was wrong. 

Letter from the Forbidden Land  Continue Reading

expert phd

Don’t Assume that Experts Know Something You Do Not 

By / / , , , / 6 minute read / Articles

The “expert” class is nothing special in intelligence. If anything this is a clarion call to the general masses of the US to stop assuming the “experts” know something. You can use the same search engines as they do to learn facts, and together we far, far outstrip the intelligence of all the experts put together.

Don’t Assume that Experts Know Something You Do Not  Continue Reading

save the cats of old san juan

Save the Cats of Old San Juan

By / / , / 8 minute read / Articles

Ask questions about the basis of this analysis. How do they justify disrupting a 500-year-old ecosystem? What about rats? Will we trade chemical poisons for organic paws? What about the heritage and character of San Juan? Does anyone even want this? How is this not “killing the wolves of Yellowstone” all over again? Do they really think they can confine this to parks and not wind up luring all the surrounding cats in?

Save the Cats of Old San Juan Continue Reading