Crisis in Perception

What happens when the people expected to carry out a policy begin to believe that obedience itself is causing harm? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan by Dahr Jamail as our lens, this investigation examines dissent within the U.S. military during the wars in Iraq and Afghani...

What if democracy can retain its familiar institutions while meaningful political power becomes increasingly concentrated? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross as our lens, this investigation examines his warning about a possible form of modern corporatist authoritarianism that wou...

What if many environmental crises become difficult to solve because the people receiving the benefits are not the same people who eventually bear the costs? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Loving This Planet: Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World by Helen Caldicott as our lens, this Deep Dive explores a recurring pattern acros...

How can a democracy recognize authoritarian danger if the cultural institutions that help citizens remember, question, and judge are being weakened at the same time? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy by Henry A. Giroux and Anthony R. DiMaggio as our lens, this episode investigates the...

What if education shapes not only what we know, but what we learn to accept as normal, authoritative, and possible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using On Critical Pedagogy by Henry A. Giroux as our lens, this episode investigates education as a formative system connecting knowledge, power, institutional authority, identity, and democratic agency....

A democracy can preserve many of its visible institutions while losing the civic culture that allows those institutions to function democratically. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism by Henry A. Giroux as our lens, this investigation examines Giroux’s argument that Trumpism sh...

A democracy can preserve many of its visible institutions while losing the civic culture that allows those institutions to function democratically. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism by Henry A. Giroux as our lens, this investigation examines Giroux’s argument that Trumpism sh...

What if democracy can be weakened before its formal institutions disappear—because the systems that educate citizens have already changed what people expect from public life? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using America on the Edge: Henry Giroux on Politics, Culture, and Education by Henry A. Giroux as our lens, this episode investigates the relati...

What happens when violence becomes less an exceptional event than a condition people are taught to accept? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle by Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux as the lens, this episode investigates the authors’ argument that neoliberalism produces a politics of...

What if behavior that looks irrational from the outside makes perfect sense from inside another creature’s perceptual world? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson as our lens, this episode investigates how human perceptual filters...

What happens when inherited rules lose their authority before new forms of belonging are ready to replace them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion as our lens, this episode investigates the social fragmentation running beneath her portraits of 1960s California. Didion moves through Haight-Ashbury, suburb...

We rely on stories to turn scattered events into something coherent. But what happens when the story itself stops explaining what we see? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The White Album by Joan Didion as our lens, this episode investigates narrative as a system for organizing perception. Across essays about personal disorientation, political m...

Scientific knowledge changes. Entire models once treated as reliable have been replaced. So what makes science more than a sequence of confident mistakes? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory by Susan Wise Bauer as our lens, this episode investigates how scientific...

What happens when patterns are unmistakable, but no single controller can be found? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow places that problem inside the technological and bureaucratic machinery of World War II. Tyrone Slothrop's map of sexual encounters appears to anticipate the locations of V-2 rocket strike...

What if much of the stress we experience around other people comes from trying to control something that was never ours to control? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins as our lens, this episode investigates the relationship between control, emotional reactivity, personal responsibility, and agency. Robbins’s fram...

What if capitalism and the market are not the same system—and concentrated economic power can undermine the very mechanisms markets are supposed to provide? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism by David C. Korten as our lens, this episode investigates Korten’s argument that global corporate capitalism...

What if the economic system begins not with markets or money, but with a story about what society should value? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth by David C. Korten as our lens, this investigation explores how cultural narratives can become embedded in economic measurement,...

What happens when institutions meant to compete within markets become powerful enough to influence the rules those markets—and governments—operate under? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the relationship between concentrated corporate power, global fina...

Passing a law can remove a barrier. But what happens when the inequality behind it survives? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King, Jr. as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates King’s argument that the major civil-rights victories of the 1960s marked a transition rather than an endp...

What happens when protecting a national identity becomes more important than examining the history and fears beneath it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Nothing Personal by James Baldwin as our lens, this episode investigates the relationship between American mythology, consumer culture, racial hierarchy, fear, and collective identity. Baldwin...

A written constitution can define limits on power—but who enforces those limits when the institutions being restrained also interpret the rules? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates Woods’s case for state nullification a...

What happens when people understand that a system is producing serious risks but continue living as though its basic structure can remain unchanged? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek argues that ecological disruption, biogenetic change, economic instability, resource pressures, and widening social exclusion sho...

What if the ability to survive criticism is itself one of a system's most important forms of power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek as our lens, this episode investigates ideology not simply as propaganda or false belief, but as a mechanism through which political and economic structures can...

What if technological progress depends partly on people who are unusually unwilling to leave successful systems alone? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, Michael Lewis follows entrepreneur Jim Clark through Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, and Hyperion, his radically computerized sailing yacht. Rather...

What happens when the difference between seeing a market and acting on it is measured in millionths of a second? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis as our lens, this episode investigates how automation transformed the U.S. stock market into a fragmented network of exchanges, dark pools, algorithms...