Crisis in Perception

What if culture is not just what societies inherit, but also a system that shapes power, identity, and social order? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. This episode explores The Culture Struggle by Michael Parenti, examining how cultural beliefs and traditions become connected to larger systems of institutions, authority, and material interests. Throug...

Who controls the meaning of a war when the government, military, journalists, politicians, and public are all competing to define it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953 by Steven Casey as our lens, this investigation examines the extraordinary informa...

What holds a society together when jobs disappear, incomes collapse, and familiar measures of success stop working? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using It's Up to the Women by Eleanor Roosevelt as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the Great Depression from an unusually intimate starting point: the household. Roosevelt argues that national reco...

What happens when political ideas leave protest movements and institutions and enter popular culture? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The Secret History of Wonder Woman, historian Jill Lepore uncovers the largely hidden intellectual and political origins of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring fictional characters. Wonder Woman did not em...

What happens when a culture stops imagining life as a cycle and begins imagining it as a path of progress? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how ideas about childhood, adulthood, success, aging, death, and immortality have been repeatedl...

The gunfire may last minutes. The consequences can continue for a lifetime. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence by Taylor S. Schumann as our lens, this episode investigates what disappears from view when gun violence is understood primarily th...

Gun violence is often discussed as a sequence of exceptional events. But what if the more revealing question is why similar risks continue to converge across different places, institutions, relationships, and historical moments? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Published by Melville House in 2020, Too Many Times: How to End Gun Violence in a Divided...

What if healing does not come from recovering the perfect family we lost, but from discovering that belonging itself can be rebuilt? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd as our lens, this Deep Dive follows fourteen-year-old Lily Owens through grief, guilt, racial conflict, maternal absence, and a search for...

What happens when an economic system must keep growing to remain stable, but the physical world can no longer sustain unlimited expansion? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The End of Capitalism: why growth and climate protection are incompatible — and how we will live in the future by Ulrike Herrmann as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates whe...

What if the welfare system people argue about most is only the part that is easiest to see? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Take the Rich Off Welfare by Mark Zepezauer and Arthur Naiman as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how tax breaks, subsidies, bailouts, procurement practices, and other government policies can transfer public resource...

What if the futures a society can imagine depend partly on whose stories it has learned to see? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, brings together twenty-five speculative-fiction writers to imagine American futures through perspectives conventional narratives often...

What if people with the least conventional political power become most influential precisely when ordinary institutions stop functioning normally? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward as our lens, this episode investigates how lower-class politi...

Free speech is often treated as a neutral principle standing above politics. Stanley Fish argues that the reality is much messier: every meaningful speech environment already contains boundaries determining what can be said, where, by whom, and with what consequences. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, C...

What if contempt for politics helps produce the dysfunction that makes people despise politics in the first place? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump by Peter Wehner as our lens, this episode examines how cultural displacement, economic anxiety, polarization, institutional distrus...

What if economic growth can make a society look richer while consuming the resources that make future prosperity possible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher as our lens, this episode investigates the difference between economic income and irreplaceable capital. Schumacher ar...

Can policies designed to suppress insecurity become part of the system that reproduces it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice by Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar as our lens, this episode investigates the systems linking terrorism, military...

What if our inability to imagine different futures is partly a failure of historical memory? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity by Roman Krznaric as our lens, this investigation explores applied history as a practical tool for navigating contemporary crises. Krznaric chall...

Why can a society become dramatically more productive while poverty remains? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Poverty is not Natural by George Curtis as our lens, this episode investigates the argument that persistent poverty may involve more than insufficient wages, charity, welfare, or economic growth. Drawing heavily on Henry George, Curtis...

What happens when protecting the sacred also gives institutions the authority to decide which beliefs may be questioned? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how restrictions on apostasy, blasphemy, heresy...

What happens when loyalty to a country becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the people who govern it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Superpatriotism by Michael Parenti as our lens, this episode investigates how patriotism can become what Parenti calls “superpatriotism”: a form of national identification in which criticism of leaders, mil...

A financial bubble becomes especially dangerous when its own success begins to look like evidence that the system is sound. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith as our lens, this investigation explores how speculation becomes a self-reinforcing system rather than simply a collection of bad investment...

What if an ordinary personal crisis is only the visible surface of forces that began long before you noticed them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami as our lens, this investigation explores how seemingly private disruptions can reveal deeper structures of memory, identity, history, and power. Toru Ok...

How much of fitting in depends on who we are—and how much depends on learning the unwritten rules of the people around us? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris as our lens, this episode explores how embarrassment, correction, family expectations, and cultural misunderstanding reveal the hidden rules governing...

What if the systems that appear most stable are sometimes the ones whose hidden risks we understand least? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as our lens, this investigation examines why human beings repeatedly mistake a stable-looking past for a predictable future. Tale...

Some suffering looks personal only because the systems distributing it are harder to see. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Dirty Truths, Michael Parenti moves across politics, media, labor, poverty, ideology, foreign policy, and personal experience to argue that many apparently separate problems become more intelligible when traced back to larger...