Crisis in Perception

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...

When does public diplomacy stop being an exchange of ideas and become a system for shaping how other societies understand America, markets, and power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World by Nancy Snow as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the United States Information Agency and the s...

What happens when the state powerful enough to enforce the rules begins treating those same rules as constraints mainly for everyone else? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy by Noam Chomsky as our lens, this investigation examines his argument that some characteristics associated with...

What if democratic breakdown can occur while the institutions of democracy still appear to be intact? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis as an entry point, this investigation examines how economic insecurity, political spectacle, nationalism, institutional accommodation, and public passivity can interact to...

What if foreign intervention, economic expansion, and military power are not separate policies, but interacting parts of the same system? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race by Michael Parenti as our lens, this investigation examines the political economy Parenti argues lies bene...

What changes when economic life stops being judged as part of a common moral order and begins to operate as a separate sphere? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, historian R. H. Tawney investigates the changing relationship between religious thought and economic activity from the medieval period through the begin...

The stories societies tell about their past do more than preserve memory. Once repeated through politics, media, education, and institutions, they can help shape what seems legitimate and possible in the present. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, edited by Kevin M. Kru...

What happens when a political movement committed to equality begins interpreting inequality through the worldview of society’s most successful professionals? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank as our lens, this investigation examines Frank’s argument that the Demo...

What happens when distrust of government begins shaping the institutions responsible for making government work? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation by Thomas Frank as our lens, this investigation examines the relationship between anti-government i...

Does a generous welfare state depend on social sameness—or on institutions capable of creating a shared sense of membership? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine: Immigration and Social Democracy in Twentieth-Century Sweden by Carly Elizabeth Schall as our lens, this investigation explores how wel...

Why does war keep returning even when its human, financial, and political costs are enormous? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism by Joel Andreas traces more than two centuries of American military expansion, from Manifest Destiny and overseas empire through the Cold War, the War on Terror, Iraq, A...

Productivity can be converted into more goods, more income, or more time. The outcome is not determined by technology alone. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet B. Schor as our lens, this episode investigates why rising productivity did not automatically produce shorter working l...

What happens when distrust of institutions is interpreted not as a possible response to institutional failure, but as evidence that ordinary people cannot be trusted with political power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank as our lens, this investigation traces the changing meaning...