Crisis in Perception

What happens when financial exclusion becomes a profitable market? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits From Poverty, edited by Michael Hudson, investigates the high-cost financial economy that developed around consumers frequently excluded from conventional banking and affordable credit during the perio...

What if the financial weakness that should constrain a debtor nation can instead reinforce its global power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance by Michael Hudson as our lens, this episode investigates how the dollar-centered international monetary system altered the convention...

What happens when the explanation of a historical cause changes after the cause itself becomes difficult to defend? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause,” edited by James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta, this Deep Dive investigates how collective memory can change a...

What if humanity’s evolutionary advantage was not simply intelligence, strength, or competition—but the ability to imagine possibilities together and turn them into new ways of living? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional by Agustín Fuentes as our lens, this Deep Dive explores how creative...

What if mortality is not simply a weakness, but one of the conditions that makes genuine transformation possible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Madeline Miller’s Circe reimagines the mythological witch as an outsider born into a divine world of enormous power, rigid hierarchy, and seemingly endless life. Using Circe as our lens, this Deep Dive exa...

Legal equality can change the rules without immediately changing the systems that distribute opportunity. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America, edited by Chester Hartman with a foreword by Congressman John Lewis, brings together one hundred contributions examining the relationship between racial inequal...

When a state is ordered to compensate its victims, who actually pays? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their State’s Wrongdoings? by Avia Pasternak as our lens, this investigation examines the distributive effect of state responsibility—the process by which obligations assigned...

What if the qualities that make someone immortal in public memory are not the qualities that made their life meaningful? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how heroic culture turns reputation into a system of incentives, expectations, and constraints. Through Patrocl...

What if America’s shift to the right was driven by more than a change in what voters believed? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics by Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the transformation of the American political system from the decl...

What happens when accumulated wealth begins increasing the power to shape the conditions under which future wealth is created? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using History of the Great American Fortunes by Gustavus Myers as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the historical machinery behind some of America’s largest concentrations of private weal...

What if an economy can become richer at the checkout counter while becoming weaker underneath? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America’s Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era by Clyde Prestowitz as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates whether cheap consumption can c...

What if the pandemic’s most lasting economic effect was not creating a new world, but accelerating the systems already shaping the old one? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity by Scott Galloway as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the pandemic as what Galloway calls an accelerant—a shock that compressed...

What happens when convenience, connection, knowledge, and status become inputs to systems that grow stronger every time we use them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway as our lens, this investigation examines how four companies translated technological innovation in...

How can a political system appear permanent while the meanings people attach to it are quietly changing? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates one of the defining paradoxes of late Soviet socialism: why the system could...

What if empire looks economically irrational only because we are counting its costs and benefits from the wrong perspective? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Face of Imperialism by Michael Parenti as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates his argument that modern imperialism is more than military dominance or a series of disconnected foreign...

What happens when a president begins trying to reverse the assumptions of the security system around him? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates John F. Kennedy’s movement from Cold War confrontation toward dialogue, arms control, and...

Police militarization is easy to recognize when it appears as armored vehicles, tactical uniforms, and battlefield-style weapons. The harder question is how extraordinary capabilities gradually become ordinary features of civilian law enforcement. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police F...

Can changing what you think about change your life—or does it mainly change what you notice, attempt, practice, and persist at? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale as our lens, this episode investigates one of the foundational claims of modern personal development: that “we become what we think about.” Nigh...

How can an institution possess increasingly accurate warnings of collapse and still behave as though there is more time? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Decent Interval by Frank Snepp as our lens, this investigation examines the fall of Saigon through the institutional systems that shaped American decision-making during the final months of the...

What if capitalism’s apparent ability to sustain itself depends on economic relationships that conventional models leave outside the frame? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the authors’ argument that capitalism...

How much of political identity is consciously chosen—and how much arrives already embedded in history, family, and community? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Why More Mormons Should Be Democrats: And Why America Should Pay Attention by Daniel C. Friend as our lens, this investigation explores the relationship between religious belief, historic...

Race is often treated as though it presents one overarching moral choice: either it should matter, or it shouldn't. David Boonin asks whether that framing survives careful examination. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions by David Boonin as our lens, this investigation examines slave re...

What if the methods used to change society are already helping determine what comes next? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States by Zoe Baker as our lens, this investigation explores the revolutionary theory and strategy of the historical anarchist movement and th...

What turns a political right into the actual capacity to exercise power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), by Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, provides Ture’s first-person account of his political development from the civil-rights movement through Black P...

When does a political system stop looking reformable to the people who most distrust it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Blood in My Eye by George L. Jackson presents a revolutionary Marxist interpretation of prisons, racial hierarchy, class power, property relations, and the state. Jackson argues that reforms cannot produce liberation when the unde...