Crisis in Perception

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...

If technology can save labor, why does it so rarely give people their time back? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society, edited by Freedom Press with an introduction by Nina Power, this investigation examines what happens after technological progress makes human labor more productive. Across contributions f...

What if capitalism’s defining feature is not stability, but continual transformation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted and illustrated by Martin Rowson, this episode investigates the economic system Marx and Engels believed was revolutionizing nineteenth-century society. Their a...

What changes when political failure stops being merely a liability and begins producing political rewards? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy by Brian Tyler Cohen as an entry point, this episode investigates Cohen’s argument that much of the modern Republican Part...

A ruler can become more secure even while the state he governs becomes less capable. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development by Yuhua Wang as our lens, this episode investigates the long-term relationship between elite networks, ruler survival, and state capacity across imper...

What happens when a political movement challenges existing institutions while also attempting to perform some of the functions those institutions have failed to provide? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker, with art by Marcus Kwame Anderson, this investigation examines the Black P...

Many everyday disagreements begin with an assumption neither person realizes they are making: that their own way of doing things is simply normal. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places by Mary Roach as our lens, this episode explores the comic friction created when different habits, anxieties, expectatio...

What makes a democratic right real: the words that guarantee it, or the institutions willing to enforce it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident by Howard Zinn brings together essays written for The Nation across several decades, including firsthand reflections on the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, constitutional liberty...

What happens when a technology capable of opening the world becomes part of a system that narrows what people are allowed to hear? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr as our lens, this investigation explores the invisible systems surrounding communication, perception, institutional power, and individual...

Stories can cross centuries, but they do not survive by themselves. Preservation is not merely a matter of storage—it is a continuing process of transmission. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr links characters separated by centuries through a fictional ancient Greek story about Aethon and his search for an ideal city...

What happens when institutions assume that private self-interest will reliably contain systemic risk? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis by Darryl Cunningham as an entry point, this episode traces the ideas, incentives, and institutional changes surrounding the 2008 financial cr...

What happens when a government retains formal power but gradually loses the cooperation that makes that power sustainable? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Rise of Red China by Robert Goldston as our lens, this episode investigates the systems behind China’s revolutionary transformation and the Communist victory of 1949. Goldston connects t...

What happens when a system can genuinely perform miracles—but those miracles depend upon turning other people into resources? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw as an entry point, this investigation examines a world where resurrection, bodily reconstruction, mythology, and institutional authority become inse...

What if slowing growth and rising inequality are partly two consequences of the same hidden system? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles as our lens, this investigation examines how regulatory capture can allow organized interests to convert political influence into economic protection. Lind...

What if low voter turnout reflects more than individual interest in politics? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Why Americans Don't Vote by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward as an entry point, this investigation examines the institutional and historical forces that shape electoral participation in the United States. Piven and Cloward...