Crisis in Perception

What if the deepest problem with work is not how hard we labor, but whether we can still see ourselves in what we do? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Working by Studs Terkel as our lens, this episode investigates work as more than an economic transaction. Through the voices of ordinary workers, Terkel reveals how employment can distribute dign...

What happens when a society outgrows the stories that once helped people understand who they are—but has not yet developed new ones? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers as our lens, this investigation explores mythology as more than ancient storytelling. Campbell presents myths as symbolic stru...

The American West is often remembered as a frontier being opened. Dee Brown asks us to turn around and examine what that same expansion looked like to the peoples already living there. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West reconstructs the conquest of the nineteenth-century West through...

What happens when the law remains the same on paper, but accountability changes according to who has power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald as our lens, this episode investigates his argument that the American justice system h...

Where do democratic ideas actually come from—and what disappears when history reduces their origins to a single intellectual tradition? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living by Thom Hartmann as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the cultural and intellectual...

What happens when the institutions watching us become increasingly powerful while the systems doing the watching remain largely invisible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy by Thom Hartmann as our lens, this Deep Dive...

What if the defining question in health care is not whether government or markets should run the system, but who the system is obligated to include? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid as our lens, this investigation compares the institutional structur...

What happens when an effective medical treatment exists, but the system surrounding addiction makes it unusually difficult to receive? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Opioid Fix: America’s Addiction Crisis and the Solution They Don’t Want You to Have by Barbara Andraka-Christou as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates why medications for o...

What happens when disinformation stops being merely false information and becomes a system for exercising power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates how deliberate falsehoods can exploit human psychology, technological amplifica...

What if the political style associated with Donald Trump makes more sense when we trace the systems that rewarded it decades before he reached Washington? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the environments and relationsh...

What happens when a system designed to manage extreme risk begins consuming its own margin for error? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the interacting pressures behind the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Krakauer arrived on Everest as...

What happens when the pursuit of independence removes the very systems that make independence sustainable? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates Christopher McCandless’s pursuit of radical self-reliance and the tension between autonomy and human interdependence. Krakauer’s accoun...

What if authoritarianism becomes most difficult to recognize when it no longer resembles the regimes preserved in historical memory? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How to Spot a Fascist by Umberto Eco as our lens, this investigation explores Eco’s concept of “Ur-Fascism”: a recurring family of cultural, psychological, and political tendencies...

What should give a constitution democratic legitimacy: its historical endurance, or how well its institutions serve democratic values in the present? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using How Democratic Is the American Constitution? by Robert A. Dahl as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the American constitutional system not as a finished blueprint,...

Governments appear powerful because their authority is visible: laws, courts, police, armies, budgets, and political offices. Howard Zinn asks us to look beneath those institutions at the cooperation that allows them to function. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn as our lens, this Deep Dive inve...

What happens when a military can measure almost everything except whether its theory of victory corresponds to reality? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam by James William Gibson as our lens, this episode investigates Gibson’s concept of Technowar: the transformation of warfare into a high-technology, capital...

What happens when an economy becomes better at rewarding the extraction of value than the creation of it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry by Dylan Ratigan as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the institutional incentives that Ratig...

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...