Crisis in Perception

What happens when a system can transform mass killing into administrative duty? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates the relationship between bureaucracy, obedience, moral judgment, and individual responsibility. Arendt’s portrait of Ad...

What happens when an economy grows richer, but prosperity becomes increasingly concentrated? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman challenges the widely accepted belief that the enrichment of a small economic elite necessarily benefits society as a whole. Drawing on research into...

What happens when predicting human behavior becomes a business—and greater certainty becomes a competitive advantage? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff argues that a distinctive form of capitalism has emerged around the extraction of human...

What happens when not knowing stops carrying a political cost—and begins carrying a political reward? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber, Andy Borowitz traces what he describes as the evolution of political ignorance through three stages: Ridicule, Acceptance, and Celebration....

Why do narcissistic relationships and public conflicts become so difficult to escape—even when everyone recognizes that something is wrong? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Fragile Bully: Understanding Our Destructive Affair with Narcissism in the Age of Trump by Laurie Helgoe, PhD, this investigation examines the interaction between grandiosit...

What happens when exposing the failures of universal ideals begins to erode confidence in the ideals themselves? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman as our lens, this investigation examines her argument that parts of the contemporary “woke” left have moved away from three principles she regards as essential to left...

What happens when political events arrive so quickly that yesterday’s shock becomes today’s baseline? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year by Amy Siskind as its lens, this episode investigates how information overload, shifting expectations, public memory, and institutional norms interact dur...

What turns religious conviction into a system of political obedience? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges as our lens, this Version 2 remaster examines Hedges’s argument that radical Christian dominionism can convert religious certainty into a broader system of authorita...

What happens when a democracy builds systems of coercion abroad—and then discovers that those systems can reshape politics at home? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. This remastered investigation revisits Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire by Jonathan M. Katz. Katz follows Major Ge...

What happens when political disagreement becomes evidence of a much larger struggle over who gets to shape culture? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using God's Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling by Lance Wallnau as our lens, this episode examines the larger institutional and religious framework through which Wallnau int...

Economic growth can create extraordinary prosperity without distributing its rewards evenly. What determines who actually receives the gains? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Economic Inequality: The American Dream Under Siege by Coral Celeste Frazer as our lens, this Deep Dive traces the historical forces that have repeatedly widened and narro...

What happens when the market stops being an economic tool and becomes a model for citizenship itself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed by Henry A. Giroux as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates Giroux’s argument that neoliberalism is more than an economic program. It also op...

What happens when the safeguards around presidential power depend on whether individual officials are willing to enforce them? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President by Michael S. Schmidt as our lens, this Deep Dive examines the tension between presidential authority, personal...

What if the American ladder of opportunity still appears functional because its missing rungs are most visible to the people trying to climb from below? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America, Sarah Kendzior examines economic decline and shrinking opportunity from the perspective of wo...

What happens when a reputation for extraordinary business success becomes political capital—and political power becomes entangled with private financial interests? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family by David Cay Johnston as our lens, this investigation examines th...

What happens when correcting a political falsehood can also help keep it alive? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us by Amanda Carpenter as our lens, this episode investigates Carpenter’s argument that Donald Trump’s 2016 political strategy repeatedly converted provocative claims into attent...

What if the crises that appear unique while we are living through them are partly shaped by social forces operating across generations? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End by Neil Howe as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates Howe’s theory that...

What happens when justified distrust becomes the raw material for manipulation? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent by Sarah Kendzior as our lens, this episode investigates how institutional betrayal, elite impunity, information disorder, and conspiracy culture can reinforce one anoth...

Democracy is often imagined as a system whose laws and institutions automatically constrain political power. Rules for Resistance asks what happens when those safeguards depend on people and institutions actively maintaining them. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Rules for Resistance: Advice from Around the Globe for the Age of Trump, edited by Melan...

What happens when misconduct remains visible, yet meaningful consequences repeatedly fail to arrive? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior as our lens, this Deep Dive investigates her argument that Trump’s rise was the culmination of decades of institut...

What changes when entertainment becomes one of the most powerful classrooms in everyday life? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, Henry A. Giroux examines Disney as more than an entertainment company. He asks what happens when a corporation with extraordinary cultural reach also functions as an...

What happens when representation changes, but the underlying structure of power does not? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, Kyla Schuller reconstructs nearly two centuries of conflict over the meaning of feminist progress. She contrasts what she calls white feminism—a political framework f...

What happens when higher education is reorganized around market value rather than its wider civic purpose? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Era by Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux as our lens, this episode investigates the university as both an...

What happens when political conflict begins rewarding people not for solving problems, but for making an opposing group angry? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself by Amanda Marcotte as our lens, this episode investigates her argumen...

What happens when punishment does more than restrict freedom—when it also teaches society, and eventually the prisoner, to see a human being as a permanent criminal identity? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. In Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, Chris Hedges recounts his years teaching inside New Jersey prisons and the class...