NEW EPISODE: The Bullshit Artists

Encounter #5 — COVID-19 and Systems-Level Thinking, the Classroom as Polity, and an Army of Socrateses

The fifth episode of The Bullshit Artists is now available on all the major podcasting services, including YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes.

After some housekeeping and a brief revisit of police violence, Rory and Jack begin this episode with a consideration of COVID-19, especially focusing on its possible origins and the widespread resistance in the US to vaccination. This topic then segues into a larger discussion of systems-level thinking, including particularly the absence of that capacity among the general public and the subsequent failure to act on or even to perceive various systems-level problems in society. Next, the conversation turns to the education system's utter inability to facilitate the development of such thinking skills among students—a shortcoming that Rory suggests is a deliberate one operating in service of the schooling system's sociological function of replicating and perpetuating capitalist social arrangements. Finally, Jack asks Rory a series of questions about his beliefs regarding political revolution in the United States, which the pair examine in light of the looming climate crisis.