Proper Propaganda: Brooke's Offer

23 Mar 2021

More than a year ago, Colton Dillion and I figured that propaganda was ready for a resurgence. We’re close to our first release, and in the spirit of spreading winnerthink to the world, I put out an invitation on Twitter for anyone to submit an article and an ideology or value to promote that article through.

Brooke Bowman was kind enough to offer her article needs and wants#2: on anger for my bid.

Any situation between two people needs them to work together. Two cars hitting each other needs both people driving the cars to work together to miss things. A fight needs two people to work together to fight. Any situation where people are against each other needs each person to work together to stay being against each other.

Car Crash

When two cars hit each other, both people driving have to stop paying attention to get the cars to hit. When two people fight, someone can usually run if they want to run, and the fight would end. When people are against each other, if any of them decides to be together instead of against each other, there is no way to be against each other.

Say Alice and Bob are against each other because Alice wants vanilla ice cream and Bob wants chocolate ice cream.

Alice: I want vanilla ice cream because it goes with the apple pie we have!
Bob: But vanilla ice cream is so boring, how about chocolate- it’s way more complex!

Ice Cream

If Alice decides to just get chocolate ice cream or Bob decides to just get vanilla ice cream, they are no longer against each other. If they both decide to get strawberry ice cream, they are no longer against each other. If Alice and Bob decide that they can get both vanilla and chocolate ice cream, they are no longer against each other. They are only against each other when it seems like they can only have one flavor and it seems like they want different flavors.

When we really want one thing to happen instead of all the things to happen, it becomes easy to think that there are fewer things that can happen instead of all the things that happen. With Alice and Bob, they are only against each other when they think they can only have one flavor of ice cream or when they think they must like different flavors of ice cream.

See, when they think only those things can happen, they make the state where they are against each other. They are together in that they both agree to be against each other by agreeing that there is only one flavor of ice cream to be had at a time, or that they must like different flavors of ice cream.

So, when we find ourselves against someone, we may see why we want to be against them. We may do this by looking at what one thing we want to happen instead of all the things that happen. When we really want one thing to happen, we get sad or mad because many things are always happening. If we stop and see when we really want one thing to happen, we can see all the things that are happening. Since there are so many things in all the things that are happening, we can find a state where we are not against what is happening. When we are not against what is happening, it is very hard to be against someone, except in a sort of play.

When we decide to be against someone and find we do not like how it feels, we can remember that we are deciding to be against them by wanting one thing to happen. By remembering, we can remember that we can just be together with them, wherever they are, by wanting all the things that happen to happen.

A fun part about this is that we often find things that we could not imagine happening, happening. Things that are more fun than anything we could see (like Cheddar ice cream!) when we were looking for just one thing. When others see us doing this, they may feel safe enough to join us in this play, because it will look a lot more fun than being against each other.