Agreements, Laws, & Beliefs – Part 2: The Winner Mindset
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Boosting respect, recognition, and self-worth are what most power-seekers do to ensure their place in the world. When these are sought, certain laws are exercised, beliefs put to the test, and truths are challenged. Hosts Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the importance of choices and how the younger generation should be taught how to fight for them. They also talk about how choices can affect violence and awaken the winner’s mindset, which is seen in Iran and America’s conflict. There is a race to the top on who will win in the respect and fairness battle, and Bill and Tom are here to shine light on this global event.
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I enjoyed our last conversation where we were touching on some things that are happening internationally. It was getting a little hopeless there at one point. You brought it back at the end and you said, “It’s okay. There’s a North Star.” We’re talking about purchasing truth through agreements, laws and beliefs. It’s an international piece that makes it complex. I’m excited to have you show us the way.
Let’s take a simple example, Tom, that you and I start chuckling about since I bring this example up. When you and I were growing up, we might have played baseball out in the street with our friends. There might’ve been a ball and a bat that was there playing baseball. One of us might have swung the bat and hit the ball and it went through a neighbor’s window. It went through their neighbor’s windows, went through their lawn, went through their yard, broke a gate, chipped some paint, hit their car, whatever.
There was inherently a mistake. There is an exercise that I’ve done with a group of parents where I take them and split them into two and put them into two different rooms. In one group, I’d have them discuss, “How do you talk this through with your kid? That kid hit the ball, it went through this.” The other group, I asked them, “What were some things that you would say if it was your neighbor that was playing with the kids and hit the ball through the window? How would you talk to the neighbor?” One group is how do you talk to the kids and one is how do you talk to the neighbor?
I can’t wait to hear the results of this.
It’s so unsettling because they were to write down the sentences that they would say to the kid about what the kid needed to do next. The other group was here is what the conversation was and what was being said to the adult. Clearly, the conversations were very different. One was laden with judgments, blames, apologies, retribution, here’s how you have to suffer now or what are the penitents and how much you have to pay for this. Meanwhile, the kid just hit the ball through the window. Did the kid have to do that much guilt and shame for the angle of which the ball came off the bat of which they are a kid?
It was an accident.
Why does that have to get to a level 7, 8, 9 or some parents, 10? “I’ll spank the kid. How could you do such a thing? You need to apologize. You have to work at your neighbor for the next twenty hours doing slave labor for free. You have to stay on Saturday all day,” whatever the punishment is. The group with the parents that we’re talking to, the neighbor that was playing with the kids that hit the ball through was, “How are we going to fix this? How much money is going to cost?” The blame, shame, criticism turns into an unfortunate circumstance.
It sounds like it’s more of an adult conversation.
More adult, it’s not power over, it’s power with. Power over is when one person is doing something that is showing off how they have greater strength in order to boost respect, self-worth, recognition, acknowledgment, even importance or value. That’s the need. One is how do we get along and have fairness and justice right now? We might only need to do fairness which looks like, “Would you be willing to call the glass person to fix the window or shall I do it?” “You’ll do it since you hit the ball.” “I got it.” “You’ve got to replace the one?” “Yes, I got that one.”
It seems like in the context of the child or youth hitting the ball into the window, the parental role seems to make this a more egregious offense.
It carries the weight in excess from a very old model that a parent is having power over this child and that this child’s behavior is a reflection on the parent’s respect.
The parents are feeling embarrassed.
Parent’s got to feel uncomfortable talking about the conversation over the neighbor because of what their kid did for being a kid. The North Star here is that when somebody doesn’t meet our needs in certain ways, there are certain agreements, laws, and even beliefs that impact that influence what the truth is. The truth gets influenced by this. The truth is that does a kid need to suffer punitive hours of time in their room, in jail because they hit a ball or a spanking or they have to do labor to pay the thing back?
Should there be a big consequence for this or should it just be understood that kids are being kids? Certainly, there needs to be some justice or correction for causing damage. Like you say, it’s maybe a level 3 and not a level 9 or 10 offense.
It sounded like level 9 or 10 offense, but you’ll catch yourself in the next month by the way. I brought that up to a five and it should have been a two. How did I get so upset at that one? You can’t sometimes. I learned this perception perspective very much from my dad because my dad was pretty good about not escalating or tilting on his escalation whenever I did something and he did something and then I did something back to him. He was good at going like, “It’s better not to respond to that thing.” Let me give you one of my childhood mistakes, one of my dad’s responses to that and then my response to my dad. I would call it the escalation to World War III.
That’s what we’re going to bring back to our current context.
I brought a little bit of lumber to build this bridge. My dad would not let me do something that I wanted at school for some reason. I thought there were some good reasons. He thought there were some good reasons, but whatever it was is that the way he spoke to me, the way he handled it, I got pissed because he wasn’t hearing me fully. He didn’t see how important it was. It might not have been important, but the main thing is the choice wasn’t discussed and I wasn’t being heard fully. Those two things pissed me off. Those are two important needs for all human beings. You’ve got to have a choice and you’ve got to be heard. If you want to get rid of gang groups, those are the two you’ve got to deal with. They need some choices and they need to be heard.
I’m learning things about my own parenting right here.
It doesn’t mean you need to provide them choice. You’ve got to have the child or even the adult come up with the choices inside themselves. You don’t even have to work by saying, “Would you like the green lollipop or the yellow lollipop?” You don’t need to do that choice to say, “I don’t know these lollipops. These are things I don’t know. What might be your choice?” Instead of giving them the choices, let their brains fight out what the choice is. That is called more in the adult not consciousness versus the power over consciousness.
Now, let’s build this bridge a little bit. I was mad about it because I couldn’t go anywhere. My dad’s truck happened to be parked in the driveway. I might’ve been like 9, maybe 10 or something like that. What I did was I took a rope and I tied it to this brick wall and then I tied it to his passenger side mirror. I put slack between it so when he came out of the passageway, he didn’t see that I had done that. He jumped in the car and threw his car to reverse, started backing the driveway and yanked that mirror right off the truck.
I was going to say, the brick wall or the mirror? The brick wall won. Those mirrors are not like mirrors now. It was a small bit of a mount and a very thin metal section to the mirror, not the big breakaway mirrors we have now.
That’s exactly right. There were some clear problems there. What did my dad do next? I’m thinking he’s going to escalate. There’s going to be some hell to pay. I thought something’s coming next. Later that day, he drove off because he had to go somewhere. I also had time to think about it and had time to think about his response. He came back in later that evening and he said, “Bill, I’m guessing you were pretty mad at me earlier. I could have said things differently so you wouldn’t have been so mad at me.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Let’s not make each other pay for it.”
There are certain agreements, laws, and beliefs that impact that influence what the truth is.
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That’s a very adult response, isn’t it? He didn’t even have your training.
No, he didn’t.
There’s something in your dad’s experience or inherently in him that saw the bigger picture and he didn’t want to make you pay.
You and I can imagine the readers were going like, “My dad would have beat the shit out of me.”
That’s a very uncommon response.
There’s a spanking that’s coming. There are a lot of things that are coming, but that wasn’t my dad’s take. My dad is taking ownership and he made me pay for something I said, not, “He is a wrong and bad child that needs to be punished so he’ll never do that again.” Do we need to escalate it? No. He killed the battle right before it went to World War III. If he picks the power over strategy and punishes me and beats me or whatever he does, he’ll have a nasty rebellious 15, 16, 17-year-old on his hand later because that’s what many kids experience. They get to 15, 16, 17, they realize their dad and their parents can’t do much to contain them and they’ve been sneaking around them for the last three years.
They realize, “They’re paper tigers because they’ve got to take care of me.” They get to do drugs and rebel. I didn’t have any of that stuff because the level of violence was low. I could say I’m born under a lucky star. Not to say that my parents don’t have a set of problems. Don’t get me started with their problems, but it wasn’t the power over problem. They had other problems of self-expression and not very good emotional intelligence. They had other languaging problems. I broke the law, I broke a family agreement. My belief was I was justified as a ten-year-old to do that. That was my justice.
You were exacting revenge, if you will, for what your father had said.
It’s so interesting, Tom, that you mentioned the word revenge because it seems like right now, we’re in a narrative that is partially leaning towards revenge. If you do something bad to me, I will do something bad or worse to you. The revenge mindset has a little trouble to it because there is escalating violence all along the way.
Even the threatening messages that are being exchanged between the American President and the country of Iran are escalating the situation even without firing any shots, “If you do this, I have 52 targets already picked out that I’m going to take out if you do anything more.”
It looks like the Iranians did a better job of communicating and staying away from the revenge game. What they did was as they warned the American base that they were going to bomb the base. They warned them five hours ahead of time. It’s like, “We’re sending missiles your way. You want to be ready to move and get clear of the area.” They knew that they also wanted to revenge narrative to be in place and it’s worth the fifteen missiles or so that they sent as a display of, “We could have killed a lot of people, but we chose not to. We chose not to by letting you know that we could have landed these things on your head. We even targeted them so they didn’t hit the base and didn’t cause any damage.”
Where are you going to go next? Are you going to escalate on a non-escalation piece? I pulled the teeth out of the tiger now. It’s like, “You can’t take revenge now. You have to deal with the accountability that you executed one of our leaders.” That’s international accountability. There was no war declared against this nation, but you took out one of our national figures. Even some of us in our country don’t like what he does. Just like in your country, many people don’t like what some of the leaderships are doing in your country, that’s not the way this adult narrative is to run.
I saw that too as it happened. I have a brother-in-law who’s in the Armed Forces. He works at the Pentagon. When those missiles were fired from Iran to the bases in Iraq, that night he was put on alert that he might be going to Iraq literally imminently. Within 24 hours, it was like, “Now everything’s fine.” Our military was preparing for escalation and it’s very interesting how it didn’t happen. I was looking at the situation, I thought, “Very well played, Iran.” They needed to show their own citizens they weren’t going to be pushed around. They’re going to stand up for themselves. They’re going to do nothing. I think I saw some reports that they painted the picture that they killed some Americans or that they did much more serious damage than what happened. They have state-run media and they can control that narrative. They needed the video of the missiles flying in the air. They did it in such a way as to not escalate the situation.
They’re creating through these images the belief that safety is being taking place, that we are going to stand up for ourselves, that we are going to take action when somebody takes action towards us. It’s one of the most difficult challenges that we have because we have an extremely huge military that needs to be fed all the time. It needs a war somewhere because it’s so big and what are we going to do with all these weapons? Are we going to decommission them or going to make new ones and decommission those? Why don’t we drop them somewhere? What’s the business model for our military contractors and military manufacturers? We need these things that we make to be used so that we can make more of them. If you make a light bulb that lasts twenty years, the light bulb business will go out of business because you need them to burn out sooner to keep the light bulb business working. Capitalism is more based on things breaking than it is about things lasting.
There’s not a lot of business growth and making things that last a lifetime.
We do have both psychological problems and economic problems that all get stuck in these agreements, laws and beliefs. You don’t want to be too tight on an agreement or a law that doesn’t give a certain amount of wiggle room. You might get fairness, but you lose freedom. You might get protection, but you lose privacy.
The protection privacy piece is a constant struggle, isn’t it?
Yes. China is going to have a lot of trouble with that with their citizenship model of everybody being good, “We’re going to videotape you just in case. If you’re bad, we’re going to take away your travel privileges.” It’s like things will not go well for you. It’s not as strong end to an overly watched society or controlled society because you’ve got to keep choice in play and you’ve got to allow people to be heard and work through the development of the good reason why or the internal motive of why it’s safe to cross the street. There are different rules for war than there are for individual crimes. It’s a little strange. In war, you could get away with all kinds of things. Individual crimes, not as much. There’s less freedom to exasperate violence.
Bill, we are in agreement that Iran was very shrewd in how they played this. They had to do something. They couldn’t do nothing for many internal domestic political reasons, but yet they did something that if Donald Trump had escalated the next level, it would have looked like he’s being a bully and using it as an excuse to go forward it seems. What do you make of the President’s press conference and talking about this and the decision not to escalate? How do you think he handled that? Was that an adult response or was it something different?
It was partly going like, “Nothing was damaged and we’re not going to do anything about that.” He failed as a negotiator. Notice how cleanly I stated that sentence. Where he failed as a negotiator is he had the ability to extend an olive branch and to set himself up to have success not only with negotiations with Iran but also to get re-elected. Would you like to know how he could have done it?
Yes, I would love to know how he could have done it.
It would have sounded like this, “We respect Iran for not choosing to target our base directly and to show a sign of protection that they’re going to protect and they’re going to stand for the things that they value, which is their homeland. We also appreciate that they gave the base a six-hour warning so there would be no loss of life.” If he would acknowledge them in a conscious adult way, watch the next sentence, “We’re interested in this moment forward to come up with some agreements that would work better for both the United States and Iran so that we can lift the sanctions and that we can get back to nuclear talks that will make a difference.”
He could have pivoted and it appeared like a real diplomat and a hero. What he did was he said, “We’re putting even tougher economic sanctions on them.” He escalated it in a different way.
He didn’t take the opportunity that was handed to him by them to demonstrate that he knew what the art of the deal was. My emotions go up and down the scale here because different needs of mine get met. It’s easy to support certain Republican values when they’re in alignment with my needs. This is how protection looks. This is what fiscal responsibility looks like. This is what integrity looks like. Here’s what laws or we live into what the laws look like. I have a lot of those same Republican values. On the democratic side, it’s like, “How do you provide help and support without creating things like co-dependency and other things? How do you do that and how do you create a healthy society that’s vibrant?” They do that. How about that? It’s more of a democratic value set other than having the belief. Everyone is in it for themselves, which is individualistic. It is not set up to be an equal opportunity for different races, different areas and different economies that are throughout this nation. It’s not even.
I agree with you. I’ll share a personal story. I’ve done a lot of international travel in my life. As an American, I feel like I didn’t get a good perspective on what America really is until I left the country and experienced some other cultures and other foreign people’s opinion and belief about what America is. I was in Germany in early to mid-‘90s on business. I had a friend from college who’s an American, but his father was German and his mother was American. He spoke German and he lived there. I met up with him and he took me to a party that was like a big art gala opening. This very famous artist named Ingo Maurer, it was an opening of his recent work. Anybody who knows the art world probably knows that name. I’m having this conversation with Maurer and I’m being introduced to him and I’m from the United States.
He says, “I love America. I have an apartment in New York,” but then he paused and he said, “but America is for the winners.” That’s what he said. He captured it in that moment. I’ve thought about it ever since. It’s been more than 25 years at least since this happened. It always stuck in my mind and the American dream itself and everything about how things are structured in our country is set for those that don’t have to aspire to have and to grow and to win. In many ways, he is right that America is for the winners. Whether our founding fathers intended it to be that way or not, or there are many aspects of our society that are not, that are more for everybody and for the common good, but in reality, it is. America is all about winning and for the winners. I found that was very interesting and I thought that’s aligned with what you were saying.
The winner mindset has an interesting piece that capitalism brings out. There is a win-lose, who can get the price right, who can get the marketing right, who can get the distribution right, who could get all these different things in the right place at the right time. Sell a certain number of products, get the product to move out, the product lasts a year or 2, 3, 5, 7, whatever the product lasts. The consumer has to come back and replace that product. That is part of our mindset. There’s a winning-losing mindset that goes with that.
We talked often about how Donald Trump is a brilliant marketer. That’s what he knows. He knows how to win at that. Very much his daily comments and the things that he praises and the things that he demonizes are all about winning for himself for the most part. It’s very interesting how in this context, he ever would have had the presence of mind to extend an olive branch because he wants to be seen as winning. He’s saying, “I don’t want a war. America doesn’t want to fight a war, therefore this is the way I want it. I’m winning,” type of thing.
I wonder if trading the life for that General Qasem Soleimani, when you think about what we traded for that, we took them out and we have yet to hear from the government any real evidence about what these imminent threats were. I don’t know that we ever will, if it will ever come out that there were any imminent threats. We took a life there. Several lives, but he’s the big one. What did we get for it? Iran is now saying, “All bets are off. We’re going to enrich Iranian to whatever level we want. We’re not going to abide by this nuclear treaty that the United States pulled out of. Forget the agreement with the rest of the world.” Was that worth it?
In marketing, you never have to deliver. All you have to do is promise and create anticipation for the promise. Even if Iran consistently promotes that they’re going to live by the agreement, our media will not promote that thought or that value. They won’t. Capitalism needs to keep viewers on edge to listen to them. There’s nothing like somebody says, “We’re a peaceful nation. We’re not going to enrich Iranian. Even though America pulled out, we’re going to keep to the agreement that we agreed because we signed it with the other nations and just because America is out of integrity, we’re not going to be out of integrity.” Will American media play that message? No, they won’t. If there’s anything that Iran has learned about the United States is that we meddle. We meddle in other people’s politics to help our capitalist mindset.
We allow others to meddle in our politics and influence our elections, if I could throw that in there.
At this point, that bridge has been crossed the other way because we’ve been doing it that way. That’s the have your cake and eat it too narrative. This is a lot of big stuff. The reason why I enjoy doing Purchasing Truth, Tom, so much is that we’re looking at perspectives and perceptions that allow us to discuss what’s the difference between individual justice, political justice, or wartime justice? Those are three different things. If Donald Trump did do a war crime, if he had a war crime that could be fried in the Hague, would America say, “Yes, he did. We’re sending him over. Try him?” Can you imagine if somebody captured him and said, “We’re going to try him here. We’re trying him in our country?”
How about if we capture Osama bin Laden and try him in the United States? Why didn’t we go down that path? If we would have done that instead of killing him, if we captured him, brought him back to the United States and tried him and stuck him in jail, that would have been more of an adult legal response. Yes, he would’ve gotten convicted, but the key thing was is it would have started down. You’re sending a message to the world is this is what a legal process looks like. We’re not doing the retaliatory kill thing, the revenge thing. We’re not doing eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. We’re going to do, “He’s dangerous. We have to protect from him.”
At that point, it could be argued that he was no longer dangerous. The damage was done. He wasn’t an imminent threat to the United States, yet we still go in there and take him out. I said last time, if there was ever somebody that deserved to be taken out with all the things he did, it was him, but it was not taking the higher road, the adult response.
That’s correct because it’s not just sending a message to his followers. It’s setting a vision of the world where people step into the next level of integrity, not the lowest common dominator that cost the lowest amount at the dollar store. That’s the race to the bottom. You want respect to be a race to the top. Who can gain more respect by doing more adult things in more integritous ways? That’s called the race to the top. Who’s going to win the respect battle? Who’s going to win the quality battle? Who’s going to win the fairness battle? Who’s going to do justice in a fair way? Who’s going to do that?
Interestingly in this case, killing that General, we unified the people of Iran. They all rose up, protested. There’s more hatred for America in that country than there was before. That’s one of the real long-term consequences of this action that was taken that’s obvious.
Here’s the weird part about it. Many Iranians loved America because we defeated Iraq. That was their enemy before. They liked us until this moment. We shifted the population away from us and we had a lot of the population because that was the whole religious as Sunni and Shi’i thing? We took out the party that was holding those groups apart anyway.
More to come, time will tell on this one.
Let’s look the next time we get together what we could to take a look at as we run-up to the elections. There’s a truth process and a messaging process. What I like to keep our eyeballs on as you and I put our noggins together is look for both media and campaign messages that look to purchase truth and ones that fail to do it. There are a lot of ones that the message comes out and it fails.
I’d like to look at that and to understand why they fail.
Elizabeth Warren did one that was really tragic. It was not a good choice.
Let’s bring that to the table for next time. I will be keeping an eye out for some of my own. That sounds like fun. We’ll do that, Bill.
Thanks, Tom.
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