How to outsmart power with a rubber chicken

Remember when you were young and free, blissfully unbothered by the absurd human hobby of power struggles while waving arms and shouting, “WE ALONE OWN THE TRUTH!”—a statement that has never been correct and has always been embarrassing? Yes you do. I saw you.

Politics is like two outlaws sparring with nerf guns in the Desert of Overthinking firing flags that read “Actually…” and “Technically…” until truth wanders off into the sand dunes with a bottle of oil and a sled.

Trying to fight power with power? Ha! That’s a fool’s errand. It’s like attempting to extinguish a bonfire by throwing armchairs into it. The flames only grow taller and now you have nowhere to sit.

I asked my four year old niece for a solution. She said, “I don’t know,” somersaulted across the room with the style and grace of a tumbleweed, and blissfully skipped away to eat grapes as if nothing happened. In the political arena, this would be dismissed as “irrelevant.” But I thought, maybe the most radical way to beat power is to make it irrelevant through play?

So, I experimented. For weeks. I baked toad bread (relax…it was vegetarian). I built a chicken replace-inator.

I wrote the first chapter of a book. All my anxieties about the world melted into world-building fueled by sheer ridiculousness. It was magical. And here’s what I learned. The one thing power cannot handle is someone who is disciplined in celebration. Someone whose moral code involves making crossbags shaped like ducks purely because its hilarious.

Then, I returned to society. I saw a man sinking into political nihilism, face down in despair like a deflated balloon. Did I lecture him like a Victorian nun? Of course not. I introduced him to paradoxical joy. I made him play. He went from doom-scrolling to navigating a world of equally absurd possibilities, and in the process, transformed his moral language.

Because you see, folks, play trumps power every time when you do it right. It just liberates chaos and suddenly the Pinky to my Brain is the guy who was trying to take me down just a moment ago. It’s science.

So here’s your assignment, my fellow rebels. Reconnect with your imagination and become a master of playful subversion.

Step 1: Invent a playful rule to a political belief. Are you time-traveling with a rubber chicken? Are you fighting a mystical creature? Are you herding invisible mischief makers into houses made of leather?

Step 2: Introduce a paradox. Does the problem have a problem with you? If it had agency, what would it say?

Step 3: Describe what you see or do using nonsense words. Does it have the case of the drizzlewumps?

Step 4: Did you notice anything new? Did you tackle it differently?

In the end, the only truly radical move is to stop believing that truth is something you can trap, cage, or weaponize and start treating it like something that only reveals itself when you’re too busy making boo-berry ghost pies for your friends to notice you’ve accidentally stumbled into it.