A wee thought experiment

ChatGPT made this image of a cranky psychology professor playing soccer while a bellicose commentator looks on and the players stare bewilderingly at the proceedings that are not a part of

Imagine a scenario in which a well known radio host with a penchant for American sports talks with a Jungian psychologist weirdly obsessed with the culture wars, about football tactics. Neither one knows what the hell they are talking about, but they have large social media followings so somehow we should listen to their opinions. ChatGPT helped me out here, because I’m incapable of writing this dialogue without losing my mind.

Chuck Dugan:
Welcome back to The Morning Yardage, I’m your host Chuck Dugan—gridiron guy, diamond devotee, and, uh, recently inducted into the world of world football! That’s right, we’re talking soccer. And with me today is a real thinker, Dr. Leonard Ambrose Penwright, a Jungian psychologist and… well, something of a European football aficionado?

Dr. Penwright:
Thank you, Charles. It is both a privilege and a burden to speak into the void that modernity has fashioned around our ancestral games. Soccer—what the Europeans call “association football”—is, fundamentally, a sacred reenactment of the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.

Chuck:
Yeah. And that’s why they play it on grass.

Penwright:
Precisely.

Chuck:
So, let’s get into it. There’s been a lot of talk about this whole “false nine” business. What is it, Leonard? I saw it on a YouTube video, and I gotta say, I didn’t see anything false about the guy wearing number nine. He looked real enough.

Penwright:
The “false nine” is emblematic of post-Freudian identity collapse. It’s a striker who refuses to strike—like a lion who meows or a Protestant who dances. He descends into the midfield, displacing the masculine telos of the goal. It’s essentially a Jungian shadow figure, disrupting the natural order.

Chuck:
So… is he like a tight end?

Penwright:
No, he is less than a tight end. He is an archetype of the dispossessed prince. Tactically, this was pioneered by the Belgians during the Crimean War. Or possibly the Dutch during the Enlightenment—it’s disputed.

Chuck:
Right, right. And that brings me to the diamond midfield. Everybody’s talking about it. You stack your midfield like a fantasy football draft: you got the quarterback, the wide receiver, and then two guys hanging back to clean up spills. I think that’s how Real Manchester beat Liverpool United in the Champion’s Bowl back in ’96.

Penwright:
You’re close, Charles. The diamond is a sacred symbol—four points, representing Carl Jung’s four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensing, and… something else. When deployed correctly, the diamond midfield becomes a psychic mandala. This is what separated the 1934 Prussian national team from the decadent Hungarian Romantics of the same era.

Chuck:
A classic rivalry! I remember my dad telling me about that match. Ended 2-2 in overtime, right?

Penwright:
It ended in ideological fracture, Chuck. The referee was a Catholic. That was controversial.

Chuck:
Well, switching gears here—everyone’s talkin’ about the high press. I assume that’s when the goalie comes out with a lot of pressure? Like a blitz package?

Penwright:
Incorrect, but spiritually adjacent. The “high press” is an attempt to enforce rigid cultural hierarchies. It’s when every player acts as the superego, suffocating the id of the opponent. It is, in many ways, fascist.

Chuck:
Love a good fascist play.

Penwright:
Indeed. That’s why the Italians did it best in 2006.

Chuck:
Okay. One more thing—what’s your take on VAR? You know, the video robot referee thing?

Penwright:
Ah, VAR. An insidious manifestation of late-stage digital panopticism. It neuters the spontaneity of the masculine heroic quest. It is Orwellian in scope and TikTokian in attention span. When a man cannot dive theatrically in the penalty box without being surveilled, what is he but a serf?

Chuck:
So you’re against it?

Penwright:
I’m against what it represents. The end of myth. The death of story. Also, I don’t understand how the offside rule works.

Chuck:
Me neither, pal. But hey, that’s soccer! Stick around, folks—we’ll be back after this with more tactical analysis and possibly a Jungian interpretation of corner kicks.

Penwright:
Ah yes, the corner kick—the final protest of the oppressed ego against the collective unconscious…

Chuck:
We’ll be right back.

Now, Imagine Chuck is Joe Rogan and Penwright is Jordan Peterson and remind me again why their conversation on climate science is relevant to anything at all?

The conversation between these two influencers is as absurd as the one I had a robot create. Being open to other points of view does not require you to listen to complete nonsense in the service of somehow expanding your worldview.