
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.
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Spending the past few weeks immersed in football culture in England and back home at Canada fed my soul. There is so much about football that I love, from the complexity of the game, all through to the culture and atmosphere of the stadium. I have been a dedicated and deeply involved football supporter of the Vancouver Whitecaps (2010-2018, ended over a series of unresolved sexual abuse scandals) and of TSS Rovers (2017- the present). The thing that drew me to football as a kid was hearing Liverpool supporters singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on the BBC Match of the Day broadcasts when I lived in England in the late 1970s. The SOUND. The sound of a big stadium full of enthusiastic supporters is unreal. It’s not something you are likely to witness in professional sports in North America except in soccer. And being present on a European night, like Finn and I were a couple of weeks ago as Tottenham hosted Eintracht Frankfurt, is absolutely magical.
The essence of football culture in the rest of the world is its organic and participatory nature, from the creation of tifo to the penning of songs and chants. As a songwriter, writing songs for my football teams has been a passion of mine. I especially love coming up with player chants, which are even more meaningful at the lower league levels, where young players ply their trades in relative obscurity, loved only by a small handful of fans.
As a complexity practitioner, I love watching the way football supporter culture ebbs and flows and wanes and flows again. I love the way we try songs out that flat out fail, or we have some instant inspiration that locks itself in as a tradition.
Recently the podcast 99% invisible did a nice piece on football songs, including some deeper history of this cultural practice that I wasn’t aware of. Even though it’s pitched at an American audience, and it is focused somewhat on Arsenal (I’m a Spurs fan, remember!) it’s well worth a listen. It gives us insight about what culture really is and how it really functions.
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One of the things I love about sport is the real life that happens out there. Nothing is predictable, nothing is a given. Competitors try themselves against each other, supporters follow and cheer them on and time is marked by transcdent moments on and off the field of play. The game is the setting for stories that are singular in occurrence or narrative arcs that span generations.
While most of the world of sport has its attention turned to the Olympic games, my own attention yesterday was fully devoted to a critical match for the men’s team of the soccer club I co-own, TSS Rovers FC. TSS Rovers are a club with a men’s and a women’s team owned by three majority shareholders and 440 community owners. I’m one of the Trustees for the Spirit of the Rovers Supporters Trust that represents our ownership group on the club board. Yesterday was the Championship Final of the League 1 BC playoffs and having already won the league, our men were poised to take to the field against our rival from North Vancouver, Altitude FC. Because we play at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby, and Altitude plays across Burrard Inlet in North Vancouver, our rivalry is called the Ironworkers Derby, named for the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Bridge, which connects the two cities.
Over the three years our league has existed, this has been a tightly contested derby, and we have had the upper hand in general. Altitude’s men’s team has had two tough seasons, but this year, they finished second in the league and beat the Vancouver Whitecaps Academy to make it to the final. They chased us all the way and if it hadn’t been for a tough 1-0 victory against them, they might have won the League title.
For our part, we have had a historic season. We won our first league title a few weeks ago with a game to spare. Three of us travelled to Kamloops to witness the historic occasion. After two years of more heartbreak and diabolical situations than I could ever describe, and two second-place finishes, we finally won, which meant we qualified for the third year in a row for the Canadian Championship, Canada’s FA Cup competition. Representing League 1 BC, we have the distinction of being the only semi-professional side to knock a professional club out of that tournament when we beat Vaklour FC of Winnipeg 3-1 on April 18 last year.
Our path to the two-round playoff final for League 1 was straightforward enough. We beat Harbourside FC last weekend 4-1 and prepared to face our rival at Swangard Stadium, our home and also the neutral venue chosen by the League for the finals day.
It was not a beautiful game of football.
We went ahead seven seconds into the game with a set piece that came off perfectly from the kickoff and got another goal in the first half from our towering centre-back, Nik White. In the second half, Altitude came back with relentless attacking energy and got a goal back on the hour mark but went down to 10 meant at the 76th minute. It didn’t seem to matter, as they threw everything at us and finally got some reward from their havoc by tying it up on an 84th-minute penalty. Three minutes later, we were awarded a penalty taken by a long time club veteran, Erik Edwardson. In a crazy game in which there was no certainty, Erik’s penalty was the closest thing to a safe bet.
Needing to defend our 3-2 lead, we bunkered down a bit, and Altitude got at us, resulting in a corner off of which ANOTHER penalty was awarded in the 90th minute. In a moment of utter heartbreak from our rivals, the penalty taker skied the kick, and we were able to kill off the six minutes of added time to win our second playoff championship and our first double trophy season.
A million storylines are woven into this match. We started the season with a team stocked with veterans and former professional players who joined us for another chance to play in the Canadian Championship. We took Pacific FC deep into injury time with a 1-0 lead before the professionals scored on the game’s last attempt and then beat us on penalties. Many of our veterans got injured or retired during the season, and players who have been with us for many of the six seasons we have been in existence stepped away from the game. Professional clubs picked up a few, including two of our more prolific strikers, Devon O’Hea and Gurman Sangha. We needed to play kids, literally, with players like 17-year-old midfielder Tristan Otoumagie staking a regular role for themselves on the side. Our coach, Brendan Teeling, had to manage a team going through a generational transition over twelve games in our short and intense season. We held the top spot in the table for most of the season, being pipped only by Altitude and the Whitecaps Academy during a week in which we had games in hand on them. We battled through curses, heartbreak, and a seemingly systemic inability to finish games dating back a couple of seasons. We got a lot of monkeys off our backs last night and saw our team pick themselves up from disappointment and refuse to give in.
And yesterday, we won our second trophy of 2024 and celebrated with many players who have been with us for many years and many who probably played their last games for us yesterday. At the celebration party last night, it was bittersweet thanking and saying goodbye to these players, and exciting to see the young ones clutching their winners’ medals and watching wide-eyed as the veterans of the team heard their songs for the last time and heard some of the stories of what it means to play for this club, Canada’s only supporter owned team, with one of Canada’s most vocal and creative lower-league supporters groups.
When you own a team and are involved in creating the culture and the conditions for people to shine and thrive, whether on or off the pitch, these moments of success are important markers of meaning. They catch and encapsulate the heart of what it means to co-create something, and they mark collective progress in the long development journey. As Colin Elmes, one of our founders, said, “We’re in the relationship business – the soccer just comes along for the ride.“
What we are doing is community.
Trophies aren’t everything, and there are dozens of stories from this season that make me proud to be involved in this club, whether it’s watching our players turn professional or seeing some of our former players like Julia Grosso, Jordyn Huitema and Joel Waterman playing for Canada’s National teams. It could just be getting to witness the inimitable Maddy Mah, a player whose college career was derailed with a concussion before she got to play and who spent three years recovering before finding her mojo again with us last year, board a plane to Toronto to finally start at university and play for the U of T Blues. And it’s about honouring players like Erik Edwardson and Kyle Jones, Ivan Mejia and Gabe Escobar and Justyn Sandhu and Danylo Smychenko, who have been with our team for three years or more, finally savouring the fruits of their work.
These relationships and moments will last a lifetime for all of us, whether we are players, supporters, owners or staff and they give us all a tangible memory of what it means to create community and why it’s important to do so.
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Folks in Mitchell County, North Carolina, working with stories of substance use to discover patterns and generate ideas for supporting folks in active addiction and recovery and prevention.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what participatory leadership really looks like. I use the word a lot in my work – teaching participatory leadership and participatory decision-making – and of course, “participation” is one of the four practices of the Art of Hosting. Hosting meetings and contexts for large-scale work means creating the conditions for participation. And it means learning how to be a good participant.
Words like this are always in danger of being overused, but a couple of moments over the past few weeks has reaffirmed the radical nature of truly participatory design and decision-making.
We have just wrapped up a couple of Art of Hosting Participatory Leadership cohorts with in-person retreats followed by online sessions. For both cohorts – one from a group of 35 senior academic leaders at a large US university and one from a coalition of community health organizations – we did a three-hour online session on participatory decision-making. In both cases, what struck me in discussions with participants is where the heart of participatory decision-making actually lies. It is not enough to be “inclusive” in making decisions. The real work – and the real benefit – comes from an actively participatory process. Inclusion, on the face of it, while worthy in itself, has a kind of passive tone to it. I can say I have included you in a decision, and I can even let you have a vote, but have you participated in the decision? Have you had a chance to co-create what we are deciding upon?
In the right context, participatory decision-making is the most powerful way to create shared ownership over decisions. In this respect, the heart of participation lies not just in having a say in the final stages of a decision but in being a part of developing the proposals being voted upon. I was in North Carolina a few weeks ago working on a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project we’ve been running on substance use and opioids. We collected over 130 stories and, as is a key feature of PNI, ran sessions to bring the community in to make sense of what they were seeing and what needed to happen in their rural counties to address patterns of substance use and support recovery. One circle consisted of folks who were all in recovery or still in active addiction. It was immensely moving to witness them in their power, considering other people’s stories, reflecting on their own stories, and working together to not only generate ideas for local governments and health agencies but actually take the initiative to create spaces for young people to learn about addiction and recovery from those with lived experience. Their feedback was that healing and recovery look like THIS: being active participating members of their societies and communities, and yet that is something that is hardly afforded to anyone, let alone people recovering from addiction.
Perhaps I take it for granted, but on reflection, it seems to me that participation – deep, authentic co-creation – is becoming an increasingly radical act. Where I live, we tend to either consume what is offered to us or are passive participants in the social and cultural dynamics going on around us. What would you say if I ask you where you participate in the world, outside of the decisions you make for your own self or family? How many things do you do where your participation is important to the thing’s success?
Me, I make music, play soccer, help sustain supporter culture at a small semi-professional soccer club, help steward two faith-based communities and participate on teams for teaching and supporting organizations and communities. These are good practices because being a participant in the world is an important capability to keep strong. And if you are someone who hosts or leads participatory spaces and processes, it’s important to know what enables good participation and what it feels like to actively co-create.
But even still, I’m not an active participant in politics, for example, where my participation, such as it is, is minimal and even optional and yet the implications of what happens in the governance arena is deeply influential on my life.
Where are the places we can extend the continuum of participation from engagement to inclusion to participation to co-creation?
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A resource: Sam Kaner et. al. wrote perhaps the finest user guide to this work with the Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision Making. This is a useful and very sparse collection of maps, tools and insights to help facilitators and leaders create the conditions for more and more participation in their work. Sparse is a good thing. The book is full of tools that folks with even a small amount of facilitation experience can put to work. A Fourth Edition of the book is being prepared for the new year.
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In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I -- Adrienne Rich, 1992, hat tip to Jim
My favourite scene from the Life of Brian starts with Brian appearing at a window, trying to get his crowd of misinformed followers to leave him alone. He is, in fact, not the Messiah, and exasperated, he tries to tell them that they have it all wrong.
“You’re all individuals!” he cries, to which the crowd responds, in unison, “Yes! We’re all individuals!”
“You’re all different!” cries Brian. “Yes! We are all different!” the crowd replies again.
And then a single voice, with a slightly melancholy edge, quietly says, “I’m not.”
He is shushed.
This diabolical twisting of the Individual — Collective polarity has been on my mind over the past few years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the briefest moment of hope that the world would suddenly wake up to pulling together and looking after our public good. We created universal basic incomes, which made the most significant difference in poverty alleviation in my lifetime. We undertook mass public health campaigns to keep vulnerable people safe and not allow our medical and health systems to get too overwhelmed. We even briefly saw our planet’s health rebound as cars and airplanes, and industry generally slowed down or stopped, and the skies cleared.
But it wasn’t sustainable. It was a temporary fix to a global problem and didn’t address the underlying causes of poverty, public health crises and climate change. Within a year, we had splintered and fractured. “We lost track of the meaning of we,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in 1992, “we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible.”
I have been on holiday these past two weeks, on Maui, and I’ve had time to read and think and rest. One of the books I took with me is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, a recent book that traces how our attention has been stolen by social media, schooling and the workplace. Deirdre, who recommended it to me at Jessica’s Book Store in Thornbury, Ontario, last month, said it made her quit social media.
The book isn’t entirely about social media – it’s much more extensive than that – but the history of social media’s colonization of our attention forms a big part of the book. Hari traces the rise of surveillance capitalism, delivered through the toxic and amoral algorithms that drive us into deeper and deeper echo chambers at a pace and a way that steals our attention before we are aware of it. The need to keep eyeballs on the app instead of the world around us drives us apart. At one point, he asks the provocative question about why Facebook can’t help us connect physically with friends and like-minded folks nearby so that we can make something together or enjoy an evening together. Why does it not recommend amazing projects and activities we could do with friends? It could easily do all of this. It could quickly help us build community, have a good time together, and make a lasting impact. But it doesn’t, and it won’t because the idea is to keep eyes on the app and keep people out of the physical world, which requires them to put down their phones and play.
Hari traces the origins of the psychology of social media back to the behaviouralist researchers and teachers who taught the cabal of engineer-capitalists that built this world in Silicon Valley. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what is different is that one can see how it works on one’s own mind. It is a chilling read because it lays bare capitalism’s unapologetic agenda that uses everything it can to generate wealth regardless of the impact.
Our attention is a battleground and a landscape that surveillance capitalists will exploit as readily as an oil company will exploit a shale play. The difference is that oil companies are subject to government regulation about what they can and cannot do, and surveillance capitalists are not. There is no environmental protection for the pristine nature of our creative minds. The predators have been given free rein to exploit it all.
The result is that we have become radically disconnected from each other. And the pandemic made it much worse as we retreated into our bubbles and became more reliant on social media for connection while at the same time being fed a steady stream of the stuff that is guaranteed to keep us engaged with apps and not each other. I think I first heard the term “doom scroll” in 2020. I recognize it in myself as the embarrassing desire to read one more stupid thread of misinformed comments. It makes me feel self-righteous. I can take on a few transphobes or racists from the safety of my own house. But that doesn’t make a change in the world. Half the time, I might even be arguing with robots.
But of course, this is precisely the cognitive-chemical loop that creates deep attractor basins that keeps us at home, on our devices, facing a massive barrier of inertia to get up and do something. Hari points out that this is not simply a problem that can be addressed by individual actions and habits, like putting away the phone at night in another room. While those are essential strategies for reclaiming attention, Hari clearly points out how attention-stealing is systemically enabled.
I can feel it in my work with TSS Rovers FC as we build this football club and enlist volunteers, spectators, and fans. To try to make a culture around something positive that requires people to come out and participate is to buck the forces of the entire world of surveillance capitalism that wants us on our phones and not in the stands singing and supporting young men and women, co-creating community, having fun together.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we discussed the crisis of belonging in our world. This has been an important concern in her research and advocacy work over several decades, which has led to all manner of crises, including mental health, development for young people, and our general tenor of social relations at the moment. I think it even contributes to the most significant issues like climate change, which arise from disconnection from each other, our natural world and the community of living things threatened by the actions of our species.
This affects all of us. Our phones and laptops have handy apps that can tell us how much time we spend on our screens, particularly on our social media apps. It is way more than you think. Thinking about places where you spend MORE time than on your social media apps is helpful. To which community do you really belong? WHOSE community do you really belong to? And, do you REALLY belong?
At the moment, I have a few activities outside of work that activates flow in my life: playing music, cooking, volunteering with both TSS Rovers FC and the Rivendell Retreat Centre, writing, gardening, and hanging out with my beloved and my kids. And altogether, I wonder if I STILL spend more time on my phone than doing these things, WHICH GIVE ME JOY. Even as I am typing this, my little tracker tells me that, on holiday, I averaged almost 4 hours of screen time daily.
These past two weeks, combined with Lent, have given me a welcome respite to reconsider my relationship with the thieves of attention who rule my life. Social media is an important part of my life and is probably how you and I are connected.
But Hari points out that the stealing of attention has existential impacts. It might be what prevents us from concentrating enough and spending the time we need together to address and move past existential crises like climate change, populism, and the threat of nuclear war. Suppose we cannot give more time to the collective problems of now because we are instead tilting at the AI-generated windmills of Facebook and Twitter. In that case, we will not be able to find one another, collaborate and perform out of our skins in the service of a viable future for this planet, its creatures, and its people.