Dodgeball Ethics: What Childhood Games Teach Us About Power, Strategy, and Work

The Recess Game That Taught Me About Power

My favorite recess game as an elementary student was dodgeball.

I know it is restricted now in many places, and for good reason. Yet, for me, dodgeball was my Sandlot. It was my childhood sanctuary at 10:17 a.m., the narrow stretch of freedom between the classroom door and the asphalt court.

There was a game of thrones nature to it, of course. A socially sanctioned little kingdom. The captains stood out front with the inherited brutality of monarchs. One by one, they chose. I was usually chosen last. Not occasionally. Consistently. Reliably. Publicly. The kind of last that teaches a child something before language does. You are outside the circle. Then the game would begin. And much of the time, I would prove them wrong.

I was small, but I was observant. I learned angles. I learned timing. I learned who threw hard but without precision. I learned who panicked when rushed. I learned who needed the satisfaction of a dramatic hit and could therefore be baited into wasting the ball.

I learned the strange intelligence of being underestimated. And in our schoolyard rules, the winner became captain for the next game. Which meant that sometimes the child chosen last became the one who chose. And of course, I chose the first captain last. I wish I could tell you this was justice. At the time, it felt like justice. It felt clean, moral, like the world had briefly corrected itself. Only later did I understand that I had not escaped the game. I had simply been given a turn at its center.

Adult Systems Still Play Childhood Games

This is one of the quiet humiliations of growing up: realizing how many of our adult systems are just childhood games with better vocabulary.

You get a master’s degree in psychology. You become a licensed mental health therapist. You start a company. You build it on values and ethics and care. You imagine a business can be an organism of repair. You believe, perhaps naïvely, that if you tell the truth clearly enough, build carefully enough, and serve people sincerely enough, the work will speak. Then the adult world begins to teach you its recess rules. What adults call, “the status quo.”

You watch competitors lift the language from your website. You watch them study your positioning, borrow your softness, mimic your values, and run ads so that when someone searches your name, their name appears first.

You watch the market reward whoever learns fastest how to approach the line without appearing to cross it. This is “how the game is played.”

Whoever finds the hack. Whoever figures out how to sound ethical without being slowed down by ethics. Whoever contributes the least while becoming fluent in the performance of importance. Eventually, if you are paying attention, you have the obvious and devastating realization: Much of late-stage capitalism is governed by dodgeball ethics.

What Are Dodgeball Ethics?

Not childhood dodgeball as play. Not the joy of running, laughing, dodging, sweating, belonging to a field for twenty minutes. I mean the deeper rule beneath the game. Someone must be targeted. Someone must be eliminated. Someone must win by making someone else sit down. Once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere. In business, politics, law, media, in the way people talk about strategy, disruption, growth, dominance, market capture, competitive advantage, and winning. The language becomes more sophisticated, but the nervous system remains the same. Pick a side. Find the weakness. Control the narrative. Move faster than conscience. Make someone else sit down.

Strategy Without Wisdom Becomes Predation

This is why so many modern institutions feel less like communities and more like courts. The courtroom may be the purest adult expression of dodgeball ethics. There is a team. There is a strategy. There is a clock. There is language. There is a field of play. There are rules everyone pretends are neutral.

The attorney’s job is not always to tell the whole truth. The attorney’s job is often to help the client win. Then, once a culture organizes itself around winning, everything else becomes negotiable.

Narrative becomes negotiable, ethics, harm, even truth.

“They played chess,” people say.

“You have to give them credit. They saw the board before anyone else could name the pieces.”

But did they? Or did they simply play dodgeball with better vocabulary?

The Difference Between Strategy and Wisdom

This is where our culture loses its mind.

We mistake domination for intelligence, legality for morality, speed for vision, extraction for leadership, and the ability to win inside a broken game for proof that the game should continue. But there is a difference between strategy and wisdom.

Strategy asks: How do I win?

Wisdom asks: What does winning cost?

Strategy studies the negative space between the rules. Wisdom studies the single mother at the fluorescent benefits office, standing beneath bad lighting with her children beside her, plexiglass between her and the person paid to say no.

Strategy asks: Is this prohibited yet?

Wisdom asks: Allowed by whom, and at whose expense?

Strategy can optimize a system without ever becoming morally responsible for what the system produces. Wisdom cannot. That is the difference.

The Defining Question for the Future of Work

This may be one of the defining questions of the next era of work, technology, politics, law, and entrepreneurship.

Not whether we can move faster, outmaneuver the competition, dominate search results, markets, narratives, elections, courts, or consciousness itself. The question is whether our moral development can keep pace with our strategic development. Because strategy without moral development becomes predation with a dashboard. It becomes extraction with a brand guide, cruelty with legal review, dodgeball played by adults who have forgotten they are still children throwing at the exposed parts of one another.

Why Ethical People Burn Out in Business

Perhaps this is why so many ethical people burn out in business.

Not because we lack discipline, are naïve, or bad at competition.

But because we enter the marketplace believing we are building a future, only to discover that many people are still playing elimination games, especially those who have been rewarded for calling elimination leadership.

Even that may be too simple. Because the painful part is not only that there are unethical people doing unethical things. That would be easier to name. Easier to resist. Easier to organize around.

The more disorienting truth is that most systems are not filled with villains. They are filled with people making small negotiations with conscience under conditions that reward them for doing so. People can be kind to their children and ruthless to their competitors. Generous to their friends and extractive toward strangers. Sincere in their stated values and evasive in the places where those values would cost them something.

They can believe in fairness while benefiting from opacity, speak beautifully about care while outsourcing the consequences of their ambition, call themselves mission-driven while quietly learning which harms are permissible because they are common, legal, deniable, or difficult to prove. That is what makes the game so spiritually exhausting. Not simply that it is hard or competitive. It asks you, over and over again, to metabolize contradiction.

It asks you to keep working alongside people who use the language of care without submitting to the discipline of care, to become less sensitive to consequence, to confuse numbness with maturity, to treat language as a weapon before treating it as a covenant, to see other people as obstacles, markets, threats, avatars, liabilities, or opportunities before seeing them as whole. Perhaps most dangerously, it asks you to participate just enough that you can no longer tell whether you are resisting the game or becoming good at it.

This is where ethical burnout becomes more than exhaustion. It becomes moral injury. It is the fatigue of watching truth become negotiable, the loneliness of noticing what others have trained themselves not to notice, the grief of realizing that many institutions do not require people to abandon their values all at once. They only require them to make one exception at a time. One softened sentence. One strategic omission. One borrowed phrase. One delayed paym

ent. One convenient ambiguity. One harm reframed as growth. One person made smaller so the story can remain clean. Eventually, the soul begins to understand what the résumé cannot admit:

The problem is not that ethical people are insufficiently strategic. The problem is that much of what our culture calls strategy is underdeveloped wisdom, and when underdeveloped wisdom is rewarded long enough, it begins to call itself leadership.

Building Beyond Dodgeball Ethics

The goal is not to become better at dodgeball ethics. The goal is to build something beyond them. Companies where language is not stolen but sourced, strategy does not require spiritual numbness, legal compliance is the floor, not the ceiling, intelligence remains married to conscience, speed does not outrun responsibility, competition does not require dehumanization, and winning is not measured only by who is left standing. Because winning cannot only mean survival at someone else’s expense. It has to be measured by what remains intact when the game is over.

Trust. Dignity. Community. Connection. The commons. The future.

What Are Our Games Training Us to Become?

This does not mean competition is always bad. Some competition sharpens us. Some games teach courage, coordination, humility, and movement. Some forms of pressure reveal capacities we did not know we had.

The problem was never play, ambition, or the desire to become excellent. The problem is what happens when a culture forgets to ask what its games are training people to become. Some games prepare us for courage. Some prepare us for cruelty. Some teach us how to move. Some teach us who to target.

Now I see dodgeball taught me about power. Who it trained me to notice. Who it trained me to eliminate. Who it trained me to become when I finally got the ball.

After the Game Is Over

I still remember the feeling of being chosen last. I also remember the feeling of choosing last. The second memory may be the more important one. The first taught me about exclusion, but the second taught me how easily pain imitates justice when it finally gets power.

That is the lesson I trust now. Not that I was wrong to want repair, or that I was wrong to want the game corrected.

The future cannot be built by simply reversing the order of harm, and the future has to ask a deeper question.

How do adults hold power once they understand childish games?