"In February 2023, Dilbert was dropped by numerous newspapers and its distributor, Andrews McMeel Syndication, after Adams published a video in which he referred to black people as a "hate group" and advised white people to "get the hell away from black people." Adams later said this was a use of hyperbole.
On June 28, 2020, Adams said on Twitter that the Dilbert
TV show was cancelled because he was white and UPN had decided to focus
on an African-American audience, and that he had been "discriminated
against".
Adams then relaunched the strip as a webcomic on his locals.com website." Adams has compared women asking for equal pay to children demanding candy. After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams tweeted that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die, or murder their own son. He said his comments were inspired by his own stepson, who became addicted to drugs at the age of 14 and later died of a fentanyl overdose.
Here are a couple of responses to the question, the first by Scott Tow:
That’s a long story I probably wasted too much time following in detail, but maybe if I explain it, I can recover some value for that time spent. I was formerly a happy follower of Dilbert and Adams’s books, several of which I thought genuinely wise. Early in Trump’s campaign in 2015/2016, I’d concluded that Trump was a useless demagogue who wanted power only to benefit himself and his ego, a “leader” who would happily screw over most his followers, since the economic interests of most of us run very counter to the economic interests of the very rich, and the main, real power the president has is to choose which of those interests to favor. It appeared to me that Trump was good at conning his followers into thinking he was on their side, though.
More below.
Still, I understand the dangers of “confirmation bias,” where we as humans tend to notice data that confirms what we already believe, and to rationalize away or just ignore evidence that might change our minds. (Interestingly, Adams discusses this very thing in one or two of his books!) For this reason, I try very hard to actively look for and carefully consider arguments against my beliefs, and I noticed in early 2016 that Adams was blogging that Trump would win the election and that he is a “Master Persuader,” someone super-powered to influence others and change minds, who should not be underestimated. He further argued that this skill would not just win him votes, but would also make him super-competent at accomplishing his will as president. Part of his thesis was that humans are very badly wired by evolution to distinguish truth from fiction, and this makes an emotionally resonant lie much more useful than a complicated, hard-to-follow truth when trying to persuade others (and real truth is usually complicated and harder to follow than lies need be).
OK, so far so good, I could follow his argument and see some truth in it, but hold on, isn’t “Master Persuader” just a nicer way to say “demagogue,” and haven’t pretty much all demagogues who found their way to power turned out to be disastrously bad for their followers, in the end? (Side note: the ability to persuade enough voters to win power does not mean the demagogue will prove effective at conning other leaders, both within their own nation and in other nations - these other leaders, by and large, didn’t rise to power by being suckers.) At this early stage of blogging about the election, Adams was making a big show of being neutral about who would actually be best for the country as president - just making some supposedly disinterested observations about who would prove better at getting votes, and why, as if the moral question of who should be president, for the greater good, was just not that interesting to him. I, and many others commenting on the blog, tried to point out that every bit of Trump’s history cried out that he didn’t give a damn about anyone but himself, and that his interests as a billionaire were vastly in conflict with the interests of 99% of his followers, so it was important to point out that if his powers of persuasion were in fact exceptionally good, this actually made him exceptionally dangerous, because the choice of the next president wasn’t just some fascinating game to follow in the blog, like some entertaining reality show for Adams’s amusement! I also tried point out that, yes, fact is often hard to distinguish from fiction, but when fact really can be distinguished (like where was Obama born), fact is therefore all the more precious, and blatantly and repeatedly lying about it for personal advantage is all the more something that should be called out and condemned.
Unfortunately, while I and many others were calling out for the blog to address reasons why skill as a demagogue should not be amorally praised (comments Adams never addressed), Trump’s followers were lapping up Adams’s message like cream for the cat, and in far larger, self-reinforcing numbers. They were clearly having an absolute blast reading up on how brilliant their guy was, as they read it, just the greatest. As this played out, Adams’s initially non-partisan-seeming, amorally-disinterested-seeming posts began slanting more and more clearly toward pushing Trump’s candidacy, ending with an open endorsement of Trump, blogs which grew progressively more favorable to Trump through the end of the election and after. Following the election, and even more following Trump’s loss in 2020 and Adams’s excuse-making for Trump’s election denial and for January 6, Adam’s content grew progressively more extreme, and he cut out the ability to those who disagreed to even comment. I think it was a classic and tragic case of “Audience Capture”. Every time Adams grew a bit more extreme, so did the audience who still followed him, and that audience kept giving him ever more love the more extreme he grew. What was ever-more-crazy and destructively extreme to the objective world at large felt ever more correct and ever more insightful inside the bubble that Adams built himself. It is a cautionary tale!
And here is a second answer, by Eric Oehler:
He’s always been a weird one. There were seeds of it in the early runs of Dilbert, during it’s 90’s .com-boom heydey. I mean, Dilbert was an engineer during the time when Engineers were the most in-demand profession in the world, and yet somehow he was working for the same boss, with the same coworkers, for the same terrible company, for his entire career. Maybe that was supposed to be some meta-joke about how all companies are the same, or something, but for all his trumpeting of how it was an accurate depiction of the life of an engineer, it…wasn’t.
But whatever. It’s a comic strip and it made boatloads of money by getting taped to every breakroom fridge in the US.
That’s where he started to go off the rails.
Sometime in the late 90’s, he decided that his expertise as a comic strip writer meant he should branch out into other ventures. Okay, fine, lots of authors and cartoonists do that. There was a Doonesbury musical, after all. But his first foray was the absolutely execrable “Dilberitos”, a pre-soylent all-in-one- nutritional lunch product for office workers. He went on media appearances, he got a lot of press for them, they were going to revolutionize food, he announced. Kinda weird thing for a cartoonist to be selling, but sure, let’s give it a try. I hunted those suckers down and oh my god were they bad. They tasted awful, they had…widely-reported (and personally verifiable) unfortunate gastrointestinal side effects, and they simply had no business ever coming to market.
So okay, cartoonist guy isn’t also a food mogul. Big deal.
Next came his philosophy books. He wrote some fictional novellas that were apparenlty going to revolutionize philosophy, in the spirit of Voltaire and Camus. Unfortunately they were pretty much rehashes of basic-level philosophy conundrums and many, many people with anything mroe than a Philo101 education said “hey, wait a minute, this is just all wrong.” So he doubled down and said “yes, but see, the point of the book is to find its flaws!” which is a weird thing to say about a book. And yet his books got hundreds of great reviews on amazon and other book review sites.
Then it came to light that he was sockpuppeting the review sites, posting his own good reviews under different identities.
That’s when the wheels started to come off. It started becoming clear that this guy was deeply convinced of his own genius and would go to great lengths to prove it, even when all evidence was that he was maybe a bit out of his depth. He started showing up places as a political commentator, he had a blog in which he weighed in profoundly on many social and political topics, even when it was deeply clear he hadn’t done any research about said topics. (there are many authors who blog about social issues, however most at least have a minimum background in said issues, or at least hold forth as “my opinion” and not “fundamental truths about the universe.”) Suddenly this guy, who had risen to fame on the back of an amusing cartoon about office life, was presenting himself as the Authority on a Number of Entirely Unrelated Topics. Heck, I even heard him on NPR of all places, weighing in on how Donald Trump only wants you to think he’s a crass, nonintellectual buffoon so he can manipulate us! (Because naturally when I want to know if there is any secret agenda to a politician, I consult a cartoonist/amateur hypnotist).
As time went on he went further and further along this road. It was weird; many cartoonists get famous for their comics and are perfectly content with that (and making money off that); Berke Breathed lives healthily off “Bloom County” residuals and merchandising and hasn’t decided to say anything that may jeopardize his income. Gary Larson made a fortune from The Far Side and went off to a quiet life as a jazz musician. Bill Watterson went into anonymous seclusion after creating possibly the greatest comic strip of all time.
But Adams, the smartest man in the room, as he is so fond of telling us, somehow lacked the insight to realize that his golden goose and primary source of income might be put at risk by courting controversy. Or maybe he overestimated his importance to the multibillion-dollar publishing conglomerates he contracted with - surely “Dilbert” was a cornerstone of the hundreds of millions of dollars Andrews McMeel brought in. Surely his non-Dilbert books were worth more to the $4Bn Penguin publishing empire than a little controversy.
He had to let everyone know his Very Important Opinions. He desperately sought validation that he was smart and important and clever. Slowly, he chipped away at his legacy with increasingly more outlandish statements - but he still managed to avoid total collapse.
Until now.
And now the smartest guy in the universe, the savviest cartoonist and observer of an office culture he hasn’t been a part of for 30+ years, decided that the Hill To Die On was “misinterpreting the results of one leading question in an inconsequential opinion poll” and declaring as a result that fully 14% of the population of his home nation were “a hate group” (it’s a really big leap even if the poll had somehow been accurate) and then advocated for racial segregation. He did display enough self-awareness to realize this was bad for his career - he said as much partway through his rant - but he decided it was too important for him to just…not say those things. The world needed to hear his determinations on race relations in the US based on a single poll (which means he either puts WAY too much stock in opinion polls, or he held a lot of these views before but hadn’t found a sufficient enough source to back up his biases before he would publicly articulate them).
So he set his career, legacy, and all his current and many of his future business dealings on fire because he decided his deep expertise on racial politics needed to be heard.
Of course, he’s rich enough that he could live comfortably for a few more lifetimes, so maybe he decided if he was going to retire, he should go out with a bang. Or maybe he wanted a career change to become a talking head on NewsMax and thought this was the best way to do it.
So what’s going on with Scott Adams is that he seems to be a guy in deep need of validation as a Very Smart Expert in everything he attempts. He’s a guy who got some pretty significant success and parlayed it into decades of hubris. He’s a slow-moving car crash of narcissistic self-destruction - we could all see this coming, we all knew it was going to end like this, but we couldn’t stop it and we couldn’t look away.
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