“I have an extra Dilbert tie if any of you would like to trade.” – Mission Hill
People often hold “celebrations of life” for someone after they died. I think that’s a shame, really. I get it – you don’t want to hold the funeral for someone who is sitting right there. Besides, when I die, if anyone shows up at the funeral, it will probably be to make sure I’m dead.
I’d hate to rob them of that opportunity.
However, The Mrs. indicates that eulogy is the wrong word, since tribute would be better. I’ll contest that at least one online source that I edited indicates that a eulogy is usually for someone who recently died, so I’m technically correct, which we all know is the best kind of correct, right?
Regardless, I think it’s fitting to spend some time talking about Scott Adams since he has announced he’s dying. Whereas with a relative it would be weird to talk about them getting ready to leap off the mortal coil while they have a heart beat and are still in the room, I think Mr. Adams might appreciate it.
One of the first Dilbert® strips.
The first time I ever saw Dilbert™ was on office samizdat. Samizdat is the name for the literature that was copied on the sly in Russia during the Cold War. It was literature that was politically incorrect and thus officially banned. I’m pretty sure HR didn’t want us to see what Wile E. Coyote® really wanted to do to the Roadrunner© while we were on company time.
Certainly, Dilbert© wasn’t banned, it also wasn’t in the local newspaper. So, we huddled around the grainy photocopied versions. And laughed.
Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert™, and is one of the greatest cartoonists of all time. His humor is outstanding, and his satire is still spot on.
Scott became a one-man cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s, and forged a national audience with his wit. He had an amazing publishing career as well – he had New York Times© national bestsellers, back when that sort of thing was meaningful.
And the marketing! Watches. Plush toys. Shirts. Calendars. You name it, if it could fit on a cubical drone’s desk, the marketing team around Mr. Adams sold it. And then they moved on to TV, to an unfortunate network that didn’t have the audience that Scott deserved.
That was okay. The Universe was treating Scott just fine.
Speaking of that, Scott was the first place I became familiar with affirmations. He’d write down what his goal was 15 times each day. And then? His goal would be met. I’ve even written about that here.
Now, there are two ways to look at this: first, Mr. Adams just bent the Universe to his will, or second, the very act of creating the affirmation made him look at the world and look for places where he could bring his goal into existence. Regardless, like most things, it worked out pretty well for him: I imagine that the last time he had money issues was back in 1997, and that’s a pretty good run.
Does that mean he always won? No. Very few people remember (thankfully) the Dilberito© which I believe was judged to be a war crime when they tried to feed the remaining stock to the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
But that was just his first act. His second was more profound. Having had success with the media, he moved on to philosophy, and his biggest book along that line is probably How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big, which I’ve written about as well. Great ideas, and presented well.
In the mid-2010s, he moved into P&P: podcasting and politics. His prediction of Donald Trump’s victory was early, and his support of Donald Trump cost Mr. Adams a lot of money. I’m not sure he cared, since by that time he had multi-generational FU money.
The phrase “Fine People Hoax”? That’s the work of Mr. Adams.
I was a regular listener of Mr. Adams podcasts. I missed his blog, which I enjoyed more, but his podcasting style was engaging as well. Coffee with Scott Adams was a regular for me when I used to hit the gym at lunch, and became a once in a while treat for those days I had road miles ahead of me for work. Since 2021, not so much, but mainly due to time constraints.
What I enjoyed the most about Adams was his ability to consistently look at the world from multiple viewpoints, and set up different frames of reference. Some of them had already occurred to me, but many hadn’t. For a person who likes ideas as much as I do, it was always fun to get a fresh perspective so different from the rest of the world.
Was he always right?
Certainly not. His predictions about the Vaxx™ were quite off, but to be fair, he did admit that he had been wrong when evidence proved that to be the case. It wasn’t personal. It was factual.
Then, there was his third act, which I’m betting happened around the time he knew his days were numbered in triple digits counting downwards. That is, of course, on his Coffee with Scott Adams podcast on February 22, 2023 when Adams discussed the result of a survey where many black Americans indicated that they didn’t like white people so much. Adams famously stated: “If nearly half of all blacks are not ok with white people, that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
People called that racist. The backlash was immediate. His comic strip was cancelled. His books were cancelled and the rights reverted to him. All of the merch? Cancelled.
(FYI, if you try to buy his stuff “new” on Amazon™ today, it’s almost certain that it is being sold by vultures who are selling unauthorized versions.)
Result? He could draw what he wanted to draw.
Dilbert® Reborn™
I am certain that Mr. Adams knew what he was doing, and, oddly, that just might be saving black Americans. Mr. Adams had always been very accommodating and supportive of black American. I think, however, post George Floyd, he realized what was happening, and realized a reckoning against black Americans was rapidly coming.
By taking the bold step to criticize black opinion about whites at a time when whites had just had the biggest outpouring of sympathy in history towards blacks, he was signaling to blacks: you can’t act like violent, entitled, spoiled people, nor can you support your racial brethren when they act like that.
Even now, the backlash against the worst of black behavior is growing due to the ubiquity of body cams and uncensored streams.
And that’s okay, because the behavior has to change. I’m pretty sure that everyone, even blacks, are tired of the nonsense.
Yet, the narrative since 1965 has been “there must be a cause and we have to fix the cause and everything will be fine.” That’s been sixty years. If the root cause hasn’t been fixed over three generations, it hasn’t been found or the actions to fix it have made it worse.
And absolutely no one in the mainstream would admit it or even talk about it.
Until Adams spoke.
Now?
There is a realization that behavior simply has to stop. People don’t care why anymore. It’s not about root causes, it’s about swift, certain, and severe justice and the outrage when that’s short-circuited.
The irony is that with comments that got Adams cancelled as a racist, he may have saved many blacks.
It’s too early to tell. The backlash is large, and growing, and people are talking about it in the open, which in the end is the only way to solve a problem. You don’t solve the problems of an alcoholic by getting them more vodka, and you don’t solve the problems of a brat by giving in to them when they throw an antisocial tantrum.
And if you subsidize poverty and single motherhood, you just get more of it.
Does he have another act?
Does he need one? He has entertained, he has been a fountain of ideas, and he has helped shape what is perhaps the most crucial social narrative of our time in the most crucial manner.
Regardless, Mr. Adams has my respect, and I wish him the very best in his last days. If he reads this, I hope that he knows that I am certainly celebrating his life.
He will be missed.
My FIL died a year ago from the same turbo prostate cancer that Biden and Adams have contracted. He was diagnosed with a benign growth in 2021, but it went from “nothing to be concerned about” to stage 4 cancer that had also metastasized into the bone in a little over 2 years. His urologist told my wife that it was vaxx-induced turbo cancer and that he’d been seeing a lot of new and rapidly growing cancers (but he couldn’t officially say it was vaxx related due to pressures from the hospital).
My sympathies to Scott and his family as I know first hand what he is going through (the cancer metastasizing into bone is extremely painful). I have always enjoyed Dilbert because he captured the quirkiness of what it is like to be an engineer in a large dysfunctional corporation. Friends that worked in small offices didn’t get the cartoon because they couldn’t fathom that so much corporate dysfunction could actually exist.
I’ll never forget one particular strip where the boss made the engineers chain their laptops to their desks to prevent theft. It seemed way over the top even by Dilbert standards, as no company would do something this stupid……About a month later we got new locking cables sent to us by our management….
J-Bird
I worked in higher ed for 3 decades. The strip always made perfect sense to me.
Yes – he absolutely nailed the paradox of large corporations. Having spent decades at them, it never ceases to amaze me how common stupidity is.
Hopefully he goes to Heaven. If not, then he’ll be with Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light and his infamous giant spoon. I say goodbye with a phrase from Dogbert…Keegah! Bundalo!
Perfectly said.
I wasn’t ever much of a Scott Adams fan until he said the Naughty Thing but he seems to be approaching his impeding death with as much grace as anyone can. From his video it sounds like he intends to seek to end his life before the cancer causes him to waste away and I can’t begrudge him that. He was a rather unique and singular voice in America and even while I sometimes disagreed with him I respect someone who holds his own positions.
He’d admit he wasn’t always right, and but he thought differently, and we need more of that. He was *not* an NPC.
Dilbert was a favorite among the software developers at DEC. At least once (in the late DEC phase where Ken Olsen had left the building but all was not quite catastrophe) there was a move to shut some of DEC/Digital’s more ancient buildings down. However planning was poor (as it often was post KO) and no one realized that it meant moving people to the buildings we were keeping, some of which were pretty darn full. The solution to this was to go from 10X10 cubicles to 8×8 cubicles, which added about 20% to the numbers of offices. This process was named Densification by the powers that be and this got out to Mr. Adams (c.f. https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=SDN19960915-01.2.52&e=——-en-20–1–img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA——–0—— I think he had pipelines into most of the high tech world). When it came for cubicles to be densified at the Spitbrook Road sites in New Hampshires some wags were playfully hanging the densification strip amongst the other flotsam and jetsam of the cubes, No one went so far as to create a head cubicle.
Good Luck Mr. Adams you will be sorely missed. May your passing be an easy one.
Anybody who is getting an error when trying to access the Dilbert strip should truncate the URL starting with “%e=”.
Agreed 100%. I went through cubicles and “open office”, which was somehow worse.
I subscribe to “Dilbert Reborn” and look forward to it daily. His current thread is that the dinosaurs built the pyramids, but he’s mostly focused on sarcasm on PC in the corporate world.
Met him back in 1995 or so, when he spoke at the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. He was introduced as some marketing wizard, wearing a wig. After a minute or so mumbling mumbo-jumbo, he took the wig off and said, “Sorry, I’m just Scott Adams, a bad cartoonist”. The room erupted in laughter.
Hopefully he’s done enough new cartoons to carry on after he’s not able to write.
Don’t know about his backlog, but there will never, ever be enough Dilbert in the world.
It will be interesting to compare and contrast the national reaction (at least, that which the media chooses to present) when both Scott Adams and ex-pResident Poopypants shuffle off this mortal coil from, coincidentally, the same final indignity. I think it is safe to say that one will be deified and the other vilified. Few on /our side/ will openly delight in the passing of Biden (though I’m sure I won’t be the only one whooping it up) whereas the liberal left will demonize Scott Adams like some KKK Grand Wizard, in the most graphic terms. They may even try to meme.
Scott is a national treasure, but even more than his art, I am impressed by his courage. This enormously high-profile figure stuck out his neck and willingly took one for the team. His was no unintentional gaffe. And he remains utterly unrepentant. What did that cost him? Millions? Perhaps billions? Obviously, his convictions are worth more to him than money or status. I admire the hell out of the guy, and only wish that I could be so fearless and bold, myself.
They won’t let go and leave him alone, even in death. Of this you may be certain. Should sanity one day return after its long siesta, you will know that we’ve truly exited the nightmare when Dilbert is restored to its rightful place in the pantheon of iconic and transformative comic strips, alongside Peanuts, and Pogo and Calvin and Hobbes.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think the left will demonize Adams. Black fatigue is becoming a very real issue and many people are starting to come around to the fact that Scott was right to call it out. Also, let’s face it, the liberal left is mostly made up of “educated” white woman who don’t read Dilbert and wouldn’t understand the humor even if they did. So unless Scott has run cartoons in Cosmo, I doubt these liberals will even know who he is.
Anon-
We spend 50% of our time on a Sea Island outside of Beaufort, SC, a town that depends on tourism, as does the rest of Beaufort County, which includes HHI/Bluffton. Soooo…
This is a big tourism weekend. Guess what? The local coloreds always have a Gullah Festival way out on St. Helena Island, 10+ min. from our small, 8 block downtown in early June. The city council asked them to hold it in our waterfront park this year (changing the dates to this weekend), and every merchant & restaurant owner is LIVID. They have taken over 100+ parking spaces in the Marina Parking Lot. The waterfront park is fenced off.
We will be inundated with riff-raff all weekend that will spend nothing in our high end “shoppes” (they are expensive). Boom-Box music all weekend. No parking within a quarter mile for restaurants. What this trash will eat is at the food wagons in the park. Our Mayor owns a restaurant, and he spearheaded this. Don’t eat at “Panini’s” ever again. We won’t.
We came down today for a pleasant weekend. We’re headed back to Charleston tomorrow AM to the condo. Found out Winchester 97 is playing at the Charleston Music Hall tomorrow at 8 and snagged tix.
Black Fatigue, in spades (pun intended).
It cost him millions, but they would have done him no good. I think he knew what was coming.
In today’s Washington Post, Megan McArdle wrote that she withheld her judgement that Joe Biden was becoming unfit for the Presidency because she was afraid of being judged “ageist”. The era of ignoring the plain truth to avoid being criticized as “ageist” or “racist” or “sexist” or “anti-Semitic” or “conspiracy theorist” is over. Scott Adams knew it, and showed us how to approach the truth.
For too long, too many people been reasoning from a logical fallacy: When “A implies B, B implies A”. For example, we can all agree that “If I were ageist, I would complain about Joe Biden’s frailty.” Abstractly, “Ageist implies Complaints”. As it happens, I complain about Joe Biden’s frailty. (There exists “B”.) Does that imply that I am “Ageist”? Of course not. (However, it does allow the possibility that I am ageist, but it is not proof.) Another example, less inflammatory: “if I eat a pizza at 6 PM, I will not be hungry at 7 PM”. Pizza implies not-hungry. But if I’m not hungry at 7 PM, I could have eaten chicken, steak, or just about anything. “Not-hungry does not imply Pizza.” See Wikipedia: “Affirming the Consequent”.
Lathechuck
They’re contorting themselves to avoid saying, “I lied.”
This is a worthy tribute/eulogy and could be perfected only by removing those superfluous (and indeed mistaken) trademark and copyright symbols.
Margaret, it’s sort of a parody of consumerist culture. I do it so often I almost do it at work.
Thank you for your kind words.
I also didn’t always agree with Mr. Adams, but I always thought him worth listening to. He’s one of the good guys, and this world needs all the good guys we can get.
He pulled his weight.
Well timed and well said. Is there a word or phrase to describe people like him? Influential while being ignored in the mainstream. Well known but not (or are no longer) celebrities. Their ideas are everywhere, often unattributed. They were right, but early (translates to wrong). Scott, Charles Murray, Mark Steyn… Schrodinger’s people?
Aptly named. How about The Bulwark?
In the before times, there were two types of prostate cancer. (95%) The kind that would maybe kill you if you lived to 120. (5%) The kind that would kill you in less than 6 months.
And now the turbo kind.
Ivermectin kills prostate cancer. Someone tell him.
Mr. Adams made a point, during his announcement, of stating that he had already tried ivermectin (with the blessing of his MD, who said “you’ve got nothing to lose”) and that it had not worked for him. He didn’t say this to shoot down ivermectin trials, but simply so that he would not be snowed under with suggestions to try it.
He’s tried it.