Scott Adams: Tracing the Decline (2 of 3)

From idiology to ideology.

Continued from here.

The smartest thing Scott Adams ever wrote was in his first nonfiction book, The Dilbert Principle.

People are idiots. Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with the low SAT scores. The only difference is that we’re idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot…Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

I think many people read these words and cut Adams a lot of slack afterward. I sure did. How charming it was for this cartooning icon to admit his own ignorance! And he was right: the overcomplicated, specialized world of today makes fools of us all.

We should, perhaps, have paid more attention to what he said a few pages later:

I’m a trained hypnotist. Years ago, I took a class to learn how to hypnotize people. As a byproduct of this training, I learned that people are mindless, irrational, easily manipulated dolts. (I think I paid $500 to learn that.)

This is bad science. If we’re to trust this anecdote, Adams drew his conclusions about humanity from people who agreed to be hypnotized. That’s a non-representative sample. Late in life, Sigmund Freud admitted many of his conclusions were suspect because of such sampling bias.

Adams has yet to do so. He claims the hypnosis class changed his views on humanity. More likely, I think, is that he cherry-picked its information, freeing himself to believe things he already wanted to believe. After all, he says that’s what we all do.

Adams has used his “trained hypnotist” status to bolster his authority throughout his career. But what’s his experience? Has he actually hypnotized anyone? I looked that up, and all I could find was an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show in which he appeared to hypnotize Carlson—not the most trustworthy subject.

Adams doesn’t cite sources, claiming only “hypnotists believe” or “hypnotists know” this or that, based on a course we can’t even prove he actually took.

In fact, Adams doesn’t seem to believe trustworthy sources exist. This partly explains why he used Rasmussen, a notoriously untrustworthy pollster, to “inform” the YouTube rant that inflamed racial tensions and cost him his newspaper audience. If you believe all sources are bull, then one’s as good as another.

Adams may have been taken in by the Rasmussen poll himself. Or he may have used its misinformation to rile up his audience, under the pretext of proving how bad polling can be. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.

Ironically, the best proof Adams understands hypnosis is that he’s hypnotized a lot of people into trusting his views by repeating “I’m a trained hypnotist, I’m a trained hypnotist, I’m a trained hypnotist” over and over and over.

That said, he did have worthwhile observations. It’s true we’re often irrational. Intuition, emotions, lazy fallacies, and mental inertia can all disguise themselves as reason. We do often make up our minds first and find reasons to justify our decisions afterward. The rules that inform our thinking are generalizations, and almost any generalization has its hidden flaw.

So which was the real Scott Adams? The self-admitted idiot, studying how dumb we all can be, from the bosses with bad hair to the peons under them? Or the self-described master hypnotist, a con man packaging misanthropy as wisdom? Was he Dilbert the office drone or Dogbert the ruthless profiteer?

For a time, I think, he was both. His novels on religion (God’s Debris, The Religion War) betrayed some arrogance about the sheeple. But his early non-business nonfiction still showed a lot of humility about his own life, in its content and in its titles (Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! and How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big).

But in 2015, “Humble Adams” began to disappear and “Hypnotist Adams” became dominant. Adams started getting drawn to another cynic associated with the letter D, a boss with bad hair who also thought people were idiots—Donald Trump.

Adams was one of the few who foresaw Trump’s election from the start of his campaign. He was perceptive about Trump’s persuasive techniques, which won him praise from both the Trump-worshipping right and the more analytical left. But as Trump’s star rose, Adams shifted from assessment into fannish imitation.

And humility, you may recall, isn’t really Donald Trump’s thing.

Adams released two books with titles that nodded to Trump’s language, Win Bigly and Loserthink. And Adams’ tack toward the radical right continued even after Trump left office. Consider this 2023 strip.

If you don’t believe climate change is a lie whispered to us by the news updates on our phones, then not only is the strip not funny, it doesn’t even make sense.

Some observers thought this was a case of Adams the so-called hypnotist hypnotizing himself, and that he now believed Trump was not only a great persuader but a great all-around thinker. Others thought it was a more mercenary decision, a stab at continued relevance, and that Adams had taken to lying about his beliefs, in hopes that hardcore Trump fans would become hardcore fans of his.

Which theory is true? It’s tempting to think both are a little true. But in the end…

It really doesn’t matter.

Next: How to destroy a legacy.