THE CASE FOR SHUNNING
So there’s this comic strip called Dilbert that a lot of people used to think was funny—certainly enough to sustain an enormously successful career in the funny pages for its creator, whose name is Scott Adams.
I read Dilbert occasionally back in the day—that is in the 1990s. I thought it was pretty funny, I think. It’s hard to remember.
The Reframe
The Case For ShunningPeople like Scott Adams claim they're being silenced. But what they actually seem to object to is being understood.
The central message of Dilbert is that everybody is stupid except you, if I’m remembering correctly.
It’s a popular message.
Anyway, time passed as time does and before you knew it, it wasn’t the 1990s anymore. Eventually social media happened to us all, and we all got to find out that Dilbert creator Scott Adams is a massive bigot and a reactionary crank.
We've known for at least a decade now that Dilbert creator Scott Adams sure does seem to believe the central message of Dilbert.
He’s very impressed by his own lack of stupidity, and also very impressed by what he perceives as the extreme stupidity of almost everyone else. He’s not impressed by much else. He’s mostly skeptical.
He’s skeptical about the science, for one thing. What science? All of it, as far as I can tell.
He’s skeptical about climate catastrophe, and doesn’t believe it’s caused by human activity, even though we are now in the midst of a rolling series of climate catastrophes.
He’s skeptical about the existence of anti-Black and anti-trans and anti-woman bigotry, even though he has claimed to believe that Black people have a natural lower average IQ than other races, and that women are not as naturally well-suited to technical fields as men, and that atavistic discomfort is a natural and perfectly understandable reaction for a person to have when they see a trans person.
He’s skeptical about the severity of the Covid pandemic, which has claimed millions of lives.
Adams is proudly a skeptic on all of these matters, and as a general rule, which is unsurprising; skepticism is a common posture among those who believe that reality must be mediated through and approved by them in order to be deemed real by the rest of us.
Again, Adams’ authority for positioning himself an arbiter of reality is that he created Dilbert, which looks like it was drawn by a modestly talented 11-year old, and has in recent years incorporated anti-diversity and anti-trans material.