Scott Adams and The Tragedy of Never being Told You Are Wrong

I liked the late Scott Adams for quite a while.

When he started, his comic was refreshing and somewhat creative. Nothing he did was earth shattering, but he spoke to the banal stupidity of corporate life, and life in general. The simplicity of the art helped the humor, and the humor was usually amusing and occasionally insightful. I am told by comics people I know that the pattern of setup-joke-comment-on-the-joke-that-was-often-funnier-than-the-joke was, if not invented by him, perfected by him and a real influence on others work. The first book he wrote was largely about the value of employees and how you should treat them well if you wanted to really succeed. Unfortunately, this was not the Scott Adams that most of us knew by the time of his death.

By the time of his death, Adams had gone extremely far right. But he had done so in an odd fashion. He didn’t just like Trump, he was one of the first to go full sycophant — claiming that Trump would win because he was the greatest persuader in the history of language. And then he got progressively more and more racist until at last he was dropped by his syndicate. Some of this was always present in his personality. The book I mentioned above ended with detailed advice on how to use visualization to manifest your dreams in the real world. And he was always prickly about criticism. But I think the larger problem is that he stopped having his ideas challenged.

Adams, as he became more financially successful, was able to quit his office job and do his cartooning full-time. He lost, then, one source of people standing up to him, one source of people who were willing to challenge him. One source of the most basic of requirements to remain fully sane as a human being — being forced to interact with people who think differently than you do. As he drifted right, he appeared to become more and more enmeshed in the right wing media environment. In that environment, his ideas would have been celebrated and reinforced, and counters to his ideas would have been dismissed and ridiculed. I do not think it a coincidence that he became more extreme during a period when right wing media and the internet made it possible to never hear that his beliefs or ideas were not popular, much less wrong. As just one example, people who watch Fox has less of a factual grip on the world than people who use other news sources.

The single most important factor required to be a fully paid up member of the human race is someone regularly telling you that what you just said is the dumbest fscking thing they have ever heard. Human beings are not meant to have no pushback to their ideas and beliefs. We are suckers for flattery, designed, it seems, to trust ourselves and our own impression much more than is helpful. This kind of functional idiocy is the scourge of the rich and powerful. Elon Musk, before he became too rich and powerful to stand up to, used to be a fairly normal business person. Now he appears to be a megalomanic. Adams appears to have gone down a similar, if less flamboyant, path. He turned from a normal comic, with sympathies toward working people, who was sometimes insightful to a hateful shadow of himself, both morally and intellectually. The seeds were likely always there, but there were never weeded out by the gardeners of humanity — people telling you that you are being an ass.

Inevitably, someone is going to claim that the left has their own bubbles. This is not really true. As a liberal, you are surrounded by algorithms that feed you right wing content and news sources that constantly downplay Medicare for all, as if that wasn’t Tuesday in the rest of the world. It is possible, of course, to end up in a complete leftist bubble, but it is much, much harder and than if you are a conservative. If you are a conservative, there exists an entire constellation of news sources dedicated to flattering your view of the world. And even outside that bubble, conservatives ideas are generally treated at least as well, and often with more respect, than leftist ideas. No one asks how tax cuts are to be paid for, or points out that Trump is sundowning, or castigates people for insulting urban dwellers. As a conservative, it is much easier to go through life with your core beliefs unchallenged, with no one to point out, however gently, that you might not be correct.

And it is going to get worse. Chatbots can appear convincingly like a human being in conversations. And at least some of the companies have programmed their bots to be sycophantic, to keep people coming back. This, unsurprisingly, has lead to people losing touch with reality. Worse, these bots have encouraged and helped people to commit suicide. Chatbots now have a body count. And while this psychosis is not unique to conservatives, it is one more venue for people to avoid having to deal with their own imperfections, one more route for the unhealthy confirmation of your own biases.

This obviously has political implications — sooner or later, reality does intrude. But this is larger than politics. Human beings need correction. We need someone to tell us when we are being stupid. Unfortunately, one half of our politics seems dedicated to creating an impenetrable bubble, and our tech overlords are designing machines that flatter us no matter how stupid or self-harming we are being.

Scott Adams, when he lived a life that contained that correction, was a popular, successful cartoonist that most people enjoyed. When he lost that correction, when there was no one to tell him to stop being stupid, he ended his life hated by the majority of the country, lost in the swamps of his own self-delusions. We need to stop building worlds in which that transformation not only can happen, but is encouraged and cheered on.