Scott Adams and Philosophy

by Daniel Yim

  1 With a few slight differences, this chapter was posted on the London Libertarian blog (http://blog.la-articles.org.uk) on 22nd February 2018.

  II

  Comic-Strip Kafka

  4

  Scoundrels, the Lot of Us

  JOHN V. KARAVITIS

  In 2016, four out of five Americans worked in the service sector. I believe that this goes a long way toward explaining the popularity of Dilbert, the American comic strip created by Scott Adams.

  Dilbert uses satire to criticize a work environment that many Americans experience daily. Readers relate to what the characters experience and say about America’s “white-collar” workplace and the bizarre and oftentimes counter-productive attitudes, behaviors, and thoughts of both managers and employees.

  Working in an office can be very stressful. For those of us who struggle in this world, we don’t just “work in an office.” We find ourselves constantly dealing with people whom we didn’t choose to spend an entire day with, day after day, for an indeterminate future. We spend our workdays trying to solve problems while at the same time dealing with office politics and the “crazy” of everyone else. (It’s always everyone else who’s crazy, of course.) And although it may not seem so at first glance, a satirical comic strip like Dilbert—because it deals with people and life—has plenty of philosophy lurking in the background.

  I Said; You Said; But What We Really Meant . . .

  The first thing you notice in a Dilbert comic strip is its format. Typically, there are three separate drawings, or “panels,” that present a quick verbal exchange either between a manager and an employee, or between employees. A statement is made in each panel, and the result is that the reader experiences a verbal exchange that is satirical in nature.

  But that’s a simplistic look at the surface. If you look more deeply into the verbal exchange, you will realize that a pattern exists. The first panel has a statement that expresses a position. The second panel has a statement that in some sense counters this position, either by rejecting it outright or by pointing out an exception to it. The second panel is a reaction to the first panel. The third panel resolves the first two panels, bringing them into harmony by showing that they are both consequences of a greater truth.

  This careful analysis may seem pedantic for something as simple as a satirical comic strip. But, given the way I’ve dissected the panels, and established the relationship among them, it’s clear that there is an overall structure to Dilbert.

  Let’s call the first panel the “thesis.” The second panel is counter to the first panel, so let’s call that panel the “antithesis.” Since the third panel takes both preceding panels and explains any apparent contradiction, let’s call the third panel the “synthesis.” This synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis is itself a new idea that reveals a deeper truth about the world. It does this by acknowledging and integrating both the thesis and the antithesis. If you really want to get philosophical about it, the flow of the statements made in the three panels reveals itself to be a Hegelian dialectic.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a German philosopher who sought to create a complete system of philosophy. The goal of this system was to provide an objective view of reality. One of the ideas within Hegel’s philosophy was that the world was continually and inexorably moving toward what he termed “absolute truth.” Hegel believed that, at any given point in time, the world had within it the seeds of its own destruction. This destruction would lead to a new, better world.

  In fact, all of history could be looked at as the story of the world moving toward a final, absolute truth—a best of all possible worlds. The world as it is now represents a thesis. The seeds of the world’s destruction—which are the contradictions that are a part of the world as it is now—form the antithesis. The consensus that results from the interaction between the two is a synthesis—a new world that replaces the old.

  Adams probably didn’t plan this at the outset. I mean, the dialectic really is a common way that people talk about things, isn’t it? Someone states a position about a topic. Someone else either counters this position or highlights an exception to it. And then, a new idea is eventually arrived at that brings the two opposing positions into harmony. This new idea leads us to a deeper appreciation of how the world works. You see? There is philosophy in Dilbert! You just have to dig a little to find it.

  It’s the dialectic that makes philosophy a search for the truth. Adams may have inadvertently turned millions of Americans into cubicle-dwelling, deskbound philosophers! But for now, we’ve really only just scratched the surface of the typical Dilbert comic strip. Can we dig deeper? Surely the structure supports something more . . . philosophical!

  Don’t Make Me Think! I Just Want to Laugh!

  You may be wondering if there’s really any point to what I’ve just said, and there is. Dilbert’s structure supports the message presented in the verbal exchanges between the characters. When you read a Dilbert comic strip, you’re being shown a facet of the white-collar workplace that seems confusing, contradictory, or even nonsensical. Managers are shown as being incompetent or oblivious, and fellow employees as difficult or just plain crazy. Reading Dilbert can make you feel as if you’re the only person who can see the proverbial train racing toward you and everyone else, and you can’t seem to warn anyone about it. (Assuming that you can first get the proper forms filled out, in triplicate; reviewed; and approved in time!)

  I referred to Dilbert as a “satirical comic strip.” And it certainly is. Satire is criticism that uses wit, humor, or exaggeration to expose people’s foibles, vices, or lack of good judgment in a specific context. We know that Adams is criticizing the absurdity of the white-collar workplace, but there’s something deeper—something philosophical—here. Dilbert comic strips are utilizing a literary device called irony.

  The root of the word irony comes from the ancient Greek eirôn, “dissembling scoundrel,” who was a character in ancient Greek comedies. The eirôn’s goal was to bring down another character who had bragged about his abilities, and the eirôn did this by trivializing his own. Irony is indirect communication which conveys a truth about a situation subtly through a contradiction: the discrepancy between what is expected and what eventually occurs. So, when we say that someone is being ironic, we understand that he is saying one thing, yet means another. This contradiction is never explicitly stated. It can’t and still be irony. In a sense, understanding irony requires you to be both inside of a situation and outside of it at the same time. The contradiction must be inferred by the reader or listener, so context is important in irony.

  Although there are many forms of irony, they all fall within three basic types: verbal, situational, and dramatic. When used verbally, irony gives the writer or speaker tools such as sarcasm, understatement, and hyperbole. All of these tools are used in Dilbert. As I was thinking about how irony is communicated, I found myself wondering whether there had ever been a wordless Dilbert comic strip! Is such a thing possible? I mean, Japanese manga (comic books) are sometimes wordless, as are a number of current American and European comic books. However, I’ve been told that to date this has never happened in Dilbert. (Dilbert.com Help Desk, personal communication, December 28th 2017.)

  Would past philosophers have appreciated Dilbert? The earliest philosopher to whom we could point would be Socrates (470–399 B.C.E.). Socrates is famous for the way he encouraged people to question the basic assumptions and definitions that they held dear, all the while showing them that they in fact didn’t have a clear understanding of what they were talking about!

  Talk about being ironic! Socrates used feigned ignorance and persistent questioning to draw his audience to what philosophers call an “aporia”—a logical impasse or contradiction. In this way, Socrates sought to show his audience that those who claimed to know something were in fact those who were the most ignorant—most of all, of their own ignorance! Socrates never gave his audience an answer to the quest
ions discussed in any of his dialogs. But by experiencing critical self-reflection through a Socratic dialog, Socrates’s audience would have had the opportunity to take responsibility for their assumptions and try to change them. Since Socrates never resolved the question at hand, his relationship to irony could be understood as neutral. (Although, clearly, he indulged in it.)

  Two more recent philosophers had much stronger opinions on the use of irony in the search for truth: Hegel, whom we encountered earlier in this chapter, and Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855). In Aesthetik (1835), Hegel was critical of irony and its usefulness. Irony is grounded in ambiguity. There is a surface meaning, along with a hidden meaning which contradicts it. For Hegel, this meant that anyone who relies on irony wasn’t taking the world seriously. Not being serious about the world means that people would withdraw from it and embrace vanity. Embracing vanity would mean looking inward, and therefore the individual would not be able to accept objective reality. Irony creates a subjective, not an objective, relationship between a writer or speaker and his audience. Hegel was creating a complete system of philosophy, one that would lead to objective reality. For Hegel, irony could not be part of a process by which we could work toward absolute truth. Hegel saw irony in a negative light.

  Kierkegaard however saw irony as life-affirming. In his doctoral dissertation, On the Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), Kierkegaard saw irony as leading us to passionately relate to revelations about the world, and to eventually take responsibility for what we believe in. It’s not enough to just show someone that their assumptions are wrong. He must be willing to take responsibility for them and change them. The possibility of changing for the better makes Kierkegaard’s view of irony positive.

  So now we’ve seen that the literary device used in Dilbert, irony, comes loaded with philosophical implications. And depending on which philosopher you’re talking to, irony can be neutral, negative, or positive. But is that it? Can we call it a day and head for home? Not yet.

  First Let’s Play . . .

  So far we’ve seen that, surprisingly, Dilbert comes packed with a lot of philosophy! First, the comic strip panels have a structure which can be referred to as a Hegelian dialectic. Second, the message that the panels communicate is delivered through the literary device of irony. But before I draw any final conclusions from the philosophy we’ve uncovered in Dilbert (my philosophical hat trick for this chapter, if you will), let’s take a well-deserved break around the office water cooler and have a little harmless fun at Dilbert’s expense.

  There are three sequential panels in a Dilbert strip, each containing a statement. We can sequentially label the panels “Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.” The structure is compact, and the message contained within it requires us to look past the surface meaning to a hidden, perhaps contradictory, meaning. Decoding the comic strip’s message depends on context, so the reader has to use his experience and intuition to understand the irony and to arrive at the truth within it. If you take a step back and think about it, this setup should sound quite familiar. When thinking about the structure of Dilbert, I found myself thinking about another art form. Can you think of any other work of art which resembles this? A compact, three-part structure, with a hidden meaning, and you’ll want to be very careful about the number of syllables.

  Dilbert comic strips are a visual and textual form of haiku.

  A haiku is a form of Japanese poetry, and most of us were exposed to it in grammar school. Haikus have compact structures: three short lines, with each line having a fixed number of syllables. A haiku communicates its message by contrasting two apparently opposite images or ideas. It uses a “cutting word” (in Japanese, kireji), whose purpose is to show how the two opposing ideas relate to each other. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I’m pretty sure that Adams didn’t have this in mind for Dilbert. Nevertheless, it shows that similar ways of parsing reality exist in both the West and the East.

  In fact, when it comes to messages and hidden meanings, saying one thing and meaning another appears to have existed throughout the history of philosophy in the West. According to German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973), philosophers have nearly always lived in times and places where their ideas would have been seen as a danger to the ruling class. As such, they had to cloak their ideas in words that seemed to express the opposite of what they intended. This is called esoteric writing, and at its heart lies irony. The surface obscures what’s really meant; and this time it’s for a good cause: to preserve a philosopher’s life! And that puts Dilbert in good company, if you ask me.

  And Then We’ll Get Serious

  All right. Enough chitchat around the water cooler. It’s time to get back to real work and wrap up the philosophy in Dilbert. So, are you ready? Don’t jump straight to glowering at me! Okay. Here goes: Readers of Dilbert just don’t get it.

  I mean, sure, they read Dilbert and get a good chuckle. They’re hip to the joke, because they’re both inside the situation and outside of it. Readers get the irony of experiencing the confusing, contradictory, even nonsensical white-collar workplace, no doubt about that. I mean, how couldn’t they? But whereas we first looked at the structure, and then at the content, we now need to look deeper into the meaning of the irony in Dilbert. Since irony is the heart of Dilbert, it informs our understanding of what’s really going on in his world—and ours.

  Kierkegaard held onto the importance of irony throughout his life. We saw this first in his doctoral dissertation. But later, in Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard showed that through the use of irony, we can all have a choice about how we live. We can live in the aesthetic world, or we can live in the ethical world. In the aesthetic world, it’s all about me, right now. But by giving in to enjoying life in the moment, I actually fail to exercise any real control over my life. Sure, I’m enjoying life, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Through my enjoyment, I may even find myself feeling superior to everyone else. But this life is an empty one because I never end up going anywhere. It’s always the same old story. I never commit to building a history, a real life for myself. That’s why living in an aesthetic world inevitably leads to despair.

  On the other hand, in the ethical world, I can use self-reflection to get a better perspective on my situation. This allows me to take responsibility for my actions. I will then find myself making real, hard choices instead of seeking enjoyment and just living for the moment. For Kierkegaard, the bridge from the aesthetic world to the ethical world was irony. By seeking out and understanding contrasting meanings in a situation, by “getting it,” irony reveals a deeper truth. With a broader perspective, more informed and better choices can be made. Ironically, it’s through making choices that we find freedom.

  Having difficulty seeing where I’m going with this? Consider: Adams has been writing Dilbert since 1989. For almost three decades, people have had the bizarre, confusing, nonsensical white-collar workplace revealed for what it is. Yet nothing has changed! This means that readers have inadvertently fallen into the trap that Hegel feared. Remember, we saw that Socrates showed that people who claim that they know something really don’t. Like Socrates, Adams is neutral with respect to irony because it’s up to his audience to exercise responsibility for their lives. But Hegel held that if you stopped at the irony and did not use it, you can become so involved with “getting it” that you turn inward. For Hegel, irony is negative.

  Dilbert’s readers do get the irony; but it’s a vain, self-centered reading, so they really don’t. The revealed message is never used to make objective changes for the better in the real world. I claim that, as Hegel warned, readers retreat into vanity as they enjoy their daily dose of Dilbert. Don’t believe me? Read this and tell me that it doesn’t sound familiar—yes, YOU, Dilbert fan!

  This is exactly how it is in the white-collar workplace/sweatshop. My boss is a self-absorbed brain-dead noodnik who couldn’t figure out two plus two without the help of a con
sensus at a Monday morning office meeting. My co-workers are pathetic, mindless, incompetent, back-stabbing drones. But of course, I don’t behave like that.

  Did Hegel use the word “vanity”? Perhaps he should have said narcissism!

  To make maximum use of the irony in Dilbert, readers would not just have to “get” the irony, but leverage it to live better lives. They would have to be ethical in their reading. But by reading Dilbert and feeling superior to everyone else, their perspective is narcissistic.

  After almost three decades, Dilbert continues to be popular. Not just because the majority of Americans find themselves working and living in that world and “getting it.” It’s more that nothing’s changed since Adams began writing Dilbert in 1989. And by office workers refusing to take responsibility for all the crazy in their workday lives, America’s white-collar workplace probably never will change.

  When we laugh at Dilbert, we’re all really laughing at, and fooling, ourselves. And we should know better by now.

  Scoundrels, the lot of us. So, so irresponsible. Ironic, no?

  5

  The Serious Point of Scott’s Humor

  ENZO GUERRA AND ADAM BARKMAN

  Dilbert comic strips are the artifact that we most commonly associate with Scott Adams. Dilbert, the title character, is a company man who engages in humorous, satirical exchanges with his boss, co-workers, and even his dog. Though it may seem as if these comics are intended as mere pleasure or entertainment, they also operate on another deeper level.

  In his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams says that in his Dilbert comic strips, he removes all the unnecessary noise from a situation, leaving nothing but its absurd yet essential core. Consider the following example taken from his most recent Dilbert book, Dilbert Gets Re-Accommodated:

  POINTY-HAIRED BOSS: Our plan is to use design psychology to make our apps more addictive. Ideally, we want to strip people of their free will and turn them into mindless upgrading zombies.