Scott Adams and Philosophy

by Daniel Yim

  Trump’s rally speeches never wandered far from the specific issues, so that anyone following the campaign even casually became acutely conscious of Trump’s policy proposals, whereas most voters had little idea of Clinton’s policies. Trump made many commitments, broad and narrow, about tightening up immigration, whereas Clinton rarely spelled out her own policy on immigration, and most voters had no idea what it was. Voters might assume that Clinton favored doing nothing to change immigration controls or even that she favored moving to “open borders.” Dedicated policy wonks might be able to ascertain that actually Clinton also favored tightening up immigration controls, though perhaps slightly less severely than Trump, but voters who merely watched the news would never have guessed this.

  It’s clear that Clinton just could not talk too much about immigration policy, for this would be to concede, in effect, that she shared a lot of common ground with Obama and with Trump. She could hardly boast about the steep increase in deportations of aliens under Obama, while denouncing Trump for his proposed deportations, much less could she promise voters that deportations would be accelerated once she was in the Oval Office. That would tend to go against the claim that Trump was uniquely evil for wanting to deport aliens. For similar reasons, she could hardly brag about Obama’s facilitation of oil and gas pipelines and promise to continue or escalate this policy.

  There has probably never been a previous election in American history where one candidate’s numerous policy proposals have been so familiar to the general electorate, while the other candidate’s proposals were almost unknown. Clinton based everything on the proposition that she was personally superior to Trump—more specifically that Trump was a monster and at least fifty percent of his supporters (she meant a quarter of the population, the working class) were “deplorable” monsters.

  Everyone who followed the campaign, even superficially, would know that Trump was advocating:

  1.A tightening up of controls on immigration, especially more effective enforcement of existing laws restricting immigration.

  2.Repeal or renegotiation of trade agreements such as NAFTA and TPP.

  3.Revival of manufacturing in the Rust Belt, partly because of #2 but also because of targeted protectionist measures such as penalties for companies which opened up plant abroad, tariffs on imports, and a general government policy of “Buy American, Hire American.”

  4.Defense of the Second Amendment—Americans’ constitutional right to own and carry guns.

  5.Appointment of conservative judges who would follow the Original Intent of the Constitution.

  6.A “pro-life” stance which in effect meant giving abortion policy back to the democratic process in the states, rather than a court-imposed “pro-choice” policy.

  7.Repeal and replacement of Obamacare.

  8.Abstention from wars (like Iraq and Libya) which don’t yield any net benefit to the US.

  9.Major reforms in the treatment of veterans.

  10.Increased military spending.

  11.A major drive to repair and modernize infrastructure.

  Everybody knows that these were Trump’s policies. Now, quick, what was Hillary’s policy on each of these issues? You see? You don’t have the foggiest notion. You might guess that she would keep Obamacare, though she said she would overhaul it, and in politics the line between overhaul and replacement is fuzzy.

  Trump vacillated between extreme and moderate versions of these policies, but he never reversed them during the campaign. What was, in effect, Clinton’s reply to these proposals? First, Trump is an evil person and we are not Trump. Second, we are entitled to be president because we are a woman. However, according to Clinton’s leftist supporters, anyone who decides to be a woman becomes a woman, and therefore Trump could at any time become the first woman president simply by announcing “I’m a woman!”

  Most of the time, Clinton avoided responding to Trump’s policy proposals with her own. She did her best to avoid any comparison of the opposing policies, and to keep the focus on Trump’s personality, a risky strategy as many people found her own personality unendearing and her own past conduct questionable. But don’t forget that if she had won, this strategy would have been hailed as awesomely clever.

  The thing that most caused me to rapidly revise my very dismissive view of Trump shortly after the election was not just that he won, but that he won in precisely the way he said he would win. He knew what he was doing; he had better intelligence about the voters. TV interviews with personnel of his polling firm, Cambridge Analytica, corroborated this interpretation.

  My guess is that Trump, years before the election, had already seen that a dramatic comeback for American manufacturing and mining was inevitable—indeed, was already in its early stages—alongside the ignorant conventional view that manufacturing and mining were in permanent decline. He could therefore not only make political capital from the plight of the Rust Belt but also, once elected, ride the wave of manufacturing and mining revival. In business circles, people were already talking about “reshoring”—the phenomenon of companies bringing their plant back into the United States. This talk originated at the beginning of the century but had mostly still not trickled down into the popular media, and now it is doing so it will be difficult to separate from the achievements of Trump, especially as Trump has admittedly done a number of things to give it a boost.

  The inevitable comeback for American manufacturing was a commonplace among business analysts years before the election (see for instance the 2012 study, The US Manufacturing Renaissance: How Shifting Global Economics Are Creating an American Comeback). Reshoring has several causes, including the spectacular and continuing rise of Chinese wages and the development of fracking, which guarantees amazingly cheap American energy for many generations to come. During the campaign, anti-Trump commentators often showed their ignorance by proclaiming that the decline of manufacturing and mining were irreversible, even as both were already rebounding robustly.

  Obama did occasionally try to explain what was going on, but the one line that resonated was “Some of these jobs are just not going to come back.” Oops. There go several thousand Michigan votes. And Hillary: “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?” Oh, dear. There go several thousand Pennsylvania and West Virginia votes. The fact that these lines were taken out of context and hurt the Democratic campaign shows that there is cunning in Trump’s apparent crudeness in making bold assertions and almost never qualifying them.

  The Obama administration officially began measures to promote reshoring in 2011, but Hillary didn’t make much of this during the campaign. This was in keeping with her avoidance of policy talk and her haughty disdain for the working class, those dumb rednecks, who, just like Blacks and Hispanics, could be relied upon to vote Democratic without being offered any serious incentive to do so. And while Hillary knew enough to understand that fracking is a tremendous boon to humanity and a guarantee of economic growth, she was no doubt afraid to drive voters to Bernie Sanders and then to Jill Stein by enthusiastically embracing cheap energy, underwritten by fracking. Obama had celebrated fracking but Hillary didn’t dare to do so.

  A general theme of Clintonism is that it relied on harnessing the energies of leftists while favoring ruling-class privilege. Hillary was embarrassed by any shining of the light on specific policies, because she wanted both the votes and the activist work of “progressives” and the financial donations of “neo-liberals” and “globalists,” and she feared that frank talk about specifics could only scare away one or the other.

  Scott occasionally mentions Hillary’s discussions of “policy details” (p. 164), implying that this was a boring and fact-oriented preoccupation by contrast with Trump’s nebulous and exciting “Persuasion.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The Hillary campaign was simply astounding and unprecedented in its avoidance of any talk about policies, as the Wesleyan study proves. As far as most voters could tell, Hillary h
ad just one policy: hatred for Trump’s personality. This avoidance of policy issues is connected with another feature of the Hillary campaign, familiar from the book Shattered. Hillary never came up with a story as to why she was running. Trump was running to “Make America Great Again,” and he would sometimes unpack it: “Make America Rich Again, Make America Strong Again, Make America Safe Again”—tightly linked to all the eleven policy proposals mentioned above.

  The Democrats made things worse for themselves by talking about Trump’s appeal to the “white working class.” Plenty of Blacks and Hispanics had lost manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt. Trump picked up unexpected Black, Hispanic, and Muslim votes, and among white workers he did especially well with former Obama and Sanders voters, beginning his long-term plan of permanently detaching the working class of all races from the Democratic Party.

  Trump plays a long game. A tightening of immigration controls is popular with voters, including those Hispanics and Muslims who are already here legally. Purely from the standpoint of political opportunism, what’s even better than being elected to tighten up immigration controls and then doing so? What’s better is being publicly opposed at every step in struggling to tighten up immigration controls. This continually reminds voters that there are forces at work plotting to frustrate the president and the popular will, and therefore constantly broadcasts the urgency of continuing to support the president. The Sanctuary City–Sanctuary State movement might have been engineered to guarantee Trump’s re-election by a landslide in 2020.

  Trump finds issues where the majority is on his side, and where he’s therefore likely to win in the long term, yet where he has to visibly battle against opposition. Even before he won in 2016—and he knew he was going to win—he was thinking of how he would manage his first term to ensure his re-election in 2020. As I have learned from my own earlier blunders in this area, the biggest mistake you can make about Trump is to suppose that he ever acts on impulse. Trump is a supremely self-controlled person who always acts methodically according to a long-range plan. Ignore this fact, and you may already have lost against Trump.

  “People Are Not Rational”

  As Scott repeatedly tells us, his contention that facts don’t matter arises from his fundamental conviction that people are not rational. According to Scott, “humans are not rational. We bounce from one illusion to another, all the while thinking we are seeing something we call reality” (Win Bigly, p. 37).

  The theory that people are fundamentally irrational is the fashionable one. We are constantly bombarded by books and articles from a wide range of sources telling us that people don’t make decisions rationally but emotionally, and then invent false reasons for why they decided the way they did.

  However, as we’ve seen, when Scott is not intoning the fashionable dogma that people are irrational, he keeps forgetting it, and keeps reminding us, unintentionally, that people do change their beliefs in accordance with facts and logic.

  So what about the rare exceptional cases which Scott calls “Cognitive Dissonance”? What about the theory held by Hillary supporters in January through June 2017 that Trump was Hitler? Or the theory held after June 2017 that Trump was incompetent or crazy?

  Though both these beliefs were seriously mistaken, I wouldn’t call them irrational. The view that humans are rational doesn’t require that they never make mistakes—quite the contrary: only a rational being can make a mistake.

  So, can I defend the “hallucinations” of Cognitive Dissonance as rational? I believe I can. The first thing to note is that such illusions are generally short-lived. Scott’s ideas about Persuasion focus on the short-range and the short-term. Theories about Trump as Hitler or Trump as mentally defective, as well as theories about “Russian collusion,” have now largely evaporated.

  What happens when something occurs that people’s previous ideas had been telling them could not possibly occur? They adjust their previous ideas, and their first stab at adjusting their ideas may not be the long-range adjustment.

  Karl Popper has explained how people develop their ideas through conjecture and refutation, in other words by making unjustified guesses and then disproving those guesses, and moving on to new and better (but still unjustified) guesses. That’s how human rationality works. That’s the only way it could work. That’s what happens in the examples offered by Scott.

  Can We Handle the Truth?

  A recurring theme in Scott’s writing and speaking is that we’re not equipped to get at the truth. Remarks like this are scattered throughout his written and oral output: “The human brain is not capable of comprehending truth at a deep level” (p. 28).

  Scott often talks about the fact that people of different opinions can be watching “two movies on the same screen.” Another metaphor he uses is that of “filters.” He says that he prefers to use the “Persuasion” filter, while other people may use other filters.

  But can’t we say that one movie or filter is to be preferred to another because it is more accurate? Here Scott equivocates. At times he implies that any such preference is a matter of taste. But, naturally, he doesn’t want to let go of the notion that his Persuasion movie or filter has something to recommend it! If he did that, there would be no reason to pay any attention to his arguments.

  What Scott repeatedly says is that we can never really know the truth, but we can prefer one “movie” or “filter” to another because

  1.It makes us happy and

  2.It is predictive.

  So, Scott argues, we adopt a point of view not because we think it’s true, but because it makes us happy to think about it and it gives us good predictions (pp. 38–47).

  But if a theory (what Scott calls a “filter”) makes us happy and makes good predictions, is that so different from being true? These are not exactly the same, but they do seem to overlap quite a bit—especially because a theory most often makes us “happy” by making sense to us, by striking us as a reasonable explanation. So, if someone had said in 2015 that a powerful coven of witches in Kazakhstan had cast a spell to ensure that Trump would win the Republican Party nomination and go on to win the US presidency, this would have been predictive, but would not have made us “happy,” only because we don’t believe that witches can influence the outcome of elections by casting spells.

  What makes us happy is largely a matter of our existing theories about the world. A new theory tends to make us happy when it fits with the totality of our existing theories—and this, I claim, is perfectly rational (though, of course, not infallible).

  As well as Cognitive Dissonance, Scott talks a lot about Confirmation Bias. He sees this as an example of irrationality. But confirmation bias is rational! As Karl Popper pointed out, our theories would be useless if we gave them up too easily. If the power goes out in my apartment, I don’t immediately abandon my belief in Coulomb’s Law or Ohm’s Law. I automatically save my most fundamental beliefs and give up more minor beliefs: in this case, my belief that the fuses were not overloaded.

  While facts do matter, theories matter more. Our preconceived assumptions—our theories—tend to dominate our thinking, and that’s rational, but sometimes these theories can be tested against facts, and sometimes the facts are decisive in causing us to change our theories. That’s rational too.

  If facts matter and theories matter, what about Scott’s exalted idea of persuasion? Everyone knows that persuasion can have some independent effect. Philosophers have always known that persuasion has a role, complementary to theories and facts. Two and half thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote a textbook of logic, his Prior Analytics. He also wrote a textbook of persuasion, his Rhetoric.

  As Ray Scott Percival has argued (in The Myth of the Closed Mind), persuasion, advertising, and propaganda can all be explained within the theory that humans are rational. Here I will just throw out one hint. When he claims that “facts don’t matter” and that “people are irrational,” Scott always focuses his attention on the very short run. He looks at
people’s immediate responses to “Cognitive Dissonance.” When he considers events lasting more than a few months, he always, in practice though not explicitly, acknowledges that facts can be decisive and usually are.

  Election campaigns are comparatively brief events which take place within a framework of prevailing ideas that can’t be challenged without political loss, and these ideas are often the outcome of influences working slowly over decades or centuries. For example, who was the first newly elected US president to be openly in favor of gay marriage? The answer (surprising to some) is: Donald J. Trump. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he presented himself as a most emphatic and deeply committed opponent of gay marriage. If he had come out in favor of gay marriage in that year, it would have been too risky.

  Between 2008 and 2016, public opinion changed so that it became more of an electoral liability than an advantage to oppose gay marriage. And this change was itself the culmination of slow changes in opinion over many decades.

  One thing that follows from this is that if you want to influence people’s political thinking for years ahead, you probably won’t want to become too involved in election campaigns.

  9

  But Women Can Vote . . .

  SANDRA HANSMANN AND CYNTHIA JONES

  As the one female main character in Dilbert, Alice is smart, but angry and violent. Now we could be wrong, but she sounds a bit like an “angry feminist.” And then there’s Carol, Dilmom, and Tina, none of whom are particularly flattering portrayals of women, but hey, it’s a cartoon, and no one in Dilbert, except maybe Dilbert, is a hero.