Scott Adams and Philosophy

by Daniel Yim

  Beyond Bewildered Amusement

  One attractive feature of existentialism is its liberating stance towards absurdity. While the concept of existentialist absurdity might convey an impression of helplessness and resignation, the opposite is true: For an existentialist like Sartre, individuals express their own will only in view of absurdity. Once asked whether Sartre felt oppressed in Paris occupied by Germany during the Second World War, he pointed out the liberating effect of the awful conditions. This gave him the opportunity to express his sense of morality both in friendships as well as in political and cultural activism. For Camus, the case is similar: when recognizing absurdity, we aren’t forced to surrender. We rather find ourselves in a state of revolt against the absurd that we deem a hindrance to our wish for a meaningful and responsive world.

  On a superficial level, Adams seems to be completely in line with Camus’s conception of the absurd and surely some of the characters in Dilbert’s universe seem to have adopted a stance of permanent revolt. But is this really the case for Scott Adams? In the The Dilbert Principle, he writes:

  It’s useless to expect rational behavior from the people you work with, or anybody else for that matter. If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others. (p. 11)

  This might seem like something an existentialist in the tradition of Camus would say. But Adams’s response is in fact cynical! He recommends acceptance, not as a first, but the ultimate step. It is recognition minus the revolt.

  Adams carefully describes the reasons for absurdities in modern corporate culture and traces them back to the ignorance of those engineers, office workers and in particular managers, who are—for intellectual reasons—unable to discharge their professional tasks. Absurdity is neither pervasive nor a result of the metaphysical condition of human existence. It is rather a contained problem, which is open to a rational solution.

  In every comic strip about mismanagement, bizarre technical decisions or errant coping mechanisms shown by corporate personnel, the reader immediately sees what’s going wrong. And, curiously enough, the solution is often obvious. Maybe bewildered amusement is just a first step toward realistic expectations in a corporate culture where the occurrence of absurdities is at least reduced.1

  1 I would like to thank Frauke Albersmeier and Daniel Yim for their kind comments and corrections.

  12

  Dilbert Is an Asshole and That’s Why He’ll Never Be Happy and Nobody Loves Him

  CHARLENE ELSBY AND ROB LUZECKY

  Scott Adams’s character Dilbert is an engineer who works in the middle of some kind of hellish bureaucracy, where every day he’s confronted with the absurd and chooses to ignore it. We see his daily troubles, his foibles, his reflections, and his attempts to achieve for himself some bit of happiness, however small. He fails, and his relatable character flaws lead us to sympathize with him, his small problems and his small life. We get the sense of our own smallness in the grand scheme of things, completely absorbed in petty day-to-day concerns in which we can all find some bit of ourselves and our own lives.

  Dilbert’s existence, however, is a glorification of the worst parts of humanity, and it precludes him from ever being happy. Eudaimonia, usually translated as “happiness” but also as “flourishing,” is an Aristotelian concept used to describe the ideal state of the human being, or the purpose of human existence to which all other purposes are subordinate. Eudaimonia is achieved by the individual who most fully exemplifies what it is to be human—what it is that we do that nothing else does, the thing that makes us human.

  Eudaimonia is a state of the soul of the virtuous person, who has dedicated their life to exemplifying the best aspects of humanity—our capacity to reason about abstract concepts like being, truth, and the good. Dilbert’s pedestrian existence leaves him fully ensconced in the relatively unimportant things, things that only seem important because the boss says they’re important, or because your whole worldview is screwed up due to the pathological acceptance of some human conception of value that doesn’t hold up in any other context than the one in which you presently live. (Remember your schooldays, when you could win a plastic trophy the teacher bought from the dollar store as a prize for some competition or other that has absolutely no applicability in the real world? Yeah, turns out nobody cares. Seemed pretty important at the time, though.)

  Outside of the corporate mindset, “Employee of the month” means nothing. It’s an arbitrary designation based on a concept of what constitutes a worthy employee, which is a messed up way of conceiving of humans only according to their capacity to produce profit for an entity run by other humans who determine their own self-worth based on how much money they can squeeze out of other people before they rebel.

  According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, being a virtuous person is necessary if you’re ever going to have a meaningful relationship with other humans. Essentially, we only like good people, and only good people are capable of appreciating other good people.

  Dilbert’s constant failure to achieve happiness occurs because he lives a miserable life, and because he’s miserable, he’ll never have a meaningful relationship. But it’s not a matter of happenstance that Dilbert is so miserable. He chose that life. At literally any given moment, he could decide not to be a boring engineer whose work ethic leaves a lot to be desired, talking to a dog and a rat he named after himself, probably because he’s so narcissistic that he can’t even imagine something existing that has nothing to do with him.

  Sometimes, he comes close to the edge of recognizing what an asshole he is, but then he always makes some excuse for why it’s someone else’s fault and continues living on, intentionally oblivious to the actual reason for his misery—which is him. He is a textbook example of what Sartre calls bad faith (mauvaise foi). He’s not blissfully ignorant; he actually sees, every so often, the edge of the abyss which, should he choose to recognize it, would lead to an existential crisis that would eventually make him a better person. But instead, he runs away from the abyss, because at the most fundamental level of his existence, he thinks he’s doing great. He thinks he’s doing fine and if he didn’t, he would change.

  In general, we act the way we do because we think it’s the best thing to do. And if we didn’t think something was the best thing to do, we wouldn’t do it. Dilbert’s meaningless existence continues because, although he at any moment could choose to behave differently, to reflect on his misery and actually do something about it, he really thinks he’s doing just fine. Dilbert’s existence is a willful, purposeful exhibition of some form of reduced humanity, a cog in the wheel of an unreflective system, and he likes it that way. That’s why he’ll never be happy and nobody loves him.

  Dilbert Is a Terrible Human

  Every so often, usually because Dogbert points it out, Dilbert verges on the recognition of some universal truth that, should he choose to incorporate it into his worldview, would make him a better person. Instead, he willfully rejects that truth in favor of remaining comfortable, by continuing to do the same old thing despite the fact that all of the evidence so far should lead him to believe that he is not doing fine.

  Like any asshole, he tries to re-prioritize his existence so that what he does well becomes the most important thing. It’s okay that he’s bad with women, because he’s a smart engineer, he’ll tell himself. And one of these things is way more important than the other. But it’s not, and he’s deluding himself. It’s the women’s fault, he claims. In the first few years of the Dilbert comic, we see him going on dates with a multitude of women, but only one date per woman. After that, we assume they run screaming into the woods, because they’re not so deluded about Dilbert’s insufficiency as a human being.

  His complete unwillingness to examine his own existence and determine that maybe latent misogyny is not the way to relate to women is proba
bly a factor. In any case, he’ll be forever alone just because he’s not a good person, and he’s not even trying to be one. At the same time, he seems to think that he’s entitled to the attention of women, and not just any women—attractive women, which he infers (on May 4th 1989) to exist “only in white Volkswagen rabbits and aerobics classes.”

  He has very high standards for such a mediocre puddle of human misery, and it’s clearly not his fault that he’s by some mystery of the universe unable to meet an attractive woman who’s going to give him the loving he has earned simply for existing in the universe. In 1990–1991, Dilbert has a couple of dates that last more than one strip—with an obese woman, a witch and a literal dog (trapped in a woman’s body), during which we can gain some valuable insight into why it is, perhaps, that his romantic adventures are always so brief. He thinks he deserves better, even though he’s a terrible human being.

  If Dilbert recognized his inadequacies, and we mean really recognized them, he would at least try to do something differently. But he doesn’t. Instead, he makes jokes about his own insecurities. There’s a whole series of strips from 1990 where Dilbert’s ego becomes a character, only to be squashed by his own insecurities. He’s actually claiming to be a very insecure person while, at the same time, believing that he deserves all of the good things in life without having to put in any effort whatever. This is bad faith.

  Bad faith is a concept from existentialism that Jean-Paul Sartre uses to describe someone’s state when they engage in life in an insincere or inauthentic fashion. Generally intimidated by the consequences of accepting some truth that they have come to recognize, they instead willfully reject that truth in favor of living a more comfortable lie. They tell themselves that they are living that lie for some legitimate, believable reason, but really they have recognized something unnerving with themselves or the universe and have chosen not to deal with it. That’s one of the necessary features of a bad faith existence—that in order to be in bad faith, you have to first recognize what it is you’re too afraid to live with. There’s a difference between someone who fails at romantic relationships and can’t conceive of the reasons why and someone who does conceive of the reasons why but decides to believe something else instead.

  On April 20th 1990, Dilbert reflects to Dogbert, over the course of three panels:

  “About 400 women turned me down for dates this year. I can only conclude one thing . . .”

  Dogbert asks, “No quality women?”

  Dilbert responds, “Exactly.”

  On May 8th 1990, Dilbert notices that all of the “cool guys” use “gentle kidding” with women. Then he sees a woman on the street and says to her, “Excuse me, Miss, does your face hurt? It’s killing me!” while giggling and snorting. And when the woman rams him into a trash can, he doesn’t then infer that maybe that was a bad idea. Maybe women don’t like it when you insult them and laugh at them. Maybe calling women ugly isn’t actually a form of “gentle kidding”, as he believes. Instead he rationalizes, “The cool guys must hate it when this happens to them.”

  These examples show that not only is Dilbert not trying, he’s trying not to. He’s trying not to recognize that he’s a terrible human who treats people poorly and maybe that’s why they don’t like him.

  Speaking of not trying, he doesn’t even put effort into his work, even though it seems to be the only thing giving meaning to his pitiful life. He has the standard concerns of any entitled white dude—the feeling of not getting enough recognition from his superiors while at the same time joking about how little effort his job requires. It’s not that he has no idea that he’s performing to subpar standards. He knows he is, he jokes about it, and he still thinks he deserves better.

  At one point, he even has the audacity to tell his boss about how stupid bosses are in general, and he suggests switching places with his boss to increase productivity. What kind of arrogant fuck thinks he can get away with that bullshit? And the rest of the time, when people ask him about his work, he makes up words and tries to overcomplicate things to sound smart, just so that people will get confused and leave him alone. He shows no respect for the intelligence of his colleagues and overtly rejects their attempts to show interest in his activities, instead making them feel stupid in order to cover up the fact that he doesn’t do his job. What an asshole. He’s an asshole who tries to make people feel stupid when they try to talk to him, and then he complains that he’s lonely. Just wow.

  And He’ll Never Be Happy

  Happiness is a state of the soul of the virtuous person. The prefix “eu” means “good” or “well,” while “daimon” is the Greek word for “spirit” (or “demon”). To be happy is to literally have a good spirit. To get happy, you have to be virtuous, and to be virtuous, you have to do good things, and in order to do good things, you have to first know what is good. And Dilbert doesn’t.

  Given the insurmountable evidence for the idea that Dilbert is indeed living the life he chose, we have to wonder how it is that he justifies it to himself. We believe that he finds his flaws endearing, and that while he claims to be insecure, he is actually quite comfortable with his character flaws, to the point where he has managed to reconceive of them as good.

  Flaws are not good. That’s why they’re called flaws. To think that they are good is a basic contradiction in terms, yet one that Dilbert must believe, given that he seems to think himself entitled to a fulfilling career and the admiration of others. He no longer has any concept of what is good, and therefore no motivation to do what is good. He is therefore precluded from developing the character virtues that, Aristotle says, are necessary to call a person happy.

  Whether someone is happy is a judgment we can make about a person at the end of their lives, based on all that they have been and done. As Aristotle says in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.”

  Besides insulting his boss and treating women like objects who owe him something, Dilbert doesn’t do much of anything. Instead, he persists, not like someone making a valiant effort to complete a difficult task, but more like a mold that, no matter how many times you bleach it, continues to grow behind the refrigerator, just always there. No matter how much social conditioning he is exposed to through other people’s reactions to his blatant failures as a human being, he persists in his effort to continue. As is.

  For Aristotle, character virtues are all “means.” They’re an equilibrium between two vices, where the vices and the virtue are part of the same spectrum. Too little of something is a vice, too much of something is a vice, but just the right amount is a virtue. Where courage is a virtue, cowardice is a vice—courage is the state of having just the right amount of fear, while the coward is too afraid. A virtuous person has a good amount of ambition or pride, while a vicious person is too ambitious or unambitious. While a virtuous person might feel righteous indignation in the face of some injustice, the deficient person is spiteful, petty, mean, and feigns modesty.

  A person who exemplifies all of the virtues will be courageous, temperate, liberal, magnificent, magnanimous, properly proud, patient, honest, witty, friendly, modest, and will respond appropriately in all sorts of circumstances. Dilbert is none of these things. Relative to all of the virtues that Aristotle claims are necessary to achieving a good state of the soul—that is to say, happiness—Dilbert is profoundly deficient. And he’ll always be that way because he avoids all of the good things that lead to happiness, not out of some grand rebellion against the universe, but because he’s pathetic.

  In order to do what’s good, you must know what’s good, and that knowledge is achieved through reason. For Aristotle, there are types of reason, one of which we use to determine what is good, and another of which is a reason we use to determine how best to achieve that good. By constantly aiming at the good, humans are really aiming at happiness—the highest good for humanity. For no one asks
seriously, “Why do you want to be happy?” and it is therefore the good to which all other goods aim. Why would you want to make money? To be happy. Why would you want a dog to talk to and walk around with? To be happy. And so on. But if you can’t use reason properly to determine what the intermediate goods are on the way to happiness, then you won’t be happy.

  On December 13th 1989, Dilbert remarks to Dogbert, “Some say it is man’s ability to reason which separates him from mere animals.” That’s true. Some do say that—people like Aristotle, who thought that our capacity to reason is what differentiates us from all of the other animals. When we aim at the highest good for humanity, we aim to express what it means to be human—and that is a “rational animal.” Thus it seems that the way to happiness is to exercise reason, and that’s just what Aristotle would say.

  Dilbert, on the other hand, avoids the conclusion that he should be reasonable, by willful distraction. In response to Dilbert’s observation, Dogbert responds, “Surely you realize that in the animal kingdom there is no equivalent to ‘all-star wrestling’.” And Dilbert laments, “Ooh—we’re missing it right now.” This is another overt foray into the land of bad faith, where Dilbert recognizes that the essence of humanity is to be rational, and decides to watch wrestling instead. The implied reasoning is that all-star wrestling is of a similar worth to reason itself, since it is similarly exclusive to humans, but just because only humans are capable of something or other, that does not mean it is good. There are many things that only humans can do that are either detrimental or just useless in regards to human happiness, and Dilbert is intentionally accepting bad logic in order so that he might go watch wrestling instead of bettering himself. He chooses to be unhappy.