Scott Adams and Philosophy

by Daniel Yim

  Knowing what someone studied doesn’t tell us how they studied it. Someone with a history degree might still be an induhvidual. Moreover, I guess it’s possible to find an engineer with social skills. As a result, granting extra votes only to those with qualifications in certain subjects also looks like a bad idea.

  The Demographic Objection

  There’s another, more fundamental, objection to linking political power and education. Other things being equal, let’s assume that more educated people are likely to make better decisions. But the trouble is that other things generally aren’t equal. The more educated are not a random cross-section of society, differing from others only by being smarter. Rather, education tends to go hand in hand with other qualities, which might detract from someone’s competence as a decision maker.

  Suppose we decide that engineers are smart people and give them extra votes. This means Dilbert, Wally, Alice, Ted, and the other engineers will each have multiple votes. Non-engineers will only have one vote each. This includes the Pointy-Haired Boss, Carol his secretary, and Tina the technical writer.

  Those who get the extra votes are not simply more educated. They’re also mainly men. It’s not that all men get extra votes, of course. But still, this proposal would result in men having more votes than women. If we’re making a decision that primarily affects women, then an educated man might be a worse decision maker than a less educated woman. It’d certainly be reasonable for someone to worry that the educated group aren’t better decision makers here.

  Note that the worry isn’t that they are worse because they’re educated. There’s no anti-intellectualism here. It can still be accepted that education improves decision making. However, the educated people are also distinctive in other ways, which may make them worse at making particular decisions. This needn’t be sex. For whatever reason (and there can be a multitude), the more educated members of a society may be mostly drawn from a particular race, religion, linguistic group, economic class, or some other group entirely.

  In all these cases, we might think that the benefits of education are offset by privileging some particular social group. We don’t even have to assume that this is actually the case. Many people think that democratic institutions should be ones that we can all accept. The mere possibility that plural voting could produce worse outcomes means that people can reasonably object to it. And so, plural voting can’t be justified to everyone.

  The Democratic Workplace

  I started with the thought that we wouldn’t run a business democratically, so why think it’s the best way to run a country? But, having considered possible alternatives to democracy, such as an elite electoral system or plural voting, it seems they’re all flawed in practice.

  We may like the idea of rule by smart people, but we can’t agree on who’s smart. While we could seek to resolve this disagreement by voting on it, that simply recreates the problem: we end up being ruled by those that induhviduals think are smart. Regardless, any attempt to set up rule by smart people only is likely to be disappointing, especially for those that get labelled non-smart. So, perhaps equal votes for everyone is best in practice, even if not in theory.

  If we accept this rather pragmatic case for democracy, it might lead us to reverse my opening question. Maybe we should make workplaces more democratic, rather than making politics more like the workplace. Since the Pointy-Haired Bosses and CEOs aren’t even the smart ones anyway, perhaps businesses would make better decisions if everyone had a democratic say in them. But, that’s a topic for another time.

  IV

  Comic-Strip Camus

  11

  Dilbert’s Absurd World

  ALEXANDER CHRISTIAN

  One of the entertaining aspects of Scott Adams’s Dilbert is its constant depiction of the absurdity of modern corporate culture. In the clutches of an obscure self-serving bureaucracy, which neither rewards professional skills nor encourages corporate responsibility, Dilbert and his more or less competent colleagues are bystanders fluctuating between consternation and resignation in view of blatant mismanagement.

  Examples of this absurdity abound: Wally, a cynical office bum devoid of any ethical principles, manages for years to maximize his personal gain while minimizing his workload to the point of blatant refusal to work. Asok, although highly intelligent and skilled, only gets assigned to minor engineering tasks—if not outright ignored—and is a common target of cultural stereotyping. Most of this is caused by the utterly incompetent micromanaging Pointy-Haired Boss, who, though blessed with a skilled team of engineers, is not able to recognize his staff’s talents. Although it’s easy for the reader to point at the absurdity of busy work and ridiculous decisions in comic strips with sharp punchlines, it’s more difficult to give a precise philosophical analysis of what absurdity actually is—both in general terms as well as in terms of blatant corporate stupidity.

  Dilbert and his colleagues seem to be confronted with absurdity similar to the kind described by philosopher and Nobel Prize–winning author Albert Camus. Some of the characters even seem to wholeheartedly embrace their absurdity. Think of Dilbert resigning himself to his company’s approach to increasing productivity: changing the dress code to “Business Dorky” (a red polo shirt and a badge on a lanyard) rather than getting rid of the incompetent corporate executives. Sure, Dilbert could openly revolt against it, intending to really change something, but instead he embraces the absurdity and takes on the new hip corporate insignia—making snarky remarks from time to time. Yet in Adams’s depiction of the absurdities of modern corporate culture there are departures from the existentialist reasoning about the absurd.

  The Absurdity of Human Life

  Among the existentialist philosophers interested in absurdity, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus is surely the one whose writing and thinking is most pervaded by the notion of absurdity. For Camus, absurdity results from an insurmountable conflict between the human desire for significance, meaning, and mental clarity on the one side, and a cold, unresponsive world on the other. Based on Camus’s extensive writing on absurdity, comprising novels like The Outsider, his philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, and his Letters to a German Friend, the absurd to him is an immediate insight into a discrepancy between our own belief system, aspirations, course of life and current experience. It is a moment of existential crisis, which can only be answered with suicide, a leap of faith, or an acknowledgement of our own absurd condition.

  The absurd has its roots in worldly suffering and misery. Since Camus is an atheist, worldly suffering and misery is utterly senseless to him. He doesn’t think it occurs as part of the grand plan of a benevolent god. The absurdity this lack of meaning creates is on a different scale than small everyday absurdities—like the newest generation of Apple Mac-Book lacking proper USB ports, so you can’t connect a printer, thereby defeating the purpose of a computer for professional or semi-professional applications.

  Camus has a more fundamental, grand-scale problem in mind. Consider the hundreds of millions of people who go to work every single day, hating their job, helping to produce goods unnecessary to human flourishing and then using a good share of their income to consume those goods and compete in races to the newest Apple gadgets. Their everyday efforts just magnify the fruitless searches for meaning.

  For Camus, the absurd is the insight into this fact, that the human impulse to search for meaning in a meaningless world is necessarily futile, yet not without hope. In order to avoid resignation and languor—this is an idea picked up from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche—Camus advocates for an active response: Without any hope for a divine intervention by a benevolent creator who listens to your plea for meaning, the human condition in light of worldly suffering should be a permanent revolt. Although a permanent revolt against the absurd is not a genuine solution to the problem, it nonetheless offers the opportunity to cope with the inherent need for meaning in a meaningless world. The existentialist recognizes absu
rdity and seeks salvation neither in suicide nor in faith. The former would be self-denial, the latter an irrational leap of faith.

  Instead, in light of the absurd, we aspire to just keep going. A symbol for this struggle is the mythological character of Sisyphus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus depicts the felicity of the absurd human in his serene and self-sufficient resignation: Sisyphus rolls a heavy boulder up a mountain slope every day. The boulder never rests on top of the mountain, but rolls right down again, and so Sisyphus repeats his pointless task over and again. This is how he revolts against the meaninglessness. The revolt doesn’t resolve the conflict between the need for meaning and a meaningless world. Rather, it is essentially a forlorn but nevertheless revolutionary endeavor—like buying a Samsung smartphone in order to escape the need for an Apple device. What Camus has in mind is a stance of snide resistance against reality.

  Scott Adams: People Are Idiots!

  Scott Adams has two distinct ways to express absurdities in his comic strips: One is to include bizarre and unworldly elements, like animals speaking a human language (Catbert or Dogbert, for instance) or mythical figures (most notably the Devil in person or troll-like accountants). Occasionally Adams also depicts simply irreal behavior, like random acts of magic or rampant acts of violence, like Alice looking for a harpoon to shoot her idiotic superior.

  Such kind of irreal absurdities, are ways to highlight the depiction of actual absurdities, like nonsensical design decisions in technical products, fantastical business plans, or failed attempts to organize business workflow.

  Universities grant MAs and PhDs in economics and business administration to confirm that managers are able to act in a competent and rational way. So, shouldn’t the mere presence of supposedly competent professionals prevent the occurrence of absurdities? Adams has an intriguing explanation of why absurd situations in workplace situations exist at all. His theory is: people are idiots. Let this deep anthropological insight sink in for a while! For Adams, everyone is an idiot, including himself. The crucial point is that people are idiots about different things at different times.

  Don’t take offense at the term “idiot.” It just means that humans have differing cognitive abilities. Some people are good with fixing jammed fax machines, some people can communicate well with crackbrained colleagues in superior positions, and some people are really good at making coffee. The problem is that people in business environments do not properly communicate their skills and are forced to do things outside the range of their competence. Think of a manager who does not understand that it is absurd to ask engineers to build a battery powered device, with an LED indicating that the battery is dead.

  Lacking individual skills or knowledge, for instance technical skills and knowledge about the most basic functioning of LEDs, is a cause of requests for absurd technical features. According to Adams, absurdities emerge from cognitive inabilities and a lack of organizational structures in modern corporate entities that properly distribute the incompetencies of employees—most notably residing in management—with cognitive skills of other people. So, the two important ingredients of absurdities are ignorance about certain things relevant for making rational management decisions and a lack of communication between employees on various steps of the corporate ladder.

  Unlike in our personal lives where we tolerate and maybe even expect irrational behavior and strange convictions, in our work environment we fall prey to the ill-conceived myth that strategic business and internal management decisions are thoroughly guided by logic and rational thinking informed by unbiased work experience and well-established economic theories. According to Adams, this is not the case. We can find just as much absurdity in the workplace as in everyday life. The difference is that absurdity is more noticeable in business environments, since we have the expectation that people who are idiots most of the time—who lack crucial cognitive abilities—all of a sudden switch on the rationality mode in their brain when they enter the office.

  Absurdities in Modern Corporate Culture

  There are ample examples of absurdities in modern corporate culture depicted in Dilbert comic strips. Adams captures the whole spectrum: In the context of business communication, he points out that so called mission- or vision-statements for technology corporations routinely consists of Dadaist-seeming strings of nonsense buzzwords. Take this mission statement for instance, which surely was the end-result of a complex armada of engineers, people from marketing, and the management department:

  Perform world-class product development, financial analysis, and fleet services using empowered team dynamics in a Total Quality paradigm until we become the industry leader. (The Dilbert Future, p. 36)

  As far as product development is concerned, Adams indicates that a lack of basic technical expertise on behalf of management staff can lead to contradictory or nonsensical technical requirements which remain uncorrected, since management neither understands technical limitations, nor defers to the technical expertise of engineers. By far the most common type of absurdity depicted by Adams falls in the category of mismanagement in personnel and everyday office work. In several cases, Dilbert, Alice, and Asok, while themselves competent, observe blatantly incompetent managers becoming appointed as leads to engineering or programming projects, although they are utterly incapable of comprehending the projects.

  Most absurdities in the universe of Dilbert result from decision-makers’ ignorance. Yet, sometimes not intellectual incompetence, but downright malicious intent is the cause of absurdity. This is particularly apparent when bizarre and other-worldly characters come into play, like Catbert, the evil director of human resources, who comes along as a sadistic megalomaniac particularly fond of developing evil policies. Such policies include the requirement to schedule sick time before being actually sick or to declare the time spent in the bathroom as vacation time.

  The engineers in Dilbert’s universe, like Dilbert, Wally, and Alice, almost always show resistance against absurd business decisions, albeit in different ways: Dilbert is most often in an epistemically privileged position, so that the reader can assume that Dilbert is totally aware of the idiotic tendencies of his colleagues or superiors, which lead to absurd decisions. Also, in a number of cases Dilbert seem to subtly revolt against something he deems absurd. For instance, when giving a presentation about the progress of a project, he casually expresses his disregard for his usually absentminded listeners:

  This next transparency is an incomprehensible jumble of complexity and undefined acronyms.

  You might wonder why I’m going to show it to you since the only possible result is to lower your opinion of my communication skills.

  Frankly, it’s because I like making complex pictures more than I like you.

  Wally, one of the oldest engineers in the company, has developed intricate arguments and mechanisms to avoid actual work. Among these mechanisms to avoid working for Pointy-Haired Boss are the Wally Reports he gives at staff meetings. These reports detail at considerable length his weekly accomplishments, which often consist in writing the report, or give a full account of trivialities or his emotional state during workday. Alice is depicted as an honest, hard-working engineer, who never receives credit for her solid achievements and is a constant object of sexist discriminations. Her resistance against absurdities resulting from errant management decisions frequently takes the form of physical violence against co-workers or management.

  Absurd, All Too Absurd

  Is the absurdity Dilbert experiences an existentialist kind of absurdity? We should note three key differences.

  Pervasive absurdity vs. contained absurdity: When existentialists speak about absurdity, they mean a deeply troubling experience, a loss of purpose that pervades everything in your everyday experience of life. It results in a personal crisis, since the world is unresponsive to your wishes and desires for a meaningful life. That is why you can’t leave a place, say your workplace, and leave existentialist absurdity behind. The same is not true fo
r the type of absurdity that Adams illustrates. Here, absurdity is contained, say in an open-plan office or a cubicle. Contained absurdity can be left behind when you leave your workplace and go home after a few hours of mindless web-browsing, daydreaming or cigarette / coffee / [insert recreational drug of choice here] break. Office workers can to some extent escape contained absurdity, since it exists at a certain place and time. In contrast, existentialists can’t escape this feeling.

  Metaphysical vs. epistemic reasons for absurdity: The second important distinction concerns the causes of absurdity. For Camus, existentialist absurdity results from metaphysical features of the world, that is, fundamental facts about the way the world is. The world out there contains office buildings, cubicles, fax machines, but also buttercups and sandwich shops. Stock prices rise and fall, people launch companies and declare bankruptcy. Illustrious as it might seem, this world is unfortunately unresponsive, it severely limits our capacity to fully determine our fate. In some sense, we are all just helpless corporate drones waiting for retirement. We see that Adams’s theory about the cause of contained absurdity in business is quite different from the existentialist perspective. For Adams, absurdity originates in humans, whose cognitive limitation crop out in particular during work days.

  Recognition vs. bewildered amusement: Finally, and this is directly connected to the aforementioned distinction between metaphysical and epistemological reasons for absurdity, Camus and Adams propose different coping strategies for absurdity. Camus plays through three possible ways to deal with pervasive absurdity: committing suicide, turning to religion, or recognizing the absurdity of human life and revolting against things you yet can’t change. Opting for the third alternative seems to be the most rational way for Camus, although there is no solution to the problem of pervasive absurdity. The original problem of contained absurdity depicted in Adams’s comic strips, which are centered around dysfunctional business environments in tech-industry, is quite different. Things like ineffective employee recognition programs and meaningless business-speak in corporate mission and vision statements could in fact be changed. Absurdity in corporate culture is not a result of some kind of essential condition of our world. It is something that someone—probably someone from management, like Catbert or Pointy Haired Boss—did to the business culture, and in view of the resulting absurdity, we know the solutions. Give honest, proper credit for good work and formulate a precise, realizable business plan, so that everyone knows what to do. However, Adams’s reaction to absurdity is very different: he recommends bewildered amusement. This is a different state of mind than existentialist recognition and revolt.