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 [1]
 Astral Codex Ten
 
 [2]Astral Codex Ten
 
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 The Dilbert Afterlife
 
 Sixty-eight years of highly defective people
 
 Jan 16, 2026
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 Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate
 cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive
 [11]1.
 
 Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part
 of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before
 graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’
 stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt
 some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between
 Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re
 all inmates in prisons with different names.
 
 But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were
 about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in
 the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a
 crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid
 consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful.
 There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the
 engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars.
 They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re
 back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd
 outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around
 here.
 
 Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works.
 Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles
 while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion,
 is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type
 of wound his art is trying to numb.
 
 This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse
 proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working,
 so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s
 paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes.
 The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping
 the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a
 passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.
 
 The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too
 scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else,
 but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk
 and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell
 you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s
 perfectly-white teeth.
 
 Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated
 contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert
 strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be
 Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He
 Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To
 This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He
 Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick
 Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get
 Interesting.
 
 If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but
 expect some detours.
 
 Fugitive From The Cubicle Police
 
 The niche that became Dilbert opened when Garfield first said “I hate Mondays”.
 The quote became a popular sensation, inspiring [13]t-shirts, coffee mugs, and
 even [14]a hit single. But (as I’m hardly the first to point out) why should
 Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work!
 
 In the 80s and 90s, saying that you hated your job was considered the height of
 humor. Drew Carey: “Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that.
 It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.”
 
 This was merely the career subregion of the supercontinent of Boomer
 self-deprecating jokes, whose other prominences included “I overeat”, “My
 marriage is on the rocks”, “I have an alcohol problem”, and “My mental health
 is poor”.
 
 [15]
 [https]
 
 Arguably this had something to do with [18]the Bohemian turn, the reaction
 against the forced cheer of the 1950s middle-class establishment of company men
 who gave their all to faceless corporations and then dropped dead of heart
 attacks at 60. You could be that guy, proudly boasting to your date about how
 you traded your second-to-last patent artery to complete a spreadsheet that
 raised shareholder value 14%. Or you could be the guy who says “Oh yeah, I have
 a day job working for the Man, but fuck the rat race, my true passion is white
 water rafting”. When your father came home every day looking haggard and worn
 out but still praising his boss because “you’ve got to respect the company or
 they won’t take care of you”, being able to say “I hate Mondays” must have felt
 liberating, like the mantra of a free man[19]2.
 
 [20]
 [https]
 
 This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle
 wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something. If you were really
 clever, you’d put the Dilbert comic where Dilbert gets in trouble for putting a
 comic on his cubicle wall on your cubicle wall, and dare them to move against
 you.
 
 (again, I was ten at the time. I only know about this because Scott Adams would
 start each of his book collections with an essay, and sometimes he would talk
 about letters he got from fans, and many of them would have stories like
 these.)
 
 But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as
 hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to
 tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then
 going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job -
 become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to
 love it. The worm turns, all that is cringe becomes based once more and vice
 versa. Imagine that guy boasting to his date again. One says: “Oh yeah, I
 grudgingly clock in every day to give my eight hours to the rat race, but trust
 me, I’m secretly hating myself the whole time”? The other: “I work for a
 boutique solar energy startup that’s ending climate change - saving the
 environment is my passion!” Zoomers are worse still: not even the fig leaf of
 social good, just pure hustle.
 
 Silicon Valley, where hustle culture has reached its apogee, has an additional
 consideration: why don’t you found a startup? If you’re so much smarter than
 your boss, why not compete against him directly? Scott Adams based Dilbert on
 his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s. Can you imagine quitting Pacific Bell in
 the 80s to, uh, found your own Pacific Bell? To go to Michael Milken or whoever
 was investing back then, and say “Excuse me, may I have $10 billion to create
 my own version of Pacific Bell, only better?” But if someone were to try to be
 Dilbert today – to say, earnestly, “I hate my job because I am smarter than my
 boss and could do it better than him,” that would be the obvious next question,
 the same way “I am better at picking stocks than Wall Street” ought to be
 followed up with “Then why don’t you invest?”
 
 [21]
 [https]
 
 Above, I described “the nerd experience” of “being smarter than everyone else,
 not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane
 man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to
 overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing
 anything useful.” You nodded along, because you knew the only possible
 conclusion to the arc suggested by that sentence was to tear it down, to launch
 a tirade about how that nerd is naive and narcissistic and probably somehow
 also a racist. In the year of our Lord 2026, of course that’s where I’m going.
 
 Dilbert is a relic of a simpler time, when the trope could be played straight.
 But it’s also an artifact of the transition, maybe even a driver of it. Scott
 Adams appreciated these considerations earlier and more acutely than anyone
 else. And they drove him nuts.
 
 Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain
 
 Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God
 always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is
 straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where
 there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with
 their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit
 they’re nothing special.
 
 For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He
 created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a
 world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly
 comics about hating work.
 
 Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to
 accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his
 frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win
 Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. Still,
 he refused to stick to comics. For a moment in the late-90s, with books like 
 The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future, he seemed on his way to be
 becoming a semi-serious business intellectual. He never quite made it, maybe
 because the Dilbert Principle wasn’t really what managers and consultants
 wanted to hear:
 
     I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the
     least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re
     the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the
     doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know,
     the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart
     people—aren't in management.
 
 Okay, “I am cleverer than everyone else”, got it. His next venture (c. 1999)
 was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed
 burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I
 swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review [23]said it “could
 have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch
 without much thought to taste”. The Onion, in its twenty year retrospective for
 the doomed comestible, [24]called it a frustrated groping towards meal
 replacements like Soylent or Huel, long before the existence of a culture nerdy
 enough to support them. Adams himself, looking back from several years’
 distance, was even more scathing: “the mineral fortification was hard to
 disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the
 Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.”
 
 His second foray into the culinary world was a local restaurant called
 Stacey’s. The New York Times does a pitch-perfect job covering the results. 
 [25]Their article starts:
 
     This is yet another story about a clueless but obtrusive boss — the kind of
     meddlesome manager you might laugh at in the panels of “Dilbert,” the daily
     comic strip.
 
 …and continues through a description of Adams making every possible rookie
 mistake. As the restaurant does worse and worse, Adams becomes more and more
 convinced that he has to figure out some clever lifehack that will turn things
 around and revolutionize restaurants. First he comes up with a theory that
 light is the key to restauranting, and spends ages fiddling with the windows.
 When this fails, he devolves into an unmistakable sign of desperation - asking
 blog commenters for advice:
 
     He also turned to Dilbert fans for suggestions on how to use the party
     room, in a posting on his blog titled “Oh Great Blog Brain.” The Dilbert
     faithful responded with more than 1,300 comments, mixing interesting ideas
     (interactive murder-mystery theater) with unlikely mischief (nude
     volleyball tournaments). Mr. Adams asked his employees to read the comments
     and is now slowly trying some of them.
 
 But what makes this article truly perfect - I can’t believe it didn’t get a
 Pulitzer - is that it’s not some kind of hostile ambush profile. Adams is
 totally self-aware. He also finds the whole situation hilarious! Everyone
 involved is in on the joke! The waiters find it hilarious! After every workday,
 Adams and the waiters get together and laugh long into the night together about
 how bad a boss Adams is!
 
 [26]
 Scott Adams, Creator of the Satirical 'Dilbert' Comic Strip, Dies at 68 - The
 New York Times
 
 There’s a running joke about how if you see a business that loses millions
 yearly, it’s probably run by some banker’s wife who’s getting subsidized to
 feel good about herself and pretend she has a high-powered job. I think this is
 approximately what was going on with Stacey’s. Adams made enough money off
 Dilbert that he could indulge his fantasies of being something more than “the
 Dilbert guy”. For a moment, he could think of himself as a
 temporarily-embarrassed businessman, rather than just a fantastically
 successful humorist. The same probably explains his forays into television
 (“Dilbert: The Animated Series”), non-Dilbert comics (“Plop: The Hairless
 Elbonian”), and technology (”WhenHub”, his site offering “live chats with
 subject-matter experts”, which was shelved after he awkwardly tried to build
 publicity by suggesting that mass shooting witnesses could profit by using his
 site to tell their stories.)
 
 Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other - usually to defend
 one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants - but I
 don’t know if they ever met. I wonder what it would have been like if they did.
 I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts
 of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything
 else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest
 businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s
 funny. Scott Adams couldn’t stop frittering his talent and fortune on doomed
 attempts to be taken seriously. But someday Elon Musk will buy America for $100
 trillion, tell the UN that he’s renaming it “the United States of 420-69”, and
 the assembled ambassadors will be as silent as the grave. Are there psychic
 gains from trade to be had between two such people?
 
 Michael Jordan was the world’s best basketball player, and insisted on testing
 himself against baseball, where he failed. [29]Herbert Hoover was one of the
 world’s best businessmen, and insisted on testing himself against politics,
 where he crashed and burned. We’re all inmates in prisons of different names.
 Most of us accept it and get on with our lives. Adams couldn’t stop rattling
 the bars.
 
 I’m No Scientist, But I Think Feng Shui Is Part Of The Answer
 
 Having failed his forays into business, Adams turned to religion. Not in the
 sense of seeking consolation through God’s love. In the sense of trying to show
 how clever he was by figuring out the true nature of the Divine
 
 The result was [31]God’s Debris. This is not a good book. On some level, Adams
 (of course) seemed to realize this, but (of course) his self-awareness only
 made things worse. In the second-worst introduction to a work of spiritual
 wisdom I’ve ever read ([32]Gurdjieff keeps first place by a hair), he explains
 that this is JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT and IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL.
 But also, it really makes you think, and it’s going to blow your mind, and
 you’ll spend the rest of your life secretly wondering whether it was true, but
 it won’t be, because IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, and IF YOU TAKE IT
 SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL. Later, in [33]a Bloomberg interview, he would say that
 this book - and not Dilbert - would be his “ultimate legacy” to the world. But
 remember, IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, and IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY YOU
 FAIL.
 
 I read it for the first time while researching this essay. The frame story is
 that a delivery boy gives a package to the wisest man in the universe, who
 invites him to stay a while and discuss philosophy (REMEMBER, IT’S JUST A WORK
 OF FICTION! THESE ARE ONLY CHARACTERS!) Their discussion is one-quarter classic
 philosophical problems that seemed deep when you were nineteen, presented with
 no reference to any previous work:
 
     “There has to be a God,” I said. “Otherwise, none of us would be here.” It
     wasn’t much of a reason, but I figured he didn’t need more.
 
     “Do you believe God is omnipotent and that people have free will?” he
     asked.
 
     “That’s standard stuff for God. So, yeah.”
 
     “If God is omnipotent, wouldn’t he know the future?”
 
     “Sure.”
 
     “If God knows what the future holds, then all our choices are already made,
     aren’t they? Free will must be an illusion.”
 
     He was clever, but I wasn’t going to fall for that trap. “God lets us
     determine the future ourselves, using our free will,” I explained.
 
     “Then you believe God doesn’t know the future?”
 
     “I guess not,” I admitted. “But he must prefer not knowing.”
 
 There is an ongoing meta-discussion among philosophy discussers of how
 acceptable it is to propose your own answers to the great questions without
 having fully mastered previous scholarship. On the one hand, philosophy is one
 of the most fundamental human activities, gating it behind the near-impossible
 task of having read every previous philosopher is elitist and gives
 self-appointed guardians of scholarship a permanent heckler’s veto on any new
 ideas, and it can create a culture so obsessed with citing every possible
 influence that eventually the part where you have an opinion withers away and
 philosophy becomes a meaningless ritual of presenting citations without
 conclusion. On the other hand, this book.
 
 Another quarter is philosophical questions which did not seem deep, even when
 you were nineteen, and which nobody has ever done work on, because nobody
 except Scott Adams ever even thought they were worth considering:
 
     What makes a holy land holy?” he asked.
 
     “Well, usually it’s because some important religious event took place
     there.”
 
     “What does it mean to say that something took place in a particular
     location when we know that the earth is constantly in motion, rotating on
     its axis and orbiting the sun? And we’re in a moving galaxy that is part of
     an expanding universe. Even if you had a spaceship and could fly anywhere,
     you can never return to the location of a past event. There would be no
     equivalent of the past location because location depends on your distance
     from other objects, and all objects in the universe would have moved
     considerably by then.”
 
     “I see your point, but on Earth the holy places keep their relationship to
     other things on Earth, and those things don’t move much,” I said.
 
     “Let’s say you dug up all the dirt and rocks and vegetation of a holy place
     and moved it someplace else, leaving nothing but a hole that is one mile
     deep in the original location. Would the holy land now be the new location
     where you put the dirt and rocks and vegetation, or the old location with
     the hole?”
 
     “I think both would be considered holy,” I said, hedging my bets.
 
     “Suppose you took only the very top layer of soil and vegetation from the
     holy place, the newer stuff that blew in or grew after the religious event
     occurred thousands of years ago. Would the place you dumped the topsoil and
     vegetation be holy?”
 
     “That’s a little trickier,” I said. “I’ll say the new location isn’t holy
     because the topsoil that you moved there isn’t itself holy, it was only in
     contact with holy land. If holy land could turn anything that touched it
     into more holy land, then the whole planet would be holy.”
 
     The old man smiled. “The concept of location is a useful delusion when
     applied to real estate ownership, or when giving someone directions to the
     store. But when it is viewed through the eyes of an omnipotent God, the
     concept of location is absurd. While we speak, nations are arming
     themselves to fight for control of lands they consider holy. They are
     trapped in the delusion that locations are real things, not just fictions
     of the mind. Many will die.”
 
 Another quarter of the discussion is the most pusillanimous possible
 subjectivism, as if [34]Robert Anton Wilson and the 2004 film What the #$*! Do
 We Know!? had a kid, then strangled it at birth until it came out brain
 damaged. We get passages like these:
 
     “I am saying that UFOs, reincarnation, and God are all equal in terms of
     their reality.”
 
     “Do you mean equally real or equally imaginary?”
 
     “Your question reveals your bias for a binary world where everything is
     either real or imaginary. That distinction lies in your perceptions, not in
     the universe. Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of
     vocabulary are your brain’s limits, not the universe’s.”
 
     “There has to be a difference between real and imagined things,” I
     countered. “My truck is real. The Easter Bunny is imagined. Those are
     different.”
 
     “As you sit here, your truck exists for you only in your memory, a place in
     your mind. The Easter Bunny lives in the same place. They are equal.”
 
 I remember the late ‘90s and early ‘00s; I was (regrettably) there. For some
 reason, all this stuff was considered the height of wisdom back then. The
 actual Buddhist classics were hard to access, but everyone assumed that
 Buddhists were wise and they probably said, you know, something like this. If
 you said stuff like this, you could be wise too.
 
 [35]
 [https]
 
 The final quarter of the book is a shockingly original take on the Lurianic
 kabbalah. I‘m not pleased to report this, and Adams likely would have been very
 surprised to learn it. Still, the resemblance is unmistakable. The wisest man
 in the world, charged with answering all of the philosophical problems that
 bothered you when you were nineteen, tells the following story: if God exists,
 He must be perfect. Therefore, the only thing he lacks is nonexistence.
 Therefore, in order to fill that lack, He must destroy himself in order to
 create the universe. The universe is composed of the fragments of that
 destruction - the titular God’s Debris. Its point is to reassemble itself into
 God. Partially-reassembled-God is not yet fully conscious, but there is some
 sort of instinct within His fragments - ie within the universe - that is
 motivated to help orchestrate the self-reassembly, and it is this instinct
 which causes anti-entropic processes like evolution. Good things are good
 because they aid in the reassembly of God; bad things are bad because they
 hinder it.
 
 [36]
 [https]
 
 Adams’ version adds several innovations to this basic story. Whatever parts of
 God aren’t involved in physical matter have become the laws of probability;
 this explains the otherwise inexplicable evolutionary coincidences that created
 humankind. There’s something about how gravity is produced by some sort of
 interference between different divine corpuscules - Adams admits that Einstein
 probably also had useful things to say about gravity, but probably his own
 version amounts to the same thing, and it’s easier to understand, and that
 makes it better (IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT! IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU
 FAIL.) But my favorite part is the augmentation of Luria with Nick Land: the
 final (or one of the final) steps in the divine reassembly is the creation of
 the Internet, aka “God’s nervous system”, which will connect everything to
 everything else and give the whole system awareness of its divine purpose.
 
 I’m honestly impressed that a Gentile worked all of this out on his own. Adams
 completes the performance by [37]reinventing Kegan levels (this time I’m
 agnostic as to whether it’s convergent evolution or simple plagiarism),
 although characteristically it is in the most annoying way possible:
 
     [The wise man] described what he called the five levels of awareness and
     said that all humans experience the first level of awareness at birth. That
     is when you first become aware that you exist.
 
     In the second level of awareness you understand that other people exist.
     You believe most of what you are told by authority figures. You accept the
     belief system in which you are raised.
 
     At the third level of awareness you recognize that humans are often wrong
     about the things they believe. You feel that you might be wrong about some
     of your own beliefs but you don’t know which ones. Despite your doubts, you
     still find comfort in your beliefs.
 
     The fourth level is skepticism. You believe the scientific method is the
     best measure of what is true and you believe you have a good working grasp
     of truth, thanks to science, your logic, and your senses. You are arrogant
     when it comes to dealing with people in levels two and three.
 
     The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands that the
     mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The Avatar
     recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar is
     aware of God’s power as expressed in probability and the inevitable
     recombination of God consciousness.
 
 I think going through every David Chapman essay and replacing the word
 “metarationality” with “THE AVATAR” would actually be very refreshing.
 
 What are we to make of all of this?
 
 Nothing is more American than inventing weird cringe fusions of religion and
 atheism where you say that God doesn’t exist as (gestures upward) some Big Man
 In The Sky the way those people believe, but also, there totally is a God, in
 some complicated sense which only I understand. When Thomas Jefferson cut all
 the passages with miracles out of his Bible, he was already standing on the
 shoulders of generations of Unitarians, Quakers, and Latitudinarians.
 
 This was augmented by the vagaries of nerd culture’s intersection with the
 sci-fi fandom. The same people who wanted to read about spaceships and ray guns
 also wanted to read about psionics and Atlantis, so the smart sci-fi nerd
 consensus morphed into something like “probably all that unexplained stuff is
 real, but has a scientific explanation”. Telepathy is made up of quantum
 particles, or whatever (I talk about this more in [38]my article on the Shaver
 Mystery). It became a nerd rite of passage to come up with your own theory that
 reconciled the spiritual and the material in the most creative way possible.
 
 And the Nineties (God’s Debris was published in 2001) were a special time. The
 decade began with the peak of Wicca and neopaganism. Contra current ideological
 fault lines, where these tendencies bring up images of Etsy witches, they
 previously dominated nerd circles, including male nerds, techie nerds, and
 right-wing nerds (did you know [39]Eric S. Raymond is neopagan?) By decade’s
 end, the cleverest (ie most annoying) nerds were switching to New Atheism;
 throughout, smaller groups were exploring Discordianism, chaos magick, and the
 Subgenius. The common thread was that Christianity had lost its hegemonic
 status, part of being a clever nerd was patting yourself on the back for having
 seen through it, but exactly what would replace it was still uncertain, and
 there was still enough piety in the water supply that people were uncomfortable
 forgetting about religion entirely. You either had to make a very conscious,
 marked choice to stop believing (New Atheism), or try your hand at the task of
 inventing some kind of softer middle ground (neopaganism, Eastern religion,
 various cults, whatever this book was supposed to be).
 
 It’s Obvious You Won’t Survive By Your Wits Alone
 
 Adams spent his life obsessed with self-help. Even more than a businessman or a
 prophet, he wanted to be a self-help guru. Of course he did. His particular
 package of woo - a combination of hypnosis, persuasion hacks, and social skills
 advice - unified the two great motifs of his life.
 
 Thesis: I am cleverer than everyone else.
 
 Antithesis: I always lose to the Pointy-Haired Boss.
 
 Synthesis: I was trying to be rational. But most people are irrational sheep;
 they can be directed only by charismatic manipulators who play on their biases,
 not by rational persuasion. But now I’m back to being cleverer than everyone
 else, because I noticed this. Also, I should become a charismatic manipulator.
 
 I phrased this in a maximally hostile way, but it’s not wrong. And Adams
 started off strong. He read Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence
 People, widely agreed to be the classic book on social skills.
 
 [41]
 [https]
 
 Then, in search of even stronger persuasion techniques, he turned to hypnosis.
 This has a bad reputation, but I basically buy that something is there.
 Psychiatry has [42]legends of psychotherapist-hypnotists who achieved amazing
 things, and there’s [43]a plausible scientific story for why it might work. So
 when Adams claimed to be a master hypnotist, I was originally willing to give
 him the benefit of the doubt.
 
 That lasted until I read [44]The Religion War[45]3, Adams’ sequel to God’s
 Debris. In the intro, which may be literally the most annoying passage ever
 written in all two million years of human history, he discusses the reception
 of the original book:
 
     This is a sequel to my book God’s Debris, a story about a deliveryman who
     chances upon the smartest person in the world and learns the secrets of
     reality. I subtitled that book A Thought Experiment and used a variety of
     hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a feeling of euphoric
     enlightenment in the reader similar to what the main character would feel
     while discovering the (fictionally) true nature of reality. Reactions to
     the book were all over the map. About half of the people who e-mailed me
     said they felt various flavors of euphoria, expanded awareness,
     connectedness, and other weird sensations that defied description. A
     surprising number of people reported reading the entire book twice in one
     day. So I know something was happening.
 
     Other people wrote angry letters and scathing reviews, pointing out the
     logical and factual flaws in the book. It is full of flaws, and much of the
     science is made up, as it states in the introduction. I explained that the
     reader is supposed to be looking for flaws. That’s what makes the
     experiment work. You might think this group of readers skipped the
     introduction and missed the stated point of the book, but I suspect that
     something else is going on. People get a kind of cognitive dissonance
     (brain cramp) when their worldview is disturbed. It’s fun to watch.
 
 I previously felt bad for writing this essay after Adams’ death; it seems kind
 of unsporting to disagree with someone who can’t respond. These paragraphs
 cured me of my misgivings: after his death is by far the best time to disagree
 with Scott Adams.
 
 The book is a novel (a real novel this time, with plot and everything) meant to
 dramatize the lessons of its predecessor. In the near future, the Muslims and
 Christians are on the verge of global war. Adams’ self-insert character, the
 Avatar, goes around hypnotizing and mind hacking everyone into cooperating with
 his hare-brained scheme for world peace.
 
 [46]
 [https]
 
 In an early chapter, the Christian alliance has captured the Avatar and sent
 him to be tortured. But the Avatar masterfully deflects the torturer’s
 attention with a bit of cold reading, some pointed questions, and a few
 hypnotic suggestions:
 
     As the Avatar planned, the interrogator’s conscious mind was scrambled by
     the emotions and thoughts of the past minutes. This brutish man, accustomed
     to avoiding deep thoughts, had imagined the tiniest particles of the
     universe, his childhood, and the battles of the future. He had laughed,
     felt pain and pity, been intellectually stimulated, confused, assured, and
     uncertain. The Avatar had challenged his worldview, and it was evaporating,
     leaving him feeling empty, unimportant, and purposeless
 
 In the thrilling climax, which takes place at Stacey’s Cafe (yes, it’s the
 real-world restaurant Adams was managing - yes, he turned his
 religious-apocalyptic thriller novel into an ad for his restaurant - yes, I bet
 he thought of this as a “hypnotic suggestion”), the characters find the Prime
 Influencer. She is able to come up with a short snappy slogan so memetically
 powerful that it defeats fundamentalist religion and ends the war (the slogan
 is: “If God is so smart, why do you fart?”). Adams’ mouthpiece character says:
 
     It wasn’t the wisdom of the question that made it so powerful; philosophers
     had posed better questions for aeons. It was the packaging—the marketing,
     if you will—the repeatability and simplicity, the timing, the Zeitgeist,
     and in the end, the fact that everyone eventually heard it from someone
     whose opinion they trusted.The question was short, provocative, and cast in
     the language of international commerce that almost everyone
     understood—English. Most important, and generally overlooked by historians:
     It rhymed and it was funny. Once you heard it, you could never forget it.
     It looped in the brain, gaining the weight and feel of truth with each
     repetition. Human brains have a limited capacity for logic and evidence.
     Throughout time, repetition and frequency were how people decided what was
     most true.
 
 This paragraph is the absolute center of Adams’ worldview (later expanded to
 book length several times in tomes named things like Win Bigly: Persuasion In A
 World Where Facts Don’t Matter). People don’t respond to logic and evidence, so
 the world is ruled by people who are good at making catchy slogans.
 Sufficiently advanced sloganeering is indistinguishable from hypnosis, and so
 when Adams has some cute turns of phrase in his previous book, he describes it
 as “[I] used a variety of hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a
 feeling of euphoric enlightenment in the reader”. This is the cringiest way
 possible to describe cute turns of phrase, and turns me off from believing any
 his further claims to hypnotic mastery.
 
 Throughout this piece, I’ve tried to emphasize that Adams was usually pretty
 self-aware. Did that include the hypnosis stuff? I’m not sure. I think he would
 have answered: certainly some people are great charismatic manipulators. Either
 their skills are magic, or they operate by some physical law. If they operate
 by physical law, they should be learnable. Maybe I’m not quite Steve Jobs level
 yet, but I have to be somewhere along the path to becoming Steve Jobs, right?
 And why not describe it in impressive terms? Steve Jobs would have come up with
 impressive-sounding terms for any skills he had, and you would have believed
 him!
 
 Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same
 idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and
 hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all
 those things! This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that
 it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area
 has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten
 thousand bright nerds who tried this. I can’t explain why it so invariably goes
 wrong. The best I can do is tell a story where, when you’re trying to do this,
 you’re selecting for either techniques that can change you, or techniques that
 can compellingly make you think you’ve been changed. The latter are much more
 common than the former. And the most successful parasites are always those
 which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and
 if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your
 host’s rationality. So you’re really selecting for things that are compelling,
 seductive, and damage your ability to tell good ideas from bad ones. This is a
 just-so story that I have no evidence for - but seriously, go to someone who
 has the words “human potential” on their business card and ask them if you can
 see the skull shed.
 
 [47]
 Dilbert Power Pose - Fretboard Anatomy
 
 But also: it’s attractive to be an effortlessly confident alpha male who oozes
 masculinity. And it’s . . . fine . . . to be a normal person with normal-person
 hangups. What you really don’t want to be is a normal person who is
 unconvincingly pretending to be a confident alpha male. “Oh hello, nice to meet
 you, I came here in my Ferrari, it’s definitely not a rental, you’re having the
 pasta - I’m choosing it for you because I’m so dominant - anyway, do you want
 to have sex when we get back? Oh, wait, I forgot to neg you, nice hair, is it
 fake?”
 
 [48]
 Amy Cuddy power poses through pop culture | TED Blog
 
 In theory, becoming a hot charismatic person with great social skills ought to
 be the same kind of task as everything else, where you practice a little and
 you’re bad, but then you practice more and you become good. But the uncanny
 valley is deep and wide, and Scott Adams was too invested in saying “Ha! I just
 hypnotized you - ha! There, did it again!” for me to trust his mountaineering
 skills.
 
 Don’t Step In The Leadership
 
 It all led, inexorably, to Trump.
 
 In summer 2015, Trump came down his escalator and announced his presidential
 candidacy. Given his comic status, his beyond-the-pale views, and his
 competition with a crowded field including Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, traditional
 media wrote him off. Sure, he immediately led in the polls, but political
 history was full of weirdos who got brief poll bumps eighteen months before an
 election only to burn out later. The prediction markets listed his chance of
 the nomination (not the Presidency!) at 5%.
 
 Which made it especially jarring when, in August, Scott Adams wrote a blog post
 asserting that Trump had “a 98% chance” of winning. This claim received
 national attention, because Trump was dominating the news cycle and Adams was
 approximately the only person, anywhere, who thought he had a chance.
 
 There are two ways to make historically good predictions. The first way is to
 be some kind of brilliant superforecaster. Adams wasn’t this. Every big
 prediction he made after this one failed. Wikipedia notes that he dominated a
 Politico feature called “[50]The Absolute Worst Political Prediction of 20XX”,
 with the authors even remarking that he “has managed to appear on this annual
 roundup of the worst predictions in politics more than any other person on the
 planet”. His most famous howler was that if Biden won in 2020, Republicans
 “would be hunted” and his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within
 a year”. But other highlights include “a major presidential candidate will die
 of COVID”, “the Supreme Court will overturn the 2024 election”, and “Hillary
 Clinton will start a race war”.
 
 The other way to make a great prediction is to live your entire life for one
 perfect moment - the inveterate bear who predicted twelve of the last zero
 recessions, but now it’s 2008 and you look like a genius. By 2015, Adams had
 become a broken record around one point: people are irrational sheep who are
 prey for charismatic manipulators. The pointy-haired boss always wins. Trump
 was the pointiest-haired person in the vicinity, and he was obviously trying to
 charismatically play on people’s instincts while other people were doing
 comparatively normal politics. Scott Adams’ hour had arrived.
 
 [51]
 
 But Adams also handled his time in the spotlight masterfully. He gave us terms
 like “clown genius”. I hate using this, because I know Scott Adams was sitting
 at his desk in his custom-built Dilbert-head-shaped tower thinking “What sort
 of hypnotic catchy slogans can I use to make my meme about Trump spread . . .
 aha! Clown genius! That has exactly the right ring!” and it absolutely worked,
 and now everyone who was following the Internet in 2015 has the phrase “clown
 genius” etched into their brains (Adams calls these “linguistic kill shots”;
 since I remember that term and use it often, I suppose “linguistic kill shot”
 is an example of itself). He went from news outlet to news outlet saying “As a
 trained hypnotist, I can tell you what tricks Trump is using to bamboozle his
 followers, given that rational persuasion is fake and marketing techniques
 alone turn the wheels of history,” and the news outlets ate it up.
 
 [52]
 Image
 You probably thought I was making up the part where Scott Adams has a
 custom-built tower shaped like Dilbert’s head.
 
 And some of his commentary was good. He was one of the first people to point
 out the classic Trump overreach, where he would say something like “Sleepy Joe
 Biden let in twenty trillion illegal immigrants!” The liberal media would take
 the bait and say “FACT CHECK: False! - Joe Biden only let in five million
 illegal immigrants!”, and thousands of people who had never previously been
 exposed to any narrative-threatening information would think “Wait, Joe Biden
 let in five million illegal immigrants?!” Once you notice it, it’s hard to
 unsee.
 
 Adams started out by stressing that he was politically independent. He didn’t 
 support Trump, he was just the outside hypnosis expert pointing out what Trump
 was doing. IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL.
 Indeed, “this person is a charismatic manipulator hacking the minds of
 irrational sheep” is hardly a pro-Trump take. And he lived in Pleasanton,
 California - a member in good standing of the San Francisco metropolitan area -
 and nice Pleasantonians simply did not become Trump supporters in 2016.
 
 On the other hand, at some point, his increasingly overblown theories of
 Trump’s greatness opened up a little wedge. The growing MAGA movement started
 treating him as one of their own; liberals started to see him as an enemy. His
 fame turned the All-Seeing Eye of social media upon him, that gaze which no man
 may meet without consequence. Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics
 becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the
 other will pile on you [55]so massively and traumatically that it will force
 you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security.
 
 As he had done so many other times during his life, he resolved the conflict in
 the dumbest, cringiest, and most public way possible: a June 2016 blog post
 announcing that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton, for his own safety, because
 he suspected he would be targeted for assassination if he didn’t:
 
     This past week we saw Clinton pair the idea of President Trump with nuclear
     disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you
     tremble in fear. That is good persuasion if you can pull it off because
     fear is a strong motivator. It is also a sharp pivot from Clinton’s prior
     approach of talking about her mastery of policy details, her experience,
     and her gender. Trump took her so-called “woman card” and turned it into a
     liability. So Clinton wisely pivoted. Her new scare tactics are solid-gold
     persuasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see Clinton’s numbers versus
     Trump improve in June, at least temporarily, until Trump finds a
     counter-move.
 
     The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to
     trigger a race war in the United States. And I would be a top-ten
     assassination target in that scenario […]
 
     So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal
     safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic
     Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton
     supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my
     safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the
     safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
 
     As I have often said, I have no psychic powers and I don’t know which
     candidate would be the best president. But I do know which outcome is most
     likely to get me killed by my fellow citizens. So for safety reason, I’m on
     team Clinton.
 
     My prediction remains that Trump will win in a landslide based on his
     superior persuasion skills. But don’t blame me for anything President Trump
     does in office because I endorse Clinton.
 
 This somehow failed to be a masterstroke of hypnotic manipulation that left
 both sides placated. But it was fine, because Trump won anyway! In the New
 Right’s wave of exultation, all was forgiven, and the first high-profile figure
 to bet on Trump became a local hero and confirmed prophet. Never mind that
 Adams had predicted Trump would win by “one of the biggest margins we’ve seen
 in recent history” when in fact he lost the popular vote. The man who had
 dreamed all his life of being respected for something other than cartooning had
 finally made it.
 
 Obviously, it destroyed him.
 
 At first, I wondered if Adams’ right-wing turn was a calculated manuever. He’d
 always longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans, and had finally achieved
 slightly-above-zero skill at it. Wouldn’t it fit his personality to see the
 right-wingers as dumb sheep, and himself as the clever Dogbert-style scammer
 who could profit off them? Did he really believe (as he claimed) that he was at
 risk of being assassinated by left-wing radicals who couldn’t handle his level
 of insight into Trump’s genius? Or was this just another hypnotic suggestion,
 retrospectively justified insofar as we’re still talking about it ten years
 later and all publicity is good publicity?
 
 [56]
 [https]
 
 But I don’t think he did it cynically. At the turn of the millennium, the
 obsessed-with-their-own-cleverness demographic leaned firmly liberal: smug New
 Atheists, hardline skeptics, members of the “reality-based community”. But in
 the 2010s, liberalism became the default, the public switched to expertolatry,
 dumb people’s orthodoxies about race and gender became easier and more fun to
 puncture than dumb people’s orthodoxies about religion - and the O.W.T.O.C.s
 lurched right. Adams was borne along by the tide. With enough time, dedication,
 and archive access, you can hop from Dilbert comic to Dilbert comic, tracing
 the exact contours of his political journey.
 
 [57]
 [https]
 ([60]source)
 [61]
 [https]
 ([64]source)
 
 There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given
 how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously
 believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose
 brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how
 I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the
 damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public
 intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of
 partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul
 Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it
 would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of
 insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn
 that was blowing?
 
 Adams was 58 when Trump changed everything. In 2001, age 44, he’d found the
 failure of his Dilberito funny. But in another interview, at age 50, he
 suggested that maybe his competitors had formed teams to sneak into
 supermarkets and hide them in the back of the shelves. Being tragically flawed
 yet also self-aware enough to laugh about it is a young man’s game.
 
 In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via
 ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian
 Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking
 right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer. Scott Adams, the
 man too clever and independent to join any political tendency, who had sworn to
 always be the master manipulator standing above the fray rather than a sheep
 with ordinary object-level opinions - had finally succumbed to sincere belief.
 
 It’s Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
 
 Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most
 teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the
 world.
 
 It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who
 starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who
 wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre.
 Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have
 one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more.
 
 I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about
 washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their
 girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during
 the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are
 nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole
 affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”.
 
 Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an
 appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also,
 once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as
 it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole
 childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my
 elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.
 
 [66]Reaction formation, where you replace a unbearable feeling with its exact
 opposite, is one of the all time great Freudian defense mechanisms. You may
 remember it from such classics as “rape victims fall in love with their rapist”
 or “secretly gay people become really homophobic”. So some percent of washed-up
 gifted kids compensate by really, really hating nerdiness, rationality, and the
 intellect.
 
 The variety of self-hating nerd are too many to number. There are the nerds who
 go into psychology to prove that EQ is a real thing and IQ merely its pale
 pathetic shadow. There are the nerds who become super-woke and talk about how
 reason and objectivity are forms of white supremacy culture. There are the
 nerds who obsess over “embodiment” and “somatic therapy” and accuse everyone
 else of “living in their heads”. There are the nerds who deflect by becoming
 really into neurodiversity - “the interesting thing about my brain isn’t that
 I’m ‘smart’ or ‘rational’, it’s that I’m ADHDtistic, which is actually a
 weakness . . . but also secretly a strength!” There are the nerds who flirt
 with fascism because it idolizes men of action, and the nerds who convert to
 Christianity because it idolizes men of faith. There are the nerds who get
 really into Seeing Like A State, and how being into rationality and metrics and
 numbers is soooooo High Modernist, but as a Kegan Level Five Avatar they are
 far beyond such petty concerns. There are the nerds who redefine “nerd” as
 “person who likes Marvel movies” - having successfully gerrymandered themselves
 outside the category, they can go back to their impeccably-accurate
 statisticsblogging on educational outcomes, or their deep dives into
 anthropology and medieval mysticism, all while casting about them imprecations
 that of course nerds are loathsome scum who deserve to be bullied.
 
 (maybe it’s unfair to attribute this to self-hatred per se. Adams wrote, not
 unfairly, that the scientismists in Kegan level 4 “are arrogant when it comes
 to dealing with people in levels two and three.” Maybe there’s the same
 desperate urge for level 5 to differentiate themselves from 4s - cf. [67]
 barberpole theory of fashion).
 
 Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As
 compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was
 humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its
 handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was
 his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other
 nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve
 gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion /
 hypnosis.”
 
 When he was young, and his mind supple, he was able to balance both these
 mechanisms; the steam of their dissonance drove the turbine of his art. As he
 grew older, the first one - especially the self-awareness - started to fail,
 and he leaned increasingly heavily on the second. Forced to bear the entire
 weight of his wounded psyche, it started showing more and more cracks, until
 eventually he ended up as a podcaster - the surest sign of a deranged mind.
 
 In comparison, his final downfall was almost trivial - a bog-standard
 cancellation, indistinguishable from every other cancellation of the 2015 -
 2025 period. Angered by a poll where some black people expressed discomfort
 with the slogan “It’s Okay To Be White”, Adams declared that “the best advice I
 would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get
 the fuck away”. Needless to say, his publisher, syndicator, and basically every
 newspaper in the country dropped him immediately. He relaunched his comics on
 Locals, an online subscription platform for cancelled people, but his reach had
 declined by two orders of magnitude and never recovered.
 
 [68]
 [https]
 
 Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be
 White”. I can’t help wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been
 equally willing to assert the okayness of the rest of his identity.
 
 Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life
 
 In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams.
 
 Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating
 myself. You’re a bald guy with glasses named Scott A who lives in the San
 Francisco Bay Area. You think you’re pretty clever, but the world has a way of
 reminding you of your limitations. You try to work a normal job. You do a
 little funny writing on the side. People like the funny writing more than you
 expected. Hardly believing your luck, you quit to do the funny writing full
 time. You explore themes about the irrationality of the world. You have some
 crazy ideas you’re not entirely willing to stand behind, and present them as
 fiction or speculation or April Fools jokes. You always wonder whether your
 purpose in life is really just funny writing - not because people don’t love
 the stuff you write, not even because you don’t get fan mail saying you somehow
 mysteriously changed people’s lives, but just because it seems less serious
 than being a titan of industry or something. You try some other things. They
 don’t go terribly, but they don’t go great either. You decide to stick with
 what you’re good at. You write a book about the Lurianic kabbalah. You get
 really into whale puns.
 
 [70]
 Shave the Whales (Dilbert #4) by Scott Adams | Goodreads
 
 As we pass through life, sometimes God shows us dopplegangers, bright or dark
 mirrors of ourselves, glimpses of how we might turn out if we zig or zag on the
 path ahead. Some of these people are meant as shining inspirations, others as
 terrible warnings, but they’re all our teachers.
 
 Adams was my teacher in a more literal way too. He published several annotated
 collections, books where he would present comics along with an explanation of
 exactly what he was doing in each place, why some things were funny and others
 weren’t, and how you could one day be as funny as him. Ten year old Scott
 devoured these. I’ve always tried to hide my power level as a humorist, lest I
 get pegged as a comedic author and people stop taking me seriously. But
 objectively my joke posts get the most likes and retweets of anything I write,
 and I owe much of my skill in the genre to cramming Adams’ advice into a
 malleable immature brain[73]4. There’s a direct line between Dogbert’s crazy
 schemes and the startup ideas in a typical Bay Area House Party post.
 
 [74]
 [https]
 
 The Talmud tells the story of the death of Rabbi Elisha. Elisha was an evil
 apostate. His former student, Rabbi Meir, who stayed good and orthodox,
 insisted that Rabbi Elisha probably went to Heaven. This was never very
 plausible, and God sent increasingly obvious signs to the contrary, including a
 booming voice from Heaven saying that Elisha was not saved. Out of loyalty to
 his ex-teacher, Meir dismissed them all - that voice was probably just some
 kind of 4D chess move - and insisted that Elisha had a share in the World To
 Come.
 
 Out of the same doomed loyalty as Rabbi Meir, I want to believe Scott Adams
 went to Heaven.
 
 There is what at first appears to be promising evidence - in [77]his final
 message to his fans, Adams said:
 
     Many Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a
     believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so
     looks attractive. So here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and
     savior, and I like forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about
     me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven.
     I won’t need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified
     for entry.
 
 It is a dogma of many religions that sincere deathbed conversions are accepted.
 But I’d be more comfortable if this sounded less like “haha, I found my final
 clever lifehack”. I can only hope he didn’t try to implant any hypnotic
 suggestions in an attempt to get a linguistic kill shot in on the Almighty. As
 another self-hating nerd writer put it, “through all these years I make
 experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be.”
 
 But I’m more encouraged by the second half of his departing note:
 
     For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy
     husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages
     don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable
     way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my
     family.
 
     Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I
     donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my
     otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add
     the most to people's lives, one way or another.
 
     That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbert cartoonist to an author
     of - what I hoped would be - useful books. By then, I believed I had
     condensed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I
     continued making Dilbert comics, of course.
 
     As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful"
     genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book
     turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide
     variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives.
     My plan to be useful was working.
 
     I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how
     to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I
     know that book changed lives because I hear it often.
 
     You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I
     know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is
     impossible to describe.
 
     My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better,
     especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one
     didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried.
 
     Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own
     thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was
     surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having.
 
     I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams,
     dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a
     more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping
     lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely.
     Again, that had great meaning for me.
 
     I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits
     from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the
     legacy I want.
 
     Be useful.
 
     And please know I loved you all to the end.
 
 I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the
 event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t
 entirely follow, but I think his various sub-shows are getting rolled into a
 broader brand, The Scott Adams School, where his acolytes discuss and teach his
 theory of persuasion:
 
 [78]
 [https]
 
 The woman on the top left is his ex-wife. Even though they’ve been divorced for
 twelve years, they never abandoned each other. All the other faces are people
 who found Adams revelatory and are choosing to continue his intellectual
 tradition. And in the comments - thirteen thousand of them - are other people
 who loved Adams. Some watch every episode of his podcast and consider him a
 genius. Others were touched in more subtle ways. People who wrote him with
 their problems and he responded. People who met him on the street and demanded
 the typical famous person “pose for a photo with me”, and he did so graciously.
 People who said his self-help books really helped them. People who just used
 Dilbert to stay sane through their cubicle jobs.
 
 (also one person blaming his death on the COVID vaccine, but this is Twitter,
 you’re never going to avoid that)
 
 Adams is easy and fun to mock - as is everyone who lives their life uniquely
 and unapologetically. I’ve had a good time psychoanalyzing him, but everyone
 does whatever they do for psychological reasons, and some people end up doing
 good.
 
 [81]
 [https]
 
 Though I can’t endorse either Adams’ politics or his persuasive methods, [82]
 everything is a combination of itself and an attempt to build a community. And
 whatever the value of his ideas, the community seems real and loving.
 
 And I’m serious when I say I consider Adams a teacher. For me, he was the sort
 of teacher who shows you what to avoid; for many others, he was the type who
 serves as inspiration. These roles aren’t quite opposites - they’re both
 downstream of a man who blazed his own path, and who recorded every step he
 took, with unusual grace and humor, as documentation for those who would face a
 choice of whether or not to follow. This wasn’t a coincidence, but the
 conscious and worthy project of his life. Just for today, I’ll consider myself
 part of the same student body as all the other Adams fans, and join my fellows
 in tribute to our fallen instructor.
 
 I hope he gets his linguistic kill shot in on God and squeaks through the
 Pearly Gates.
 
 [83]
 [https]
 Source: [86]cartoonsbyardeet.com
 
 [87]1
 
 As is quantum complexity blogger Scott Aaronson.
 
 [88]2
 
 Cf. the old joke about the Soviet Jew trying to emigrate to Israel. The secret
 police is giving him a hard time - “What don’t you like about our communist
 paradise? You think the economy is too weak?” “Oh no, I can’t complain.” “You
 think the politics are oppressive?” “Oh no, I can’t complain.” “You think we
 prevent you from practicing your primitive religion?” “Oh no, I can’t
 complain.” “Then why do you want to leave for Israel?” “Because there, I can
 complain.”
 
 [89]3
 
 "What’s the normal English term for when holy people fight over holy sites
 because of their differing beliefs about what is holy? Oh, right, a Religion
 War.”
 
 [90]4
 
 To be more precise, half of my skill. I attribute the other half to Dave Barry,
 who I consumed the same way during the same period of my life.
 
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 References:
 
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