MAGAbert
I used to love classic Dilbert. I even have a collectible bound book of the strips here at home.
Lately, I’ve been asking myself why I appear to find myself in a world where with increasing frequency, people who created good stuff go off the rails and ultimately become intolerable? Have successful creative people always been this crap and we just didn’t notice it this explicitly because social media did not exist? Is unfiltered broadcasting of opinions about topics one doesn’t know the first thing about merely a symptom or the cause? And what precisely does success do to the human psyche? I’m pretty sure there are several contributing factors to go full Kanye. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that there’s more to it.
One gets the impression that people have always been shit and just hid that fact behind social norms and graces. The moment their inner disgust about or hate towards someone or something is no longer muttered under their breaths, when it feels like one can get away with acting on one’s worst impulses, it starts spilling out. Like a puss-filled sore ready to burst, in an attempt to spread the hate, to infect as much tissue and other hosts as possible. Hate is an infectious disease.
I’m left with moving away from more and more people I used to respect. I’m willing to indulge individuals with strong and unconventional opinions that may offend certain people. However, there’s a line. Scott Adams crossed it. Not because of one bizarre comparison but because of being an inconsiderate, massively arrogant dick for a long, long time. He just put what’s inside of him on the outside, for all to see. Not unlike what I’m doing here. He did that for years. He thought that individually and collectively we’d be too stupid to understand him. But we did. I bet that’s what his ego is unable to process: people may be stupid overall but not as stupid as one isolated cartoonist thinks.
A.R. Moxon offers an appropriate comment on the whole thing:
https://armoxon.substack.com/p/the-case-for-shunning
Ruben Bolling made a fitting cartoon:
https://boingboing.net/2023/02/27/magabert.html
I wonder what it says about me that I used to like Dilbert. Maybe I used to share the distorted worldview of looking down on other people’s intelligence. Maybe it used to be an outlet for frustrations of dealing with people whose drives and motivations I didn’t understand — and couldn’t be bothered with.
In any case, I don’t like them any more and did so for a long time. There was nothing new to them, just the same old finger-pointing of “look how stupid other people are”. It gets old eventually, just like Scott Adams’ unrequested opinions on everything.