It was a lovely silly idea with a gentle whiff of plausibility within. Scott Adams’ books continued the thread. The Dilbert Future, and then God’s Debris. I connected with them both and signed up to his newsletter. It was filled with commonly held processes being unpicked in unnatural ways.
- Can you make a meal that is exactly what the body needs and nothing else? (The Dilburrito)
- Can you select which branch you travel in through the multiverse using affirmations?
- How deep does the holy land go and could you take an inch thick layer off the top and spread it out someone else to make twice as much holy land?
The problem with training yourself to distance yourself from emotions and empathy when thinking like this is that a phrase that seems like another part of the puzzle is still going to have emotional weight that you don’t intend. When Scott was pondering cultural behaviour he wrote "women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently."
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The f### you just said? |
Almost all of Scott Adams spare energy at the moment seems to be pointed towards the Trump Administration. Unpicking emotional charged ideas and playing with the puzzle aspect of them has left many calling him alt-right despite him actively stating he leans left and is only interested in the tools being used.
Living a life thinking like this is socially dangerous. We are, each of us, primates at heart. Storytelling monkeys. Our default state is emotion. It’s how we communicate. If we hear someone trying to find the good in someone or something our tribe has learned to hate we react emotionally. If we’re attacked we develop emotional defences to see the attackers as the other tribe. And then to connect with the people who agree with us. I don’t think Scott Adams is immune to this.
I still like to follow Scott Adams. He gave me the tools to analyse my own biases and, in doing so, to analyse his. I’ve hopefully now got the skill-set to take just the right amount of salt with everything he says. I love to address complex social issues with the same dispassion, but I’ve learned to make decisions based firstly on kindness, then, a distant second, on being right. This has helped me rebalance the puzzles and ideas side of me with the social animal, and being a kind social animal is like a monkey super-power.
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