He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.
Post-WWII, Chiang Kai-shek was far too friendly with the defeated, disgraced, and oft-hated Japanese military. And the blatantly racist Americans. Vs. Mao was friendly with (if often made out to be a tool of) the Soviets - hardly nice people, but in China far less ill-behaved or loathed. Since Mao won the Chinese Civil War - with considerable help from the Soviets, and far more help from the cruelty, corruption, and poor company of the Nationalist regime - then "dialed back" Soviet power and influence over the following decades, he'd seem the obvious winner of the "Freed China from Foreign Domination" crown.