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.
There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry.
I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.”
Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignoring it or refusing to call it out.
But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day. The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
Realising:
- everyone has performed good and bad actions
- having performed a good action doesn't "make up for or cancel out" a bad action. You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.
- you can be appreciated for your good actions while your bad actions still stand.
: all these take some life experience and perhaps significant thought on the concepts.
> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.