Scott Adams has officially gone ‘too far’ in his race relations statement. Or has he?

The answer to THAT question comes down to how you first answer two OTHER questions:

1) Do you know his actual statement taken in its context or just what the clickbait headline machines have told you about his supposed ‘indiscretions’?

2) Do you know what point Scott was trying to make and whether he is coming from a position of goodwill or malice?

As he often says on his ‘two movies one screen’ analogy of people looking at one set of facts and coming away with very different conclusions, the ideas you may have in your head while you take in information play a big role in shaping your understanding of any new information (ideas, videos, events you happen to witness) you encounter. (The Charlottesville Hoax is one fine example of where he applies that process.)

Sometimes, two people can come away from the same event with entirely opposite reactions for precisely that reason.

The ‘punishment’ and the ‘crime’

Now the Dilbert creator is under fire for the heinous heresy of saying an Un-sayable Thing™ on the interwebs.

He has been found ‘guilty’ of political heresy by the semi-professionalized outrage mob who have mastered the use of social media leverage to bully cowardly corporate types into subservient obedience.

We’ll describe the punishment that the outrage mob has rained down on him before we look at whether it was justified.

The punishment due?

As a result of the outrage mob doing what they do best, the ENTIRE syndication of Dilbert has been nuked.

And not just Dilbert, either.

It’s not the first time he’s been kicked in the teeth like this.

Scott Adams isn’t crying about it. He has a fairly straightforward reply to his critics:

The ‘crime’ he’s accused of committing

Unlike so many people on the interwebs who rush to judgment, we have had long experience of being on the receiving end of dishonest news stories and know that not everything said about a person on the internet is true.

So hearing about the controversy only after it was well underway we did what Scott challenged people to do — and what he himself did in defending Trump against the Charlottesville smear — we looked at what was actually said, in context.

What started this particular ball rolling was a poll from last week.

Here’s a screenshot. (You can look up the source if you need further context.)

What our readers may not know (and certainly the outrage doesn’t realize) is that Scott Adams’ own personal life history stands as evidence of the ‘brute facts’ variety contradicting the entire narrative his detractors are trying to build against him.

He sees the current condition of the upcoming generation of inner-city kids and how they are being failed, especially by the status quo of our miserable education system. He has taken a number of steps to try to get involved, even talking to BLM, before it became obvious to him that they were an unserious outfit not interested in actually doing the hard work of solving problems.

He was even sympathetic to Kaepernick for the exact reason so many others were not — because it was disruptive, got people angry, and made people pay attention to the issue he was trying to raise.

He self-describes his politics as left-leaning (‘I’m a lefty’), but he’s open to people from across the aisle who offer what he views as meaningful solutions to problems he wants to see solved. That explains why he (and so many others in his camp) warmed to Trump.

Back to the ‘infraction’ he’s accused of.

Scott refers people to this particular video where he describes much of the preamble I just described under the current ‘crime’ heading, before talking about the incident itself and the surrounding context.

We don’t expect our readers to watch the full two hours to get the context. That’s where time stamps come in handy. And for people in a hurry, there’s always the transcript.

The man known on the internet as ‘Hotep Jesus’ brought Scott on to talk about what all the fuss was about and included the actual cut. The first thirty minutes or so will get you up to speed. Our timestamp summary will do it even faster.

Fans of Scott will recognize the ‘simultaneous sip’ right off the top.

2:08, 2:20 He’s feeling great and thrives on the attention as an ‘energy monster’ (*that latter point will become important later on*)

3:16 — what he meant by ‘identifying as black’, goes on to cover a lot of his interactions with causes important to black people (as described above)

4:02, 4:21 (and following) describes his politics and what people get wrong about his politics before continuing to unpack the kind of social issues he has been involved in and what outside-the-box solutions he favors, especially the kind that leave room to account for obstacles and objections of people who might ordinarily be opposed to the idea at the core, including some innovative suggestions about how changes to the tax code might be adjusted to incentivize success rather than dependency.

14:39 (Has some red meat for our readers.)  Job One is breaking the Teacher’s Unions

15:33 Focus pivots to the event itself. Discusses motive behind it. Is it this, is it that?

16:13 Scott lets us peek behind the curtain and see the ‘why’ behind his internet interactions. ‘I never do something for one reason’. As in — he has multiple things he’s trying to accomplish in any interaction. He goes on to explain, and this part is important to understand his reasons… including explaining why some of the accusations against him aren’t just wrong, they are self-refuting.

Example: the accusation that Scott does this for ‘financial reasons’ makes no sense because it just cost him an entire income stream. He debunks a few other theories before giving his actual reasons.

17:14 — I discovered the price of free speech is really high and there are only a few people willing to pay it. So that I could extend the conversation to something that everybody needs to hear.

Then he explains that the clip will be provocative, but that the central point he has been making is one nobody has disagreed with, even if they are afraid of the consequences of actually articulating that point themselves. (This goes back to Hotep Jesus’ ‘creating room for the conversation’ point he made at the 17:03/17:08 mark.)

17:56 (and following) if you want to disagree with the statement, focus on the point itself, not any of the other distractions that get kicked up around it. He acknowledges that the data itself is imperfect.

The actual clip of the quote that started the controversy

18:44 “So if if nearly half of All Blacks are not okay with white people — according to this poll not according to me according to this poll — that’s a hate group. That’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them, and I would say you know, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.”

As Scott said, it’s a provocative clip, if you react emotionally to it rather than pausing to make sense of what point he is really trying to make here.

So, what IS he trying to say here?

…explained

As Scott unpacks his reasoning, you will see a few different things in play.

This ought to be obvious by what we have said about his advocacy for minorities and the underprivileged, but in case it’s not: he explains his opposition to discrimination against any individual.

He goes on to explain the difference in his approach between individuals versus groups.

He does not support or endorse any form of discrimination against an individual. There are Constitutional protections that exist to protect individuals against such discrimination, and it is right and good that they exist.

But his statement is best understood in the context he meant it to be understood in — individuals working to maximize their success within group dynamics. If an organization or group has natural biases against you, your chances of success within the context of a group that is negatively oriented against you are lower than they might be if you were among another group that did not share those biases.

Then he gives some examples.

First, you will see him give harmless and uncontroversial examples of people sizing up their situation within a group dynamic and selecting the option where one dynamic is the smarter choice for the furthering of private goals.

Think in terms of ‘rational maximization’ for this section.

A man has two job offers, one with a company composed almost entirely of female managers and the other with a healthy representation of men in leadership. Which one offers a greater potential for job growth? You can’t say for certain, but all other things being equal, your chances look better in a place where there is already a pattern of men being hired.

You can’t make any sweeping judgments about the biases of women there, but the culture of the company helps you infer some assumptions.

He gives another example. A young black person starting out in life and sizing up career choices asks for advice. Looking around at the present culture, this might be a good time for such a person to set himself or herself on a career track for management of a Fortune 500 company. The logic is simple: companies face pressure to adjust their management structure to increase the number of people from under-represented backgrounds.

Scott has a positive (if nuanced) view of Affirmative Action and thinks that a logical person rationally maximizing for his or her success in this situation would exploit the opportunty of corporate interest in hiring minority managers and fast-tracking their success.

Does it disadvantage other groups? It does, but that’s just a harsh fact of present reality.

If a Black man lived in Cleveland (53% of population was black) Scott would recommend maximizing the advantage in his Fortune 500 example by living/working somewhere where there were fewer other black professionals who could compete to make use of current Corporate hiring biases favorable to black employees.

Now we come to where it gets flipped. We see DEI and CRT being taught in schools across America.

This teaching explicitly accuses people like Scott (wealthy, white, heterosexual male) as being the root cause of most of life’s problems. This is where the conversation gets spicy.

The same statements Scott made earlier about constitutional rights, discrimination, and hiring still apply. Like in the earlier scenarios, he is not talking about individual people, but group dynamics.

If there is a group that is being explicitly taught to see you as the Devil Incarnate, would you expect that to have any impact on their future interactions with you?

What lessons that made logical sense in the previous scenarios might be adapted to this situation? Here, we’ve stumbled on the Unsayable Thing.

Scott Adams has paid a price to make room to say it, and has made it pretty obvious that any whatever lesson he wanted us to draw must exclude a move toward bigotry.

It prompts the question: what other lesson does that leave us to infer from his question?

What, indeed…?

Fortunately, thanks to Scott Adams having the courage to say the Un-sayable Thing™, we now have a little more space to ponder and discuss that question.

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