Scott Adams, Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68 After Prostate Cancer Battle
Scott Adams, the mind behind the beloved comic strip Dilbert, has passed away at age 68. He fought a long battle with prostate cancer. Adams became famous for his sharp satire of office life, but later transformed into a controversial digital figure.
Mixed Reactions to His Passing
Major publications offered varied perspectives on Adams' life and work. The Washington Post described him as a hero to office workers who later embraced the role of a digital provocateur. They noted his inflammatory comments on race, politics, and identity.
The New York Times highlighted how his corporate experience inspired Dilbert. They also mentioned that over 1,000 newspapers dropped the strip after his racist podcast remarks in 2023. People magazine initially labeled him "disgraced" before removing the author's name entirely.
Remembering Adams Through His Own Words
Perhaps the best way to understand Scott Adams is through his own humble assessment. He once wrote about his skills with characteristic self-deprecation.
"I have poor art skills, mediocre business skills, good but not great writing talent, and an early knowledge of the Internet. And I have a good but not great sense of humour. I'm like one big mediocre soup. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force."
This combination proved remarkably effective. Developers might call it a full stack approach. Dilbert resonated deeply because it felt so relatable to millions.
The Dilbert Philosophy
Adams possessed a unique understanding of corporate absurdity. In many ways, Dilbert served as an ideological sequel to Yes Minister. While Yes Minister exposed bureaucratic dysfunction, Dilbert tackled the corporate institutions that evolved from those bureaucracies.
If Yes Minister showed clashes between bureaucracy and executives, Dilbert captured battles between management and employees. Management often takes credit while employees shoulder blame.
Adams drew from personal experience to create the Dilbert Principle. This concept riffed on the Peter Principle about rising to incompetence. The Dilbert Principle suggests corporations deliberately move incompetent people into management where they cause minimal damage.
More Than Office Satire
At its core, Dilbertism represents more than workplace humor. It stands as an accusation against modern corporations. Adams argued that corporations aren't accidentally inefficient but deliberately irrational.
They reward talkers over thinkers, optics managers over outcome deliverers. In Dilbert's world, intelligence becomes a liability. Competence remains invisible while clarity limits careers. Power flows to the unaccountable rather than the capable.
Adams revealed with brutal clarity that corporations don't fail despite incompetence. They often succeed because incompetence provides cover, hierarchy, and plausible deniability. The system works exactly as designed, just not for the people doing actual work.
Amplifying Corporate Absurdities
Adams amplified how incompetence thrives and receives protection in corporate cultures. Meetings exist to distribute blame rather than create outcomes. Management language, even before GPT, sounded intelligent while conveying nothing.
He captured weaponized incompetence before the term became popular. Consider some of his sharpest observations.
- Hard work is rewarding. Taking credit for other people's hard work is rewarding and faster.
- The goal of management is not productivity. It's plausible deniability.
- The purpose of a meeting is to create the illusion that something is happening.
- Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems, they will invent some.
- The appearance of competence is more important than competence itself.
- The trick to success is learning which rules matter and which ones don't.
- Every system eventually evolves into one that rewards conformity over results.
Final Days and First "Death"
Adams continued creating Dilbert until his final days despite health challenges. Last November, he tweeted about focal dystonia in his right hand and semi-paralysis in his left. His art director drew the strip while Adams continued writing.
His physical passing marked his second "death." The first occurred in 2023 when publications dropped Dilbert after controversial comments. He suggested Black respondents disagreeing with "it's okay to be white" constituted a hate group.
Follow-up remarks about white people avoiding Black people brought widespread condemnation. Major publications canceled the strip entirely. Given his public support for Donald Trump since 2016, this rupture seemed inevitable.
Political Evolution and Worldview
Adams' political journey proved as controversial as it was deliberate. A longtime student of persuasion and hypnosis, he supported Trump early not for morality or governance but persuasion skills. He believed Trump understood media dynamics better than critics.
Adams repeatedly argued politics centered on storytelling, emotion, and perception rather than policy. He dismissed fact-checking as politically irrelevant. He described modern voters as driven more by narrative resonance than empirical truth.
This worldview hardened into contrarian stances on race, identity politics, gender, and institutional trust. He framed himself as anti-woke and anti-establishment, positioning provocations as "clarity" rather than cruelty.
Critics saw grievance politics while Adams saw himself diagnosing uncomfortable truths about persuasion and social fracture. His political commentary followed Dilbert's pattern: reduce complex systems to ugly incentives and laugh at results.
Legacy Questions
Adams' comments raise perennial questions about creators. Should we remember them for their work or the magic they created through it? Either way, Adams would have found the discussion amusing.
He once made caustic yet accurate observations about civilization. Explaining how the printing press preserved good ideas, he wrote: "We are a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilisation that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants."
He elaborated that all surrounding technology, management theories, economic models, and science helping us live to eighty came from a tiny percentage of deviant smart people. The rest simply tread water as fast as possible.
His favorite example involved Kodak's Weekender single-use camera. Customers called support asking if they could use it during the week.
A Different Kind of Genius
The word "genius" gets overused today, but it fits Scott Adams appropriately. He wasn't among the deviants who designed civilization, but he belonged to the few who explained it to the ninnies trapped inside.
In doing so, he transformed confusion into clarity, frustration into laughter, and work into something survivable. That represents a genuine civilizational contribution. Without such art, what makes us truly human?
