In Defense of Elitism by Joel Stein

Author:Joel Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

But when he succeeded as a cartoonist, Scott didn’t enter the Loop. He’s never met the editors at the newspapers that run Dilbert. He doesn’t go to elite conferences. He doesn’t even own a suit because he hasn’t had an occasion to wear one. Scott was never given enough respect from the elite, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of any comic strip besides Doonesbury.

Dilbert is a salvo against elites. Its principal joke is that Dilbert’s boss is a moron. People tacked Dilbert cartoons to their cubicles right where their bosses could see, like soldiers spray-painting an anarchist’s red A on the side of their tanks. Surprisingly, their bosses didn’t untack them. Instead, they taped Dilbert comics to the walls of their offices, mocking their own bosses. Dilbert wasn’t a protest against middle management. It was a war cry against everyone in charge of everything. It’s not only Dilbert’s boss who is clueless, but also Dilbert’s boss’s boss. “It’s turtles all the way up,” Scott tells me. His book, The Dilbert Principle, explains his management theory, which is that companies promote the incompetent up the management chain to remove them from the workflow.

Bosses, Scott says, have no clue. This is the same argument Jerry used in Miami to convince me that the diplomats don’t know how to deal with North Korea. It’s the same rebel yell elite traitor Michael Gove (college at Oxford, editor at The Times; cabinet member) shouted to get people to vote for Brexit: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organizations from acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” Normal, decent people hate acronyms, except when they’re texting or trying to breathe underwater. Gisela Stuart, a member of Parliament who worked with Gove to pass Brexit, suggested the best method for weighing whether the UK should remain in a complex international economic and political union was this: “There is only one expert that matters, and that’s you, the voter.”

I ask Scott how many experts it took to build this house. He shows me a guest bathroom that has a corner where two cabinet drawers meet in a way that one can’t be opened. This is what expert architects do. Besides, some of the ideas for his house came from more than 3,000 fans who sent ideas to the Dilbert’s Ultimate House (DUH) project. These nonprofessionals are the ones responsible for the cat bathroom, the Christmas tree closet, and, most significantly, the enormous Dilbert head–shaped tower whose window-eyes overlook the pool. This is the Temple of Dilbert, a place to pray for the common man’s victory over the elite. Except for these cabinet drawers. “There’s no such thing as expertise. It just doesn’t exist,” Scott says. “The expert is full of shit.” This seemed like an extreme opinion from a guy who got so good at hypnosis he has given women orgasms without touching them. Which are three things I have not mastered.

This is a major nihilistic escalation of Jerry’s theory.

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