“To err is human. To cover it up is weasel.” (Scott Adams).
And so, the author and cartoonist, Scott Adams lays out his explanation of how things are in our workaday world. In his book “Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel: A Guide to Outwitting Your Boss, Your Coworkers, and the Other Pants-Wearing Ferrets in Your life” written way back in 2002, Adams explores “The Weasel Zone”. This is the “gigantic grey area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. And “it’s where most of life happens.”
He adds, “Sometimes also known as Weaselville, Weaseltown, the Way of the Weasel, Weaselopolis, Weaselburg, and Redmond.” [reference to where Microsoft is headquartered].
“In the Weasel Zone everything is misleading, but not exactly a lie. There’s a subtle difference. When you lie, you hope to fool someone. But when you’re being a weasel, everyone is aware that you’re a manipulative, scheming, misleading sociopath.”
When the weasel knows that you know he’s weaseling, Adams feels it is a form of honesty–“a weasel form”. Examples that he gives are that “No one believes the engineer that says he will explain things briefly. No one believes a contractor that says the job will be done in a week… No one believes a politician who says that large contributions don’t influence his decisions.”
Political writers have called this behavior in Washington, Japanese Kabuki theater signifying a lot of bluff and bluster but it’s all staged. Around 2008, the word kayfabe popped up which is a term for the unspoken art of fakery in pro-wrestling.
A therapist friend recommended a book called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Tavris and Aronson. I read a couple chapters and then skimmed through the rest. The premise in “Mistakes” is that people use a lot of self-justification to defend bad decisions or hurtful behavior. Another phrase for this is “cognitive dissonance”.
But Scott Adams’ book is much more fun than the Tavris and Aronson book. He doesn’t pussy foot around. Plus, it’s got cartoons
I don’t think those guys are Jungians. The physician, Carl Jung, saw that people were different as did many physicians like Hippocrates. It was a simple as that. People different from me aren’t bad, they are just different. People are born with a certain kind of hardware, he reasoned. They are maybe a MacOS or Microsoft Windows or some kind of Linux. We are born with preferences in the way we take in information, how we make decisions based on that information and where we get our energy from i.e the outside world of people and places or by being alone with oneself. As we grow up our family, friends and work act like software. They enhance or inhibit our growth as a unique human. Jung recommended working on our own strengths, our preferences until well into our twenties. Then we should try to get in other people’s shoes and try to understand them from their point of view. He called that individuation. I call it growing up.
For the record, Adams is a critic of the Jungian psychological test known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. “The idea is that people can be categorized by personality type and you can work with them better if you take that into account. Okay, I buy that. My quibble with the theory is that if you aren’t bright enough to know that people have different personalities, you’re asking a lot of the Myers-Briggs training to get you over the hump. My second quibble is that their personality categories don’t include weasel, moron, or flaming butt-hole. I don’t know about you, but I rarely have problems with any other type of personality.”
This is exactly what my rancher husband says every time I talk about someone that displays no empathy. I try to explain it by personality type or Asperger’s. Rancher will say, “He’s just a”butt-hole”. But rancher theory breaks down when his own friend displays butt-holeness. “Oh, he means well,” or “he’s a good guy”. See that’s what we hear every day on the news about politicians. “He has good intentions, I’m sure”. Really? Really? Well that gets into defending your tribe or being a particular male way of looking at friendship. And that’s another essay.
So, this is where I’m supposed to come up with some uplifting idea or advice. I learned this from Scott Adams too. Adams advice is to embrace the inevitable and go weasel. (He may be winking a bit with this advice.) But I’m one of those who is still part of the resistance. So here goes my uplifting advice: living in Weaseltown works for most people. Again, to err is human, but to cover up the mistake is weasel. They go with the flow. They talk themselves into a peaceful conformity. But for we few, we happy few who feel exhilarated by using curiosity and self-examination to discover the man behind the curtain, it’s time to put on our flippers and goggles because we need to get into that river once again and start swimming upstream as difficult as that may be. But we could also channel the Scott Adams of his book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter”” and try to persuade the others that the non weasel way might be the best way to get you where you’re going.
Stop Preaching and Start Talking: “The Lost Art of Argument”
Most USAians think they are super smart. It’s kind of like being sophomores in the history of the world. We think we know everything. We bragged about what our rambunctiousness produced. But now we stopped making stuff and we think that being a weasel is our way out of everything. The new term for this weaselness is disinformation. And now we have retreated into bubbles babbling weasel phrases amongst ourselves in chat rooms.
Rudyard Lynch has a podcast called History 102. Rudyard is wise beyond his 24 years and approaches history from an anthropological angle. I was listening to the latest topic that he discusses with his co-host Austin Padgett. “Explaining the Age of Neo-Liberalism”. They explore the breakdown of society and bemoan the reality that nobody talks to each other anymore. Rudyard makes the observation “If you can’t talk about it, you can’t think about it.” These guys are addressing our current predicament of taking the same “facts” and coming up with two or more competing film stories.
One big reason for these muddled narratives is that we don’t engage in dialogue except amongst people who we agree with rather than at “a town meeting” or cafe or watering hole where one must look neighbors in the face and try to make a point and to try to see their point. The French, on the other hand, have their cafe society. They do their duty as citizens by talking “politics”. (“Politics” is a discussion, not a shouting match, of the way we wish to live our lives and what we enjoy and what gives our lives meaning). The French leave work and go out to a cafe and argue about life and art. They engage in conversation and often use dialectics in search of clues to the mysteries of life. Or at least that’s the way it used to be. When I was in grad school, after play rehearsal we would go to a bar, order pitchers of beer and discuss how we would save the world through art. When I did Off-Off Broadway theater in New York City, we would adjourn to Peter McManus’ Irish pub around the corner from the theater and argue about the choices our characters should make. We loved to look at all the angles and the contradictions.
But somewhere along the line those personal confrontations became fewer and fewer and didn’t seem to translate into our public lives as citizens. Historian Christopher Lasch in his book “Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” has a chapter called “The Lost Art of Argument”. In it he writes that “what Democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Yes, we do need information but information that is “generated only by debate.” So, he takes the “information revolution” and turns it on its head. Information in and of itself is worthless without being debated. “Information, usually seen as the pre-condition of debate is better understood as a by-product.”
And how do we gather these clues? By asking questions. We take our ideas and subject them to somebody else’s arguments. If we passionately engage with the eagerness to learn, we may instead of changing somebody else’s mind find that we have changed our mind. So, we must listen carefully and be willing to challenge our own beliefs and to say “Maybe what I believe may be wrong.” How exciting and far less dull than passively taking in information from some newspaper or from so pundit.
Lasch gives a shout out to the social historian Ray Oldenburg’s “The Great Good Place” and with Oldenburg mourns the passing of the local watering hole, the cafe, the hair salon, the soda fountain steps and other places between work and home where conversations used to flourish. These were places like the soda fountain steps where kids listened to their fathers debate a local policy with vigor and good-hearted disagreement. Those places where professions mingled as equals are hard to find in the suburbs, but they still exist in small towns and big cities. I was lucky to spend many years in a small town where wisdom came from caring for cows and not from a book. Democracy dies if we hide in cul-de sacs furtively taking anxiety meds as we peer out of the drawn blinds or retreat to cocktail parties or book clubs where everybody is of the same class and tows the party line “Four legs good. Two legs bad”. So, I suggest this year that you get out and find a Cheers bar in your neighborhood or even better, a Star Wars bar and strike up a conversation with somebody who may see things differently than you do. If you don’t have one of those, then go to the nearest town that has one and adopt it as your own. And for heaven’s sake don’t get your information from a newspaper. You can get your questions there though.
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Posted in Bar Codes, Social Commentary, The Cowgirl Contrarian
Tagged communication, disinformation, Lasch, politics, saloons