“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.
“To err is human. To cover it up is weasel.” (Scott Adams).
A therapist friend recommended a new book called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Tavris and Aronson. I read a couple chapters and then skimmed through the rest. It reminded me of books by Malcolm Gladwell and the “Nudge” guys who are friends of Obama. Simple premise and lots of interesting examples. 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”. Cognitive dissonance is the “state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as their example: “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it will kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” (Not sure this is the best example as tobacco is addictive so there’s a reason it’s hard to stop the dumb thing.) They also use the example of trying to make sense out of contradictory ideas such as Albert Camus’ idea that humans spend their lives trying “to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd”. This causes anxiety in most humans , they say.
It hit me that these psychologists must not be Jungians. Carl Jung embraced contradictions and was not cowed by them. The whole concept of the shadow aka our dark side is based on humans being born hardwired in a certain way but through the software of life that includes families, friends, and work, we begin to experience our opposites; the contradictions in life. If we learn and grow and accept these opposites/ contradictions, we are healthy. If we just can’t see our “dark side”, we don’t know that we live in a place called Weaseltown. Continue reading →
Weaseltown -An Homage to Scott Adams (Written in 2013 and revised 2026)
“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.
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Posted in Bar Codes, Media, Social Commentary, The Accidental Activist, The Cowgirl Contrarian
Tagged Carl Jung, Myers/Briggs, Scott Adams