I'm Sorry You're An Asshole, Part 5: Office Face

The Art of the Backhanded Apology

• Because I’m cool, I’m again taking the role of Cool Second Mover in responding to Scott “Pointy-Haired Narcissist” Adams’ “Anti-Vaxers Win” apologia video virtually decades after everyone else. To begin, here are some receipts I found in the old shoebox in the closet next to the .38 Special that grandpa used to kill find us a new grandma:

  • Washington Post 7/30/19 (archive link): ‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams apologizes to Gilroy victims for a tweet touting his app.

  • My Apology for Believing CNN About the Covington Catholic Boys Fake News.

  • Just search “scott adams apology,” you’re a grownup.

You don’t have to read/watch any of the above, as the tl;dr is pretty simple: Scott Adams makes a gaffe on social media, usually an unempathetic or knee-jerk response to a current event that he thinks is a take his audience will love. Other audiences howl outrage and some of his audience defects because the take is legitimately bad, wrong, or insensitive. Adams issues a backhanded apology usually including sarcastic self-effacement (he provides here a handy template for sarcastic non-apologies), blames it on cancel culture, and explains why he’s right but is apologizing to make the oversensitive children shut up.

Adams won a lot of fans and built a big audience among the dissenting community for his sober, “the truth hurts” approach to articulating why he believed Trump was going to win the election and more broadly about how to view politics through the lens of his claimed expert status in superpersusasion. He often has a Jordan Petersonesque “I own the libs because I am calmly rational and they are all blue-haired hysterics” (I like some but not all of what Peterson does/writes and appreciate his principles but find him overrated) schpiel behind most of his thinkpieces and has spent a lot of time positioning himself as a guru of social analysis.

I admit to finding Adams interesting and appealing for quite a while; I read his books on persuasion and business during a stint of reading literally dozens of similar books on the subject and got through the first of his parable-novels about his theories on metaphysics and religion. Somewhere along the line- before I heard anything about his COVID takes- I abruptly got sick of him and dropped my interest.

I honestly don’t know exactly what triggered it; I wasn’t active on social media and wasn’t following his series of post-Trump bad takes. Some thing or series of things made me feel like he was a narcissist, prone to positioning himself as a victim of society’s stupidity and reluctantly assuming the mantle of people’s hero in the wake of his victimization, and given to incredible insights and vision that are uncommonly special, usually citing his great entrepreneurial success as proof positive.

He felt like a guy that really wished he believed in religion or at least could fake it as well as L. Ron Hubbard so he could start a cult and eventually embarrass them 20 years and millions of dollars later by explaining that he had performed some trick of superpersuasion and they had fallen for it, flawed creatures they were, exactly as he foresaw, which was the real religion all along.

There’s a weird blind spot I’m observing in various corners of the internet in which Adams’ latest apology for being fiercely pro-COVID shots and as fiercely mocking of the midwit and sheeple “anti-vaxxers” (Adams’ term) that fell victim to their confirmation bias in their zeal to be anti-establishment renegades and rejected a completely safe and totally effective vaccine for the greatest epidemiological threat ever to face modern man. His mea culpa in the video is being played straight by many as sincere, and isn’t it wonderful that a man as smart and influential as Adams is able to admit he’s wrong about something so important? Surely, this is a model for how to heal and move forward, let us all dance in a circle and the boys can touch weiners in the middle.

And I just don’t get it. Scott’s video (and, really, all of his similar communiques) is a transparently backhanded non-apology with the only change to his demeanor thus far being that he is no longer insisting in the face of mounting evidence that he is still right. It’s now that the mean, vindictive “anti-vaxxers” that JUST WON’T DROP IT were right (but for the wrong reasons because they were wannabe rebels and paranoids and not because they actually understood the information), they were completely right, OKAY, SO ENJOY IT BECAUSE YOU’RE BEING SUCH JERKS ABOUT IT THAT THIS IS CLEARLY ABOUT WINNING FOR YOU BUT NOT FOR ME, FOR ME IT WAS ABOUT FOLLOWING THE SCIENCE.

This was like when I was very little and Fathermouth or Mothermouth would say something like “fine, you’re right that it is not COMPLETELY impossible or falsifiable that dinosaurs played video games, please finally wash the dishes and do your homework so we can stop talking about this inane topic.”

It feels so obviously an almost archetypal backhanded apology of the kind every toxic marriage, corporate press release, or celebrity confession is built on: I am technically (and only technically because of the weird word games you play) in violation of some terms that YOU set, and YOU’RE being so emotional about this perceived injustice that I’m going to Be The Grownup and follow a token ritual of contrition so we can Move Forward.

And the clearest indication that this is a non-apology is the repetitive use of the phrase “won” and “winner.” He uses the phrase “appear to be right” (nice hedge) once at the beginning of his speech, but from then on it’s “won” and “winner,” as though this was a debate club competition about things with no objective answer and the “anti-Vaccine people” (his term again) just managed to argue better.

Everyone get that? There was no “correct” or “incorrect” here, at all; Adams simply lost a contest, and he’ll graciously acknowledge you won the contest, because that’s all it was: a contest with no external meaning, and that’s what mature competitors do when they lose sportsball.

Second, his “concession of losing” omits a fundamental element of a real, actual apology, something Adams may never have done in his life: an accurate identification and acknowledgement of specific wrongdoing.

Adams didn’t just “lose” by getting vaxxed out his ears and ass where “the Smart anti-COVID Injection people” (Adams weirdly and erratically capitalizes the various terms he uses to describe his ‘opponents’ in the text version of his non-apology which is probably some incredibly clever hypnosis or superpersuasive subliminal coding that Adams has mastered that we can but fall for). He spent the entirety of the pandemic using his position as a social influencer and guru to advocate for lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masks, punishment for the unvaxxed, and to castigate and soundly mock the stupidity of his opposition on every social channel he copiously occupies.

THAT’S what you did wrong, Adams. Nobody gave a shit about what you did or didn’t choose to put in your own body. You were a cheerleader and a brownshirt and your weapon of choice was your “smarter than thou” bully pulpit.

You backed the bad guys. THAT’S the thing everyone wants apologies for. But you knew that already, because you’re such a smart guy.

Which is why you and anyone who doesn’t want to see something else know that your latest communication is nothing like an apology.

P.S. All of this reminded me of how fascinating I find the entire realm of apologies and why sincere ones are so incredibly hard for most humans and the insane array of non-apologetic behavior deployed to squirm out of them. Expect a more analytic I’m Sorry You’re An Asshole entry coming to this space soon.