One of the most popular mysteries about this blog is why I enjoy getting people so worked up while concealing my own opinions in layers of deniable sarcasm.
Dilbert Blog reader Glenn Acheson accidentally answered that question with his comment yesterday: “Reading some of the comments to your blog always restores my lack of faith in humanity.” So part of the answer is that I think it’s hilarious to read absurd opinions vigorously presented in the comments. Your mileage may vary. I find it fascinating on many levels.
When I wrote my first book, The Dilbert Principle, I inadvertently stumbled on the most powerful, sure-fire book-selling concept ever: Say what other people are already thinking, but say it better than they are thinking it. In my case, I told people that their managers were as useful as the undigested bits of peanuts in a squirrel’s turd. (See, you just laughed.) Bingo – best seller.
All non-fiction best-selling opinion books are nothing more than your own opinions fed back to you with seasoning. Ann Coulter sells to conservatives who agree with her. Al Franken sells to liberals who agree with him. And they do it brilliantly, in my opinion.
I tried to violate that rule with a later book called Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel. My thesis was that everyone is a weasel, including you and me. Oops. I think seven people bought that book, and probably as gifts for people they don’t like. No one wants to hear that he or she is a weasel. People want a book that says OTHER people are weasels because that’s what they believe. Most people don’t want to risk having their mind changed.
To be fair, there are independent thinkers who read all sorts of books. But there aren’t enough of them to make a best seller.
Getting back to my original point, the reason my opinions on this blog sometimes seem impenetrable and mysterious is because they don’t map to any opinions you’ve seen before. I often have no opinion at all about how we should deal with a world issue because I rarely feel I have enough information to make a good call. What I do have is strong opinions on how we should be THINKING about a problem. I’m all about the process.
That makes me a minority of exactly one. So if I ask in this blog, in essence, “How do I decide if the president of Iran is a nut job?” that’s not an opinion. It’s a question about how you look at a problem. Thinking about the best way to approach a problem is so rare and unexpected that it causes cognitive dissonance in many readers. They want me to have an opinion so they can agree with it or disagree. So they solve the dissonance by assigning me to an opinion they have heard before – “cheese-eating surrender monkey” for example. And then they attack the opinion they hallucinated me to have. You’ve seen it a hundred times on this blog.
Your question of the day is this: Have any of you ever changed an opinion of world events because of anything you read here?