The Dwight Schrute Theory of American Culture

Yesterday on my podcast, I talked to actor/comedian/writer Rainn Wilson, who famously played Dwight Schrute on The Office. (This was the first episode of The Russell Moore Show that my kids insisted on being there for.) As we talked, I started to realize how Dwight Schrute just might explain how we arrived at this scary moment in American life.

In his (amazingly good) history of the television show, The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s, journalist Andy Greene recounts a fierce debate among the writers and producers after Steve Carell, the lead actor who played Michael Scott, left the show after seven seasons. At issue was what character would replace Scott as the “World’s Best Boss” at Dunder Mifflin Scranton.

Aaron Shure, one of the show’s writers, didn’t think Dwight should be the boss because “Dwight is not as benign as Michael Scott. He’s like this weird amalgam of Mennonite and Star Trek nerd.”

“I also didn’t want Dwight to be empowered because I was afraid he wouldn’t be funny anymore,” Shure said. “It’s funny if he sets the office on fire and blowtorches all the doorknobs. But if he did that all day long without any sort of check on his behavior, it would be terrifying.”

Danny Chun, on the other hand, argued that the responsibility itself would change Dwight’s character. “To me it felt like he was going to do some insane, inappropriate, horrible, and cruel things, but he may now suddenly be forced into a position to contemplate what he was doing a little more, and that seemed intriguing.”

That may have been an in-house dispute among television writers on a set in Sherman Oaks, California, several years ago—but I increasingly find it to be one of the most fundamental issues in American culture right now.

One reason our culture seems especially precarious and anxious at the moment is not just because so many of our institutions are failing. It’s because our institutions seem scary.

Whether we are talking about Congress, the tech industry, public health authorities, the press, law enforcement, the church—or almost any other institution in American life—we’ve seen two almost equally terrifying realities.

In some cases, institutions lose trust because of their highly competent but morally evil leaders. (Think Robert California when he’s sober.) No one questions whether the scientists and engineers working on artificial intelligence programs in Silicon Valley are skilled at what they do. The fear is that they are as skilled as the people who gave us a social media ecosystem that’s turned out to be highly effective at isolating and enraging people with algorithms and disinformation. No one wonders whether the pharmaceutical marketers who sold entire populations of people into opioid addiction know what they’re doing. We worry that they know all too well and all too much.

The little nub of truth at the root of this fear is where conspiracy theories thrive. Anxious people start to assume that there are all sorts of highly competent, morally depraved people running everything around them. That can be scary.

But then there’s the Dwight Schrute problem—and it is even scarier.

The episode Shure referenced, where Dwight staged a fire drill by torching the doorknobs, sending the office into a frenzy (and triggering one character to have a heart attack), was one of the most popular in the series’ run (helped by the fact that it aired just after the Super Bowl). But, as Shure noted, the story line was a Dwight limited to some degree in his ability to carry out mayhem. He was just the assistant to the regional manager.

The series’ lead character, boss Michael Scott, was an idiot, to be sure. But his idiocy was hemmed in by a certain kind of sweetness and sincerity. Michael was a delusional narcissist in many ways, yet what he ultimately wanted was to be loved and accepted by a family of friends. He wanted to sing karaoke with Jim, to be invited to parties by Ryan, to be the godfather of Jim and Pam’s baby. Even when he did objectively awful things (like attempting to frame human resources director Toby Flenderson for a crime), there was a check on how far he could go.

When Dwight did, in fact, become manager, the audience loved it because it was so obviously temporary. They could deal with the dictator-style portrait of himself he installed and the desk modeled after that of Saddam Hussein’s son because both things were short-term.

In any institution—or in our culture at large—people start to worry when they realize their leaders have neither the expertise to navigate through difficult challenges nor the brakes to restrain their worst impulses. What could be funny in a situation without power can be terrifying in a situation with actual authority.

Perhaps that’s why people find ways to mythologize institutions or leaders when things start looking scary. Maybe it’s why some think that a political leader who no one can pretend has a moral compass is playing brilliant “four-dimensional chess” that only looks chaotic because he’s too smart to let “them” know what he’s doing. And maybe it’s why we tell ourselves it’s okay for a pastor to scream uncontrollably because he’s a church-growth ninja who can take the congregation “to the next level.”

Behind it all is the assumption, as some Office writers put forth with Dwight, that responsibility itself will transform character and competence. The thought is that, yes, Dwight might put Sprinkles the cat in the freezer to euthanize her—but once he’s manager, he will step up to the burden of the task. The stakes are too high, after all.

This is magical thinking that helps us sleep through the night, but it isn’t true. While Dwight does end up being the manager at the end of the series, it’s only after a long character-altering arc.

The idea that private character doesn’t matter to public leadership is not only morally corrosive but also ultimately fear-inducing. Any office or position—be it regional manager of a midlevel paper company, bishop of a church, president of the United States, or even spouse or parent—doesn’t transform someone into an individual capable of holding it.

The same dynamic is true for being a disciple of Christ. Jesus told us, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much” (Luke 16:10). What’s internal to a person eventually shows itself.

A diseased tree cannot yield good fruit (Matt. 7:18), even if the whole community is counting on it to combat starvation. Dwight Schrute might be right that nitrogen is the most essential element for “above-ground leafy growth.” But all the nitrogen in the world can’t grow anything out of a dead root.

Any mythology needs a chaos figure: a Loki, a Joker, a Dwight. But when such figures are in charge, the results are bleak. We then start giving up on character and competence and look for an even more chaotic figure to put checks on the first. That way leads—in an office, on a film set, in a country, or in a church—to “Threat Level Midnight,” and deep down, we all know it.

Russell Moore