Slippery Slope

The second part...

In the last post, I talked about a slippery slope argument that I should have listened to. In this one, I am going to discuss why I was blind to the arguments that were being made.

Slippery slope arguments are a favorite in the political arena, and because of this, they tend to be outright dismissed as a waste of time. If the argument did indeed have merit, it is too late by the time others realize this and people look back on it with poignant regard. They realize that they should have listened, but there isn’t much to be done about that now. You would think that this would be an occasion that they would stop and take stock of this, so in the future, they wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss, but that usually isn’t the case.

Why? Because they don’t want the argument to be right. Usually, when you are arguing against a slippery slope it is going to be about a subject that you see as a moral good. Because you see it this way, you assume that others see it just how you do, and if they do not, they are overreacting. It is easy to dismiss arguments like, if you allow dying people to kill themselves the government or caregivers will try to kill undesirable parts of the population to make things easier for themselves or to save money.

That seems ridiculous. In my mind, I was talking about people that are dying and don’t want to suffer. Most people can see this and understand that the reasoning is sound. No one wants to suffer, no one wants their family members to suffer, and allowing people to make these decisions themselves is a reasonable thing to do.

There is, of course, the religious argument, but this isn’t one that has much weight to the nonreligious person. It can be easily dismissed if the person doesn’t believe in God or the possible judgment that could come from ending one’s own life, or allowing suicide to be legal in society. Instead, the argument needs to have moral teeth that don’t depend on a book that someone can outright ignore if they aren’t a believer.

In my case, my argument was based on personal experience of seeing many people deal with a terminal disease, and also my own selfishness. I don’t have any interest in suffering personally, and because that is my perspective, I would prefer that society allow me to have my own life decisions in my own hands. If I want that for me, I have to want it for everyone who faces the same circumstances, as you create the world in which you want to live.

My assumption, my wrong assumption, was that people had evolved past simply wanting to wash their hands of humans that they don’t see as valuable. I thought that the whole Holocaust and other genocides had made that mentality to be one we had more or less universally rejected as acceptable, and therefore death with dignity would be reserved for people that are in the terminal stages of a disease. No one wants to wantonly kill the elderly, infirm, or the vulnerable, right?

Nope, and wrong. I have seen many examples of this in recent years, some of which I listed in the previous post, but the worst one was during Covid. It was when young people who were sick with covid were sent to nursing homes, and shared rooms with elderly people, infecting them with covid, and leading to somewhere around thirty thousand deaths. There was no reason for this to happen. There were designated field hospitals that they could have been sent to. They weren’t, and those field hospitals stood near empty or completely empty and unused. There were hospital ships that saw almost no patients where they were docked, and the patients instead were sent to share rooms with the people that were considered the most at risk.

Adriana, the woman that I had this discussion with, had far more insight into the mentality of humans toward one another than I did. I certainly knew that humans could be garishly evil to one another, and I do think that the default state of humanity is savagery. I should have been able to apply my knowledge regarding humans to this discussion, but it was something that I wanted to be legal, so I didn’t want to consider that she might be right. That was a mistake on my part.

I still think that death with dignity is something that should be possible for those that actually are going to die anyway. What it should not be is a gateway to allow for the removal of humans that are inconvenient to others for whatever reason. There is a notion that once you get what it is that you want, that everyone will agree with you. That everyone will say, “All right, we got to the goal. Well done everyone, let’s go home”, and that will be the end of it.

That is naive. Just because it’s what you wanted, just because you assumed that is how everyone thought about it, doesn’t mean you were right. It also doesn’t mean that other people are just going to quit pushing. You got to where you wanted to go, but you didn’t see that the road you were helping build was never meant to stop where you wanted it to. You were just one stop along the way.

Minnesota is being asked to become a suicide tourism destination

There is a lot of information out there, and there is a lot of life experience that you do not have. I know that there is a ton that I don’t have. Instead of ignoring the risks because they seemed illogical, I am now seeing things like that article. It is easy to dismiss what you think is silly, especially when it stands in the way of getting something that you think is a good thing. Maybe that thing is a good thing, but what comes next is not at all.

Don’t assume that everyone around you is logical and reasonable. Don’t assume that they have the same goal as you do. Understand that people with very bad intentions will use your belief that they agree with your logical and reasonable opinion to hijack your movement and make it into something totally unrecognizable. Things like social movements tend to be a great deal like charities and I will explain what I mean by that.

When you start a group, you do so with a problem in mind. Homeless chickens let’s say. So your goal should be getting all the homeless chickens a coop, right? Seems simple. You go around, make your argument, collect funds, and help those homeless little chickies until each and every one is in it’s own flock of other chickens. End of problem, and no more need for the foundation for homeless chickens, right?

That should be how it works, but it isn’t. Here’s what happens instead. You have this problem, and you set out to solve it. You collect donations, you hire some people to help you out. Now you have more staff, and you have more donations coming in, because you have more solicitors out there asking.

More money, more staff, and your own personal compensation comes from the donations. All above board mind you. Everyone is depending on the income from the donations to keep doing the work, but also so they continue to get paid. This is their job now.

If they solve the problem they set out to solve, a lot of people are going to be without an income, including the organizers. Well, that’s bad, right? So they spend more money on “awareness” than they do actually investing in fixing the issue. The organization exists for the sake of itself, not what it set out to solve.

Take this into an emotional compensation realm and you get the same result. No desire to actually fix something, but rather a desire to exist as that thing for the sake of it. People that have no interest in things being right in the world, and in some cases simply want to tear it down for the sake of it. Others that have their own goals that they know the overall group would not agree with, so they keep those goals hidden and depend on the moral outrage and tribalism to keep the movement going to get to where they want to be. People involved in these things will look back later and wonder what happened to the movement that they were a part of, because they can’t recognize what it has become. Just because something feels good does not make it good.

Pay attention to people that disagree with you. Just because you don’t want something to be true doesn’t mean that it isn’t. Just because you want the other person to be wrong doesn’t mean that they are. They may be sounding a warning, and you might remember that warning later on down the line when consequences that you never intended are staring you in the face from a cause you championed.