The slippery slope fallacy involves predicting that one small move, say, dropping a hook, will ignite a series of actions that lead to whale-sized results. Once you give them an inch, start down that path, open that can of worms, the worms escape and chastise you for your horrible taste in canned food. The fallacy knits causes and effects together as if they are logically connected. If they happen to be logically connected, you don't really have a fallacy. You have a valid prediction.
In the case of my fish, however, fallacy abounds. The food chain doesn't always work in nesting-doll order, from large to small. Sometimes slender lampreys feed upon the skin of larger sharks, and sometimes whales skip all the intermediary fish and eat plankton. And sometimes, you just catch one fish, take it home, and fry it in some cornmeal.
Most events cause cascading effects. Maybe a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in the U.S. This doesn't mean, however, that we need to regard butterflies as weather gods.
Slippery slope predictions may sometimes serve to influence rather than to predict. Dystopian literature could be viewed as a kind of slippery slope argument, an extreme prediction that hopes that by forecasting a diet of soylent green, it can keep soylent green out of our menus by changing the minds of its readers. In 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, a novel that predicted illiteracy, widespread totalitarianism, the worship of Henry Ford, and other social terrors. In some pockets, Ford-worship might prevail, but Huxley's prediction was still an exaggeration by most measures. In 1959, however, Huxley appended his novel with a series of essays in which he made further predictions: "It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now, all the world's over-populated and underdeveloped countries will be under some kind of totalitarian rule--probably by the Communist party." Was his prediction a success? That depends on what the prediction hoped to accomplish; accuracy, or influence. I hope that authors like Huxley continue to make wild, articulate predictions in novel form, and that they continue to be mostly incorrect.
Slippery slope arguments often warn against granting degrees of trust to an entity or group that seems untrustworthy, and the hazards that ensue when said entity takes advantage. Such a scenario is illustrated in such biased children's titles as If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and If You Give a Moose a Muffin, in which furry mammals proceed to make further demands and generally trespass on proffered hospitality of any kind. The mouse and moose communities are currently filing suits against the author, claiming punitive damages in the form of baked goods.
At other times, the slippery slope warns against the dramatic impact that can result from picking up corrupt habits or stepping out of one's social sphere. In one American folktale*, a man catches a fish but cannot bring himself to kill it. Instead, he introduces the fish to the dangerous habit of breathing air. Eventually, the fish takes to walking around behind its owner like a lapdog. Sadly, it doesn't take long for the friendship to end, for the fish falls into a barrel full of water and drowns.
This folktale was the subject of my first and only experiment in plagiarism, which led me towards a slippery slope of my own. In 1992, my keyboarding instructor proposed that everyone in our class contribute a story to fill a novel thing called a WebPage with interesting content about life in Alaska. Most kids contributed stories about snowmobiling or fishing. Most of my fishing experiences involved catching fish the normal way, trying to make PBJ with a fileting knife, and surviving outhouses, or worse, a lack of outhouses. This hardly seemed like appropriate material for a WebSite, so I borrowed material that I considered infinitely superior. The original folktale was told in a delicious Huck Finn dialect, which I keyed in haphazardly, including my own variations, but generally remaining faithful to the voice.
Two months later, my family visited a favorite aunt and uncle in Seattle, a trip I had been anticipating for months. We were eating fish for dinner one night, when my uncle began casually slipping lines from the folktale into dinner conversation. He had discovered my school's website, and meant to praise me for my writing ability. As soon as I realized what was happening, I knew that I had done something horribly, horribly wrong. I tried changing the subject. Thinking me bashful, or perhaps a bit slow, my uncle kept up the oblique references. I couldn't bring myself to own up to the crime which began to take on whale-like dimensions in my imagination. I couldn't sleep for most of the Seattle trip. I kept picturing my aunt and uncle's dismay, Mr. Schwartz (whose name was on the book) indignantly phoning in the crime, police cars pulling up in front of the house, SWAT teams rappelling down next to the windows, ready to clap me in irons. The punishment for memorizing folktales is that it inspires thinking in folktale proportions.
My mother eventually recognized the story (I had told it to my family many times), and I apologized with a mixture of contrition and relief. Fortunately, my slope never descended lower than that point. This was decidedly the end of my plagiaristic forays.
I didn't know at the time that Mr. Schwartz hadn't actually written the story, nor that a common method of transmitting folk tales involves committing them to memory, then retelling them as if from personal experience. I'm not sure the knowledge would have made me feel better, because this was no backcountry swamp; this was a WebSite. And WebSites are for freshly-minted material. At least, this one is.
That is why a snail at a water slide doesn't quite cut it.
That is why a snail at a water slide doesn't quite cut it.
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