Why the Reactionaries Are Always Right

There are powerful social and financial incentives for pushing any change to its most absurd extreme

Younger readers won’t remember this, but years ago we used to have this logical fallacy called the “Slippery Slope”. It was invoked often to belittle the idea that social change was accelerating at an uncomfortable pace; the person pointing out the fallacy would say that one change will not necessarily lead to another, and that it was hystercal and alarmist to believe that radical behaviour in one domain will necessarily spread elsewhere. You don’t hear much about the Slippery Slope as a fallacy any more.

One of the stories of the last decade is that the Slippery Slope is real (I think of it as more of a pit, or a cliff, but whatever) and that the people who worry about what extremes a mooted change will be taken to are always right. What brings this to mind is the recent news on the progress of Assisted Dying laws in Canada (they’re euthanising the homeless if you haven’t heard). My favourite example is the migration of american campus activism into organisations across the globe, which so many people on social media assured me would never happen, even as it was happening. You will have your own examples and there are obvious ones I can’t mention.

The underlying motives and mechanisms of this process are sometimes hidden, so I thought it would be interesting to lay out why I think this is the case. Why is the Slope so Slippery?

The overarching reason is that the only sacred value in our society is identification of new rights, advocacy for them, and their codification as morally, legally and aesthetically superior to any historic rights.

There are a couple of reasons for this including increased education, collapse of christianity as a restraint and alternative moral framework, and the effect of technology in intensifying public competition for social status. Whatever the reasons, it’s true that the easiest way to gain social status is to identify a new right or an insufficiently fulfilled existing one, and advocate as much as possible for that right to be legally codified in some way.

“Insufficiently fulfilled” can mean anything from “something everyone agrees is a basic natual right that is not being met” to “I can make the argument that a marginal and obscure right can be further expanded, regardless of whether that’s something anyone wants”.

The social status aspect is very important. There’s a reason that celebrities want more than anything to be identified as activists, and that the most advanced stage of extreme wealth is to give your money away to the right political causes.

The flip side of that is also true, which is the surest way to destroy your reputation is to appear to want to limit a new right, or even just recognising some kind of limitation on the expansion and identification of new rights generally. You’ll recall that people expressing concerns about certain recent changes were dismissed as “right-hoarding dinosaurs”.

All of that helps to explain the utility of marginal identities, and the constant creation of new ones. In our current environment the identification of a new, marginal identity is to the social climber what the discovery of a new continent is to an explorer. Room to expand into; a store of riches to be mined; a base to rebuild the world as you would like it to be and from which to further explore.

That moral structure means to identify a right is to simultaneously and implicitly deem it good, valuable and desirable. That is one basis on which governments pour money into NGOs, charities and activist groups - to support society in protecting and administering the new right. In practice these groups often also use their resources to agitate to expand their remit; to identify new ways the right is not being met, new groups to whom it applies, and most importantly new ways of making the right a legal obligation over and above any existing one with which it conflicts. A gamer might call this process 4X Liberalism.

In summary there is an immense social and financial incentive to identify new rights and to expand them indefinitely once identified. Not only does no equivalent incentive exist on the restrictionist side of the equation - on the contrary, restrictionism is strongly disincentivised, socially (you’ll lose friends and status), financially (you’ll lose advertisiers, sponsors, jobs) and legally (hate-speech laws, payment processor deplatforming).

Just a note on the title here which is supposed to be tongue in cheek. Reactionaries will often argue that the creation of this or that right will have a devastating, degenerative effect on society, and are often wrong about that. What they are always right about is the direction of travel. Once we determine that a right is valid there *is* a mechanism in place that ensures it will be expanded to and past it’s logical conclusion, and used to invent and promote new and as yet undreamed of rights, with the assistance of the media, the state, and the law.