Imagine you’re trying to cross a chasm, and the only way across is a tightrope. Now imagine that everyone on earth has to cross that tightrope. Some people make it across and others don’t. The people who cross the tightrope say that the people who fell have only themselves to blame for falling–if they simply trained harder, they would have crossed. Even some of the people who fell start to make this argument.
Now imagine the reward for crossing the chasm is safe housing, food and water. And there is no other way to get housing, food or water.
Crossing a tightrope is extremely difficult. For some, it’s impossible. Imagine blaming someone paralyzed from the waist down for failing to cross the tightrope, or someone with an amputated leg, or a child, or an elderly person. There is a group of people with fit minds and limbs that fall down the chasm, too. Even if all of your legs work, there are many barriers to becoming skilled enough to cross. You almost certainly need formal training from a teacher. Surely they teach tightrope classes at clown college. But going to clown college costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time to complete, and the college has to choose to accept you. Not everyone can go to clown college, because the clown college will only accept so many students a year, regardless of how many people apply. There’s only so many clown colleges in the world, so many experienced teachers each with limited time to teach. Even with thorough training, some people still won’t have the coordination necessary to cross a tightrope reliably. It’s an extremely hard skill to master.
More importantly, though, why is a tightrope the only option for crossing this chasm? Couldn’t we build a bridge over it? Bridges are more expensive, but we’ve built bridges before–surely we can build one again. Is someone preventing us from building a bridge? Does a rich man own the chasm and refuse to let people build a bridge? Does the rich man own all the clown colleges, too? Does the rich man create propaganda in the form of journalism and TV interviews where people argue that we don’t need any bridges? Does he destroy every other source of housing, food and water so we have to cross his tightrope? How did he get rich? Simple: he was the first person to cross the tightrope. Other people tried before him, but he shot those people if they got close to crossing.
The Tightrope Fallacy: Arguing that something hard shouldn’t be made easier solely because it is theoretically possible.
