CONCEPT
The Incremental Slide
Glover's name for the gradient mechanism of moral decay: not a cliff but a slope, each step small enough to seem continuous with the last, the cumulative trajectory visible only from a distance no single participant occupies.
The incremental slide is Glover's most portable insight. He found, examining the biographies of people who participated in historical atrocities, that no single decision explained their participation. There was no moment of conversion, no crossing of a threshold. There was instead a sequence — the first step small, barely uncomfortable; the second slightly larger, made easier by the first; the third easier still. The landscape looked level from inside because each comparison was local. Only from a distance did the gradient become visible, and by then the person standing on the slope had been reshaped by it. The mechanism is not confined to atrocity. It operates wherever institutional pressure and individual convenience align to favor a sequence of small concessions over a stand that would feel, in the moment, disproportionate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The slide's danger is its invisibility. Unlike a single dramatic decision, which can be evaluated against one's