The Probability Broach, chapter 6
To recap the previous chapter: After escaping a gun battle with government thugs, Win Bear found himself in an unfamiliar futuristic city where everyone is armed. While trying to get his bearings, he found someone listed in a phone directory with the same name as him. He resolved to go visit his doppelganger and get some answers, but right on the doorstep of his destination, he was gunned down by a black hovercraft.
This chapter begins with him regaining awareness in the middle of surgery, with three vague shapes looming over him:
Ever wake up in a darkened room and a soft bed, with a headache clear down to your knees? My arms wouldn’t move. When I inhaled, sharp pains skewered me from spine to sternum. I was alive, but leaking.
“Hold these,” the first voice, softly feminine, said. “And feed them into the cutter. We’ll have to remove it all, I’m afraid.” Sound of rasping, scraping. Whatever they were chopping off, I hoped I wouldn’t sing falsetto afterward.
The doctors (or whoever they are) remark on how bad his health is, even beyond the bullet holes:
“Such crude dental prosthetics! And he’s in advanced geriosis—see the swollen belly, the sagging tissue around the eyes? What little hair he has is turning gray!
…you should see the scanner—poisonous congestion, ulceration. And the arteries! Even without these bullets in him… he’d be gone in another ten years.”
They notice he’s conscious, and a masculine voice asks him who he is. Win still thinks he’s been flung into the future and that there was a world war in the interim, which accounts for why everything looks so unfamiliar. He tries to explain:
I tried to clear my vision. The guy looked enough like me to get drafted in my place. “Win Bear… Lieutenant, Denver—used to be a city, sixty miles south. Only it’s gone! Blown to—” I stopped, breathing heavily against withering pain. “I’m, well, from the past—a time traveler!”
He frowned perplexedly. Nothing was wrong with my vision. I could make out every hair in his bushy, very familiar eyebrows. “Friend, sixty miles south of here, there’s only Saint Charles Town. Been there, oh, 125 years. Nothing but buffalo before that.”
Win is baffled, and in too much pain to come up with any other explanation. The people treating him are merciful:
“We’re at redline already. The painkillers just aren’t working.”
“What painkillers?” I wheezed past the red-hot pokers in my chest.
… “I give up,” the beautiful voice said. “Lucy, electrosleep—out in a van, a blue case under the regenerator.”
One of the people tending to him comes back with what looks like a tiny gun. She presses it against his neck, and he’s instantly unconscious.
L. Neil Smith did something clever in this section. However, that cleverness is in service of covering up an unsavory political implication, given the realities of human nature. He’s pulled off an authorial sleight of hand to paper over what would otherwise be a glaring, obvious problem with his preferred brand of society.
Here’s the problem: In an anarcho-capitalist world, what would most people do if they heard gunshots outside and found a stranger bleeding to death on their doorstep? Wouldn’t they be more likely to conclude that this is someone else’s feud and they don’t want to get involved?
Would you be eager to take a dying stranger into your house and treat them at your own expense, knowing that some unknown party wants them dead, and knowing there are no police to call if you become the killer’s next target for helping their intended victim? Isn’t it more likely that the average person would say, “This is none of my business, I’m staying out of it”?
The clever part is that Smith concocts one of the very few plausible justifications for involving yourself in a scenario like this. Namely, the owner of this house – the other Win Bear – would naturally be shocked to see his identical twin. He’d want to save the stranger’s life so he can find out what the heck is going on.
Obviously, that’s not going to happen in a realistic world that doesn’t have parallel-universe portals. If not for that only-in-fiction happenstance, the bad guys would have won. Win knows who they are and what they want, but no one else in this world does. If they had killed him, nobody would have stopped them, or even tried to. They would have succeeded with their evil world-domination scheme.
After all, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there’s no government. There are no police. There’s nobody whose job it is to investigate a corpse in the gutter. There could be private detectives (the other Win Bear is one), but obviously, a dead person isn’t going to pay to find out who killed them.
True, if a murder victim has family or close friends, they might hire someone to track down the killer. But that’s just another way of saying that, in this world, access to justice depends on having rich friends. If you have no one who’s willing to avenge you, or no one who can afford to, anyone can kill you without consequences.
In a later chapter, Smith has a handwavy answer to this. He says there are “professionally neutral” civil liberties organizations who investigate unsolved crimes as a pro bono service, “just to make sure no one can murder some friendless wino”.
OK, maybe. But in a society where profit drives everything, how much of a budget do you think they’re going to devote to that, and how high a priority are they going to put on those cases?
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Without some government backing how do they investigate things? For the most part people are not going to give them access to property, items found at the crime scene or answer many questions.
Heck, that would be a major problem for all crime. Without proper investigations for crime there are going to be a lot of mistaken feuds. Bob gets shot and is found by his wife Judy. Bob’s family think Judy killed her husband but it was actually an investor in his company that felt ripped off. Judy might hire an investigator but his ability to look into things doesn’t go much beyond the house.
Also, the alternate-universe Win Bear is a private investigator… but yes, it’s far from clear what that job entails, and the book is vague about it.
How does anyone investigate crimes in a society where there are no search warrants? As this book will later mention, the North American Confederacy doesn’t even know about fingerprints.
I don’t know what’s more difficult to believe, an anarcho-capitalist society being a utopia or that the people in that alternate universe are identical twins of the people in our universe. Just think about it a little bit: this is a universe in which history was so different that the entire city of Denver doesn’t exist, and yet somehow, the exact same people met at the exact same times and swapped the exact same DNA with the exact same results to produce the exact same children as in our universe. The whole concept is just ridiculous.
And for any fellow Trekkies out there, I have the exact same issue with Star Trek’s mirror universe.
And another problem with the idea of ‘professionally neutral civil rights organizations’ is… assuming they actually have funding from somewhere, what’s to stop any group like that from effectively becoming a government? Who’s enforcing the ‘neutral’ part, and what’s to stop them from doing exactly the sort of things modern police departments have been caught doing, of finding some guy they don’t like and pinning a murder on them because it makes them look like they’re doing something without having to actually spend money, time, and effort on a real investigation?
I mean, we have examples from the U.S. of privately funded fire departments actively letting a place burn down because the owner hadn’t paid them, and then only standing around to make sure the fire didn’t spread to anybody else’s property. Which, of course, is dangerous and stupid in itself; fires often do spread out of control if you don’t stomp on them quickly. When my uncle was an idiot and nearly started a forest fire because he’d left lit candles out on the cabin deck while drinking, the first people on the scene were the people who weren’t supposed to handle fires on our side of the lake, only their own, but they wanted to make sure it didn’t get out of control before the others showed up. There’s a reason fire departments are one of the things governments exist to do; fires are everybody’s problem.
That’s an excellent point. There’s no due process in this world, so they can investigate using any methods or standards they please. There’d be no one stopping these private investigative agencies from just singling out the nearest minority to be their scapegoat and proclaiming they “solved” the murder, so give us more money please.
We have rules to make things complicated for the people in power for a reason; current events give us way too much evidence of how badly things can go wrong if the wrong person gets access to power without any significant impediments. (And people have spent the last few generations chipping away at the impediments that were supposed to be there.) And you can’t just keep the wrong people out of power, because who enforces that?
I’ve said before that, to a large extent, one of the purposes of the Roman Senate was to get all the rich families who thought they should be running things into one place and busy arguing with each other so the day-to-day running of the Republic could be done around them.
So many of these libertarian fantasies fall apart if looked at with any grasp of history or human nature. (I’ve done cybersecurity work; ‘what’s the worst thing that one asshole could do just on a lark’ is a not uncommon question, and the true answers are very often not what you would prefer to hear. Smith obviously never asked that question.)
What does the phrase ‘“professionally neutral” civil liberties organizations” even mean? If ‘civil liberties’ is their profession, does that mean they’re neutral about civil liberties? This sounds like just some last-minute hand-waviness by an author trying to pretend his libertarian “society” would magically invent something like this when needed.
I agree with every comment above, and also: it sounds as if this particular household (and how many others?) have some pretty sophisticated medical tools and an operating room setup. Additionally, this version of Win Bear and at least one other person in his household have what is (to us) pretty comprehensive medical training. Who paid for this training? How did alternate-universe Win Bear make money while he was undergoing medical training? If someone in the household can’t afford this level of training and facilities/equipment, then what? If there’s no government, there’s no government-funded healthcare or healthcare facilities.
Loving this analysis. Seems to me the USA already pretty much has a Liberatarian health system – and is heading for an eeven more extreme one as Obamacare and medicaid get ever mor escrapepd and cut and reduced to nothing. Its one of the very worst in the world and getting worse all the time. In this scenaio and any “real” version of L. Neil Smith’s impossible Utopian Liberatarian Paradise Win Bear would be absolutely fuuu.. stuffed here.
Now I’m wondering if a certain strain of this type of thinking has led to another phenomenon that’s going to get someone killed. One of my off-brand cable station shows reruns about failed homesteaders and the company that goes in and rescues them from their own stupidity. All these shows start with a person/family that wants to live completely off the grid, then goes off and does it in the stupidest way possible. For example, they might buy land in a swamp and then wonder why their house keeps flooding and their livestock keeps getting eaten by alligators and they keep getting malaria and Lyme disease. Or they’ll buy property way out in the desert where the winds never stop blowing, and they have to haul and store water but they have minimal water storage, and their crops won’t grow. Or they’ll buy land way up in the mountains with no cellphone service and have a family member with frequent health issues.
The point is that these people are all filled with the certitude that they–yes, THEY–can survive all on their own without any kind of civilization whatsoever, and find out they can’t, in large part because they never bothered to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to make it work for them (that’s where the homesteading experts come in and solve all their problems).
I saw a similar mindset in the stay-at-home mothers in our last neighborhood. Can they follow the directions on the box of mac-and-cheese? Well, then, they’re obviously a Michelin-starred chef! Can they wash a skinned knee and put a bandaid on it? Obviously, that makes them superior to a world-renowned doctor! Can they use an ATM? The most experienced financier trembles in their presence!
The truth is that the average person is, well, average. And most people might be good in one or two areas, but nobody is the top-rated expert in everything there is to be. But there’s a certain strain of people like L. Neil Smith who imagine they’re experts in every field. In order to live in the world of The Probability Broach, it seems the average person must simultaneously be a physical security expert, a financier, a fortress-building construction expert, and an emergency room doctor. And probably more stuff we’ll find out later.
Is that Homestead Rescue? I watched that show a couple of times. It was entertaining, although I’m pretty sure the family who runs it is a bunch of Trumpists.
Libertarians make a fetish of absolute self-reliance, and I understand the desire – up to a point. I like knowing how to do things for myself. But, as you said, no one is or can be good at everything. The biggest part of being wise is knowing what you don’t know, and acknowledging when you’d be better off consulting an expert.
I know some families in my neighborhood who homeschool. I don’t, because I know the teachers are more qualified than me, and I feel like I’d be in over my head very quickly. My son has benefited hugely from public school; they’ve given him support and services I wouldn’t have been able to provide at home.
I had to check–yes, that show is Homestead Rescue. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes because they’re all the same: people make stupid decisions and get into trouble and the family rides to the rescue. I suspect the family that swoop in to save the feckless would-be homesteaders likely are Trump fans. And just because that particular family knows how to set up a homestead, that doesn’t mean they’re equally competent at mainframe coding or law or separating conjoined twins at birth.
Homeschooling is another huge topic: I had one kid who was an asynchronous learner. In middle school, the teachers pointed out that he was ready for college in some areas. Since my county offers half-price tuition for minors, I took advantage of the college-level classes and used a certified (that is, reviewed by the same governing body that judges public and private schools) online school for the classes at high-school level–teachers reviewed and graded the work submitted online. In order to do that, I had to join a homeschooling group in my state, which put me in close contact with homeschoolers and their mothers (homeschooling fathers might exist, but I never met one).
The good news is that there are families who homeschool with an eye to academic achievement. Additionally, community colleges open their doors to these families, and even top-tier schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford offer classes online. This worked for me–just as you do, I believe that trained teachers can offer support and learning experiences that I cannot. If the community college professor said my kid got an A in chemistry, then I knew that my kid understood the material and demonstrated that knowledge to a trained professional.
The bad news is that I found in my area for every family that focused on education and setting their child up for success as an adult, there were far more homeschooling for reasons like, “I don’t like to get up in the morning and so my kids just do whatever until lunch” or “I don’t want my child exposed to people and ideas I’m biased against” (these were actual justifications I heard). Then there were the second- and third-generation homeschool families where mommy didn’t learn anything growing up, and then passed that along to her children. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.
The clever part is that Smith concocts one of the very few plausible justifications for involving yourself in a scenario like this. Namely, the owner of this house – the other Win Bear – would naturally be shocked to see his identical twin. He’d want to save the stranger’s life so he can find out what the heck is going on.
In fairness, I can think of two quite plausible reasons why Other Win Bear would want to intervene: 1) The incident took place very near his property, so he’d have a legitimate interest in something that affects his safety, his ability to enjoy his property, and maybe the resale value thereof as well. And 2) the victim looks a lot like himself, and was shot while approaching Other’s house; which means the shooters could have actually meant to kill Other and went after the wrong guy.
Follow-on quibble: I honestly don’t think Other Win Bear would necessarily recognize Win, or anyone else, as “his identical twin,” at least not at first or even second sight. From what I’ve read/heard, people generally aren’t that good at recognizing that someone else looks or sounds exactly like them. I can pick out someone who looks a good bit like me, but it would take more time, and more serious observation, for me to get to “holy crap, that guy looks EXACTLY like me!”
And it would be especially hard to do this if the other guy is lying on the ground bleeding from a gunshot wound. Other Win Bear would have at least had to drag Win into his house before he’d have been able to get a good enough look at him to conclude he’s an identical twin.
@raging bee, good point. Another? Even genetically identical twins can have looks that diverge based on their lifestyles (e.g. smoker/non-smoker, fitter/unfit). Given that we’re supposed to believe this alternate universe is just healthier and happier and just plain good-er in every way, wouldn’t alterate-Win be younger-looking, fitter, and just gosh-darn perfect-er in every way?
Unless, of course, Socialist Reality Win Bear was enough of a Rugged Individualist to make all the right life choices despite the socialist nanny-state doing…whatever it allegedly does to turn everyone into sheeple? (Or — and here’s a really weird idea — the socialist nanny-state ensured he had safe and healthy food and enough education to make sensible choices, and maybe a local rec-center where he could exercise and stay fit?)
I’m willing to bet there’s gonna be a scene later in this book where Win Bear goes back to his home-verse and tells people they can be free and happy if only they do what he’s been tough enough to do all along…
I’m trying to find the story – but I seem to recall a short story in the Confederacy universe, in which Win Bear needs to question someone, who (using his libertarian rights) refuses to answer, and Win implies that the killer he’s investigating might be after folks like the potential witness – much in the way that a police officer in the bad old statist world would do
Because Smith’s only beef with government is that it sometimes puts some restrictions on the rich and powerful; he doesn’t mind keeping all the authoritarian structures from our statist world. This is why ancaps aren’t anarchists despite both groups opposing the state.
Here’s the quote from “The Spirit of Exmas Sideways”, after a potential witness stands on his right to privacy and the confidentiality of business records: Win Bear says:
“Suppose the killers going after ill-mannered centenarian bosses of various major LaPorte institutions.”
and the fellow folds, just like in the bad old US.