The Probability Broach, chapter 6
Following his brief interlude of mid-surgery awareness, Win wakes up for real:
Standing over me was a breathtaking peaches-and-cream blonde, perhaps thirty, hazel eyes—when she smiled, the corners crinkled like she meant it—and an ever so slightly upturned nose. She wore a bright-red coverall with a circled white cross embroidered on the left shoulder.
The wall seemed one huge window opening into a honey-colored meadow and purple columbines. Maybe a mile away an evergreen forest fronted foothills and the ghostly peaks of the Rockies. The illusion was spoiled by a door through the wall and the railed top of a staircase. Television? A beautiful job. I could almost smell the sage.
It’s ironically appropriate that this beautiful landscape turns out to be pixelated artifice.
Given that this anarcho-capitalist world has no environmental preservation laws, it should be a blighted hellscape where forests are clear-cut for timber, mountains are bulldozed for ore, lakes and rivers are used as dumping grounds, and whatever’s left is despoiled with garish advertisements. Pristine natural beauty doesn’t produce a profit for anyone, so in a world where money rules everything, it should all be ruined. The only pastoral scenes ought to be digital fakes like this one.
As we saw previously, L. Neil Smith insists that isn’t the case. The North American Confederacy is a beautiful place with
bucolic parkland and modest, tasteful development. But he doesn’t have an explanation for why that isn’t the case. Who or what prevents these places from being sold off and strip-mined?
The woman at Win’s bedside introduces herself as Clarissa Olson, “Certified Healer”. She’s pleased to see him awake, and Win returns the compliment by engaging in some light banter – or as we’d call it, sexual harassment.
I took a deep breath, found the pain completely gone, and tried sitting up.
“Hold on, Lieutenant! You’re not quite ready for that!” The lady dimpled, pushing me back gently. “How do you feel?”
“I guess I’ll do, at that. Is this a hospital?”
“You want to get really sick? A hospital, indeed! I almost believe you are a time traveler as you claimed last night.”
“What else did I say? Hope I had enough sense to make an improper suggestion or two your way.”
“You’re a ‘Man from the Past,’ from a city that’s never existed. Otherwise you were quite gentlemanly, all things considered.”
But don’t worry – Clarissa doesn’t mind. In anarcho-capitalist utopia, healthcare workers are totally cool with being hit on by their patients. Apparently, it’s only the nanny state that makes women object to being catcalled. Who knew?
Clarissa says she removed a dozen bullets from Win’s body. She shows him the tattered remains of the bulletproof vest he donned the day before, when he left his apartment in the other Earth: “That’s why there was enough of you left for me to work on.”
“When will I be up and around?”
“Well, you’re healing pretty slowly. You were gradually dying of malnutrition: deficiencies in the nitrilosides, lecithin, ascorbic acid; a dozen degenerative diseases I’ve only read about. But as that clears up, your wounds will knit faster. Day after tomorrow—at least for a brief walkaround?”
“Where I come from, bullet holes take a lot longer than that to heal up! This has gotta be the future… or heaven, if you’ll pardon my getting personal.”
There’s no good place to point this out because the book omits it, so I’ll mention it here: Clarissa apparently never charges Win for this life-saving emergency surgery. Despite this being an uber-capitalist society, there’s no mention of him having to pay anything for it, not now or later.
How does it work, in a world with no laws and no public safety net, when a stranger shows up unconscious and bleeding to death? Just as I asked about medical care in Atlas Shrugged, “In a laissez-faire utopia, if someone suffers a critical injury and can’t prove on the spot that they can afford medical help, what happens? Would they be left to bleed to death on the ground?”
Health care is the classic case of a market failure, because critically ill people can’t afford to take their time and shop around for the best deal. They have no choice but to go to the first doctor available and agree to whatever price they demand. In turn, the doctor should charge that patient as much as they can possibly pay – up to and including a lifetime of debt slavery.
That doesn’t happen here, but only because libertarian novelists have their characters play nice and cut each other sweetheart deals, rather than taking their beliefs to their logical, ruthless conclusion.
In a passage a little later in the book, Win gives an aside into the advanced medical technology this world has and how it’s healing him much faster:
The cast on my arm was the devil’s own nuisance, although lighter than a plaster one, and ingeniously rigged for washing and scratching—in essence, merely a rigid plastic mesh. Clarissa maintained that, along with electronics and vitamins, it was helping me knit a hundred times faster than I had any right to expect. I don’t know all the therapeutic details, but I’m sure the FDA would have outlawed it.
This is another of those libertarian fixations that comes up surprisingly often. It’s the fervent belief that government prevents scientific progress.
The filmmakers of the Atlas Shrugged movies claimed that “red tape” holds back Star Trek-style medical scanners. Right-wing crank Michele Bachmann once claimed the free market could easily cure Alzheimer’s disease if only government regulators would get out of the way. And here, L. Neil Smith asserts that the FDA would, for some reason, outlaw a device that heals bullet wounds overnight. (Wouldn’t the military love to get their hands on something like this?)
This belief has an obvious implication. Of course, the government can’t prevent people from inventing things; it can only ban them after they’ve been created. This means there should be advanced medical technologies already in existence that are being held back by government bureaucrats. Where are they?
(Also, why would the government do this? Bureaucrats are people too. They get sick, they have loved ones who get sick. What reason would they have to ban cures they might benefit from?)
If anything, the reverse happens too often. Rather than being too cautious, the government approves drugs that have to be pulled because of dangerous side effects. They’ve approved uber-expensive anti-Alzheimer’s drugs that don’t work, essentially out of desperation for a lack of better options. Worthless quackery like homeopathy is barely regulated at all.
Even if regulators could stand to be more cautious, the government hasn’t stifled all innovation. On the contrary, almost any actual scientist would tell you that public funding is the keystone of their work. And new advances are still coming: During the COVID pandemic, RNA vaccine technology permitted safe, effective vaccines to be created in record time. CRISPR-based genetic engineering therapies to permanently cure previously untreatable diseases are coming online. Government research support nurtured both of these revolutionary technologies.
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There are also things the government bans out of caution, which wouldn’t happen in this utopia. Food dyes that are banned because there is some slight reason to think they might be bad and there is no particular reason to use them. In this sort of no government world nobody would even test for interactions decades down the road. And how would they handle situations where substance A and substance B are safe on there own but combined are dangerous? If they are in two different products both manufactures can say their product is safe.
Governments do go overboard on occasion. It’s one of those things where it’s the exception but the cases stick in people’s minds. And for every legitimate complaint there is a denier that just refuses to believe smoking causes cancer.
And here, L. Neil Smith asserts that the FDA would, for some reason, outlaw a device that heals bullet wounds overnight. (Wouldn’t the military love to get their hands on something like this?)
Yes. Yes, they would, even in a totally peaceful world where they don’t expect to go to war anywhere in the foreseeable future! In fact, if anyone in any army got a hint that such a thing could be developed, they’d be the ones driving the research, development and rollout of this new tech — not the private sector. And since they’d be doing all that for all the ground-level soldiers, not just the highest-paid officers, the military would end up making the tech available, and affordable, to ordinary civilians, not just the highest bidders. This is how we got penicillin!
(And even if the NAC saw no need to have an army, or spend any money on whatever army they do have, there seem to be OTHER COUNTRIES on this fantasy-Earth, so at least one of those other countries would, inevitably, jump at a chance to do something for THEIR armed services. Even if all those other countries were “governed” the same way as the NAC, they’d still be practicing good-fences foreign policies (especially since the NAC, at least, is so full of armed anarchists who don’t want anyone telling ’em what do nosireebob).)
As we saw previously, L. Neil Smith insists that isn’t the case. The North American Confederacy is a beautiful place with
bucolic parkland and modest, tasteful development. But he doesn’t have an explanation for why that isn’t the case. Who or what prevents these places from being sold off and strip-mined?
As you said in chapter 0 of this review, L. Neil Smith was just plain bonkers, and stuck in a fantasy world because he could never reconcile himself to the real one. That’s really all that needs to be said here.
Welp, I called it. This imaginary society is just so much better in every single way. The people are healthier and (presumably) live longer, better lives. It’s not a surprise that women in this society are also so accustomed to sexual harassment that it doesn’t even register with the healer.
I also laughed at the notion of Confederate and modest, tasteful homes. When I think of the people I know who subscribe to the “the war is still going and the south is winning!” folks, I see the trailers with the broken toilets being used as planters outside and the velvet Elvises inside.
As to Libertarians and vitamins and accusing others of vitamin deficiency…when Covid hit, these were the first folks insisting a dose of sheep wormer/dog heartworm preventive (that is, ivermectin) would totally for realsies work on a virus. Wearing a mask, keeping your distance from others, and washing your hands? (Just like you would for any other virus) That’s just foolish-talk! Sheep wormer, now THAT’s good medicine!
The nutrients she mentions? One is an anti-cancer drug that doesn’t work, that also contains cyanide. Another is naturally found in eggs and soybeans, and if too much is taken, causes no end of gastro-intestinal upsets. The last one–Vitamin C–also causes gastro-intestinal upsets if too much is taken. Makes sense that people who think sheep dewormer cures viruses and peach pits cure cancer would also believe excessive amounts of vitamins are just fine.
Also, as far as lightweight, removable casts go…this is not extraordinary, new tech. Back in the early 1980s, a friend’s mother had one while a bone injury healed. She could take it off briefly to bathe or if she needed a break from it.
Another point: how do we know what drugs/additives/etc. are safe and which aren’t? Through research paid for by the gov’t. In this imaginary world, who would be paying for all the testing to find the breakthroughs?
Also, as someone who has had wounds, I can guarantee you that nothing will make skin grow back overnight.
I agree with @2, Raging Bee: Smith was stuck in a fantasy world.
I started re-reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents yesterday and immediately saw its relation to The Probability Broach. The book was originally published in 1998. It’s a sequel to Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, which is perhaps even more applicable to The Probability Broach but my copy of it got lost in a move. The publication dates are important. There was supposed to be a follow-on book, Parable of the Trickster, but Butler died before completing it.
This series features a USA that’s collapsed. While there’s still a nominal government, it’s run by a charlatan pretending to be a religious zealot who enjoys inflicting pain and death on his perceived enemies–even if they’re US citizens. Remember the publication date–this predates Trump but foretells him. His slogan is Make America Great Again. <–that stopped me in my tracks.
The story takes place in California post rioting and full-chaos: it's much like a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome society, with frequent mentions of climate change turning the southern and central parts of the state unlivable. Remember the publication dates and realize how obvious climate change was nearly 30 years ago.
Now here's the compare-and-contrast with The Probability Broach: in this society, people have banded together for survival. The main character in the second book is the daughter of the woman who helped found the little colony of survivors in the first book. The colony gets by trading goods and services with other groups, only rarely having "hard currency" (that is, coins). Most of the population can't read or write because public schools cost too much money. The population goes armed, but they have to, for survival. For example, one group from the colony goes out scavenging abandoned farms for anything they can get, when they're fired upon by an armored RV–in order to travel anywhere, armor and weapons are necessary. It turns out the ones wielding the guns are small children, whose parents and older brother lie dying because they let their guard down for a moment and were attacked and two of the family members kidnapped into slavery. This atrocity is nothing new or shocking to the people in this book–everyone has lost loved ones, always by some brutal way.
Unlike the utopia of The Probability Broach where everyone goes armed to the teeth but nobody bothers anyone and people freely give up goods and services, In Butler's world, religion is used to control people, the strong brutalize the weak, and survival looks like (to quote the book) "living in the 19th century".
Apologies; I forgot to document the main point of my previous post before I hit the Post Comment button: affordable care. The little colony has a doctor in the first book: a 60-year-old man who saw what was coming pre-collapse and bought a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. In the first book, he frantically tries to train up member of the colony because he knows he’s at the end of his life. In a world where an infection can kill because there’s a lack of medical supplies, he and his knowledge and small cache of medical supplies are a luxury far above the ability of the other local groups to afford. And he can’t just give his services out for free except in his own colony, and only because the colony stresses self-sufficiency and actively works to train up its members according to their abilities, so while he treats patients and trains others, others grow and prepare food and run the schools to teach everyone to read and write, etc.
This is a far more likely scenario of a government-less world than the clean, bright fantasy in The Probability Broach, where violence is practically unheard of and people give away medical supplies and expertise on a whim.
I keep asking that question while watching RFKJ’s war on vaccines, fluoride, and scientific research in general (Nature is now “junk science” and the NIH has cancelled its subscription), and also wonder about the Senatesuckers that approved him. Same for their war on clean air and water and the climate. What do they plan to do when there’s nothing left but their money?
Anyway, I guess the people who believed the conspiracies know their own kind better than we did, and figured the government must be doing what they would do if that power were in their hands. I wonder if their paranoia will shift to other targets now that this one is finally openly doing what they always suspected it was doing (back when it wasn’t).
Tourism can be quite profitable, and is one of the means, especially in Africa, of getting the locals on board with preservation of the ecosystem, when without tourism, their immediate needs and interests are in conflict with preservation. That doesn’t sound like what’s going on in the book though.