The Probability Broach, chapter 7
Win Bear has come to terms with the fact that he’s no longer in his own world, but the North American Confederacy, an anarcho-capitalist society where American history took a different track. He hasn’t traveled forward in time like he initially thought, but, as he puts it, sideways:
…either my whole life until now had been some kind of dope dream, or somehow history had shifted sideways. Correction: I had been shifted sideways in time.
…And where, oh, where, was the world I’d been born into, grown up in, loved and hated? Did it still exist?
L. Neil Smith has Win express at least some angst about this possibility. As he says to his counterpart Ed, “Suppose Meiss’s machine just sort of held me in place while my own world was ripped out from under me and yours slipped in to take its place!… How do I know that whatever change in history created your world didn’t destroy mine?”
Under the circumstances, I’d agree that this is a reasonable human reaction—except for the fact that it rings false to the character. Win never misses his own world or regrets leaving it. Nor does he express the slightest desire to return to it. This world is superior in every way to the one he came from.
There’s also no one in his world that he cares about, loves, or misses. He’s conveniently divorced (and actually, the text says his ex-wife died in a car crash after divorcing him). He has no kids, no family, and no friends. If there had been someone in his world he cared about, this might present a greater dilemma, but Smith’s scripting him to have no attachments allows this concern to be summarily dismissed.
(Just as a contrast, I’ll say that this is a major concern of Rae Robinson, the protagonist in my novel Commonwealth. Even if you’ve escaped the world of suffering and made it to utopia, what happens to the people you’ve left behind?)
Win’s story sounds crazy, as even he admits. But Ed says there are some points in his favor, besides the otherwise-inexplicable fact of their identical appearances.
One piece of evidence is the gun Win had on him, a Browning, which he took from a government thug who accosted him in Meiss’ lab. Ed says that manufacturing firearms requires heavy industry—and while his world has a Browning gun company, they didn’t make this one:
“Well, look at mine. It’s a Browning, too.” He hauled a .45-sized pistol from under his poncho, popped the magazine, and shuffled the chamber round onto the bed. It was beautiful, a soft dull gray with slimmer, cleaner lines than an Army Colt.
… “Your Browning,” Ed said, “is made of steel, smaller, but heavier than mine, which is almost entirely titanium. The last steel firearms were made in this country over sixty years ago—I looked it up. Mine was manufactured by molecular deposition, electron discharge—processes that don’t leave toolmarks. Yours, though they’ve done a first-class job, was obviously cut from a solid slab, another method obsolete for generations. No offense.”
Between Win’s overnight healing of near-fatal injuries and now objects made by “molecular deposition” without tools, the NAC’s technology is superior in every way. This is in keeping with Smith’s belief that government funding somehow holds innovation back, rather than supporting it—so in his view, a world without any government would be radically more advanced.
But if this is the case, why doesn’t it play out the same way in our world?
Why are the nations with the most advanced science and technology also the ones with the strongest and most stable governments? Shouldn’t developing nations with weak, uninvolved, or nonexistent governments be hotbeds of innovation? Why is Silicon Valley in California, rather than Oklahoma? Why is Europe more advanced than Somalia or South Sudan?
Ed nodded. “I see. Well this morning while you were sleeping, I ‘commed Browning and took the liberty of showing them this thing. Made by antiquated methods, yet no antique. It caused quite a sensation. I suspect they’d offer you a pretty tenth-piece for it.”
I laughed. “Might need a grubstake at that. I can’t go on being a charity case forever.”
…He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry about charity. Just take it easy so your bones will knit straight.”
This is a very noteworthy passage, if only because it touches on something that this book otherwise never addresses. Namely, in an ancap society with no public safety nets, what happens to people who are unable to work?
Up to this point, as I noted earlier, Win is subsisting on the charity of these people he’s just met. Ed drove off his attackers, Clarissa treated his wounds, and he’s staying at Ed’s house while he recuperates. So far, they’ve asked for nothing from him in repayment. It’s no spoiler to say that they never do.
That’s extremely convenient for Win, who’d otherwise be in a dire predicament. He’s a stranger in a strange land—no house, no possessions, no money except pocket change, no transferable skills (there are no police departments here!), no family or friends he could turn to.
But while he was fortunate to find people willing to support him indefinitely for free, that can’t be the case for everyone. What happens to you in this world if you’re orphaned as a child, or contract a serious chronic illness, or become disabled in an accident, or lose your job and burn through your savings, or pledge all your assets to a business that goes bust?
If you run out of money, do you have to beg in the gutter? Are there debtors’ prisons? Dickensian workhouses where the destitute are put to slave labor? Or are you just expected to die?
As I said, the issue never comes up in TPB. There are no homeless people pushing shopping carts, no hobos riding the rails, no beggars or panhandlers on street corners, no mentally ill or drug-addicted people living on the streets. There are no ghettos, no tent cities, no shantytowns, no Hoovervilles. It’s a subject that Smith steers well clear of. He doesn’t explain why none of these unfortunates exist, so much as he just sweeps the whole issue under the carpet.
If you asked L. Neil Smith, I suspect he’d fall back on his (economically implausible) insistence that everything is cheap and no one is poor in the NAC. Even if you’re starting over from scratch, you can walk into any business, get a job on the spot, and start rebuilding your life within days.
But even if that were true, it beggars belief that no one falls through the cracks, in a society where there’s no one whose job is to prevent that. There must be misfits, outcasts and pariahs. There must be people who suffer the burden of discrimination, or who get cheated, defrauded or scammed out of their life savings.
No society yet has completely solved the problem of helping and protecting everyone equally. But in a state with public safety nets, progressive taxation and anti-discrimination laws, there are at least some options open to the least fortunate. By design, Smith’s supposed utopia has none of these. The only thing it offers is “sink or swim”.
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From what I understand, an-caps blame lots of poverty on the government. Now, that is the case to a degree-government policies do hurt poor people sometimes. As for the rest, their answer would be “charities will care for them” or “not my problem”. I’m not sure where they expect homeless people to go assuming that charity doesn’t take care of it in a world with all land private. That is a specific problem that I haven’t seen them tackle.
Funnily, that’s only true in the sense that government is what gives capitalism the power to exist. (In a stateless world, if the poor decided they’d redistribute the wealth without the capitalists’ consent, there would be any government forces that take the capitalist’s side and put down the rebellion.)
So government causes poverty but only in the sense that Hitler’s parents caused the Holocaust.
I don’t think it’s so simple, but yes to a degree that’s true.
By the same token, government also gives ALTERNATIVES to capitalism the power to exist. “In a stateless world,” the only way a majority of people could “redistribute” wealth would be by mob action, and that would have very little chance of working out at all well. Also, “In a stateless world,” whoever owns the most or most crucial resources would, immediately and inevitably, form a state that suits their interests, and of course there would be no other state institutions to counter them.
Historical experience shows that the only way a majority can rein in the wealthiest minority is by creating a STATE that supports agencies and institutions that effectively regulate the most powerful people as well as the least.
Would it even make sense for Win to think his own world was destroyed? He saw all the clues that hint at Meiss having traveled back and forth between these worlds for some time. It’s a shame, since this was a rare human reaction from these characters. Ed seems pretty kind now, but why do I have the feeling I’ll start to hate him before the chapter is out?
(Actually, does this make Win the forerunner of the Isekai protagonists who never think about or care about their home world again once they die and are reincarnated into the new one? Naturally, only mediocre fiction imitated this.)
“But if this is the case, why doesn’t it play out the same way in our world?”
I’m not defending his technology-suppression conspiracy theories, but you are not taking the impact of neocolonialism into account. Places like Somalia and South Sudan are impoverished because of exploitation, not because of government, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to bootstrap themselves into a First World standard of living when the exploitation hasn’t ceased. There is a huge confounding variable here that you are overlooking. I really thought you’d know better than to see that the historic imperialists are rich and the victims of imperialism are poor, and then conclude that a stateless society must be lawless and poor. Obviously, the instability of the Third World societies is directly caused by them being colonized in the past. Of course, even if there were Global North countries to compare, the real issue is capitalism and the billionaire class suppressing innovation (unless it obviously makes them richer). Smith has it backwards but what can you expect from an ancap?
“This is a noteworthy passage…”
Indeed it is. Smith is genuinely blaming faults inherent to capitalism on government, which is only true in the sense that capitalism cannot exist without government. (The reverse is not true.) If a society actually got rid of governments then in order to prevent the state from reforming, it would also have to restructure its economics so that people can’t hoard capital and force others to work for them just to access their vital resources. Obviously a moneyless society would have nothing that prevents anyone from getting their necessities. “Money implies poverty,” as a wise man said. By comparison, our real society and Smith’s false utopia differ only in degree, not kind. What prevents the poor from ignoring capitalists’ exclusive claims on the resources the poor need to live is the government forcing them to acknowledge the capitalist’s right to withhold vital necessities from them. That is true both in the NAC and here. If this could not be enforced, and the poor decided to redistribute the wealth fairly, the capitalist would have to grin and bear it, since they couldn’t send company thugs after them. Hence, capitalism can ONLY exist if there is a state.
I think that last line is only true in the sense that if there isn’t a state, the capitalists will effectively create one by buying off anybody who’s just looking for an excuse to hurt other people and creating their own private army that way to prevent anybody else from taking his money by force. And then you get basically a company town or banana republic, with the capitalist effectively being the state.
This lasts until enough people get upset and gather together in enough force to overwhelm the private army and they force other people to accept rules to prevent it from happening again, at which point you’ve just created a state as well.
As long as there exist any vaguely sociopathic people willing to take advantage of others, a state is eventually going to happen in any community larger than Dunbar’s number.
Yeah, so far as I’ve seen any form of anarchy either collapses, is turned into a state or was a state already by another name.
I only disagree in the sense that anarchy means no rulers, not no rules. I nonhierarchical society would not be a state the way anarchists define the term. So that second option (people overthrow the company town and make rules to prevent its resurgence) would not be a state because there is no hierarchy.
I know, I’m a former anarchist. However, to me and others, it’s the same thing by other terms. I’m also not optimistic that we can stop all hierarchy.
That’s fine, but anarchists do not consider rules as such to be undesirable.
I really thought you’d know better than to see that the historic imperialists are rich and the victims of imperialism are poor, and then conclude that a stateless society must be lawless and poor.
What we see is this: the “historic imperialists” remain rich, orderly and relatively free societies, even after they’ve totally lost their imperial/colonial possessions, and fought some huge and destructive wars with each other, because they have had strong, competent governments recently; and many (NOT all) former subjects of empires are poor because they don’t have strong, competent governments, for whatever reasons. Some formerly-imperialist countries are relatively poor and backward because they have dysfunctional governments (Russia); others are becoming poorer as their formerly-advanced governments get raided and stripped for parts by oligarchs (UK, USA); while at least a few formerly-conquered countries have made decent progress since gaining independence due to having strong and competent governments. Not all former possessions of the British, French, Spanish, German or Russian Empires are doing nearly as poorly as Somalia.
I know, and didn’t mean to imply they do.
If I were to find myself in an alternate world, my first thought wouldn’t be that my world had been destroyed–it would be that somehow I moved through space and/or time. I’m also side-eyeing that Win had not so much as a friend or a friendly acquaintance to care about in the world he presumes is destroyed. Someone who has no human feeling toward any person or animal is a psychopath.
And again, I’m calling out the North American Confederacy as a place anyone would want to live. The only reason the Confederate states stayed afloat was from the labor of slaves and the sale of slaves.
I’m also side-eyeing how anyone in this society simply looks things up. DARPA, green-lighted in 1958 by Eisenhower (another gov’t employee) for national security. It was funded by the government, and eventually led to the internet. Had all the money not flowed that way, no doubt the internet would eventually have been built by some government, but it would have been much later than the 1987 this book is set in.
FDR (a government employee!) put together the first New Deal in 1932 and the second New Deal in 1935, which contained the Social Security Act. There were far too many people in the USA falling through the cracks of society, and those programs helped millions of Americans get back on their feet. It provided support for widows and orphans and elderly people. For examples of what life would be like without those supports, we can turn to Dickens and early seasons of Call the Midwife for life in the UK before the safety net.
Whenever I see the word “anarcho-capitalist” I always initially misread it as “arachno-capitalist.” I don’t know if that’s due to PZ’s influence or a subconscious view of capitalism as an elaborate web constructed to trap prey.
The UK did a lot to ensure that it’s former possessions did not have strong governments, and critically that they were always negotiating from a position of relative weakness so money continued to flow to the UK. We still do that even in our weakened state. I don’t think the likes of Thatcher realised that their bonfire of regulations would lead to international conglomerates as or more powerful than most individual countries, but I don’t think they’d have cared either as long as the UK wasn’t one of the countries that was on top. Shame about how that worked out.
@Jazzlet, well, the UK does have its extended family of parasites to support in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed, and that takes billions and billions of pounds.