The Probability Broach, chapter 10
Win Bear and his friends have captured a hitman. By threatening the prisoner with summary execution, Win got the thug to confess who sent him. His tactic was a success, but his friends are angry at him, especially Clarissa Olson, the doctor. She was warm with him before, but now she’s decidedly frosty:
She glared. “Is this the way you treat wounded prisoners in Denver?”
“Not for a long, long time.” I shook my head slowly. “Back home, he’d have more rights than honest people. I’m sorry.”
Wait, what?
In case you’ve forgotten, because L. Neil Smith apparently has, the world Win Bear came from is a dystopian autocracy where bloodthirsty secret police gun down enemies of the state with impunity, and even kill cops who get too close to the truth.
It would be a better excuse for Win to say this is how he normally treats prisoners, and didn’t know they do things differently here. Perhaps Smith thought that wouldn’t cast his protagonist in a sympathetic light.
The reason for this dialogue is that Smith is trying to achieve two incompatible things at the same time. He wants to show Win’s world (which, remember, is meant to be our world) as a nation of slaves oppressed under the brutal jackboot of government. However—in line with his right-wing Dirty Harry politics—he also wants to accuse it of coddling criminals, rather than giving them the swift, harsh justice they deserve.
You can’t have it both ways. Do we live in a power-mad dictatorship that tramples on people’s rights? Or are we too soft, too legalistic, and overly concerned with people’s rights? Those are opposite problems!
“It was a horrible thing you did. Immoral. I’m not sure I like you very much, Lieutenant Win Bear!”
“I’m not sure I like myself very much,” I answered, tasting bile. “And what do you mean, ‘immoral’? After what he did? I’ve had about enough of this self-righteous crap. You’re all so smugly satisfied with your Confederate status quo, you can’t see the lunacy of it flapping right in front of your own silly noses!”
Lucy turned, disbelief on her face. “What’s bitten you, son?”
Suddenly they were all strangers, creatures from another world. “The good doctor here—for something I already feel rotten about, thanks—while everybody in this safe, stable, oh-so-humane society carries a handgun, prepared to kill at the drop of a hat! What the hell are you all afraid of? How come such well-adjusted people cling so hysterically to their perverted phallic symbols?”
“What the hell are you all afraid of?” is a bizarre question under the circumstances. Win arrived in this anarcho-capitalist society a few days ago, and people have already tried to murder him at least three times.
It would make more sense for Win to accuse this society of dishonestly pretending to be idyllic and peaceful, while really it’s a violent hellhole where death lurks around every corner and no one is safe. The fact that everyone carries guns for protection would serve as proof of how dangerous it is. But Smith doesn’t have him make that argument, perhaps because it would hit too close to home.
This is the place for an Ayn Rand-style monologue, as Clarissa explains to him just why guns are so damn important:
“Win, civilized people go armed to say, ‘I am self-sufficient. I’ll never burden others.’ They’re also saying, ‘If you need my help, here I am, ready‘—yes, a contradiction, but a pretty noble one, I think. Independence is the source of freedom, the first essential ingredient of mental health. You’re good at taking care of yourself, Lieutenant. Why can’t you allow others the same right?
Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out. Is that evil? Is that wrong?
People who object to weapons aren’t abolishing violence, they’re begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically ‘right.’ Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.”
Smith thinks that weapons make you “free”, in the sense that they overrule raw physical strength. A person with a gun will beat a person without a gun. I could agree with that.
But he fails to ask the followup question: what beats a person with a gun? The answer should be obvious: two people with guns.
This is the problem Smith never grapples with, possibly because he’s so entrenched in an ultra-individualist, every-man-for-himself mindset that it never occurs to him. No matter how macho you are, you can’t hope to win a fight if two or more people gang up on you. Being armed doesn’t change this calculus, not if everyone has the same weapons—it only raises the stakes.
He seems to believe that, in an armed society, tyranny is impossible because every individual will fight to the death against oppression. But a single person bravely fighting off an armed mob only happens in movies. In reality, when you’re outnumbered, most people will make the rational choice to give in. That’s how it worked for most of history, after all.
The actual best way to protect yourself is being part of a group whose members defend each other. And because a bigger group beats a smaller group, what you really want is to be part of the biggest group of all.
That, in a crude sense, is what the state is: an entity that has a monopoly on force. In a democracy, we control the state’s actions by consensus, passing laws that define under what circumstances its power can be unleashed, rather than leaving it up to the whim of a dictator or a king. Some more-civilized societies occasionally even have constitutional guardrails to protect the rights of minorities from majoritarian abuse.
The tradeoff is that not everyone gets to do what they want all the time. But of course, no society could guarantee that, however constituted. Smith disagrees only because of his view that there are no tradeoffs between freedom and safety; that by abolishing all laws that restrain how people act (including laws against murder, robbery, rape and the like), we all magically become safer.
What would actually happen, if we abolished the state and no one had a monopoly on force, is that all the historical factors that led to the creation of states the first time would play out again. The most wealthy and powerful would gather small armies of thugs to themselves, becoming local warlords or robber barons.
In this new, lawless world, the most ruthless would rise to the top. They’d rule by fiat, imposing their will on all the regular people in their sphere of influence, conquering smaller gangs. The only check on their power would be if they happened to encounter a bigger gang. It would be the might-makes-right world that Smith claims to be worried about, but brought about by his own ideology.
And because it would be starting over from a blank slate, with no historical precedent to guide it, there’s no guarantee it would bind itself to protect anyone’s rights. It might well be a tyranny as bad as or worse than the most brutal dictatorships of the past.
Remember, Win Bear grouses that in his world, criminals (or—to put it more accurately—people accused of a crime) have too many rights and protections! That sounds a lot like Smith admitting that democracy is less oppressive than he wants us to believe it is. He wants to scrap all those hard-won legal protections and replace them with nothing. That’s not a recipe for freedom, but for chaos.
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Or a man in bulletproof armour with multiple guns?
A man in walking robotic exoskeleton with robotic weaponry that automatically targets the enenies or sprays enough bullets out quickly enough to overwhelm all opposition or lobs grenades or sprays fire or toxic chemicals in a radius around it etc… (Setting aside all ethics and concern for bystanders because, hey mah fweedumb!!!1ty!)
Which, hmm.. why haven’t they got these sort of solutions in Smith’s hypotetical Utopia?
Damn good question. Especially since there’s no Big Gummint, and no taxes or regulation, restraining any brave individualists from inventing any sort of weapon or defense they can think of. With Human Ingenuity fully unleashed, arms races between neighbors would get way out of hand, way fast.
I have more obvious answers:
1. a faster person with a gun. Shooting is more difficult than people who’ve seen too many movies think. Shooting under pressure doubly so. If, 30 years ago, you’d shown me a gun on your hip I’d have been able, due to training, to draw and fire a handgun before you’d finished pulling your coat back. Being in a civilised country I’d of course never be equipped to do so outside some very specific circumstance, but the point is, unless you’re VERY well trained and have trained THIS WEEK, there are people – individual, single people – who will be more than capable of threat assessing you, deciding to kill you, and doing so, before you’ve even completed the movement that alerted them in the first place. Most gun fondlers are not only not so trained, but they lack the discipline to apply the training in the first place. They’re untrainable.
2. a person who is better at shooting, with a gun that has a longer range – if your target is definitely armed, as these people seem to be, only an idiot would engage them with a handgun. Camp out with a sniper rifle or even just an assault rifle somewhere and wait. Engage from 100 metres away. At that range with a decent rifle and sight, you pretty much can’t miss (unless you’re, y’know, just trying to make the guy you’re shooting at look good to win an election, for instance).
3. a person who doesn’t bother with guns and moves straight to artillery. It’s not subtle and there may be collateral damage… if you care, but most battles aren’t won with soldiers shooting pistols, or even rifles – it’s all about the artillery.
4. a person who doesn’t bother with anything explosive and simply walks up behind you with a knife. (cue the usual “nobody could sneak up on me” fantasies from gun-fondlers who presumably sleep sitting up.)
5. a person who doesn’t bother with anything up close and personal like a knife or loud and explody like guns or bombs, but has a different set of skills – perhaps a professional chemical engineer who would think to hijack a tanker of chlorine and simply park it outside the target’s house/shed/workplace/whatever, open the tap and saunter off. It’s very difficult to defend against someone who understands how fragile humans really are and is professionally familiar with the many, many ways that common substances can kill them, even accidentally.
I mean, I could go on (and frequently do), but the number of answers to “what beats a person with a gun” is limited only by your imagination and education.
Also, a person with a gun might find himself in a situation where he can’t prevail without his gun, and drew his gun because he was scared and that’s all he had; but who also doesn’t really have good reason to use lethal force over the particular thing he’s fighting over. So once he’s done something so rash as pull a gun over, say, a parking space, his opponent could just raise an eyebrow and say “you’re really gonna shoot me over this?” and then start beating the would-be gunman with a stick or bat or whatever he had handy.
Lots of people seem to think of guns as magic talismans that instantly cause opponents to lose their will and do whatever the gunman says.
PS. Surprise twist Win Bear’s torture didn’t work because his victim gave him false info that literally leads nowhere.
That victim then gathers more people against Win and gets a big enough, angry enough group together to arrest and put Mr Bear on trial for what he did – and calls his new friends as the first witnesses.
Because whilst torture can get people to speak they won’t always speak accurately and honestly eg Princess Leia and her confession of the rebel base on Dantoine rather honestly confessing that it was on Yavin or moon thereof. during the Alderaan destruction scene.
Plus, oh yeah, “Witch trials” complete with confessions of the impossible that ended in judicial murders of innocent people. A bit like many found to have happened in the USA by the Innocnece Project. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project )
Nothing to do with the rest of the article, but the picture at the top reminded me of something a while back.
Evan Dorkin is a cartoonist (probably best known for things like Milk and Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad!) and for a while he had an anthology comic book just called ‘Dork’. One of the things he occasionally put in that book was ‘Little People Players’, in which he’d draw comics about essentially a play staged where all the characters were drawn as ‘Little People’ toys from Fisher Price.
One of the plays he did was Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery. It was really surreal to see something like The Lottery being drawn as if it were being played out loud by a few five year olds moving their toys around. (Which, of course, was the point.)
1 StevoR: Bystanders are a huge issue. In a gun fight if somebody isn’t taken out with the first shot both sides are going to get what cover they can. Shooting then becomes a bit of guesswork where the person actually is and if the barrier will stop a bullet. With the potential for chain reactions as people who see other unknown people shooting draw their own guns.
Then imagine what happens if somebody was carrying a submachine gun rather then a pistol. In this world you can make a good case that a large caliber pistol makes the most sense to avoid bystanders but not everybody is going to care. And just what is the moral case for hitting a bystander? If you can’t risk hitting any ever then you can’t defend yourself but at some level of lack of concern for bystanders you become responsible for their deaths.
In a better book, Win would be sufficiently corrupt that he falsely thinks that accused criminals have too many rights in his world (possibly because (he thinks) the federal government is using the criminal class to oppress the law-abiding) – and so is looking forward to Dirty-Harrying it until he learns that all the noble CSAers automatically jump to defend even a fellow who had been attacking them moments earlier, because they’re just that decent. But Smith is stuck because he wants his hero to be a decent guy who can be converted to the CSA cause without too much trouble, while still maintaining the idea that everything about our world is bad – except for Win.
(And the Truth Shall Set You Free by Sharon Green plays things better – the person transported to the somewhat libertarian-esque society is a smart criminal, who sees the society as full of suckers, whom she will take advantage of, and learns that she was wrong)