The Probability Broach, chapter 15

(If you don’t know where the title is from, allow me to introduce you to the Lyttle Lytton Contest.)

Let’s review what The Probability Broach has told us about how its world works.

L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy is an anarcho-capitalist society with no police, no laws and no justice system. Furthermore, everyone is armed and ready to kill at a moment’s notice.

According to its author, what makes this society function—as opposed to collapsing into an endless war of all against all—is that there are unwritten rules which everyone respects.

People in the NAC have free speech; no one will blow your head off because they don’t like something you said. If someone attacks you and you shoot them in self-defense, that’s allowable; but if you disarm them, you can’t execute them in cold blood, you have to turn them over to a neutral third party for a trial. Everyone has private property rights; you can’t break into someone’s house and take it over just because you like it better than yours.

Got it? Good. Now let’s look at some passages in the text which show that this is all a dirty lie.

As we saw last week, our heroes know that the villain, John Jay Madison, is plotting to take over the world. But they have no proof. They’re sure that the evidence is in Madison’s house, but there’s no such thing as a search warrant here. So they resolve to do the only thing they can do, which is to illegally break into his house and retrieve it themselves.

Ed and Win Bear are parked outside Madison’s house, engaged in the time-honored ritual of the stakeout:

“Look out!” Ed whispered. We slumped farther down as a pair of enormous black hovercars—the Frontenac, lately repaired, and its twin brother—came around a corner and pulled up in front of the house.

This is the car that fired on Win and almost killed him. The fact that Madison owns it still doesn’t help them, because there’s no law enforcement to which they can report this incriminating fact.

Ed offered me a set of goggles with half-inch slabs for lenses. I started to strap them on, thought better of it, and simply held them before my eyes. “Infrared?” I asked. The images were in color, the hues wildly distorted. The Frontenacs were still black, but the landscaping was sickly shades of red-violet.

“Paratronic. Convert almost anything to visible wavelengths, with pretty strange results sometimes, depending on the—quiet!”

A gang of people have emerged from Madison’s front door. Two of them are Madison and his butler. The other two are people Win recognizes all too well, because they’re from his world.

One is Otis Bealls, former boss of the murdered physicist Vaughn Meiss. The other is Oscar Burgess, the scarred secret-police thug who tried to shut down Win’s investigation.

None of this comes as a surprise to Win, but he wonders just how deep this plot goes:

The gears in my head were grinding. I wasn’t surprised that SecPol had been on my trail, but Burgess himself? Unless they had their own Broach working, he must have followed me to Fort Collins, into the lab, and out through Meiss’s machine. How many others had made it through before the one we’d found got buried in the collapsed excavation?

Fortunately, the villains are leaving. They pile into their car and drive off. Once they’re gone, Ed and Win circle around to the back side of Madison’s mansion.

They crouch by the door, and Ed pulls out an unfamiliar device. Pay close attention to this part:

Ed produced a device, slid out an antenna, and unfolded a sharp-pointed ground stake.

“This is my defeater—like the one our burglar used.”

“I hope it works better than his did.”

As you may remember, in an earlier chapter, Win was almost murdered by an assassin who broke into Ed’s home. The hitman got in with the help of a defeater, a piece of tech that disables someone else’s burglar alarms.

As I pointed out at the time, there’s no non-criminal use for such a device. The fact that you can go out and buy one—apparently there are businesses that manufacture them—has unsavory implications for the NAC. Why would that business even exist, if everyone here is so unfailingly respectful of everyone else’s private property?

And now we find out that Ed Bear, one of the heroes, owns one too!

Ed explains that his defeater works on a different principle: it connects to his computer at home, and if they trip any sensors, his computer will “start arguing” with Madison’s computer and delay the alarm from going off. Once that happens, they’ll have a few extra minutes to make their getaway.

My hands shook as I accepted another gadget. “S-sorry. I’m used to working the other side of the burglary game!”

“Calm down! You don’t hear my teeth chattering, and I’m not used to it, either.”

This is an outright lie. It has to be. If Ed isn’t used to burglarizing other people’s houses, why would he own a device whose only purpose is to help him do that?

But wait, you say. Maybe Ed is an honest man who never usually stoops so low. Maybe he bought the defeater just for this job.

Nope—because as the next paragraph shows, he owns other burglary tools too, and he has experience with them:

The back porch wasn’t locked, but the floorboards were real groaners. By the time Ed was doing things to the back door with tiny tools, I was surprised my pants were still dry. He taped the latch to keep it from springing shut.

Lockpicking isn’t something you just pick up! It takes lots and lots of practice to be good at it. (People like Lockpicking Lawyer just make it look easy.) There’s no way Ed would be able to do this on his first try. He’s clearly done it before.

Based on this chapter, all the NAC’s rhetoric about the sanctity of private property rights is so much lip service. They all say it, but no one believes it. Everyone in this world owns crime stuff and has practice in using it.

This tracks with other evidence from the text. It’s supposed to be illegal to torture or threaten a captive, but Win did just that, and his friends all overlooked it. They were a little upset, but they didn’t cast him out or shun him, the way people in the NAC are supposed to do to wrongdoers.

The conclusion to draw from this, even if the author didn’t intend it, is that these unwritten “rights” are worthless. People in the NAC hypocritically claim to respect them, but flagrantly violate them whenever it serves their interests. I’d argue that that’s unintentionally realistic, and exactly what we should expect in a society like this.

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The Probability Broach, chapter 15

This chapter opens with another of Smith’s fictional quotes put in the mouths of real historical figures. This one is attributed to Sequoyah (who in real life was the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, but wasn’t an anarchist political theorist as Smith labels him).

“Are two people healthier than one person? Are two wiser? Then why believe they have more rights? History’s sadness is that sanity, wisdom, justice—the very qualities that make us human—are not additive, while one’s brute animal ability to do another injury, is. Two people are, tragically, stronger than one. Stripped to naked truth, that is the basis for all government, dictatorial or democratic. Can we not do better?”

—Sequoyah Guess
Anarchism Understood

Can two people be wiser than one? Yes! Was that even controversial?

It can go either way, to be fair. There’s such a thing as mob mentality, but there’s also such a thing as the wisdom of crowds. As a libertarian, you’d think Smith would be in favor of that: it’s always been proposed as an explanation for why free markets work, how it can be true that individual ignorance combines to produce a collectively rational result.

The wisdom of crowds is also why nations are governed by legislative bodies rather than kings, and criminal trials have a jury rather than leaving the verdict in the hands of a single random individual. There’s always a risk that one person will make a bad decision because of bias, ignorance or some other idiosyncratic reason. With a larger group, it’s more likely that individual prejudices and whims cancel each other out to produce a reliable result.

Back to the plot: Ed, Win and Lucy have assembled at Lucy’s house (“I’d counted eight cats so far, one sleeping in Lucy’s bony lap, another making his way up the difficult north face of Ed’s shoulder. I was trying to keep a kitten from perching on my head”) to discuss their meeting with John Jay Madison, a.k.a. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. It turns out Lucy remembers him from the Prussian war—they fought on opposite sides:

“The Red Knight of Prussia himself,” Lucy declared. “‘Twas his Flying Circus put me afoot back in thirty-eight. Never forget it—there we were: The Pensacola an’ the Boise flankin’ my Fresno Lady, bearin’ northeast outa Cologne. They—”

“But that’d make him at least—”

“Ninety-six,” Ed said.

(Lucy, meanwhile, is 136. The North American Confederacy has life-extension technology, so no one finds this odd.)

Win wants to know why Madison was addressing Lucy as “Your Honor”. She admits that she helps mediate an argument now and then for “catfood money”:

“Pay attention,” Ed warned, “she’s being modest. Lucy’s a highly respected adjudicator and member of the Continental Congress.”

… “A distinction,” Lucy intoned, “utterly without distinction. Congress hasn’t met in thirty years, and I’m hopin’ like crazy it won’t ever have to again.”

Ed and Win are hatching a plan to break into Madison’s place and search for concrete proof of his world-domination scheme. Since Lucy holds an official position with the NAC, Win asks if she could get them a search warrant, so they can do this in an above-board way. But, of course, she can’t:

“Winnie, I got no official capacity. Nobody does, not even the president of the Confederacy. She only rides herd on the Continental Congress, if and when… What you and Ed are planning is unethical, immoral, and—”

“Fattening?”

“I was about to say, illegal—if we were the legislatin’ kind, which we ain’t. You two get shot up in there, nobody’s gonna say a thing. Madison’ll be within his rights. Or, he could sue you right down to your bellybutton lint.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do while he’s taking over the planet?”

“Son, we gave up preventive law enforcement long before we gave up law.”

What Lucy is saying is that in the NAC, even if you have knowledge that someone is plotting a crime, there’s nothing you can do but stand by and watch until they actually commit it. Attempted murder isn’t an offense; only murder is. (This world runs on Sideshow Bob logic.)

In our world, if you’re shot and narrowly survive, there’d be a police report. You could describe the vehicle that the shots were fired from, testify that one of the attackers named someone named Madison as the ringleader. Detectives would collect forensic evidence from the scene. All of this would provide probable cause for a judge to grant a search warrant, which could either turn up further evidence or clear the suspect’s name.

Also, if the police find evidence that someone is planning a serious crime—let’s say, holding secret meetings where they discuss a plot to kidnap and kill a sitting governor—they can be arrested for that. (That’s called criminal conspiracy.)

You don’t have to sit on your hands and wait for a would-be criminal to actually hurt someone before anyone takes any action. Smith denigrates this as “preventive law enforcement”, but isn’t that what we should want? Police who prevent crime from happening, rather than just punishing the perpetrators after the fact?

Meanwhile, in the NAC, the protagonists can’t legally do anything at all. A criminal can plot their crime in exacting detail without having to fear any consequences. Even to investigate a serious crime that’s already occurred, you have to break the law by trespassing in the suspect’s home. (When police are outlawed, only outlaws will be police!)

Their only chance, as Ed explains, is to break in to Madison’s house and find something that retroactively justifies their doing so. He can sue them for burglary, but they can countersue for a bigger crime. He’ll end up owing them way more money, and potentially getting exiled if he can’t pay. Win describes this as, “The end justifies the means”—all things considered, a frightening attitude for a cop to hold.

This goes to show that “total freedom” isn’t a political position that benefits everyone equally. It’s a much bigger advantage for those with evil intentions.

The way that L. Neil Smith writes his anarcho-capitalist world, it’s not just that they don’t have police or law enforcement; it’s that the legal system actively forbids these activities, even if carried out by private parties. The ordinary evidence-gathering and investigating that law enforcement would normally engage in are against the law here. Anyone who attempts them is risking death or a punishing lawsuit.

Meanwhile, activities that would be serious felonies in our world are perfectly legal and allowable. You can recruit conspirators, plot crimes, threaten people, stockpile weapons—and nobody can do anything to stop you.

This is a good argument for the importance of the Hobbesian social contract. We all agree to surrender some freedoms, in exchange for the protection of a state that’s supposed to keep us safe from those who’d do us harm. Ironically, the plot Smith wrote furnishes a good illustration of why this bargain of civilization is worth making.

Image credit: Library of Congress

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