The Probability Broach, chapter 19
Now that the Continental Congress is in session and other business has been dealt with, Win and his friends finally have a chance to inform the North American Confederacy about the enemy at the gates. President Jenny Smythe is on their side, so she yields the gavel to her vice president and addresses the delegates.
(The North American Confederacy’s vice president is a sapient gorilla, Dr. Olongo Featherstone-Haugh, pronounced “Fanshaw”. I’ve commented on this before, but it’s hard not to read racial undertones into the fact that L. Neil Smith never depicts a single Black person in his anarcho-capitalist utopia, but does have multiple named characters who are talking apes.)
“Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Assembled delegates,” she addressed the cameras, “people of North America and the System. Twice in the last century, our culture has embraced new peoples—peoples we had long known, but failed properly to understand. I refer, of course, to simian beings and to the people of the seas, the cetaceans. Today, we anticipate a time when new life is discovered on a distant world, life that shares with us that sum of values we call Civilization.”
“…Fate has chosen me to bring you that news—with two shocking qualifications: the new world is called Earth, its location, anywhere you look around you, for it shares space with our own, existing at a different point along one of the several dimensions of time.”
The delegates are already buzzing over this shocking news, but Jenny has more:
“Ladies and gentlemen! We shall be at war with this new Earth within days—weeks at the most a terrible new kind of war, ending only when all life on both our planets is utterly extinguished!
…Therefore, I move that Congress declare a state of emergency to deal with this situation before civilization itself is destroyed.”
It’s important to include this excerpt for later, because it shows that no one in the NAC wasn’t informed about exactly what level of threat they were facing.
Upon hearing Jenny’s ominous news, the assembly is in an uproar:
A tidal wave of noise swept over the crowded room. Lucy grabbed her mike, punching for recognition. This too was pre-arranged. “Mr. Vice President!—Shuddup, you varmints!—Mr. Vice President!” In exasperation, she drew her enormous pistol, triggering three devastating blasts into the timbered ceiling. Sawdust fell, and with it, silence.
“The Chair recognizes Lucille Kropotkin.”
“About bloody time, too, Fanshaw, old ape. Okay, I second Jenny’s motion, so’s we can explain to all these yahoos here exactly what’s been going on!”
But the Hamiltonians are attending this Congress too, and they’re not standing idly by as their plot is exposed before the world. John Jay Madison rises to speak and is recognized by the chair:
“Mr. Vice President, we have just witnessed the introductory maneuvers of an unprecedented criminal conspiracy… I myself have been accosted by these lunatics, and have some acquaintance with what they’re trying to sell. In the interests of decency, I demand that their fantasies be dismissed immediately, so that we may all go home.” Boos, hisses, interspersed with a cheer or two. One of his henchman rose and shouted, “Second!”
“Out of order, Dr. Skinner. There’s a motion already on the floor.”
This gambit having failed, the bad guys try another one, offering a formal amendment to Jenny’s motion to reconvene as a “committee-of-the-whole” in order to study the problem at length before making any decisions. After a back-and-forth of dueling amendments, it passes:
Slam! went the gavel. “The amendment passes by a majority of 99.44 percent. This body is recessed and reconstituted as a committee-of-the-whole!”
I groaned. Had we lost?
“Great goiters, no!” said Lucy. “We were hoping for something like this, but couldn’t figure a way to swing it ourselves. Those Hamiltonians did it for us, bless their cruddy little hides.”
Win is baffled, but she explains: The bad guys’ plan was to do the NAC version of a filibuster—trying to tie the Congress up in endless debate so they could never actually vote on anything. But, as Lucy says gleefully, the villains played right into their hands. Until that motion passed, any speaker was limited to ten minutes, which would have severely limited their options on how to make their case about what should be done. Now all time limits on debate are suspended, and the good guys have as much time as they want to present their evidence.
L. Neil Smith intended all of this to be boring and convoluted, since he hates politics. But it points to a different problem that I want to flag: None of this parliamentary procedure should exist in an ancap society.
This stuff about “the chair recognizes” and “second the motion” and strict time limits on how long people get to speak are vestiges of a political order that Smith says he doesn’t accept. I thought this society had no laws and no rules!
In an anarchy like this one, which is “free” in a might-makes-right, law-of-the-jungle sense, the way it should work is that when you want to talk, you stand up and start yelling, and the loudest yeller wins by drowning out everyone else. After all, Lucy fired a gun into the ceiling when she wanted to talk! Why is she the only one who’s doing that?
Of course, if they followed this procedure, Congress would be an incomprehensible roar of noise. It would be impossible to agree on anything or take any action, so nothing would ever get done.
That’s an inadvertent demonstration of a philosophical point that this book otherwise staunchly refuses to admit: complete and total freedom isn’t always the best option. Sometimes, you need rules and regulations to get things done. Robert’s Rules of Order, the classic manual of parliamentary procedure, makes this very point to justify its own existence:
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.
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Other posts in this series:
I thought the Hamiltonians weren’t taken seriously as anything but a bunch of stupid malcontents who hated our freedoms. Now this pompous Hessian is working to advance his “secret” evil conspiracy by speaking to the full Congress?
Even in a fairly anarchist society I would accept that people understand a large congress needs rules of order. I wouldn’t expect them to be this complex and formal.
It is something that Smith could easily write into the story. Have somebody explain that the rules are an anachronism left over from the pre-NAC government but they work well enough for a country that rarely calls a congress. Nobody cares enough to organize to change them.
I would read part of this as a matter of what is social acceptable to talk about but but that is not what Smith has in mind. It’s a situation where everybody says they hate politics and the government doesn’t do much and people ignore it. In reality it does more then people admit and there is a whole group of professional politicians like Lucy, people who would never admit to it because it’s socially unacceptable. That is clearly not what Smith is trying to say.