The Probability Broach: Liberum veto

A man giving two thumbs down

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

Win and Clarissa are on their honeymoon, but he’s still trying to figure out why the North American Confederacy is so different from his world. After much searching, he thinks he’s found the point where the two timelines split. In the NAC, the Declaration of Independence has one extra word:

The screen split, showing nearly identical documents side by side, the handwriting far too small to read, one tiny, illegible word blinking on and off. Clarissa punched ZOOM. The vital paragraphs leaped into visibility, the U.S.A.’s on the right, the Confederacy’s on the left:

…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happinefs—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the…

“There it is!” I paused. “But what the hell does it mean? Is this what I’ve been searching for, what made all the difference?”

She shrugged. “Well, the sentences do have rather different implications, don’t they?”

I thought about that. Yes, if each were followed to the letter. I read “my” version aloud: “…deriving their just powers from the—”

“—unanimous!—” Clarissa supplied from hers.

“—consent of the governed,” I finished.

Smith is fixated on this idea of absolute consent. He hates the notion of any law applying to him against his will. What he ignores is that, if you abolish government, you don’t abolish coercion; you abolish the only means by which people can protect themselves against coercion.

In the laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog world of anarcho-capitalism, if someone is richer or more powerful than you, they can treat you as ruthlessly as they like. If they own the land you live on, they can raise your rent to extortionate levels. Even if they don’t, they can make your life hell by surrounding your house with stinking factory farms or toxic petrochemical plants or deafeningly loud data centers. With no usury laws, lenders can entrap people in debt that compounds at inescapable rates.

Employers can coerce hungry, desperate people to sign their lives away into indentured servitude. They can treat their workers as expendable, sending them into grueling, dangerous conditions. They can make them live in company towns where they can only buy basic goods at extortionate prices and can lose their income and their home at a single stroke if they disobey the boss.

If all else fails, they can coerce you with sheer brute force, sending armed thugs to your door to push you around and make you submit to their demands, or to kill you if you won’t. Again, it bears repeating that all these things have actually happened.

The answer to these outrages is the many banding together against the few, using their collective power as a counterweight. That’s the point of those “Organize” posters.

The "Organize" photo showing a flock of fish eating a larger fish

On a large scale, it’s also the idea of democracy. Rather than being ruled by monarchs, or plutocrats so rich and powerful they might as well be monarchs, we can come together to agree on laws that protect us all equally, so nobody can abuse or exploit anyone else regardless of the gap in wealth or power between them. (At least, that’s supposed to be how it works.)

“Win, why do you suppose Jefferson added that one extra word?”

“I don’t know. It would explain Gallatin’s supporting the Whiskey Rebellion. Unanimous consent? Ask those Pennsylvania farmers! Try getting any bunch of people,” I paraphrased Lucy, “to agree unanimously on anything! No wonder your government is so harmless and impotent!”

I was going to make this point, but Win makes it for me. People are unique, quirky, ornery and stubborn. They have wildly different opinions, beliefs, biases and upbringings. A large crowd will almost never agree completely about anything. Therefore, by requiring unanimity, you make government incapable of ever acting.

This means that, in the laissez-faire dystopia, the perpetrators of injustice can prevent action forever merely by voting in favor of themselves. (You may have heard the libertarian jibe that “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner”. Well, my response to that is: Anarcho-capitalism is one wolf and one sheep, and the wolf proclaims that none of the other sheep are allowed to intrude by passing anti-freedom, nanny-state laws about who he can and can’t eat.)

Or a single reckless person can blackmail everyone else, demanding a bribe before he’ll give his consent to solve a problem that threatens everyone. It creates a massive incentive for Prisoner’s-Dilemma-style betrayal.

There’s a real-life example: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a 17th-century European superpower. It was progressive for its era: one of the first constitutional monarchies, with legal guarantees of rights including religious freedom, and a nobles’ parliament called the Sejm which elected a king who was required to follow its decisions.

Unfortunately, the Commonwealth had a fatal flaw: the liberum veto, which allowed any member of the Sejm to block any legislation. Exactly as Smith wanted, it required unanimous consent to pass anything. The result was that the state was frequently paralyzed. After an initial period of expansion, its economy stagnated, its wealth became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and in times of crisis, it was unable to raise an army or defend its borders. As a result, it was slowly nibbled away by rival powers, until it was partitioned by its neighbors and dissolved.

In a very Ayn Rand-esque coda, Win narrates that he’s learned from NAC philosophers that “there’s only one act of free will… to think or not to think”. He says this is the ultimate explanation for the different wording in the two Declarations:

History isn’t determined by some mysterious impersonal machinery, but by people deciding whether to use their minds or slough it off. In this world, Jefferson decided to insert that one little word. Win Bear and Ed Bear don’t exist in twinned reality because they’re both Indians, but because they—their ancestors—decided they would, history be damned… The old alibis won’t wash any more: we’re responsible, and nothing’s ever written indelibly on that wall.

Apparently, Smith believes you can bootstrap yourself into existence, overcoming historical forces and genetics through sheer willpower. That’s his final explanation for why many people are the same in both worlds, despite their divergent histories.

As bizarre as this is, it fits his ideology. In a sense, this is something a libertarian anarchist would have to say. If people are the product of their heredity or their upbringing, they can’t be blamed for that. You can’t credit or fault someone for traits they didn’t choose to have. It also implies that you can make people better (or worse) by changing the society that created them.

But in Smith’s mind, none of that matters. People are who they are because they decide to be, and for no other reason—and they’ll be that way regardless of the world they exist in. Every outcome on both a personal and a societal level is brought about by people’s individual choice and nothing else.

In that worldview, you could justify not having laws or a safety net, since it won’t create any change in outcomes. But that worldview is based on pure magical thinking. It’s the supernatural belief that free will is a separate thing that not only floats free of both environment and genetics, but is more powerful than either. It holds that people choose to be good or evil, wise or ignorant, freedom-loving or power-hungry, and nothing that anyone else does can change that.

But this is patently not true. Whether or not you believe in anything called free will, humans are the product of their circumstances. Our brains are physical objects, subject to natural laws, and influenced by the environment they grow up in. Change that environment, and you change the people. To hold to a libertarian or religious worldview that denies this, you have to deny causality itself.

Next week: I’ll spend a little time discussing the appendix to The Probability Broach, which presents a timeline for Smith’s parallel universe.

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The Probability Broach: When is a war not a war?

Cavalry soldiers charging into battle

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

In the final chapter of TPB, L. Neil Smith is still wrapping up loose ends. He says that the scientists are mass-producing their Probability Broach jammer, selling the device everywhere to block future incursions from unfriendly universes.

Because it seems like a point against his ideal anarcho-capitalist society that it was helpless to defend itself and was only saved by accident, he has Win Bear offer another last-minute saving throw: even if the villains had enacted their invasion plot, they still would have failed in the end.

But even if Madison had gotten everything he wanted from SecPol, I now think he would have lost anyway. Most Confederates would have taken to the hills, fought for centuries if necessary, rather than surrender to tyranny. And nobody in this crazy quilt of a country has the authority to surrender. Nobody. Eventually that would have driven Madison or his successors nuts. As it is, the few hypothetical surviving Federalists have other problems: their leaders are dead. People like Federalists need leaders. Confederates don’t. That’s why they’ll always win.

Well, if it makes you feel better to tell yourself that. Personally, it strikes me as a hollow consolation to say, “We wouldn’t really have lost the war. We just would have had all our major cities nuked, most of our territory conquered, and the ragged, irradiated bands of survivors would have fled into the wilderness to scratch out a meager existence while waging a centuries-long guerrilla struggle against their tyrannical oppressors!”

In another wrap-up paragraph, Win sorrowfully relates that Ed Bear, who he’s come to think of as a brother, is leaving Earth for good.

Win says it only belatedly occurred to him to wonder why Lucy, even at 136 years old, “was the only gray-haired little old lady” he’s met in this world. It turns out that she used to be an asteroid engineer, “jockeying rocks like Ceres and the Martian moons into locations and shapes that people prefer”—until an accident in space caused her to be blasted with a near-fatal dose of radiation.

Advanced medical technology saved her life, but she had to postpone anti-aging treatment for several years. In that time, she moved to Earth, met Ed, and fell in love. Once she’s young again, she and Ed are going back to the stars together: “toward a million ice-cold rocks just waiting to be turned into gold mines”.

And I’ll miss Lucy, for all her ridiculous advice and uncalled-for opinions. Just this afternoon, she was at it again.

“But Lucy,” I said, exasperated as usual, “you can’t call Americans warlike, exactly. We went to all kinds of trouble to avoid war. More, sometimes, than we should have.”

“And still managed ten or eleven real good ones!” she snorted. “That, plus all your rules and regulations, put you a hundred years behind us and at about three percent of our standard of living.” She rolled a cigar in her fingers, listening to the tobacco. “Anyway, I never said your people are warlike, Winnie. People don’t cause wars, governments do. Eliminate governments—hell, just eliminate conscription and taxation—and you eliminate war. Simple as that!”

“Bullshit!… You anarchists managed plenty of wars on your own. Look at the War in Europe, or the one with the Czar.”

“Whoa there, boy! The last war we fought as a nation was in Mexico, and we were still the old United States, then. The Confederacy ain’t a nation, and it doesn’t fight wars.”

“Oh? Well, who does, then?”

“Governments, son, like I said. ‘Twas a Prussian government decided to gobble up Europe. Same with the Czar in Antarctica. Every fight we’ve stumbled into has been that way, from the Revolution to this silly thing with the Hamiltonians: individuals tryin’ to stop what some damn fool government started.”

This sounds like a noble aspiration—peace on earth, no more war, no more killing—except that Smith’s own plot shows it’s false.

As you may remember, the North American Confederacy did get involved in this world’s version of World War 1. They assembled a force called the “Thousand Airship Flight” to invade Europe, defeating the Prussian army using advanced weapons such as “Goddard rockets”.

Later on, the NAC also engaged in a war with the Russian Czar, first fighting his forces in Antarctica, then winning a naval battle at the Bering Strait. Even at the Continental Congress, we heard from a faction called the “Neoimperialists“, who want the NAC to mobilize to destroy any governments left in the world.

Heavily-armed volunteer legions? Air forces firing missiles? Naval fleets defending the seas? First strikes to overthrow unfriendly states? All that sure sounds like war to me. But Lucy denies it, based on a semantic sleight of hand: only governments fight wars, so if you abolish government, you get rid of war. Even if it looks like war and sounds like war, it’s not, because her definition says so!

That may satisfy a staunch anarcho-capitalist, but it’s not likely to convince anyone who doesn’t already share the author’s premises. Even Win (for once) points out the fallacy of it.

Smith, through Lucy, insists that only governments have a reason to fight wars. This ignores the many instances through history where private entities unleashed organized violence: whether it’s imperialist trading companies who colonized other lands in the name of profit, or drug cartels who fight street battles over turf, or religious crusaders who set off to conquer the infidels in the name of faith, or capitalist business owners who hire armed thugs to kill striking workers.

Did any of these human-rights outrages happen in the NAC’s alternate history? How could they not, if there’s no government and no law to prevent them? What would stop a robber baron from hiring mercenaries to just take some land he wanted for himself? Or out-of-work mercenary firms from looting a city or turning to piracy?

It’s true that governments often go to war for bad reasons (as we’ve repeatedly seen under Republican presidents), and we should deplore that. But you can’t just stop there and conclude that governments increase the net amount of violence in the world. You also have to ask what conflicts didn’t happen because states compelled aggrieved parties to come to the bargaining table, whereas a power vacuum might have led to an armed conflict. (A list of U.N. peacekeeping missions might be a good place to start looking.)

Smith doesn’t want to engage in this kind of nuanced analysis. His ideology is strictly one-dimensional: Whatever the other side does is war, and therefore bad; whatever we do is not war, and therefore good. Ironically, this kind of uncritical black-and-white thinking has led to more wars than anything else.

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New on OnlySky: Christians are AI-pilled

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about a surprising new finding: practicing Christians are more likely to use and trust AI than the general public or the nonreligious demographic – and that includes questions about faith and theology. Several different studies independently confirm this stranger-than-fiction result.

Why are some believers consulting chatbots in preference to asking their own clergy members or reading the Bible? My hypothesis is that AI is a natural fit for them. It fills the same niche in their lives as their belief in God: to people who’ve been taught not to think for themselves and to rely on outside guidance for every major decision, AI gives them that, without the inconvenience and friction of attending church. It’s always there, always listens, takes their most trivial concerns seriously, heaps praise upon them and tells them they’re right no matter what. It’s a true deus ex machina that does everything they’ve ever really wanted from God.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

Naively, you might have expected that churchgoing Christians would be less likely to use or trust AI. After all, these believers have been taught to trust the Bible as the only source of truth and their church as its supreme interpreter. It seems like they should be suspicious of any source of information that isn’t deeply rooted in their own faith tradition, let alone a new and enigmatic intelligence concocted by Silicon Valley.

But this expectation is wrong. In fact, practicing Christians are more likely to consult AI—for religious and nonreligious questions alike.

The million-dollar question is, why have so many believers embraced this technology?

The statistical relationship between frequency of church attendance and trust in AI should be a clue. The more fervently a person believes, the more likely they are to embrace AI—because AI serves the same purpose in their lives as their religion does. To be perhaps too blunt, it alleviates the need to think for yourself.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: A day late and a dollar short

An antique analog clock face

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

In the final chapter of TPB, L. Neil Smith tries to wrap up some loose ends. He seems to recognize, belatedly, that it made his alleged utopia look bad for them to be utterly helpless in the face of an invasion. In an attempt to make up for this, Win narrates that the Continental Congress reconvened after he departed and swung into action after all:

I don’t know why I expected that stubborn congregation to sit on their hands with the world collapsing around their ears. Too used to the U.S. Congress, I guess.

But… they did!

That’s indisputable. The Continental Congress had the threat explained to them in detail. They heard firsthand testimony and video evidence. The villain confessed his entire plan. And in the face of all that proof, they voted to adjourn without taking any action, because doing anything to thwart the bad guys would have violated their rights.

This is a retcon on Smith’s part. In the earlier chapters, he made a big deal about how difficult it was to get Congress to assemble in the first place, because it requires the active participation of at least 90% of the population of North America, and because it meets in an unappealing remote area as an intentional obstacle. It normally meets only once every few decades, if that, and this one took weeks of work by the protagonists to persuade enough influential people to make it happen.

Once they voted to adjourn, that should have been it. Most people would have lost interest and gone home. The idea that Congress could easily be called back into session very shortly afterward flies in the face of what the author tells us about how this society works.

The explosions in Saint Charles and Auraria didn’t really change anything—maybe relaxed the timetable a little—because the Confederacy has decided to strike back. Not against the Hamiltonians, who were never regarded as a significant threat, but against SecPol and the culture that allows such an abomination to exist. And not with Confederate A-bombs or troops, but in the same way that Sequoyah won the Mexican War: with ideas.

There’s a lot of fundraising and enlistment going on in the Confederacy now. We’re preparing to change a world, an entire universe, and drag the United States of America, kicking and screaming, through two centuries of peace and freedom it managed to miss by letting Alexander Hamilton screw things up back in 1789.

Win narrates that the Propertarian Party in his world, as well as a few other politically amenable organizations, are about to receive funding and support from the North American Confederacy. It’s at this point that we find out that this whole story is a manuscript he wrote that’s being sent to them:

You can’t draft anybody or raise war taxes here, but you can ask folks to chip in, and try to explain why it’s important. And you can try to explain to the Propertarian Party why the first copy of this manuscript and an initial seventy-five pounds of 999 fine have suddenly materialized in the middle of their conference table.

This sounds like an anarchist-friendly plan: voluntary and peaceful, changing people’s minds with words and ideas rather than with force. Too bad that under the circumstances, it would have been much too little, too late.

As TPB spent most of its length reminding us, the Hamiltonians from this world and SecPol from Win’s world were prepared to conquer the North American Confederacy with overwhelming force. They were going to drop nuclear bombs to destroy any potential centers of resistance, then march armies through the Probability Broach portal to subjugate the survivors. And they would have succeeded, if not for a last-minute technological deus ex machina combined with Win’s completely accidental meddling.

This isn’t the kind of threat that can be countered with political tracts about the virtues of anarcho-capitalism. The NAC’s peaceful evangelism would have been utterly futile in the face of an organized enemy willing to use violence and terror to get their way.

The “persuade everyone to be an anarchist” plan would only have a chance of succeeding in a tolerant society with free speech—but Smith has insisted all along that Win doesn’t live in that kind of world. He lives in a dystopia where government black helicopters blast unauthorized radio stations, and jackbooted secret police haul people off to reeducation camps or even murder them outright to suppress the slightest whisper of dissent.

Ironically, if you think armed resistance against such an oppressive regime would be a better plan, then it would appear the nonhuman sapients of the NAC are smarter than the humans:

The simians are preparing a small army of volunteers to travel across the Broach. They have a tough job ahead of them, taking their borrowed culture to relatives who have, as yet, no culture at all. I’d love to see the first CIA reports of well-dressed, heavily armed “infrahumans” roaming the African countryside.

Ooloorie haughtily assures me that her own people will have no such difficulties. Cetacean civilization, she claims, was already ancient when H. sapiens was discovering the useful properties of obsidian. I’ve spent a lot of Telecom time with her while I’m recovering, listening to fascinating stories: how porpoises first discovered the forgotten world above the sea; how they decided to observe and protect man until he was fit company for civilized beings; how the finny folk met in a roving, decades-long convention, deciding at last to let the Confederacy join them.

So watch out, tuna fishermen! As I’ve had reason to learn, lasers are nasty weapons.

Smith continues his bizarre insistence that apes and cetaceans didn’t need to be uplifted to intelligence, but that they were intelligent all along—in Win’s world (the “real world”) as well as in the North American Confederacy.

If cetacean civilization is as ancient and as advanced as Smith says, it makes no sense that Win’s world wouldn’t have found out about it. How could it be possible that we’ve been hunting whales or drowning dolphins in fishing nets without suffering retributive attacks from cetacean armies with frickin’ laser beams?

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