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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The Probability Broach, chapter 18

Win and Lucy are twiddling their thumbs in the meeting chamber, waiting for the Continental Congress to formally convene. Win is upset about how flippant everyone seems to be acting, given the scale of the crisis:

“But it should be taken seriously,” I finally protested. “It’s only the seventh Continental Congress in—”

“Even so, I’ll bet more folks’re watching that Mike Morrison western on channel 962 tonight. Everybody’s got a right to ignore the state and be safe doin’ it. Makes up for fanatics, like me.”

This is a clear demonstration of why anarcho-capitalism is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too fantasy. Smith believes everyone should have a right to ignore the state, and be safe doing so.

Obviously, this is impossible. It’s pure wishful thinking. The reason we have a state is that there are collective-action problems that affect everyone and that can’t just be ignored or wished away. Someone has to organize an evacuation if there’s a flood or a wildfire; to set up quarantine and contact tracing in case of a plague. This whole book is another example: the prospect of an invasion by a Hamiltonian army with nuclear weapons.

You can’t make a problem like that go away by ignoring it. But if you do choose to ignore it, you can’t insist that you have a “right” to be safe from it regardless. Dangers don’t disappear just because you stick your head in the sand so you can’t see them.

As more time drags on, Win gets impatient. He fears for the lives of his friends who’ve been kidnapped by the Hamiltonians, and it’s exasperating that the Continental Congress seems to be in no hurry:

New names blinked onto the screen, the room gradually filled. Important-looking people stopped by to greet Lucy like a long-lost friend. Apparently I’d underestimated this batty little old lady. We ordered a meal. More nothing happened. Finally: “When does this show get on the road anyway?”

… “Ain’t no certified regulation starting time. How could there be?”

“God damn it, Lucy! Clarissa and Ed are prisoners! Maybe dead already.” I cringed inwardly at the words. “And we’re sitting here on our—”

“I know. But whatever happens—even to them—is gonna happen right here, and not until at least nine-tenths of North America’s represented.”

As Lucy explains, the Continental Congress can’t begin until 90% of North America is represented, either as in-person attendees or virtually by proxy votes. Win checks the big board:

I looked: 0.83901256. “Eighty-three percent?”

“Closer t’eighty-four, and no Congress till it hits ninety.”

I brought this up last week, but I’ll reiterate it here: It’s glaringly obvious that this can’t possibly work in Smith’s anarchist politics.

The only way to know if 90% of people are represented is if there’s an authoritative record of how many people live in the North American Confederacy. But Smith has consistently said that no such thing exists. In fact, people there are so fanatical about privacy that they’d shoot a census-taker on sight.

This is a problem that’s dogged the entire book, like with Smith’s discussion of traffic fatalities, or his belief that large, heavily armed corporations would voluntarily obey an unfavorable ruling from a private arbitrator. It’s cargo cult anarcho-capitalism: he assumes that the state can vanish, but all the state functions that he takes for granted would persist as before.

(Also, who decided 90% was the threshold? Everyone treats that number as suspiciously official. Why not 95%, or 85%?)

Win frets that this could take weeks, but Lucy says to give her some credit. She and Jenny Smythe, president of the NAC, have been working behind the scenes for weeks to wrangle enough delegates to get this show on the road. Sure enough, just as she says it, the number hits 0.9:

Jenny entered without fanfare, punching in at her terminal.

Her image appeared overhead as she said softly, “The Seventh Continental Congress of the North American Confederacy is now in session. Mr. Parliamentarian, may I have the protocols?”

Win is eager to speak, but unfortunately, he and his friends aren’t the only ones who have agendas to bring before the Congress. There are other people who get time, too, as Lucy explains:

“I thought we called this Congress to warn—”

“That’s where you’re wrong. This is just us good ol’ folks, whose number ‘happens’ to be ninety percent, remember?

…everyone’s entitled to speak, and in practice, they reserve space on Jenny’s agenda, in case we ever have a Congress. Some been waiting for decades, carried over from her predecessors’ lists. Offering ’em this rare shot helped us put it together. Lucky there ain’t ten times as many.”

Win grouses, but sits impatiently as other delegates take their turn at the podium. One group (the “Franklinites”) wants Congress to agree to meet every year – a notion that’s roundly booed and quickly voted down. The next to speak is a woman who identifies as the leader of the Dissolutionist faction:

“Madame President,” said a pretty, honey-haired girl with a wry smile, “I move that Congress adjourn—”

Catcalls and curses filled the room.

Shouting over the tumult, Jenny exclaimed, “I’ll remind the delegates that a motion to adjourn is always in order! Second?”

“Madame President! May I be allowed to finish my motion?” She was still on her feet, others around her standing in their chairs. The noise died down—what can you add to a motion to adjourn? “Madame President, delegates assembled, I move that this body adjourn—permanently!”

These people are the anarchists’ anarchists. They believe there should be no legislature at all, even this vestigial one, and they’re proposing that it be dissolved permanently. They either don’t know—or, more likely, don’t care—about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It’s head-in-the-sand politics at its finest.

What should be shocking is that Lucy votes for them, despite knowing the stakes:

Lucy had leaped up, shouting, “Second, Second!” Now she came back to herself, grinned sheepishly, and sat down. “Always did have a radical streak, I guess.” She relit her cigar. The Dissolutionists lost, three to one, but for some reason they cheered again, and Lucy beamed.

She treats this as a noble effort that deserves support, even though she was one of the people who worked to get this Congress together – and knowing that if the Dissolutionists succeed in abolishing it before it can do anything, her kidnapped friends will be killed and her world will be annihilated by nuclear bombs. Yet again, Smith’s characters put ideology over common sense.

One more group, the “Neoimperialists”, want the NAC to go to war with any remnants of government left anywhere in the world:

“Nothin’ new,” Lucy explained. “The Neos, mostly war vets, start with a good enough idea. Government’s morally repugnant to any decent person. But how’d they avoid killing a lot of the very folks they’re liberating? Just won’t wash.”

A very common tactic on the right wing – from evangelical Christians to right-wing libertarians – is that they refuse to admit the existence of moral philosophies other than their own. They treat good-faith disagreement about what’s right and wrong as equivalent to vicious indifference to right and wrong.

This passage is an example of that. Lucy says that government is repugnant to “any decent person”. Because the author holds that view, he writes as if it’s the only possible view. Although he wants this book to be a work of persuasion, he’s not trying very hard to appeal to anyone who doesn’t already agree with him.

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The Probability Broach, chapter 18

The Seventh Continental Congress of the North American Confederacy is about to get underway. Win and Lucy file into the delegates’ chamber, which is half legislative chamber and half stadium, complete with vendors hawking overpriced snack food:

I don’t know what I’d been expecting—the U.N. General Assembly or Flash Gordon’s Bathroom—it was a barn: weathered pine, rough beams, dominated by a huge Telecom screen up front. Somewhere a vendor was crying “Peanuts! Piñons! Fried Grasshoppers!” My belly rumbled and I tasted greasy hamburger. Two walls were stepped into tiers of upholstered benches. Thousands of desks cluttered the football field-sized floor.

“Thousands” of desks in a space the size of a football field? I think L. Neil Smith needs to check his math.

An American football field is 360 feet long by 160 feet wide, or 57,600 square feet. Assuming the delegates’ desks are the size of a standard office cubicle, they’d be 6×6, or 36 square feet. That works out to 1600 desks at most, and that’s making the unrealistic assumption of zero space for aisles.

It turns out Lucy has connections, as much as anyone can have in this anarcho-capitalist society. She’s there in an official capacity as a delegate, so they’re not stuck in the nosebleed seats. They have a reserved desk out on the floor, where the action is.

Her name appeared at the front of the room, among a few others already present, followed by a number: 6076. “My constituency, such as it is, six-thousand-odd people—odd enough t’let me stand for ’em at this quiltin’ bee, anyway. Sure y’won’t have a grasshopper?”

“Ulp!” I shook my head, taking the extra seat. “Lucy, you continue to amaze me. You represent some district in Laporte?”

“No district to it, son. We’re all ‘at large’ here. Though there’s some as shouldn’t be. Anybody can represent anybody else or nobody but themselves. Not even themselves, if they just wanna sit in the gallery and be entertained.”

As Lucy explains to Win, everyone in the NAC is free to attend the Continental Congress, either to participate as a delegate or just to watch. All the proceedings are live-streamed, but only people who are physically present can vote. That’s on purpose, because, as Lucy puts it, “This place is supposed to be inconvenient!”

If you don’t want to attend in person but you do want your voice to be heard, you can assign your vote to someone who is there, and they can cast it on your behalf. There’s no limit to how many proxy votes a single person can have, so any delegate might be only representing themselves, or they might represent a small handful of others, or they might represent thousands or millions. Lucy’s constituents are mostly old friends and fellow veterans whom she fought alongside in the Prussian war.

“Most folks just show up representing friends, neighbors, people in the same trade. Maybe half a dozen are professionals, with a million proxies each.”

“That many?”

“Don’t get sarcastical! Votes don’t amount to much, anyway. It’s what gets said here. Though nothing guarantees anyone’ll listen.” The screen changed again, more delegates arriving, vote-strengths shifting as viewers all over the continent punched in proxies and cancellations. Totals were revised moment by moment; many a politico with thousands of supporters might suddenly discover that, through the miracle of electronics, he was representing no one but himself.

This is the most detailed picture Smith gives of how he thinks government should work, so I want to spend this week discussing it.

Let me start with the good: On paper, I like this idea a lot. It would be tricky to get right, but it has some major advantages.

Organizing government this way would put an end to voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other anti-democratic tactics. Since anyone can show up and vote, there’s no need for expensive campaigns—a chronic flaw of our system that limits political participation to the wealthy. If your representative acts contrary to your interests, you don’t need to impeach them or hold a recall election—just switch your proxy to someone else.

It would mean real choice for voters. You wouldn’t be limited to choosing one of the handful of candidates who are willing to run in your district, nor are you stuck with the person who wins 51% of the minority who vote. No one would be shut out of representation because their preferred candidate loses. Everyone can pick the representative who best shares their views, which would mean a legislature that truly reflects the popular will.

That’s the praise. Now the criticism.

This would never work in the kind of anarchist politics L. Neil Smith favors. It should be screamingly obvious that it would fail catastrophically.

Start with the most obvious problem. Smith tells us that Lucy represents 6,076 people. How do they know that?

Remember, in the North American Confederacy, there’s no census. (In fact, Smith specifically says the people of the NAC would shoot a census taker on sight.) There’s no Social Security list or any other official database of the population. There’s no authoritative record of how many people live in this society, where they live, or what their names are.

So, how do they know that a delegate speaks for the number of people they claim to speak for?

If I show up at this meeting and say I represent a million people, how could anyone prove or disprove that? If I gave them a list of names, how would they know I’m not voting on behalf of dead people, or people who don’t live in the North American Confederacy, or outright inventing people who don’t exist? What records would they consult?

Also, even if I could somehow prove my proxies were real people, how would they verify that those people want me to represent them, and I’m not voting on their behalf without their permission? Smith says it’s all done electronically, but any computer system can be hacked.

There are problems in the other direction too. If I’m a voter who wants to influence the Congress, what stops me from assigning my proxy to multiple delegates to boost my views? Or if I have two Telecom setups at home, can I cast two votes?

You can imagine unethical interest groups setting up bot farms—thousands of servers run by software impersonating real people, automatically casting votes for whoever the person in charge wants. It happens all the time on social media, and you can be sure it would be tried here, where the stakes are higher.

Ironically, this system might work with a centralized authority that maintains a voter registration database. But in an anarchy, it never would.

Smith glosses over all these problems. It’s possible that they never occurred to him. That’s a common blind spot afflicting utopian political theorists of all stripes. They’re so sure that everyone would embrace their system and play fair, they never give any thought to dealing with people who are willing to break the rules.

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The Probability Broach, chapter 18

Win’s airship has arrived at the capitol city of the North American Confederacy:

Gallatinopolis, geographic and political center of North America, is a crusty little patch of buildings surrounded by an entire planet of wheat fields. A lone highway stretches from the south: Greenway 200, an emerald ribbon in a sea of gold departing northward until it’s covered with a springy mutated moss.

As they disembark, Win is in a gloomy mood. He and Lucy made it, but their friends Clarissa and Ed are gone, kidnapped by the bad guys en route. If they’re not already dead, they’re hostages, and Madison will be sure to use them as bargaining chips to sway the upcoming congressional meeting in his favor. (So much for “the hostage kills you“.)

This section recounts a little of the NAC’s fictional history. In its early days, as Americans expanded westward, the capitol moved with them, but not to a fixed location. It wandered all over the country for years, switching from one city to another. Often, wherever the president lived was treated as the capitol by default. Finally, it was “dumped” at a fixed location in the Dakota Territories, at the exact geographical center of the continent.

Given the huge skyscrapers and other advanced technology he’s seen in this world, Win was expecting something with more gravitas. But the NAC’s capitol looks like a primitive backwater town. It’s all rustic shacks and slapdash buildings, with few creature comforts:

I snorted. “This is progressive, modern, space-age Gallatinopolis?”

“This is miserable, backward, rustic Gallatinopolis. Ain’t it swell?”

I eventually learned not to look down at my feet: the city is preserved exactly as it was eighty-seven years ago—its chief and only industry the much-to-be-despised operation of occasional government. The place looks like a mining boom town: tarpaper shacks ready to burn given thirty seconds of warm weather and a mild breeze, streets narrow runnels of churned mud—but frozen, under two inches of transparent plastic.

Win asks Lucy why it’s in the middle of nowhere and why it looks like this:

“To make it just as inconvenient as possible to everyone! If Tucker’d had his way, the poxy thing’d be in Siberia! Government needs to be tiresome. Folks think twice before they agree to come up here. We’ve met only six times since the capital was moved. That’s six times too many, but anarchy takes practice.”

(“Tucker” is Benjamin Tucker, a socialist anarchist who served as president of the NAC in Smith’s alternate history.)

This isn’t an aside; it’s a key fact about L. Neil Smith’s political philosophy. The North American Confederacy is an anarchist society with only a vestigial government. It has a legislature, but it can’t make laws as we understand them, only recommendations with no coercive power. And even at that, Smith situates the capitol out in the boonies, far from all major population centers, so that it’s as inconvenient as possible for Congress to get together and meet.

This makes it difficult for the government to get tyrannical ideas and start oppressing people, which is presumably the point. However, it also means that in a crisis, there’s a built-in disincentive to action. If the NAC is facing a threat, it’s essentially impossible for it to respond in an organized way. As we’ll see, that’s exactly how things play out.

This doesn’t cross Smith’s mind, because it’s central to his ideology that there are evils that arise from too much government, but no evils that arise from too little. He says so in the fictional quote that opens this chapter:

I am less concerned with good and evil than with freedom and non-freedom. Good and evil may both exist within a free society, But given sufficient time, all that remains under tyranny is evil.

We seek only a consistent application of the principle of liberty, without exception, without excuse, without compromise. We do not promise infallibility, but are determined, against the trend of six thousand years of human history, to make our errors on the side of individual rights.

—Albert Gallatin
Rule of Reason

That sounds very noble and principled. But it runs smack into collective-action problems: situations in which, when each individual makes the self-interested choice, it produces bad consequences for everyone.

There are many examples of this, which I’ve been discussing as we go through the book. I previously wrote about quarantine to fight pandemics; about air and water pollution; about the Dust Bowl, which arose from destructive overfarming; and about irrigating the desert and how to settle the question of water rights.

Most of all, there’s the question of emergencies. If a natural disaster was bearing down on the NAC, or a hostile foreign power was massing its forces to invade, what would they do? How could they muster the organization to respond to a danger that threatened every citizen, when they’ve intentionally made it as difficult as possible to do so?

We never see any large-scale emergencies of that kind in this book. Smith stacks the deck in his favor, writing the plot so that his fictional society never faces a disaster beyond its ability to overcome.

But the real world isn’t so obliging. Nuclear reactors melt down and spread contamination; hurricanes and tsunamis flood coastal settlements; earthquakes shake the ground; volcanoes erupt and wildfires burn; and even the most peaceful country sometimes gets bombed or invaded by a larger, imperialist power through no fault of its own. At times like these, people – including libertarians – quickly rediscover the advantages of having a competent, efficient government to muster defenses, coordinate emergency responders, set up shelters, distribute aid, and take charge of evacuation.

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