The Probability Broach: Cracks in utopia

The "all seeing eye on the pyramid" from US dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

By threatening a captive prisoner, Win Bear was able to extract two useful pieces of information: one, that someone named “Madison” sent the goon squad after him, and two, that this Madison has or wants to acquire nuclear weapons (“He’ll blast you all to radioactive slag!”).

That second part is more disturbing to Win than to his new friends. Although the North American Confederacy has more advanced technology than the world he came from, Win knows what a nuclear bomb is, while his friends seem unfamiliar with the concept. They give him blank looks when he asks them about it.

But even though it got them the information they wanted, torturing a prisoner is against the rules of this society. Anyone who commits a crime and can’t make restitution is supposed to be ostracized by all, thrown out into the street and left to starve. That’s the way Smith tells us it works here.

However, even though Win flagrantly violated a prisoner’s rights in front of them, his friends never even consider doing that to him. We saw last time that they’re a little angry, but their anger only lasts a few paragraphs and then it’s never brought up again. Despite Smith’s insistence that his anarchy works because everyone follows the unwritten social contract, he unintentionally depicts the more realistic outcome: people overlooking the rules to help out their friends.

That said, when Win asks, “I’ve gone and spoiled it, haven’t I?”, they confirm the prisoner can file a legal case:

“‘Fraid so, buster,” Lucy absently swirled her ice, “He’ll likely sue our pants off and you don’t have that much to spare.”

… “He can’t get blood out of a turnip. Does that mean Devil’s Island?”

“Asteroids. No, Winnie, it just means we can’t sue him: our claims’ll cancel out.”

Once again, no one proposes the obvious solution, which is to kill the prisoner before he can complain to anyone about his treatment. In a world with no laws, where murder is perfectly allowable as long as you say it was self-defense, that’s the rational course of action.

Luckily for Win, this never becomes an issue. When the Civil Liberties Association arrives, the prisoner denies being tortured. No reason for this is given. You’d think the bad guys, who want to subvert this society, would be eager to wield its rules against their enemies. Even if they failed to kill Win, why not try to tie him up in court?

By the time I got to bed, the authorities had carted off the bodies, living and otherwise, along with depositions in living color and stereophonic sound, from every witness and participant—a lengthy process, but not without its rewards.

I wasn’t going to the asteroids, after all. Our damaged guest denied being intimidated—was downright vehement about it. I wasn’t looking any gift horses in the mouth, but everybody else was curious as the CLA shook him down.

“What’s this?” The representative removed a medallion from the prisoner’s neck.

… “Private property!” he snarled. “Give it back!”

The medal is bronze, engraved with “1789” and the “eye-in-the-pyramid” logo—better known as the Eye of Providence—which Win recognizes because it’s on the money where he comes from.

(Evil Overlord tip: Don’t make your henchmen wear identifying regalia when they go out to commit assassinations!)

Lucy, who until this point hasn’t been described as anything other than Ed Bear’s elderly neighbor, declares that she recognizes the symbol:

“I’ve seen this type before”—Lucy chuckled grimly—”back in the War in Europe. Coulda collected a mess of those medals if I’d been the souvenir type.”

Ed looked exasperated. “There you go again, Lucy, that was seventy years ago, and the Confederacy was neutral. The only Americans over there were volunteers in—”

“The Thousand Airship Flight! Bloody Huns shot us to pieces, but I got my passengers down okay, and joined the fighting.”

Lucy explains that they were fighting the Prussians, who had launched an imperial war of conquest against the rest of Europe. It’s this timeline’s version of World War I.

The North American Confederacy, being an anarchy without a standing army, officially stayed neutral. But thousands of its citizens volunteered to go and join the resistance, and Lucy was one of them. (As we’ll see, the NAC has life-extending technology, which is how she’s still alive to recall it seventy years later.)

The symbol dates back to the war, but doesn’t come from the Prussians, she says. Rather, it’s from the conspirators who were giving them their marching orders:

Ed goggled. “You mean it’s really—”

“That’s right, Eddie, it’s them. And Win, I do know what an atom bomb is. I helped move Phobos into synchronous orbit over Coprates.” She jerked an unkind thumb toward the prisoner. “If these crablice’re plannin’ t’use thermonuclear earth-movers as weapons…”

“Who the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “Who’s them?”

“The Hamiltonians,” Ed answered quietly. “They’re the ones trying to kill you, Win.”

If you hadn’t guessed, the “Hamiltonians” are a secret cabal plotting to impose that ultimate evil: government. Smith chooses this appellation for his villains because he hates Alexander Hamilton the most of all America’s founders.

This is the first indication that that anyone is plotting to overthrow this society. Smith is eager to convince us that his version of anarchism works; that the North American Confederacy is a super-advanced, prosperous, peaceful utopia. But, clearly, it still has people who are so disgruntled that they want to tear it down.

This could be the launching point for an interesting philosophical discussion. If the NAC is as good as its author says it is, what motivates people to be Hamiltonians?

In fact, they’re so attracted to this ideology that they’re willing to kill or die for its sake—as opposed to, say, writing angry letters to the editor. That’s an extreme level of devotion that’s normally only brought out by severe oppression or desperation.

Cover of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin

What made them so fanatical? Are these the poor and homeless, people who couldn’t earn enough to survive, and joined a cult because it was better than starving? Did they suffer some appalling injustice at the hands of its for-profit legal system? Are they serfs or indentured servants who escaped brutal treatment by rich owners and want to strike back? Is there a dark underbelly to the NAC that we’re not seeing?

These are the kinds of questions any decent world-builder should ask. Obviously, some societies are better and some are worse, but no arrangement is going to please everyone. The best way to learn about a civilization, real or fictional, is to look into its cracks—to ask who it’s not serving, and why.

Alas, this potentially interesting question goes unanswered in this book. Smith never explains what motivates the Hamiltonians, nor treats them as anything other than anonymous, disposable goons. For plot purposes, there have to be bad guys even in his superior anarcho-capitalist world, but he doesn’t want to delve into their reasoning. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t give them believable motivations without risking his utopia seeming not so utopian.

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New on OnlySky: The fossil fuel era is ending in flames

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the fossil fuel era will end – not with a whimper, but with a bang of exploding refineries.

Despite sanctions, price caps and other attempts to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the Western world can’t kick the habit of buying its oil. The dollars and euros are the lifeblood of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war machine. Now Ukraine is changing the calculus, with fleets of domestic drones and cruise missiles destroying Russian refineries, pipelines and other fossil-fuel infrastructure. And Russia’s military seems helpless to do anything about it.

This is something every politician should be thinking about. Even if you think climate change is a liberal hoax (or are paid by lobbyists to say that you do), there’s also a national security argument for renewables. The Ukraine war has proven that oil and gas infrastructure can’t be protected, especially with drones becoming cheaper and more capable all the time. But a society with solar panels on every roof has no such vulnerable points. What will it take for the world to learn that lesson?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

For years, Russia served as Europe’s gas station. Despite having few other industries of note, Russia has abundant oil and gas reserves, which it was happy to sell to European nations to cement their economic links.

However, Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine showed Europeans the folly of depending on a belligerent, warmongering dictator for their energy needs. Like any drug dealer, Putin wanted his customers hooked so he’d have leverage over them. At the start of the war, Russia engaged in brazen energy blackmail, threatening to cut off the fuel supply unless the E.U. looked the other way.

But to the Europeans’ credit, they didn’t knuckle under. They slapped Russia with sanctions, sought out alternative sources of fuel, and redoubled their efforts to shift to renewable energy. Putin’s attempt at blackmail fizzled: in the first month of 2025, Russia’s last gas pipeline to Europe was shut off for good.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Might makes right

A fallen pink peg surrounded by a ring of blue pegs

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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The Probability Broach: Justice for sale

An 1881 political cartoon showing the Hawaiian Islands being auctioned off

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

Win Bear and his friends fought off a home invasion and captured one of the thugs. Win wants to threaten the captive into talking, but his friends Ed and Lucy say things are done differently here.

They’ve already contacted the Civil Liberties Association, or CLA, which is the closest thing to the authorities in this society. Ed says the CLA will investigate, collect evidence and testimony, and pay for a defense if an accused person has no money:

“Then we’ll get together and hire a judge acceptable to all sides. Any appeal will go to a second judge—”

“Paid for by the first!”

“Yes, Lucy, paid for by the first. And if that decision doesn’t stick, a third judge may be called. His vote is final. Any two judges finish the matter. The whole process could take as long as a week.”

You’re supposed to focus on “as long as a week”—which is meant to sound great, although it’s an unrealistically speedy time for any justice system to operate.

But there’s another part of this that deserves more scrutiny.

One of the biggest problems I see with anarchism—including L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist variety, but other types as well—is that the justice system can’t be voluntary. Otherwise, stubborn wrongdoers will ignore attempts by others to correct their behavior.

This passage illustrates the problem. Smith tries to slip it in without you noticing: if there’s a dispute in his North American Confederacy, you have to hire a judge who’s “acceptable to all sides” to settle it. Well, what if I declare that no judge is acceptable to me? Can I hold off the legal process forever by refusing to participate?

If I’m beating my kids, or catcalling women in the street, or having noisy late-night parties that keep my neighbors up, or driving drunk, and someone files a complaint—what stops me from just ignoring them, refusing every attempt at resolution, and continuing on my merry way?

In our society, if you keep dodging subpoenas and skipping court dates, the court will eventually issue a default judgment against you that the police can enforce. If your behavior rises to the standard of serious criminality, you’ll be arrested whether you consent to it or not (as sovereign citizens have found out, to their dismay).

But an anarchist society lacks those options. The overarching idea of anarchism is that there should be no coercive power relations or hierarchies. That sounds good in theory, but only until some antisocial asshole is making your life miserable and there’s no way to make them stop.

There’s another problem here, and this one is specific to Smith’s brand of anarcho-capitalism. Let’s say we have a dispute, and we choose a judge following the procedure Smith suggests. Then I turn to the judge and say: “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars to rule for me.”

Why wouldn’t people do that? There’s no law against it, after all!

Obviously, the other side will offer a competing bribe, and things will escalate. This means the NAC’s legal system isn’t a trial. It’s an auction, where a favorable verdict can be purchased by whoever can pay the most. It’s yet another reason why the rich would be untouchable, while the poor would be completely shut out of obtaining justice.

Ed spelled out the rest of the procedure… People who hurt others are expected to pay for it, literally. There are no “victimless crimes:” shoot heroin, snort a little coke, ride your bike without a helmet, do anything—to yourself.

The “law” only compels you to restore your victims to the state they’d be in had the crime never occurred. Fail in that, and your name and face get plastered all over, a formidable threat in a society geared to something like the Telecom. Who’ll do business with somebody who refuses his moral debts? No place to purchase food, clothing, shelter, ammunition—any of the necessities of life.

And one certain way to get ostracized is to commit an irrevocable crime, like murder, for which restitution cannot be made.

Please don’t overlook the mention of ammunition as one of the “necessities of life”.

This is Smith’s answer for how an anarchist society could have enforceable justice in the absence of punishments like prisons or chain gangs. You have to compensate your victim for the harm you did, or else be ostracized and risk starvation.

He asks, rhetorically, “Who’ll do business with somebody who refuses his moral debts?”—so let’s go over the answers to that question.

1. Someone who hasn’t heard of you: This is the first and biggest one. According to Smith, the North American Confederacy encompasses the entire continent of North America (hence the name). Together with other anarchist societies in this world, there are over seven billion inhabitants.

For this to work, every business owner would have to recognize, on sight, every single wrongdoer in the world. Otherwise, criminals could just change their name, maybe dye their hair, and move to the next town over. Remember, there are no public records or official documents you can check to ID someone—they’ve never even heard of fingerprints!

Even if a minuscule percentage of the population commits crimes, that’s still tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Does he really think store clerks are going to pore over comically long lists of mugshots to figure out who not to do business with?

2. Someone who doesn’t care: Smith takes it for granted that everyone in the NAC will stand on principle and refuse to do business with a criminal who won’t make restitution.

This is, obviously, absurd. In an uber-capitalist economy, there are bound to be business owners who take the attitude that money is money and they don’t care where it comes from. That shouldn’t just be a common attitude; it should be the majority opinion.

How many businesses in our world would turn down the chance to profit, just to signal their disapproval of a customer’s behavior in an unrelated matter? Is this even a little plausible in a society based entirely on self-interest?

3. Someone who approves of your crime: Here’s another obvious problem: what if outcasts band together and support each other?

What if there are racists who approve of hate crimes against minorities? Religious cults and fundamentalists who scorn outsiders and support each other no matter what? Aggrieved people who suffered unfair rulings, and help others who they believe are in the same situation? What if you’re a beloved celebrity and your fans refuse to believe you’re guilty?

Unless ostracism is unanimous, it’s not effective as a punishment. That might happen in a tiny village where everyone knows everyone, but there’s no chance of it in a civilization this scale. It flies in the face of human nature.

Smith comes close to conceding this won’t work, as he says that self-exile is also an option:

Exiles can take their property and leave. Several countries still accept them, and a number of asteroid colonies. None very pleasant. The bright side is there’s no professional criminal class, no “ex-offenders.” Once you’ve made it good, you’re square. Every day is a fresh start, and that beats hell out of sitting in a concrete box, stamping out license plates.

It seems as though Smith felt compelled to add that “none very pleasant” line. Would it be a problem if exiles could go someplace that was pleasant? Would the people of the North American Confederacy see that as unacceptable?

Now that he was safely caught, our prisoner was relying on a highly-civilized system: no Confederate would harm him, but he was afraid of me. And that was intriguing.

“Screw your goddamned CLA!” I bellowed, working up a totally artificial rage, “I’m gonna get some answers the good old-fashioned way!” I waved the gun, brushing the tip of his nose. “You wanna wind up with your friends out there, face down in the driveway?” I shoved the muzzle against his left eye and clacked the hammer backward, grinning like a demon.

He screamed and struggled. The guards had to plant their feet. “Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!”

The death threats have the intended effect, and the prisoner spills his guts:

The prisoner sobbed, head forward on his chest. “It was Madison. He said it was for the Cause! Keep that savage away!” I was suddenly afraid he’d faint before he really opened up. “Madison will get you! He’ll take care of you all! He’s—he’s got something, something from the other—” He stared at me, I think in sudden comprehension. “He’ll blast you all to radioactive slag!”

So… torture is a good thing?

Smith wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, he’s anxious to prove his political ideas could work. He wants to write an anarcho-capitalist world where everyone is unimpeachably moral and respects everyone else’s rights. Even Win feels bad about threatening the thug, and his friends are mad at him for it (though of course they quickly forgive him).

On the other hand, he’s written a plot where torture is justified, arguably even essential. As we’ll see, this “Madison” name is a crucial clue. Without it, the protagonists’ investigation would have gone nowhere. The North American Confederacy would have been invaded, possibly conquered. And Win was only able to obtain it by “breaking the law”.

Which is it? Should we hold to our principles even at risk of annihilation, or do desperate times justify desperate measures?

That’s a dilemma every society faces, not something unique to this one. But it hits with special force because Smith insists there is no tradeoff—that more liberty also means more safety. Yet even in a fictional world of his own creation, he can’t make it work out that way.

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The Anglican schism culminates

Here’s an update to a story that’s been brewing for almost twenty years.

In 2006 and then in 2010, I wrote about how the Anglican church was slowly fracturing. This month, this schism became official.

Anglicanism is the world’s largest Protestant denomination and the third-largest Christian denomination. However, liberal and conservative churches within the denomination have been locked in a standoff for years over women’s equality and LGBTQ rights. Now the divorce papers have been served.

An alliance of conservative Anglican churches, mostly but not exclusively in Africa, which calls itself the Global Anglican Future Conference or GAFCON, grandiosely announced that they’ve “taken control of the Anglican Communion”.

What this announcement really signifies is that the GAFCON churches have split with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who’s the nominal head of the Anglican denomination worldwide, and the Anglican Consultative Council. The GAFCON churches will no longer listen to them, give them any money, or attend the Lambeth Conference of bishops. From now on, they consider themselves their own denomination.

In their announcement, GAFCON references the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration of conservative Anglican churches. As with all these tedious theological disputes, it proclaims with no evidence that they and they alone understand what God really wants.

And, as with all conservative religion, it denounces any and all moral progress as a sin, and insists that past error has to be propagated into the future forever. The most relevant part is article 8, which rejects all notions of LGBTQ rights and proclaims “the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family”.

But when you scratch the surface of homophobia, you always find a misogynist, patriarchal worldview. That’s the case here.

While conservative Anglican churches have been fuming for years over gay rights, the event that precipitated the breakup was the October 2025 appointment of Sarah Mulally, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. The GAFCON churches raged that this was forbidden because the Bible doesn’t allow women to hold positions of power over men:

“Christ is the head of the Church, man is the head of the family, and from creation God has never handed over the position of leadership to woman,” Nigeria’s Funkuro Godrules Victor Amgbare, Bishop of Northern Izon, told Reuters in Abuja.

How many people are going to end up on each side of this divide? GAFCON claims, with little evidence, to represent 85% of Anglicans. But these numbers seem to be inflated, and more objective research puts the number closer to half. It’s also not clear whether the self-proclaimed GAFCON leaders speak for all Anglicans in their respective countries.

Whatever the numbers, this schism sends a clear message. It’s another piece of evidence that religion is fundamentally hostile to moral progress. For a woman, being religious means, at best, constantly having to battle for your own equality against church leaders that see you as second-class citizens. This is true even in supposedly more liberal denominations.

In striking out on their own, GAFCON has only underlined this point. It seems likely that this will further accelerate the decline of religion and the spread of secularism, especially among young women – a trend that’s already in progress. The conservative churches think they can stand athwart this trend and yell stop, but all they’ll accomplish is to consign themselves even more firmly to the fading past.

The Probability Broach: Go directly to jail

A prison cell with light streaming through a barred window

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

Our heroes fought off a gang of thugs that attacked them in the night, and they’ve captured one of the assailants alive.

Win Bear is all in favor of torturing the prisoner (or at least scaring him into believing he’ll be tortured) to force him to talk. But his friends from the North American Confederacy say that’s not how it works there:

“What the hell do you mean? This guy and his friends rough you and Forsyth up, and now I can’t even bend him a little? We’d know how to take care of him back home!” I began describing the Spanish Inquisition, the Iron Maiden, certain North Korean variations. I was just warming up the hot pincers when Ed worked himself in between the prisoner and me.

“Look, Win, we’ll do this my way. I’ve just called Civil Liberties Association—”

“Huh?”

“What would you prefer, a lynching? He’s got rights, my friend, the same rights you’ll want, if you’re ever accused. The CLA or some other professionally neutral organization takes care of everything. They’ll call his security company, his relatives, friends—”

… “And what do they do, send him to the country club?”

Ed looked exasperated. “He’ll spend the night in custody, just as I might, under similar circumstances, wind up under Professional Protectives’ supervision. No, they won’t let him go—not the way they’re bonded!”

“Y’gotta admit, Eddie,” Lucy butted in again, “the accommodations’re pretty accommodatin’. Shucks, the guest pays for ’em—and recovers with interest if he’s proven innocent.”

On the very next page, L. Neil Smith says “there aren’t any real prisons” in the North American Confederacy. But this is obviously false, and his own writing contradicts it. There are prisons, or at least jails, in this society. It’s just that they’re run by private companies, rather than administered by the government.

There are two big problems with this, both of which L. Neil Smith is blissfully ignorant of. Let’s examine them one at a time.

The first one is that, because this is an anarcho-capitalist society, there are no police, but there are private security companies that perform the same “policing” function. According to Smith, these companies cooperate with each other. I hire my security firm to protect me from criminals, but if I’m accused of a crime, they’re also responsible for holding me in custody until I get a trial.

This would never work. Take a moment to think about the incentives.

Is my security firm going to imprison or punish me, their paying customer, merely on the say-so of a person who isn’t their customer? Obviously not.

Even if a security company was rigorously fair and treated everyone impartially, the race to the bottom of capitalist competition would guarantee that company would go out of business. Everyone would drop them and switch to a different security company that promised favorable treatment to its subscribers. (Imagine the commercials: “Bob’s Discount Security—Where your first felony is free!”)

Before long, these security companies would be little more than protection rackets, ensuring that their customers have impunity for any crimes they commit against outsiders. If you mugged or pistol-whipped someone and they made a complaint against you, your security company would check that your dues were paid up, then announce that in their professional judgment, you’re 100% innocent and are free to go about your day.

Meanwhile, if two customers of the same firm got into a dispute, it’s obvious what would happen: whoever pays more would get the verdict they wanted. It would be justice for sale to the highest bidder, which is what you should expect in a society where everything is driven by money and profit incentives.

These problems would be even more acute when it comes to the people who own these security companies, as I’ve pointed out before. Are private cops going to arrest the person who pays their salary? Of course not.

In this society, the CEOs and top investors of security firms would literally be above the law. They’d be in charge of private armies that answer only to them, like mafia dons or feudal lords in the days of old. Needless to say, TPB never depicts the extremely foreseeable abuses that would arise from this arrangement.

But let’s set this aside and say for the sake of argument that it works the way Smith insists it would. Let’s say I’m accused of a crime, I’m in arrears to my security firm, and they decide to lock me up to send a message about the consequences of not paying your bill.

The problem is that, once a suspect is in custody, the incentives flip the other way.

As Lucy said, a prisoner in this society has to pay for their own imprisonment. (What if you can’t afford it? Do you just starve to death in jail? Better hope that trial is speedy!)

But if they’re found innocent, they can get that money back. This creates yet another massive conflict of interest: once you’ve been detained, private prison companies have a strong incentive to ensure you’re found guilty—because otherwise, they have to eat the costs of your room and board.

If this is also the firm you hire to protect you on a regular basis, they’d have access to all kinds of intimate details about your life, your associations and your daily routine that they could selectively deploy. They could leak information to a judge, jury or whoever’s overseeing the trial to cast you in a bad light. (I’ll write more about Smith’s view of courts and trials next week.)

Whichever way it works, there’s no one in this legal system whose only motive is seeing that justice is done. Everyone ultimately serves the interests of their profits and their paymasters—and if those don’t align with the facts of who’s innocent and who’s guilty, too bad. That’s the only outcome we’d have any right to expect in a society where money reigns supreme and there’s no such thing as law to check its power.

L. Neil Smith insists that none of these things will ever happen, because everyone in his North American Confederacy has ironclad principles that they’ll never bend or break—even when staring into the face of someone who just tried to kill them.

But if everyone was so unimpeachably moral, it wouldn’t matter what kind of society we had. The reason we have rules is because some people, sometimes, will try to harm or exploit others for their own benefit. How does society respond when that happens? What, if anything, prevents the rich and the powerful from trampling on everyone else? An anarcho-capitalist system like this one has no answer for that.

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New on OnlySky: A cure for Huntington’s disease?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the hope of genetic therapy to cure a particularly nasty disease.

Huntington’s disease is the paradigm example of DNA as destiny. If you have the mutant gene that causes it, you’re guaranteed to develop the disease. No lifestyle change can prevent it or slow its progression, and Huntington’s is inevitably fatal. It gradually kills brain cells, causing a host of terrible symptoms, from uncontrollable jerky movements to memory lapses to mood swings, and eventually dementia and death. From the first onset of symptoms, typical life expectancy is at most twenty years.

Until recently, there was nothing whatsoever that doctors could do for sufferers. But now medical science has provided a ray of light, in the form of an audacious experimental treatment that combines genetic therapy with brain surgery. It’s the first treatment that has clinical evidence to show that it slows the progression of the disease, and more advances may be coming soon, holding out the hope of a true cure.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

Targeting most internal organs is a challenging task as it is. But the brain, which is protected by the blood-brain barrier that blocks most drugs, seems like a nigh-impossible target for genetic therapy.

However, one team of scientists has made a breakthrough. uniQure, a gene therapy company from the Netherlands, has developed an experimental therapy called AMT-130.

AMT-130 uses an adeno-associated virus or AAV, a harmless virus that’s easily engineered to deliver genetic material of our choosing. The hard part is getting it where it needs to go: the striatum, a region deep inside the brain that’s involved in motor skills and cognition, and that suffers some of the most severe damage from Huntington’s.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Crime and punishment

A gavel resting in front of a set of scales

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

When he arrived in this alternate universe, Win Bear was shot and almost died. Lucky for him, the North American Confederacy has super-advanced medical technology. The high-tech cast that’s healing his bullet wounds is supposed to come off tomorrow. He’s giddy at the prospect, feeling like a kid the night before Christmas.

His counterpart, Ed, tells Win he’s going out to check up on a client. Among Win’s belongings, he notices a pen with a “Paratronics” logo, which he recognizes as his and asks to have it back—except Win brought it from his own world. It’s the one he found in the murdered physicist Vaughn Meiss’ office.

That seems like a clue, especially since Paratronics is the corporate client Ed was going to visit. They both vow to investigate it.

That night, Win is drifting off to sleep when he’s suddenly jerked awake by an alarm. A mechanical voice blares: “INTRUDER AT FRONT GATE!”

He grabs his gun, leaps out of bed and runs outside, to find a melee at Ed’s front door:

At the gate a cluster of forms wrestled just inside the entrance… One guard lay on the ground, blood seeping ugly black onto the driveway, someone in charcoal-colored coveralls standing over him. Ed was on his back, arms outstretched and empty. A huge figure, also in gray, was pointing a weapon at his face. I lined up on the stranger’s chest and pulled the trigger, launching a blinding fireball in the semidarkness. The figure leaped and crumpled.

With Win blazing away at them, plus the rest of the private security team converging on the spot, the attackers scatter.

Ed and Captain Forsyth were both sucker-punched. They’re concussed, but alive. The man that Win shot—actually a gorilla, because that’s a thing here—is dead, and another of the attackers, this one a human, was wounded in the leg.

They carry the wounded into the house. Ed’s neighbor Lucy, awakened by the gunshots (“frustrated at missing all the excitement”) shows up in short order, and again calls for Clarissa the healer to treat their injuries.

That left our friend with the hole in his leg parked sullenly in a corner, two angry chimpanzees holding him none too gently and exchanging interesting notions about what to do with him if Forsyth got worse. That gave me an idea, so I went upstairs to put some clothes on. Draped in a bathrobe, I came back with my forty-one… The prisoner stiffened visibly when I caught his eye, kept looking over at Ed, then back at me, with an occasional wild glance at the S & W.

“Okay, asshole,” I said in my best backroom rubber-hose voice, “You gonna come clean, or do I hafta ventilate you some more?”

… “Barbarian!” he spat. “You don’t frighten me!”

“Is that so?” I shifted the muzzle to rest between his eyebrows. “I got two more slugs left. Think the boys here’d mind if I splatter your brains all over their uniforms? I’ll pay for the dry cleaning. Or would you like it somewhere neater, fellas?” I pointed the gun at his crotch.

“Get this savage away!” he screamed. “I stand on my rights!”

Yes, mock executions are a war crime. Win notes that he made sure the gun was unloaded before pulling this stunt, as if that makes it better.

We’ll get into this question more next week, but as an intro, let me point out that the idea of a person—prisoner or otherwise—having “rights” in the North American Confederacy is a contradiction in terms.

A right is a freedom or protection that the government can’t legally deprive you of. But there is no government here. There might be rights in the sense of moral principles that most people voluntarily agree to respect, but that’s not the same thing at all. You can do anything to anyone if you’re powerful enough or clever enough to get away with it. You won’t be breaking any laws, because there are no laws.

For example: L. Neil Smith is clear that in this society, killing someone in self-defense is completely fine. No one will give you any problems for it. What he seems less clear about is the obvious implication: if you kill someone, you just have to say it was self-defense.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true; it shouldn’t even matter if your story is contradicted by the evidence. There are no police who’ll investigate, after all. Your story only has to be plausible enough to pass minimal scrutiny, to convince everyone else to mind their own business.

(Wait, you say—wouldn’t friends or relatives of the deceased investigate their death, and come after you if they think you’re lying about what happened? Logically, yes. But the same thing should happen even for a justified killing, and yet Smith is adamant that there are no endless blood feuds here—despite that being a common feature of societies with weak or ineffective governments.)

There’s another unpleasant implication that Smith glides past. All of his protagonists—including Win himself, despite his fake execution ploy—have a rigid code of morality and would never actually harm a prisoner. But we can hardly assume that everyone in this society is so principled.

Basically, if someone tries to commit a crime and you capture them, you can torture them as much as you want, just as long as you kill them afterwards so they can never complain about it.

As we’ll see, Win’s friends are upset with him for threatening a captive, but really, he’s the one acting logically. That should be the way to handle this problem: break out the thumbscrews and the hot irons, make the hitman spill his guts about who sent him, then shoot him and bury his body in the wilderness.

In an anarcho-capitalist society where you’re solely responsible for protecting your own life, that’s the proper way to handle this problem. Why respect these imaginary, unenforced “rights” and let him go, when that just gives him a chance to try again?

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New on OnlySky: What would it take to raise the birth rate?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the trend of falling birth rates and what, if anything, we can do to reverse it.

The birth rate is falling across the world, in both wealthy and developing nations, in societies that seemingly have little in common culturally or politically. If this trend continues, the global population will level out within a few decades and then start to shrink. If this is a problem we need to collectively address – and not everyone agrees that it is – then the first thing we need to do is to figure out the cause.

This column proposes one possible explanation, and a solution to go with it.

Within the last two decades, for the first time ever, humanity became a majority-urban species. But cities are crowded and expensive, and tens of millions of people around the world are struggling with the burden of sky-high housing prices. Could this also be the cause of our birth woes: people forgoing having kids just because they can’t afford enough space for a family? Would building more affordable housing increase the birth rate as well?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

In spread-out rural regions, land is cheap and there are few barriers to population growth. However, in an urban setting, space comes at a premium. If your apartment doesn’t have an extra bedroom, having kids requires moving to a bigger place. That can be a costly proposition, if it’s financially feasible at all.

The repercussions of super-expensive housing don’t stop there. It also makes it harder for young adults to move out from their parents’ houses, delaying them from starting families of their own. It causes a trickle-down effect that increases the prices of everything else, including school taxes and daycare. It forces even people who have homes to devote a greater and greater share of their budgets to upkeep, leaving less for everything else.

With the deck so heavily stacked against them, it’s no surprise that some people decide kids are a luxury that’s simply too expensive to afford.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Ook ook

A close-up of a chimpanzee

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

Win Bear keeps getting attacked by unknown assailants, and he’s narrowly escaped death twice. In the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy, there are no police. If you’re in danger, you have to pay for private security to protect yourself. Win’s counterpart, Ed Bear, has done just that:

Captain Forsyth, head of the security contingent, was an old friend of Ed’s, a grizzled, wiry customer in a gray herringbone lava-lava and long black cutaway coat—right in style for Confederate rent-a-cops, and not the least bit funny once you took in the wide leather gunbelt and heavy automatic strapped around his waist.

…Oh yes. He’s also a chimpanzee.

On the day he arrived in the NAC, Win remembers seeing funny-looking strangers on the street. He thought they were mutants, but actually, they were apes. Now that he’s met Captain Forsyth, he learns how this came to pass:

I remembered the discovery in my own world that simians can’t talk only because their vocal apparatus isn’t up to it. We’d only just begun teaching them sign language. It had started here a hundred years earlier, maybe because Darwin’s opinions were more graciously received, or maybe because Confederates view innovation as a blessing instead of a threat. Or maybe because they haven’t wasted so much time and effort, so many useful lives, on war and economic disaster. Anyway, science and philosophy have never been separate departments here. Any critter who can handle more than a few hundred words is human.

We saw how, in Smith’s alternate history, racism just melted away when government was abolished. Now it appears the same is true of religious fundamentalism.

We’re never told if religion still exists in this world. Are most citizens of the NAC Christian, Muslim, or something else entirely? Are there still churches, and if so, what do they look like? Smith is uninterested in that subject; he never addresses it in any meaningful way.

But whatever their beliefs, everyone in the North American Confederacy welcomes science. There’s no ideological resistance to new discoveries. Smith says evolution was “more graciously received” than in the real world, where it faced (and still faces) stubborn opposition from religious literalists who believe their book of myths is absolute truth.

(This is a contrast to Ayn Rand, who got the heebie-jeebies about evolution. She didn’t outright deny it, but she refused to say if she thought it was true. She was an atheist, but she found it icky that humans might be related to other animals.)

I can’t deny it’s an attractive idea, but again, the causality cries out for an explanation. In the absence of government, it seems likely that religion would get stronger, since churches would claim to offer a source of stability in a world otherwise lacking it. That’s what happened in Europe during the Dark Ages.

With no public schools, religious schools would be some of the main providers of education, and they’d be free to teach children anything without oversight or standards. And while some denominations don’t deny science, many do. Why wouldn’t biblical literalism, young-earth creationism, and every other kind of pseudoscience and superstition run amok in this world?

As soon as they understood the setup, chimps, gorillas, a couple of other species waded right in and began exercising their rights.

…Lacking vocal speech, simians wear a device which translates tiny muscular movements—subliminal sign-talk—into sound. As with individual handwriting and telegraphy, each “voice” has its own personality: natural variations in bone-structure, muscular development, perhaps even character.

…Gallatin and Spooner believed it: any creature who can think is, Q.E.D., “people.” It’s calmly anticipated here that someday there’ll be computers with rights—and they’ll be welcome too.

There’s something missing from this chapter. The more sci-fi you’ve read, the more likely you are to overlook it—because it’s such a familiar and expected element, it’s easy to assume its presence and not notice that it’s never mentioned.

In many sci-fi works, advanced civilizations use genetic engineering to uplift other species to intelligence. If you read this part quickly, you might think that’s what Smith is saying, too.

But no. There’s no genetic engineering. What he’s saying is that chimps, gorillas and other apes were always intelligent, and the only reason we didn’t notice is because they lacked the capacity for spoken language.

The only thing they were waiting for was a political system to their liking. When they saw Smith’s version of anarchy and approved of it (were chimps reading the newspaper?), they came forward.

Once technology gave them the ability to speak, it immediately became obvious that they were equal in every other respect to human beings: written language, tool making and tool use, economic understanding, political participation, and scientific reasoning. As commenter andrewnotwerdna jokingly summed up Smith’s view: “Did you know that gorillas would be able to speak if it weren’t for taxes?”

(This does, ironically, echo the Indonesian mythology which claims that orangutans can speak but choose not to, fearing that humans would enslave them and put them to work if they knew.)

It’s true that great apes, our closest relatives on the tree of life, share some of our intellectual talents. They can learn language, to an extent, and use tools, to an extent. They can pass the mirror self-recognition test. They’re capable of feats of multi-step reasoning, like figuring out that they need to stack boxes on top of each other to reach a reward.

However, I mean no disrespect to our ape cousins when I say that they’re not intelligent in the same sense or to the same degree as humans.

Chimps use sticks to fish for tasty termites and rocks as hammers to crack nuts. But you’ll never see a chimpanzee constructing a fire drill or a rudimentary lathe – or even knapping stones into spearheads.

Similarly, apes can be taught some sign language (some have learned several hundred signs). However, they’ll never compose a sonnet or write an autobiography. They don’t have the capacity for complex syntax that human children learn intuitively.

Once again, I think Smith was trying to make a generous gesture toward inclusivity, but he went about it in one of the weirdest ways possible. Also, by asserting that these species were intelligent all along and didn’t need any help from us, it allows him to sidestep a different problem: Are there animal rights in the North American Confederacy?

If a creature can’t speak or advocate for itself, does it have any legal protections? Against cruel treatment, or abuse, or being hunted to extinction? Can NAC citizens bring back bear-baiting or dogfighting, or perform cruel medical experiments on them without oversight, or raise animals in cramped and filthy cages for food or furs?

Given that this is an anarchy where the only rights you have are what you can defend for yourself, the answer would seemingly have to be no. No hands means no firearms, which means no rights. That leads to some very ugly scenarios which, no surprise, go unmentioned in this book.

Image credit: Clément Bardot, via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

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