New role at OnlySky

News incoming!

I’ve been a regular columnist for OnlySky since 2022. Originally conceived as a news and opinion site for all things secular, it hit a funding snag and shut down in 2024, but later relaunched with a new focus on possible futures.

Now Dale McGowan, OnlySky’s longtime editor-in-chief, is moving on. He’s accepted a full-time position with a national nonprofit that’s working to protect the U.S. electoral system. It sounds like a rough job, now more than ever, but I’m glad someone is doing it.

With Dale’s departure, I’ve accepted a promotion. Starting this month, I’m the new editor-in-chief of OnlySky.

If you’ve been reading my blog here on FTB, nothing is going to change. I intend to keep splitting my time between the two sites as I’ve been doing. My weekly column on OnlySky is oriented specifically toward futurism and future prediction, while on Freethought Blogs, I’ll keep writing about atheism and secularism, book reviews (including my ongoing series on The Probability Broach), current events, and whatever else catches my interest.

Now that I’ve hung out my shingle, I have to post a want ad: OnlySky is seeking writers!

We’re accepting pitches on almost any topic. Politics and religion are allowed, but so are science, technology and culture – just as long as it has a connection to the future or to a possible future. We want to hear predictions, speculations, and leaps of imagination about ways the world could be different. Nonfiction is fine, but I’d be happy to publish well-written fiction as well.

The best part: OnlySky pays for original content! It’s not a lot, admittedly, but it’s more than nothing.

If you’re interested, contact me by e-mail or in the comments below and tell me what you want to write about, and we’ll discuss details.

The Probability Broach: Education isn’t efficient

Graduates in their caps and gowns

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

Lt. Win Bear has taken a road trip to speak with Vaughn Meiss’ boss, the chair of the physics department at Colorado State University. After being kept waiting for an hour and a half, he’s finally granted an audience:

I wasn’t going to like Dr. Otis Bealls or his little Errol Flynn mustache. A nicotine-stained yellow-gray, it was the only hair he had—except for a scraggly fringe around the back of his head—and appeared to be growing from his nostrils. Affecting baggy tweeds, cheap velveteen waistcoat, and rimless plastic spectacles he fiddled with continuously, he failed to convey the academic impression he aspired to. The whole ensemble reminded me of the proverbial dirty old man who “carved another notch in his gold-handled cane.”

That’s quite an accusation, considering Win told us from his own mouth that he’s inclined to agree with anything a pretty woman says. It takes one to know one, I guess?

Bealls says he’s willing to assist the police in their inquiries, but he has no idea why Win is there; he hasn’t heard about Meiss’ murder. Win begins, “I understand he worked here…”

“Officer, please! Ph.D.’s do not work here! Janitors, stenographers, other menials work here. If I may optimistically exaggerate, undergraduates work here. Professors pass the Torch of Civilization, deliberate our Vast Body of Knowledge. They Labor in the Vineyards of Science, pushing back the Barriers of the Un—”

“Dr. Bealls,” I interrupted. “One of your Laborers won’t be hanging around the Vineyards anymore. He’s lying on a sheet-steel table at the Denver City Morgue, so full of machine gun bullets, he’s gonna need a forklift for a—”

This exchange, as we’ll see, is supposed to be a clue to Bealls’ character. Just like in Ayn Rand novels, any character who talks about abstract ideals like “civilization” and “science” and “knowledge” is an evil socialist who wants to destroy everything decent. You can recognize the good guys because they only care about money.

Win asks if Meiss had any enemies. He wasn’t popular in the physics department, according to Bealls:

“Variant opinions, particularly in these times of economic reappraisal, betray a certain inhumility. Nor have we room for contumacious individualism. Socially Responsible Science cannot proceed in such a manner.”

… “What form did his particular contumaciousness take?”

“He writes letters—wild, irresponsible things, absolutist, subversive! Do you know, he claims this institution would be more efficient run for profit? As if efficiency were a valid criterion in education!”

Obviously, we’re intended to disagree with Bealls. Everything about his character is designed to bias you against him, from his arrogant manner to his pompous speech to his unattractive appearance. His scorn for efficiency is supposed to sound wildly ridiculous and to exemplify how out-of-touch he is.

However, in spite of L. Neil Smith’s best efforts, I don’t entirely disagree. It’s true: education shouldn’t be efficient.

After all, public schools are free and open to everyone, without regard to their likelihood of future success. They even offer therapy, tutoring and other expensive accommodations for students with special needs!

An “efficient” policy, by contrast, would be to only spend our resources on educating those who stand to benefit the most. You could imagine a society that administers a test to children at a young age, sends those who score best to well-funded elite schools, and consigns everyone else to menial labor and serfdom, Brave New World-style. That would be “efficient” in the sense Smith means. But civilized countries don’t do that, and for good reason.

There’s an economic argument for free education, because educated people both earn more and produce more over their lifetimes, contributing more to GDP. But there’s also a moral argument for education. It’s good for a society to have educated citizens. It benefits democracy to have citizens who know history and philosophy and science, so they can understand the issues and vote wisely. The gains from this policy are harder to measure, but they’re at least as important as strictly monetary considerations.

And, ironically, for-profit colleges aren’t the model of efficiency that Smith thinks. The private education industry is riddled with shams and scams. According to whistleblowers, they aggressively target the most vulnerable, encourage them to take out huge loans to attend, hire unqualified instructors and pocket the profits.

Over the last few years, for-profit colleges have been failing left and right, leaving students burdened with massive debt while possessing no degree and no marketable skills. The only thing they’re “efficient” at is extracting money from the gullible.

On top of his distasteful devotion to profit, Bealls says, Meiss was unpopular because he wouldn’t lower himself to the level of his colleagues:

“I mean they frequently complain he goes out of his way to make his professional undertakings vague and esoteric. They—”

“Couldn’t understand what he was doing.”

“I would find other words. He has no right to set himself above his peers.”

Bealls explains that Meiss once pursued experiments of a “sensitive nature”, but he stopped working on them two and a half years ago. He said he had an ethical objection to proceeding any further:

“So why the panic now? That’s a long time, as government secrets go.”

Bealls went into his spectacle-scrubbing bit again. “Understand, sir, he was—considering his mediocre talent—quite far ahead in the field. The price of catering to reckless independence. I’m afraid no one else has been able—and if that weren’t enough, walking around with all that information in his brain—”

I couldn’t help it. “Was he supposed to turn it in? His brain, I mean. The usual practice is to do that before you start working for the—”

This scene shows how in TPB, like in Ayn Rand novels, intelligence sorts neatly by political ideology. Everyone who agrees with the author’s views is a competent supergenius, and everyone who disagrees is a blithering fool or a brutish thug. There are no unintelligent anarcho-capitalists, and there are no brilliant socialists. (Possibly the one exception is Win himself, but he’s the Dr. Watson whose narrative role is to have other characters explain everything to him for the reader’s benefit.)

Putting all the smart, competent, attractive people on the same side is a glaring sign that the author is stacking the deck in his favor. His utopian society functions in-story not because the worldbuilding is especially well-thought-out, but because he’s brainwashed the inhabitants into artificial unanimity, so they’re all willing to play by his rules.

Of course, real life doesn’t work like this. You can’t necessarily predict someone’s IQ from their political affiliation. To the extent that there’s a correlation, it points the other way: people with more education are more likely to be liberal. L. Neil Smith would have had a heart attack if he knew that Albert Einstein wrote an essay titled “Why Socialism?”

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New on OnlySky: AI and the post-truth era

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about whether AI is making it impossible for voters to trust anything they see or hear.

Zohran Mamdani, a socialist candidate for mayor of NYC, made waves when a Republican opponent accused him of using deepfake technology in his ads to pretend he was fluent in Spanish. It sounds too ridiculous to credit, but it’s just the cresting wave of a problem that’s only going to get bigger in coming years. What happens when anyone can create a perfect audio or video clone of anyone else on demand?

It’s not only that unethical politicians will use deepfakes to frame their opponents for things they didn’t do, although that tactic has already been tried. Just as troubling is the possibility that politicians who genuinely committed misdeeds will try to evade accountability by insisting their opponents are making deepfakes of them!

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

This fits with what we know about human psychology. People with an ideological commitment excel at coming up with reasons to reject evidence that challenges their preconceptions. Young-earth creationists say that dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to test believers’ faith. Conspiracy theorists say that the omnipotent conspiracy plants false flags to lead the public astray. Even scientists, when defending a cherished hypothesis, can argue that contrary evidence is misinterpreted or won’t be replicated.

This is an extension of that trend into politics. The political arena has always been a domain of lies and exaggerations, but we may soon see untruth proliferating like never before. AI gives voters from across the political spectrum a ready-made excuse to wave away anything that casts doubt on their candidate.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Smoke gets in your eyes

An orange-tinted landscape of industrial haze

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

After disarming the bomb in his apartment, Win spends a rough night sleeping on the floor for fear of boobytraps. Before going to sleep, he found two more: another antipersonnel mine under his bed, and a wire rigged to electrocute anyone who used the shower. In the morning, before he leaves for work, he dons his bulletproof vest and takes all his guns and extra ammunition (“This wasn’t my day for regulations”).

Back at the office, since Chief MacDonald never filed any paperwork, Win is still officially assigned to the Vaughn Meiss murder. He checks out a car, saying that he’s going to interview Meiss’ mother to throw off suspicion. In reality, he’s going to Meiss’ workplace at Colorado State University.

It was good to push my Plymouth out of that eternal curtain of brown smoke. Millions of bike-induced coronaries won’t put a dent in pollution, when the State House exempts its own “Public Service” gunk factories. With a cautious eye on the rearview mirror, I settled back and let the miles peel off—ice-blue Rockies on my left, Kansas somewhere off to the right—and tried forgetting corpses, Burgess, maybe even poor old Mac awhile.

Now wait just a darn minute.

Is pollution a bad thing, in Smith’s opinion? This passage implies that it is. That’s a step forward compared to Ayn Rand, who was staunchly pro-pollution (she describes smog from coal fires as “sacred“).

But in the anarcho-capitalist utopia that Smith fantasizes about, it would obviously be impossible to have environmental protection laws. Anyone could pollute to their heart’s content: spew smoke into the sky, pour raw sewage in rivers, dump trash in the ocean, bury toxic waste where it leaches into the soil.

Obviously, for-profit businesses can and have done all these things. They’ve caused a litany of infamous disasters, from Love Canal to Cancer Alley to the Donora death fog to the Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon. But Smith is so dead-set on blaming government for every evil, he shoves that history under the rug and pretends that the state – not private actors chasing profit in an unregulated market – is solely responsible for pollution.

Coincidentally, this passage also shows why the free market can never solve this kind of problem. He hints that the state is pushing people to ride bikes, but it won’t matter as long as they keep spewing out pollution themselves.

That’s Prisoner’s Dilemma logic, and it’s the exact reason why an ancap world would suffer environmental devastation. Everyone who runs a polluting or planet-destroying business will reason, “Why should I bother cleaning up after myself? It won’t make a difference, because everyone else won’t bother!” – and because everyone thinks this way, the problem will never be solved.

The only way to stop this race to the bottom is with a government, which can pass laws that bind everyone. It’s the social coordination mechanism that overcomes the hurdle of individual Prisoner’s Dilemma selfishness. The experience of history proves it: since the Clean Air Act was passed, air pollutants like particulate matter, ozone and sulfur dioxide have declined decade by decade. Millions of people live longer, healthier lives because of this law (even if too many places, especially poor and minority communities, still bear the burden of environmental racism).

I couldn’t forget the body armor, though even with the drop in temperature outside the inversion-bowl that makes Denver the second-stupidest place in America to build a city.

You might wonder, as did I, what L. Neil Smith thinks is the stupidest place to build a city. If he ever says, I couldn’t find it.

The inversion bowl is real, however. It’s a problem that dates back to the late 1800s, as an environmental engineer explains:

“It’s worse in the winter because of something called temperature inversion,” Devore explained, when cold air gets trapped under a layer of warmer air.

“In Denver, because we’re actually in somewhat of a bowl, where we’re bounded on one side by the mountains and the Platte River Valley on the other side, which actually rises up a little bit, so we become trapped.”

Those inversions can last between a day, sometimes even a couple of weeks, she said, and when those happen, the air is stagnant.

When this happens, pollution from any source – soot from burning wood and brushfires, nitrogen and sulfur dioxide from car and truck exhaust, particulate matter from oil and gas drilling – gets trapped and lingers in the stagnant air, rather than being dispersed by wind. The result is a noxious brown cloud that makes the air unhealthy to breathe, potentially for days on end.

But again, the free market will never solve this problem, and Smith doesn’t even try to argue otherwise. The way to fix this is with collective action: vehicle-emissions standards, burn bans, and other laws that protect air quality, so pollution doesn’t build up.

I flipped over to CB for some amateur entertainment.

There was plenty: farmers swapping yarns along their lonely furrows; truckers seditiously exchanging tips. Suddenly the band exploded with obscenity: President Jackson is a ——, four or five unpopular federal agencies are ——. The diatribe began to repeat itself. I slowed, listened—yes, there it was again: a CB “bomb,” a cheap, battery-operated tape player with a seven-minute loop, and an equally expendable transmitter, buried by the roadside and simmering up through a ten-foot copper wire, waiting for FCC gunships to triangulate and blast it to pieces. Remote-control radicalism. The People’s Committee for Free Papua entertained me almost all the way to Fort Collins, then quacked suddenly and went off the air.

Illegal pirate broadcasts and FCC black helicopters! It sounds like a parody of right-wing militiaman paranoia, but this book plays it absolutely straight. (You have to wonder whether “President Jackson” is meant to be Jesse Jackson, or whether Smith was using a generic name so as not to implicate any real-world politician.)

Has the First Amendment been repealed in this world? Can people be imprisoned or worse for protesting the government? This is yet another throwaway detail that hints at a wild backstory – which, alas, we’re never going to get. By the end of this chapter, Win Bear is going to escape from this sorry world for good, with scarcely a glance backwards.

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Pope Francis dies

Pope Francis

Pope Francis died this month at the age of 88, after twelve years at the helm of the Catholic church. What should atheists think about his legacy?

Despite my scorn for Roman Catholicism’s absurd dogmas and imperial pomp, I can’t deny there were things I liked about the guy. For instance, he said some good things about climate change. I was amused when he fired an ultra-conservative bishop.

To his credit, he said that homosexuality shouldn’t be a crime, and he formally apologized for the church’s participation in cultural genocide of indigenous people. He spoke out for immigrant rights and against Israel’s war on Gaza.

All these are praiseworthy sentiments, and hopefully the next pope will continue to emphasize them. But what’s more notable are the things Francis didn’t do. Granted, the papacy is only a bully pulpit when it comes to world affairs – but even within the church, where he had power, he didn’t use it.

He didn’t lift Catholicism’s absolute ban on contraception and abortion that’s cost so many women their lives, their health and their freedom. He didn’t allow women to become priests; in fact, he agreed with it. He didn’t condemn, and even seemed to excuse, fundamentalist violence against freethinkers who satirize religion.

He did nothing meaningful about the continuing scandal of priests molesting children. In particular, he didn’t take the biggest step a pope could theoretically take: sanctioning bishops who covered it up.

Despite his occasional sympathetic remarks, he didn’t change any of Catholicism’s harsh and repressive dogmas about LGBTQ people.

It’s true that he permitted priests to bless same-sex couples (the same way they bless pets, or golf clubs), but only as long as they don’t do it in a way that implies official sanction of their relationship. It’s almost a backhanded compliment, recognizing people in same-sex partnerships as long as they accept being treated as lesser than opposite-sex relationships. He also didn’t stop the cruel practice of Catholic schools randomly firing beloved teachers for being gay.

This seems like the theme of Francis’ papacy. He tried to convey an impression of acceptance and tolerance, but without changing the religious dogmas that were the problem in the first place.

You have to wonder what his motivations were. Did he want reform, but was hemmed in by church politics and the weight of tradition, which conspired to prevent him from bringing about real change? Or was it only a PR strategy – did he agree with those religious rules and teachings, and only sought to put a friendly face on them to make the church more appealing?

We’ll probably never know what the truth was. But either way, there’s a lesson in it, even for those of us who aren’t Catholic.

Although Francis wasn’t truly an agent of change, people thought he was. And they loved him for it: he was consistently popular throughout his papacy. He was more popular than his predecessor, which means tribal loyalty among Catholics can’t be the sole explanation.

What this shows is that people want a humane leader. They hunger for a leader who projects a sense of kindliness and compassion, someone who cares about them and empathizes with them. That moral philosophy still appeals to people, even in a world of right-wing demagogues who make cruelty their governing rule. Whether or not Francis truly exemplified those gentler virtues, Catholics believed he did, and that’s why they liked him.

This should be a lesson for reformers and social-justice warriors of all stripes. If we want to win, we have to be clear about why we want a better world. It’s not about a tribalistic desire to “win”, or a merely economic concern for fairness. It’s because we care about everyone and want what’s best for them. If progressivism isn’t rooted in this love of humanity, it has no chance of success.

Image credit: Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han), released under CC BY 2.0 license

The Probability Broach: Superfluous villainy

The Probability Broach, chapter 3

Win is sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the police department, waiting to catch a bus home. The story doesn’t linger on it, but I think this is meant to be another sign of how hellish his dystopian U.S. has gotten: things are so bad that city employees have to use mass transit!

Behind the counter a radio recited body counts from our latest victory in New Guinea. The Papuans should have run out of people three years ago.

Between energy shortages, government patent theft, and now this – it’s yet another fragment of the backstory that Smith never more than vaguely gestures towards.

The backstory of this world is never fleshed out, but from the hints we get, it seems like every bad thing is happening at once. There are energy shortages and rationing, oppressive secret police, organized crime running the government, and this chapter adds 1984-style war propaganda. What went so badly wrong here? Which of these evils was the root cause?

As I said before, I doubt if Smith sees this as inconsistent. In his view, government is purely a force for evil; what’s more, it’s the sole cause of evil. He doesn’t see any contradiction in blaming every possible bad thing on the state simultaneously. In his anarchist utopia, when all government is abolished, peace and prosperity burst into full flower seemingly overnight.

Now I was blackballed without so much as a memo—much to my superior’s relief—by vague pressure “from god knows how high.” Mac’s office was bugged, if you believed him, and his telephone tapped. An ex-security-cleared scientist who rated his own car and a government-issue handgun had been mortally afraid of the very agency he once worked for. The maraschino cherry on top was the fact that said professor had been gunned down with a .380 Ingram—a favorite item of hardware for covert SecPol operations.

So what was really going on? I’d probably never find out. Tomorrow morning I’d be back on ordinary Capitol Hill muggings.

Obviously, there’s no great mystery about what happened to Meiss. The only thing Win doesn’t know yet is the motive. But just when he’s resigned to ignorance, he sees his chief departing the office:

Through the window I watched Mac emerge from the City and County Building, briefcase in hand. He paused to straighten his tie and stepped into the street. Suddenly there was a screech as a parked car accelerated violently. Mac turned, annoyance, incomprehension, sudden terror racing each other across his face. He ran, trying to make the median. Too late. The front bumper hit him at knee level—a sickening whump of hollow metal on solid flesh. His body flopped like a rag doll, head and arms draped over the hood, legs disappearing underneath. The car never slowed. I heard the engine race as the pedal was floored. Mac whipped to the pavement, his head smashing into the asphalt as the car devoured him, his outflung hand still visible, gripping the briefcase.

The only thing missing is the famous line, “And he was just one day from retirement.”

After the body is carted away and all the paperwork is done, Win returns morosely to his apartment. But when he lets himself in, something is wrong. The bedroom door is ajar, and he’s sure he left it closed:

I stretched out on the floor, feeling silly in my own apartment, and slowly levered out the S & W. They should have hit me coming in. They were going to pay for that mistake. I planned to punch several soft, custom-loaded 240-grain slugs into whoever was behind that door. Crawling painfully on knees and elbows, I tried to remember to keep my butt down.

A damned good thing I didn’t pull the trigger. Creeping closer, I noticed a fine, shiny wire stretching from the doorknob. I’d always cursed that streetlight shining in my window; now it had saved my life. I laid the forty-one on the carpet and carefully traced the wire to a menacing shape attached to the frame inside. It looked vaguely like a striped whiskey bottle, but I knew those “stripes” were cut deeply into the casing to assure proper fragmentation. The wire led to a ring, one of four clustered at the top. An easy pull would raise and fire the striker.

A Belgian PRB-43: common in New Guinea, a favorite with domestic terrorists, too. I felt grateful they’d left something I was familiar with.

Win is able to cut the wire and disarm the booby trap, but he sits in shock for a long time, “cradling the harmless bomb” in his lap. It’s a small human moment in a chapter that has so much casual violence.

As dramatic as this is, it seems like superfluous villainy. They were doing as they were told! This should be Evil Overlord 101: you punish people for disobedience, not for obedience.

A sinister dark figure sitting on a spiked throne

As this guy could have told you, the phrase “You have failed me for the last time!” exists for a reason.

If Chief MacDonald had refused the order to take Win off the case, or if Win had persisted in investigating without official sanction, then SecPol would have a reason to murder the two of them… but nothing like that happened. The chief bowed to pressure from above, and Win was off the case with no leads. He’d even given up his desire to investigate. The villains’ scheme would have come to fruition without any interference if they’d just left well enough alone.

It’s never adequately explained, either now or later, why the bad guys wanted Win and MacDonald dead. If you need secrecy to carry out your evil plans, this is the exact wrong way to go about it. It certainly seems like the death of two police officers on the same day – one of them a chief – should have drawn scrutiny from someone. Conversely, if the world is so corrupt and SecPol so powerful that they can murder local police with impunity, why even bother with the coverup?

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New on OnlySky: Will China build the future?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about which nation will build the future, if the U.S. plans on abandoning funding for science and technology. If it’s not going to be us anymore, who will pick up the crown of technological progress?

There’s one obvious contender, especially in light of this news: China recently announced that it’s built and is successfully operating a nuclear reactor based on the element thorium, which is more abundant and cleaner than uranium. It’s a design that was tested and proven to be feasible by 20th-century Western research, but was never deployed on a large scale.

How should we Americans feel about this? Should we be worried and dismayed that we’re losing our dominance and sliding into backwardness? Or should we be heartened that someone is continuing to make progress, even if it’s not us? What does this mean for the future of science – and the future of democracy, if an authoritarian state like China is stepping in where we won’t?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

In the long run, scientific and technological achievement benefits all of humanity. New discoveries spread and diffuse until they’re part of the common knowledge base of the world, which raises everyone’s living standards. China, after all, can claim credit for bringing the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing into existence. These inventions changed the world for everyone, no matter where they were created.

At this moment of history, when some nations are falling under the shadow of malignant anti-intellectualism, it’s reassuring to know that progress is continuing somewhere. Even if the US is marching backwards, we’re not dragging the rest of the world with us. Smarter nations will continue to fund research, make discoveries, and build the future whether we join in or not.

That being said, there are also reasons to feel ambivalent about this story…

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Free-market mafiosi

Al Capone's mugshot

The Probability Broach, chapter 3

Chapter 3 opens with another fictional quote, from the book Jenny Noble gave Win Bear last chapter:

Stating merely that there is no conflict between human rights and property rights surrenders half the argument to the enemies of liberty. All human rights are property rights, beginning with the right to own your own life, the right to own and control the body that houses it, and on, to every feeling and thought, every opinion and idea, every good and service that life and body are capable of creating.

-Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty

Just to point it out, “Mary Ross-Byrd” is a gender-swapped pun on Murray Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist who wrote a book called For a New Liberty.

This is the kind of oversimplification that libertarians habitually indulge in. Smith says that all rights are property rights and that they all stem from the same root.

If you wanted to, you could define autonomy over your own body and life as a kind of property right. But property rights over the external world are a different animal.

You don’t need to compete with anyone else to control your body – you’re the only one in there, so to speak. But when it comes to, say, a plot of land, it’s not so clear-cut. How does something that no one owns become property belonging to a specific person? (This is a perennial problem for libertarians of all stripes.)

What counts as a means of establishing ownership, and what doesn’t? How do you know if something has a rightful owner or not? How is property transferred from one person to another, and under what circumstances? If there’s a dispute about who owns something, how do we settle it?

The answers to these questions aren’t self-evident. They depend on a raft of complex theories about politics and economics. Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists like to act as if their entire worldview can be trivially derived from a few axioms. In reality, it’s not that straightforward.

Back to the story, Win reports in to the chief about the progress of his investigation:

At five, I had a call to go see the division chief, Captain Roger MacDonald, the only man on Homicide shorter than me. But where I’m wide, he was round, with hair like a coat of wet paint and palms that were always damp. Naturally, he was the type who insisted on shaking hands.

The chief seems nervous. Rather than his office, he insists on meeting Win in the men’s room, and he turns on the water before he starts talking to create a protective screen of noise.

Win snarks about how much water he’s wasting (“Water Board’s gonna love you, Mac”), but the chief isn’t amused. He says his office and his telephone are bugged and he can’t speak freely:

“Win, listen! I’ve got to take you off the Meiss thing. I’m not supposed to tell you why, but I’ll be damned if—what can they threaten me with? Losing my devalued pension?”

I nodded grimly. “Especially since you have to put in forty years, now. Times are tough all over. Go on.”

“The word’s been passed down the line, from god knows how high. There’s more to this than I can tell you, more than I know myself… or want to! Anyway, you’re off the case.”

Win is disgruntled. He objects, like the cynical-but-honest cop he’s supposed to be:

“You’ve got to understand…” MacDonald pleaded. “There’s something big—”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the shiny golden coin in my pocket. “Who is it, Mac, the local Mafiosi—the government, maybe?”

Mac’s piggish little eyes widened a fraction. “My God, Win, what makes you think there’s a difference? Where have you been the last thirty years?”

This is another vague gesture at the backstory that Smith never gives for his dystopian world. It implies that organized crime has gotten so powerful that it’s taken over the government – or merged with it. Either way, instead of a just government that protects its people and upholds their rights, the U.S. is run by a cabal of greedy and tyrannical rulers bent on extracting as much wealth from their subjects as possible, no matter how much cruelty or violence it takes.

We can all agree that this is undesirable. So here’s my question: what would prevent this same thing from happening in an anarchist society – either a left-wing communist anarchy or a right-wing capitalist anarchy?

All it takes is a bunch of power-hungry sociopaths (of which there are guaranteed to be a few in any sufficiently large number of people) to recognize that a society without laws is ripe for the picking. They can band together, become a gang, and impose their will on everyone around them through violence and intimidation.

You can imagine it happening the other way, too. You could imagine an organized-crime group that starts as a legitimate business, but as they become wealthier and more powerful, they become increasingly unwilling to tolerate competition or worker unrest. Eventually, they start using dirty tricks or outright violence to chase off competitors, break strikes, and dominate everyone in their area of influence.

Either way, the result is the same. This free-market mafia can exact protection money through blackmail. They can skim the profits off businesses they control. They can seize control over valuable assets like factories. And they can use this ill-gotten wealth to attract still more people to their side, as others make the rational calculation that it’s better to throw their lot in with the bosses and reap the rewards of loyalty, rather than becoming one of their oppressed serfs.

If this free-market mafia grows large and powerful enough, they can effectively become the government, controlling the economic flows in whatever area they have dominion over and imposing their own ruthless brand of law and order. Indeed, according to some researchers, this was the historical role of the actual Mafia, moving in and taking over where the legitimate government was weak:

Scholars such as Diego Gambetta and Leopold Franchetti have characterized the Mafia as a “cartel of private protection firms”. The primary activity of the Mafia is to provide protection and guarantee trust in areas of the Sicilian economy where the police and courts cannot be relied upon. The Mafia arbitrates disputes between criminals, organizes and oversees illicit business deals, and protects businessmen and criminals from cheats, thieves, and vandals. This aspect of the Mafia is often overlooked in the media because, unlike drug dealing and extortion, it is often not reported to the police.

L. Neil Smith’s ideology holds that because government is bad, the right thing to do is abolish it. But he doesn’t have an answer for what would stop a scenario like this, where someone moves into the power vacuum and tries to become a new government by force. It’s especially ironic because he knew it was a possibility: the villains in The Probability Broach have a plan along these lines.

The closest he comes to an answer, as we’ll see, is saying that everyone should carry weapons so they can defend their liberty. But one person with a knife or a gun can’t put up a fight against a dozen or a hundred heavily-armed thugs. The Hollywood image of a lone action hero single-handedly defeating a gang of bad guys is feel-good fiction. In reality, the person who has the bigger army on their side almost always wins.

The conclusion to draw from this thought experiment is that anarchist societies are unstable. Without any organized body capable of force, they have no means to defend themselves against outside incursion or takeover from within. Even if it were possible to create such a society, it would always be in jeopardy of collapsing into a mafia state, controlled by the people who have the most instruments of violence and the fewest compunctions about using them.

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New on OnlySky: How to warn the future

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the philosophical problem of how we can warn the distant future about long-lived hazards we’re creating today.

In 2011, I saw a documentary called Into Eternity, about the Finnish government’s plan to dispose of high-level nuclear waste. They’re digging a deep subterranean vault, named Onkalo, where spent fuel rods and other radioactive material will be permanently interred.

Fourteen years after that documentary, and more than twenty years after the start of construction, Onkalo is ready to begin operations. The radioactive waste it’s meant to contain will be dangerous for 100,000 years, so it has to last at least that long. But geology is a known quantity. The bigger problem is what warning we should leave for our distant descendants, who may not remember why the repository was constructed, who may not speak our language, who may not even share our scientific view of the world. Is there any truly universal symbol for danger that transcends the idiosyncrasies of culture?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

We can’t depend on uninterrupted transmission of information over time. Memories fade, digital storage degrades, libraries burn, and stone carvings weather away to nothing. Civilizations collapse in war or disaster, and their knowledge can be lost with them. Over timescales of millennia, these are all very real possibilities.

The civilizations that come after us may not remember where the repository is or the reason it was constructed. If they dig into it, how can we warn them so they don’t accidentally irradiate themselves?

A language like Linear A, which is “only” thirty-five centuries old, is indecipherable. It’s likely that no written warning would still be comprehensible in ten thousand years—much less a hundred thousand. Even our basic symbology, like the red circle-and-slash or the yellow-and-black radiation trefoil, might mutate over time to the point of unrecognizability or be forgotten entirely.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Metal detectors cause terrorism

A clear plastic bag with bottles inside, reading "This bag was screened by the aviation security authority of the Federal Republic of Germany"

The Probability Broach, chapter 2

As I’ve mentioned, The Probability Broach is a work of evangelism. Unlike Ayn Rand, whose default mode is to condemn anyone who doesn’t already agree with her, this book wants to persuade. It doesn’t assume that its audience already knows everything it has to say. It tries to introduce the author’s beliefs to readers one step at a time, and to make a case for them as it does.

However, L. Neil Smith faces a problem in doing so. Some parts of his anarcho-capitalist worldview are almost reasonable, while others are way out there. And he doesn’t know which is which.

Smith is so deep in his own ideology, he’s not cognizant of which parts of it will strike an average reader as bizarre, ridiculous, or offputting. Often, one of his wackier beliefs breaks through – surfacing from the narrative like a fly in the soup – and derails his argument. This chapter has one of those WTF-worthy moments.

To begin with, Win Bear shows off his regular-joe credentials by saying he doesn’t like most of the laws he’s supposed to enforce. He looks the other way rather than arrest people for breaking them:

“Jenny, I didn’t pass the Confiscation Act, and I feel the same about dope and tobacco: just don’t wave them around in public so I have to bust you. Hell, I even – oh, for godsake, do you have a cigarette? I’m going into convulsions!”

She shuffled through a drawer, coming up with a pack of dried-out Players, hand-imported from north-of-the-border. I lit one gratefully and settled back to let the dizziness pass. “If you repeat this, I’ll call you a liar. My hide’s been saved at least twice by civilians – people who figured we might be on the same side. Totally forgot to arrest them for weapons possession afterward. Must be getting senile.”

In this world, the U.S. has become an authoritarian socialist state, but Canada is the land of liberty. That’s a trope I haven’t seen before. (Does tobacco grow in Canada? Somehow I doubt it.)

“Vaughn’s gun didn’t do him much good, though.”

I shrugged. “Not against a machine pistol. Yes, that’s what it was. The thing about gun laws, if you’re gonna risk breaking them, it might as well be for something potent. The law only raises the ante. Look at how airport metal-detectors turned hijackers onto bombs. If it’s any consolation, it looks like your professor managed to take at least one of his attackers with him.”

There’s a germ of logic in this when it comes to zero-tolerance policies that treat all crimes as equally serious. If the punishment for every crime is the same, a criminal might as well gamble on committing a big one, if it means a bigger reward. If burglary and murder both get the death penalty, there’s no reason for a burglar not to kill the witness.

For most people, this is a reason to design laws and penalties thoughtfully. We should try to discourage people from breaking the law, but if they do break it, we should give them an incentive to come clean rather than keep racking up more crimes on their record.

But that isn’t L. Neil Smith’s take. He claims that any law against anything is useless, because laws have no effect on people’s behavior. People who weren’t inclined to commit a crime wouldn’t have done so whether there was a law against it or not, and people who want to do an illegal thing will just break the law anyway. (He says so later in the book, using almost this wording.) The idea that laws can deter crime never occurs to him.

This chapter is an expression of that viewpoint. He claims, in all seriousness, that no one would ever have taken a bomb onto an airplane if their original plan to take a gun onto an airplane wasn’t foiled by metal detectors. To put it another way: he thinks metal detectors cause bombings.

Obviously, airplane bombings aren’t an escalation of hijackings. They’re different crimes, committed for different reasons. Most airplane hijackers want to take hostages, either for ransom or to use as political bargaining chips. Airplane bombings are acts of pure terrorism, intended to inflict suffering and spread fear rather than to accomplish a concrete goal.

There are reasonable points to be made about “security theater” – measures put in place because they look good, not because they’re effective. Still, if you’ve ever flown on a plane, ask yourself: would you feel more or less safe if you knew the other passengers didn’t go through metal detectors?

Win asks Jenny Noble if Meiss had any enemies she’s aware of, but she says no. He shows her the mysterious gold coin he found at the crime scene, but she doesn’t know anything about that either. All in all, this meeting was a bust, giving him no leads to go on (but giving the author ample opportunity to lecture readers about his beliefs).

“Jenny – something else I’ll deny saying if you repeat it: Meiss knew he was going to die, but he stayed cool enough to pull the trigger four times. I disagree with nearly everything you believe, but if you’re all like that, there’ll be Propertarians in the White House someday.”

She looked at me as if for the first time, then grinned and patted me on the cheek. “We’ll make an anarchocapitalist out of you yet, Lieutenant.”

This is, of course, so L. Neil Smith can talk up how brave and manly his anarcho-libertarian freedom-lovers are. Even the skeptical cop thinks they’re badasses!

However, there are two problems with this.

First: Win says, “I disagree with nearly everything you believe,” but that’s just a lie. When he gets transported to anarchocapitalist utopia in a few chapters, he fits in immediately.

Indeed, his dialogue in this chapter shows that he was already sympathetic to their ideology. Despite being a police officer, he doesn’t dislike or distrust them, and he just said that he doesn’t enforce laws he doesn’t agree with if he has an excuse not to. This isn’t genuine disagreement; it’s the Lee Strobel trick of pretending to be a skeptic so your “conversion” seems more convincing to naive readers.

Second: Win’s praise falls a little flat when you consider that Meiss was killed in a drive-by shooting. That’s not the kind of death that affords ample time for reflection.

He was able to shoot back, but that’s not proof that he “knew he was going to die, but he stayed cool”. He might just as well have reacted on instinct, firing in blind panic before he knew what hit him.

Image credit: Kgbo via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

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