The Probability Broach, chapter 14
In the last chapter, Win received some bad news. The explosion that hurled him into the North American Confederacy, caused by a government goon shorting out the portal while halfway through, was much bigger on the other side. Depending on how big, it could have been civilization-ending for Win’s world.
There’s only one way to know for sure. Win and his friends go to the university’s caved-in research shed in the park, where Win made his explosive arrival, and start digging to find out how much of his assailant’s body was left behind.
Ed, Win and Deejay, the scientist, take turns digging. Ed’s friends turn up while they work: Clarissa, because she’s a doctor and can help identify the body, and Lucy, Ed’s elderly war-hero neighbor, because she’s just nosy and wants to see what’s going on.
Eventually, they hit paydirt—the charred body of the thug who was chasing Win:
It wasn’t really so bad. I peeked through my fingers. From what the worms had left, we figured he’d been chopped off just below the knees. Oolorie, counting on her flippers, informed us that Bealls’s entire building was now a pile of secondhand cinder blocks. At any rate, we hadn’t destroyed the planet or invited it to be blown up by Strategic Air Command. I still had a place to go home to.
Tired and blistered from their exertions, they call it a day. Ed and Clarissa go home to rest, but Lucy persuades Win and Deejay to go out to dinner, where she spends her time making jokes and suggestive remarks:
“Great Albert’s Ghost, Winnie, it’s good to see you up and doing! Think of it: fresh outa sickbed, in as foreign a country as they come, and already you’re out with a pair of good-lookin’ women!” She winked at Deejay.
“Win, now that you know your world’s still in one piece, will you be going back? If we can get another Broach running, I mean.”
I thought about it. “Not until we’ve straightened this mess out. We’ve got to find whoever’s trying to kill me, and I hate to think of this beautiful place plastered with nuclear weapons. After that? I have a career back home, and nothing much to do here except get in the way and mooch off my friends.”
As previously established, they know the gang of bad guys chasing Win are “Federalists”—people who want to take over this anarcho-capitalist society and create a centralized government. But they have few leads to go on:
“Well, we need to find out more about these Federalists. How about it, Lucy, are they as dangerous as you all seem to think?”
“Dangerouser! No one with all his marbles’d listen to ’em, but they seem to find enough power-greedy dummies each generation to cause the rest of us a lot of trouble.”
This passage is notable because it’s one of the very few places that L. Neil Smith acknowledges something he otherwise ignores.
In an earlier chapter, we saw that—in spite of the author insisting the NAC is a utopia of freedom—some people are willing to join a terrorist organization that wants to overthrow it. Smith never explains why they’re so radically disgruntled (did they suffer some kind of grave injustice?). This is the closest he comes to addressing the subject, saying that there are always “power-greedy dummies” who crave rule over others.
This is ironic because Smith is confirming my argument about “free-market mafiosi“. The most probable failure mode of an anarchist society is that psychopaths, thugs and wannabe dictators would band together, form an army of their own, and take over a world which has no organized force capable of resisting them.
He acknowledges that this is a serious problem in the North American Confederacy. Moreover, it’s not just a fluke but a perennial threat which keeps recurring (“each generation”).
I’m sure this was entirely inadvertent. Smith just didn’t think through the implications of that line when he wrote it. Still, it’s ironic to see him admit that his anarcho-capitalist world is constantly endangered in exactly the way critics would say it is.
“If we find them, what can we do about it?”
“Depends on what they’re up to. Gonna be hard, ‘less we catch ’em settin’ fuses. It’s a free world: you can’t shoot people for havin’ stupid ideas.”
But, like… you can?
To repeat myself for the hundredth time, there’s no justice system in the North American Confederacy. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone, and even if you wanted to, there’s no official body where you can bring a case. (There are private arbitrators who hear disputes between parties, but it’s unclear what would happen if you tried to sue someone in that system and they refused to participate.)
You don’t need a search warrant or a smoking gun. If you know someone is planning something bad, even if you have no proof, you can just roll up and shoot them. There’s no third party you need to convince. Granted, their heirs might seek revenge on you, but they could do that in any case.
Lucy’s dialogue implies that the NAC has unwritten customs or guidelines which are similar to our notion of legally protected rights, and which the vast majority of people respect, even though nothing compels them to. That’s a very tolerant attitude, but how long would it last if the “Federalists” are as big a threat as she says?
Wouldn’t there eventually come a point where people get fed up with anyone espousing Federalist rhetoric? Even if killing them was seen as too extreme, it seems likely that angry mobs would tar and feather them on sight, or run them out of town on a rail, or do something else intimidating, painful and/or humiliating to shut them up or chase them away.
These kinds of public shaming rituals were very common in the past, and they’re still practiced in some places. They’re how small communities kept their residents in line (in both good and bad ways) in the absence of a formalized legal system. In an anarchist society with no laws, it’s very likely they’d become more prevalent, not less.
It’s a recent and modern innovation in ethics to hold that you can’t punish people for their opinions, no matter how offensive. Arguably, the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment helped establish this idea—but Smith rejects the Constitution!
In his timeline, America rebelled against the Constitution and overthrew it violently. That being the case, wouldn’t they logically also reject everything that came with it? Why wouldn’t they adopt the older, colonial idea that speech can be censored to preserve public order? What court is going to tell them otherwise?
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Other posts in this series:
I’m still not clear on why the NAC side of the portal didn’t get massively obliterated since about 3/4 of the guy ended up there. Does the kablooey only happen on one side? oO
It’s not very clear, but apparently if the portal shorts out while someone is halfway through it, there’s an explosion, and the explosion is bigger on the side the connection was initiated from, and also bigger or smaller depending on which side more of the interrupting mass is on.
It’s pretty handwavy even by the loose standards of sci-fi.
I’m trying to picture how you count on flippers. Did she count to 2?
Maybe they’re tattooed 🙂
Did Smith explain — I can’t bring myself to go back to your earlier posts and read more excerpts — why the Whisky Rebellion led to full-on anarchism? Nobody was advocating for that in our world; nobody was rejecting the right of the states to govern themselves. Someone mentioned there’s a fundamental turning point that supposedly explains all this. I can’t wait to mock it.
It didn’t. Anarcho-capitalism is not anarchism. Considering how much the Founding Fathers fetishized property rights, I could see something like this happening. What I cannot see happening is it persisting for two centuries without either collapsing into a state or (much less likely) moving on to real anarchism.
This post has the most concise explanation of Smith’s timeline:
https://proxy.freethought.online/daylight/2025/09/19/tpb-villainous-authoritarians/
But if you mean, why did the Whiskey Rebellion culminate in Albert Gallatin becoming president and abolishing government entirely, rather than, say, going back to the Articles of Confederation… no, there’s no explanation of that.
That’s what I meant. Even though it fits with Smith’s general hand-waving approach to writing alternate history, that’s damn sloppy.
I also think he underestimates how big the jump between “I don’t want to pay this tax” and “therefore, government should not exist’ is. Particularly in the late 1700s.
I’m still wondering what’s going on in the rest of the world. The NAC has flying cars that can be bought for a few hours’ work…is the rest of the world getting by on gasoline/electric cars? What about all the beyond-cutting-edge medical technology?
There’s an appendix to the book that has a timeline for Smith’s alternate history. It explains that pretty much the entire rest of the world has also converted to anarcho-capitalism, in a series of revolutions inspired by the U.S.’, that took place throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
The “Prussian war”, which is touched on in this chapter, is Smith’s version of World War 1. It was one of the last major conflicts in his world, waged by an imperial power trying to conquer its anarchist neighbors.
Heh. Thanks for that information. It’s making me laugh to think about every country in the world switching over to Smith’s preferred system.
…pretty much the entire rest of the world has also converted to anarcho-capitalism, in a series of revolutions inspired by the U.S…
Including Tsarist Russia and Imperial China? Puh. Lease. The West couldn’t inspire them to even go toward monarchy-plus-parliament, so there’s no way they’d have gone toward full-on anarcho-anything.
From what the worms had left…
What, until then NOBODY had gone to where there’d been an explosion — in the middle of a populated area, remember — to see who’d been hurt or killed, or to try to find out what had caused it? Everyone in the area just kept on doing whatever, long enough for worms to converge on a corpse and start eating it? (And…just worms? Not maggots or roaches or crows or vultures or anything else? I’m not sure which species of critters feed on human corpses when they’re left out, but I AM sure Smith doesn’t know either. What was his source — lyrics from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”?)
Oolorie, counting on her flippers…
…all the way up to two? And how do you calculate blast damage using either fingers or flippers?
I’m sure this was entirely inadvertent. Smith just didn’t think through the implications of that line when he wrote it.
Ya think?! You could say that about almost every line in the book!
Is it just me, or is this book really getting this much worse with each chapter?
Not defending Smith here, but the only reason that wannabe dictators, thugs, and psychopaths don’t band together into an army and take over the real world (other than their inherent inability to work together without betraying each other) is that they don’t have to. If such a person wants power, all he has to do is run for office under the Republican Party, and, in our Trumpian world, is all but guaranteed to win the election eventually. Our constitution isn’t stopping Trump’s tyrannical ambitions all that much. An apparatus that legitimizes violence and tyranny is already in place; why would they tear it down to build it back up again?
“Arguably, the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment helped establish this idea—but Smith rejects the Constitution! ”
Later on in the book, there’s a bit which suggests that the Bill of Rights is a part of the Constitution that he does like. Smith’s evil Federalists want to impose the original Constitution, sans amendments (which again reminds us what Smith can’t admit – in the real world, the Constitution wasn’t imposed by fiat on an unwilling populace; it was the result of compromise and negotiation).