Exposing the Emperor

Agents of Chaos, by Norman Spinrad. Popular Library, 222 pp., $1.50.

In 1973, inspired by Norman Spinrad’s 1967 science fiction novel, Rex Weiner and ten other anarchistic, free-enterprising entrepreneurs formed Agents of Pie-Kill, Unlimited. For a fee, they threw pies at the victims of their customers’ choice, exploding the pretensions of such deserving public figures as Guru Maharaj-ji, the psychic Peter Hurkos, and the Reverend Ike. Time called it “the biggest fad since streaking.”

But it was more than a fad. It was a first glimmering of the knowledge that the emperor wears no clothes, that one way to undermine authority is to destroy its legitimacy. More than six hundred pies later, in his introduction to the new edition of Agents of Chaos, Weiner explains: “Can you imagine that Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, or Richard Nixon could have for a minute continued their infamous careers had they tasted the full cosmic flavor of a well-timed lemon meringue pie?”

In Spinrad’s 24th century dystopia, there are no lemon meringue pies, but there is the Brotherhood of Assassins. Their goal is freedom. Their method is Chaos.

Contrary to the still-popular cliche which equates anarchy with disorder, contemporary libertarians understand that government produces chaos while freedom creates order. We know that those socioeconomic relationships which are “the result of human action but not of human design,” what Hayek identifies as a spontaneous order, is a rational order.

But less enlightened ages have intuited this phenomenon in the context of mysticism, through falsely literalized metaphors. Lao Tsu’s age mystified it as the Tao; Adam Smith’s age mystified it as the Invisible Hand. Spinrad’s genius is to imagine a future age in which freedom is mystified by the Brotherhood’s occult pseudoscience into a religion of Chaos.

The antipode of Chaos, naturally enough, is Order, the self-legitimizing ideology of the Hegemony of Sol. The Hegemony is a technocratic dictatorship imprisoning mankind in domed cities from Mercury to Pluto, where “Anything not Permitted is Prohibited.”

In an ironic inversion of a free society’s justice system, the Hegemonic Code lists only those few Permitted Actions which are legal for the constantly watched and carefully supervised Wards of the State, while the Preamble to the Revised Hegemonic Constitution affirms “Better a million wards shall perish than one Unpermitted Act go unpunished.” All Unpermitted Acts are crimes, instantly punished by radiation death beamed from the omnipresent Eyes of the Hegemony’s Master Guardian computer.

In three centuries, the totalitarian Hegemony has wiped out such messy, inconveniently unpredictable phenomena as war, hunger, disease — and freedom. Spinrad’s apparent assumption that a high level of technology, prosperity, and efficiency can coexist with tyranny may detract from his story’s verisimilitude, but, conceding his fictional premise, one can agree that in such a universe the way to oppose tyranny might very well be to attack “Order.”

Yet to the mysterious Brotherhood, Order inheres also in the Hegemony's prime antagonist: the Democratic League, a small band of idealistic but ineffectual dissidents who use sabotage and guerrilla tactics to fight for a “democratic” alternative to the authoritarian Hegemony, but who no longer have any notion of what that alternative might be. They use the word “freedom,” but its meaning has been lost.

Thus the League battles to destroy the Hegemony, the Hegemony battles to destroy the League, while the Brotherhood of Assassins paradoxically works for freedom by engaging in chaotic acts of violence that randomly undercut the efforts of both groups.

The paradox is rather obscurely “illuminated” by the Brotherhood's prophet, Gregor Markowitz: “The enemy of Order is Chaos, But the enemy of Order is also the enemy of Chaos.” Markowitz, one of Spinrad’s most creative literary inventions, is a brilliant parody of those twentieth century pseudoscientists who have misapplied the methodology and concepts of modern physics to the social sciences.

The Brotherhood’s Bible, quoted extensively throughout the story, is Markowitz’s Theory of Social Entropy. “Every Social Conflict is the arena for three mutually antagonistic forces: the Establishment, the opposition which seeks to overthrow the existing Order and replace it with one of its own, and the tendency towards increased Social Entropy which all Social Conflict engenders.”

This hash of hip Hegelianism, scientism, Zen mysticism and Governor Jerry Brown goes a long way to explain why Agents of Chaos has become the nucleus of an underground cult for assorted social outcasts, numbering among them not only zany pie-throwing absurdists, but also leftwing radicals, convicts, and anarchists.

Certainly, if there’s one thing the libertarian movement doesn’t need, it’s another cult novel. Nevertheless, Agents of Chaos can be, and probably will be, read as a libertarian parable. Just imagine the Hegemony as the American welfare/warfare State, the Democratic League as the Libertarian Party, and the Brotherhood as those anarchists who oppose both government and politics.

Spinrad’s unintended message would seem to be, then, that by institutionalizing their own political hierarchy to reform the State, libertarians have made the LP vulnerable to the danger of becoming the power Establishment's mirror image.

Agents of Chaos, is an astonishingly coherent and concise work, almost romantic in its surprise ending. It should be read, ultimately, not because of its cult appeal, but despite it.

Michael Grossberg is a compulsive reader of science fiction when he is not busy chairing the Libertarian Party of Texas.