The Problem

Recently I read, or at least started to read, "Escape from Terra". It's a sci-fi webcomic with a pretty clear allegorical message that eventually put me off of it and sent me searching for less heavy political fare.

It plays heavily with minarchy and libertarian themes overlying a sort of meeting between Gene Roddenberry and Joss Whedon. The future is home to a post-capitalist One Earth government; the bureaucratic socialist collective plays the role more traditionally left to Empires, while the protagonists live in an anarchistic mining colony.

The protagonist is an auditor for the Earth government and reflexively expresses much of their bias against the freedom loving anarchists. Earthlings are painfully politically correct, regard any sort of competition as barbaric. They apparently regard capitalism with the same distaste, fear, and hatred that can be found amongst victims of the Fordian society of Brave New World.

The Belters, in an effort to illustrate to the protagonist the errors of his ways, decide to take him to a zero-atmosphere hockey game. It's basically space played in an arena with no atmosphere, meaning the players have to wear heavy protected suits; high sticking can expose the victim to explosive decompression and the perpetrator to the wrath of the other players. There is no need for referees, because rule breaking carries such heavy consequences and penalties that nobody would ever dare break the rules.

A problem immediately and obviously presented itself: with no oversight or opportunity for redress, any rules broken result immediately in painful death. The Belter society is heavily armed, citing the modern defense of the second amendment; e.g. that the potential for every bystander to be an armed combatant quells crime. It occurred to me that a well-armed society like this would have a problem trying to kill a rule-breaker, especially since he's suddenly surrounded by people who would, by social convention, gladly be his murderers.

The protagonist complains that the rules are unnecessarily barbaric if someone were to break the rules, at which point someone smugly points out that nobody broke the rules. The implication is heavy--nobody ever breaks the rules if you make the penalty sufficiently punishing. Which struck me as strange--people in professional sports are badly wounded quite frequently without anyone ever breaking the rules. It's the nature of sports, especially contact sports as violent as hockey, that people periodically get injured. It seems to me that the potential for equipment malfunctions coupled with the violent nature of the sport could make the sport a good shade of deadly by accident.

Of course, all this is predicated on the idea that the punishment is doled out immediately by incensed players concerned for their own safety; opponents won't stand for it because they could be next, and teammates don't stand for it because they could be the target of equal retribution, meaning that bad luck and malevolence are punished the same way with no oversight. That was pretty horrifying--the idea that one could be slain in cold blood over something as trifling as an accident in a hockey match.

Then something worse came to mind. What if it wasn't an emotional decision made on-the-spot as a unit? Was the comic suggesting that a group of individuals could detain another individual they felt had "done wrong" and summarily execute him? Not just could, but would?

Then of course there's the idea of automatic murder from a fictive standpoint. There are only a few teams, and presumably everybody knows everybody else. Opponents in small, dedicated leagues generally do. Teammates on closely knit amateur teams ought to. Some of the players are brothers, so they obviously do. And they'd participate in what is apparently the only punishment method in this version of hockey, which is killing the offending player, no matter who he is?

The arc ends with protagonist (naturally) enthralled and invigorated by the sport, deprived of any kind of competition by Earth's obsession with fairness and lack of competitive spirit. It's part of the chain that leads the protagonist to accept the anarchist culture. At some point, he's even given a banner which seems like a show of good faith until it's explicitly stated by the cast that it's meant to bring him derision and shame him into returning to the anarchist state. Nobody is forcing him to do anything, but they're manipulating events so that has to come back.

And these people are apparently the heroes of the tale.