A Review of Andrew Cleary’s Disarming

How exactly would a stateless society operate? Take into consideration the complexity of human action and there simply is not a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. However, Andrew Cleary gives us a roll of the dice with his novella Disarming. According to Cleary:

“My author journey began 10 years ago when I sat down to start writing a sprawling, multi-threaded novel that would resolve certain political questions once and for all for all of society because, you know, I know the answers. Five years later, staring at thousands of pages of horrible nonsense, I decided to set my ambitions just a little lower and to focus on one of the many ‘thought experiments’ that I daydream about; Disarming is the result of this more modest ambition.”

Despite this self-described modest venture, you not only get a plot that is interesting in its own right but also considerable heavy lifting necessary to establish a framework of a stateless society that can be taken seriously and keep the reader engaged. You end up with a pretty decent sketch of a world in which a patchwork privatized society, located in a fictional Acacia Valley near the autonomous zone of Macau in China, attempts to exist alongside state actors.

Most of the residents seem to have trickled into this hard-to-reach area from places all over the globe and although they have sorted themselves politically they are not necessarily geographically separated. The main protagonist Virginia Rhuel explains:

“I think it’s like people of different religions? Each religious organization has different rules, they have their own governing bodies, but that doesn’t mean people of different religions can’t be neighbors.”

This type of intermingling might seem to be insignificant until you realize these groups are using competing security firms, conflict resolution agencies, and in some cases even have different levels of voluntary taxation. How all this works is not always explicitly spelled out, but the author does labor to ensure that readers are understanding different concepts and theories of property and social organization. And as such, from the hermit to the commune, you also get examples of those whose ideology does demand physical separation. The setting itself is a main character whose development is just as important as any other in the story and is a source of conflict continuously needing reconciliation propelling the story forward.

Virginia Rhuel, sole proprietor of Acacia Valley Dispute Avoidance and Resolution Consultancy is now one of the big games in town after leaving her previous employer, Keenan Meh-Hong, and creating a competing agency. Keenan’s agency focuses more on physical security and Rhuel wanted to develop more in the direction of conflict resolution. She is a skilled mediator excelling in the ability to help her clients find some personal subjective surplus value which they are willing to trade one another in order to find resolve. Later in the story, you will also discover another similar competitor, The Darwin Jones Adjudication Company, which uses theoretical frameworks to arrive at rulings that are voluntarily agreed upon by his clients. The effectiveness of these agencies is threaded together with networks of insurance and business coalitions as well as a voluntary council that strives to maintain a foundation of intercommunication.

Enter the Rogue Nuclear Weapon Problem

Kamiko Anthony, daughter of ex-prisoners of the Japanese internment camps of WWII, had been a dedicated student growing up and eventually would go on to complete an MBA. She opens a lucrative and honest import/export business in San Francisco, eventually turns to agorism, and ends up becoming explosively successful. Later she marries a history professor who had written academic papers critical of the US which causes her to come under the government spotlight. Forced to become an expatriate, she moves to the Acacia Valley area. The only problem is she has brought with her a small nuclear device obtained from one of her black market connections. This news eventually gets out not only causing alarm with the locals but also garnering the attention of the US military. All eyes are on the Valley!

One of the more unique aspects of Cleary’s storytelling is the use of newspaper articles and transcribed broadcasts at the beginning of each chapter, helping to flesh out the details and creating a sort of tactile connection to this world. The two articles opening chapter one established for me what seemed to be an interesting style and had me feeling right away like a member of the Acacia Valley community.

This short e-book only sets you back a few bucks and can be read in about the time it takes to watch a movie. And even though it took Andrew Cleary a bit of time to refine his focus and get this story together, I’m hoping we will see in the near future further development of this subject matter into something just as entertaining as Disarming.

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