  We conjecture that brown dwarfs are substellar objects because they have been
ejected from small newborn multiple systems which have decayed in dynamical
interactions. In this view, brown dwarfs are stellar embryos for which the star
formation process was aborted before the hydrostatic cores could build up
enough mass to eventually start hydrogen burning. The disintegration of a small
multiple system is a stochastic process, which can be described only in terms
of the half-life of the decay. A stellar embryo competes with its siblings in
order to accrete infalling matter, and the one that grows slowest is most
likely to be ejected. With better luck, a brown dwarf would therefore have
become a normal star. This interpretation of brown dwarfs readily explains the
rarity of brown dwarfs as companions to normal stars (aka the ``brown dwarf
desert''), the absence of wide brown dwarf binaries, and the flattening of the
low mass end of the initial mass function. Possible observational tests of this
scenario include statistics of brown dwarfs near Class 0 sources, and the
kinematics of brown dwarfs in star forming regions while they still retain a
kinematic signature of their expulsion. Because the ejection process limits the
amount of gas brought along in a disk, it is predicted that substellar
equivalents to the classical T Tauri stars should be very rare.
