Okay so long story short. In the 1940s esteemed philosopher and mathematician Kurt Godel claimed (in his own Citizenship interview with Albert Einstein as his advocate but that's neither here nor there) that he had discovered a loophole in the US Constitution that allowed it to turned into a functional full on dictatorship. Godel never actually clarified what he discovered and, near as I can tell, never broached the subject again.
The most common theory is that Godel was referring to Article V which allows the Constitution to be amended but doesn't put limitations on how it could be amended so, the theory goes, all someone had to do is amend the Constitution to change the way the Constitution is amended. Now if you go "by the book" amending the Constitution is pretty damn hard, but if you could amend it to make amending it easier (which you "might" be able to sell in certain circumstances if you worded it right) you could make it so you, the Dictator, could amend the Constitution via verbal command, creating essentially a Constitutional Dictatorship.
I don't like that theory. That sort of "Set can't contain itself" reductionism seems rather coffee shop for Godel. Godel doesn't strike me as someone who wouldn't account for the political version of the Paradox of Tolerance. "Oh but what you change the change" is a little overly simplistic. And "A system can become a dictatorship if you change the system to allow it" doesn't strike me as a truth bomb.
But there's not a lot of other hard theories out there as to what Godel might have been talking about.
Any ideas? Theories? Drunken ramblings?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=2010183
https://brianmlucey.wordpress.com/20...stitutionally/
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-mathemat...e-a-1607024259
The most common theory is that Godel was referring to Article V which allows the Constitution to be amended but doesn't put limitations on how it could be amended so, the theory goes, all someone had to do is amend the Constitution to change the way the Constitution is amended. Now if you go "by the book" amending the Constitution is pretty damn hard, but if you could amend it to make amending it easier (which you "might" be able to sell in certain circumstances if you worded it right) you could make it so you, the Dictator, could amend the Constitution via verbal command, creating essentially a Constitutional Dictatorship.
I don't like that theory. That sort of "Set can't contain itself" reductionism seems rather coffee shop for Godel. Godel doesn't strike me as someone who wouldn't account for the political version of the Paradox of Tolerance. "Oh but what you change the change" is a little overly simplistic. And "A system can become a dictatorship if you change the system to allow it" doesn't strike me as a truth bomb.
But there's not a lot of other hard theories out there as to what Godel might have been talking about.
Any ideas? Theories? Drunken ramblings?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=2010183
https://brianmlucey.wordpress.com/20...stitutionally/
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-mathemat...e-a-1607024259
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2ITNlMu
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