I'm not a US citizen but I'd like to think I understand the significance of the American Constitution to the USA and the progressive politics of mankind.
So the current US administration is selling out the country to their corporate cronies. Isn't this what the US Constitution is supposed to protect the citizens from? Okay, you don't need some foreigner gloating over your (all our, actually) problems. The point of this diary is to highlight a bit of history that sprang into my mind while reading a Port-DPW diary.
This diary concerns then mathematical genius Kurt Gödel and the events surrounding his becoming a US citizen. If you've never heard of him, let me just say he was a man considered a peer by Albert Einstein, who also features in the following amusing anecdote.
I first read this story in
Who Got Einstein's Office? by Ed Regis. (I know, it's amazon link, get the isbn and buy blue by all means.) I'm going to quote
this New Yorker article because it's on-line.
A bit of background. If you don't know what he was into then let's have a taste.
Being both rigorous and averse to controversy, he did not like to argue his convictions unless he had an airtight way of demonstrating that they were valid. But how could one demonstrate that mathematics could not be reduced to the artifices of logic? Gödel's strategy--one of "heart-stopping beauty," as Goldstein justly observes--was to use logic against itself. Beginning with a logical system for mathematics, one presumed to be free of contradictions, he invented an ingenious scheme that allowed the formulas in it to engage in a sort of double speak. A formula that said something about numbers could also, in this scheme, be interpreted as saying something about other formulas and how they were logically related to one another. In fact, as Gödel showed, a numerical formula could even be made to say something about itself. (Goldstein compares this to a play in which the characters are also actors in a play within the play; if the playwright is sufficiently clever, the lines the actors speak in the play within the play can be interpreted as having a "real life" meaning in the play proper.) Having painstakingly built this apparatus of mathematical self-reference, Gödel came up with an astonishing twist: he produced a formula that, while ostensibly saying something about numbers, also says, "I am not provable." At first, this looks like a paradox, recalling as it does the proverbial Cretan who announces, "All Cretans are liars." But Gödel's self-referential formula comments on its provability, not on its truthfulness. Could it be lying? No, because if it were, that would mean it could be proved, which would make it true. So, in asserting that it cannot be proved, it has to be telling the truth. But the truth of this proposition can be seen only from outside the logical system. Inside the system, it is neither provable nor disprovable. The system, then, is incomplete. The conclusion--that no logical system can capture all the truths of mathematics--is known as the first incompleteness theorem. Gödel also proved that no logical system for mathematics could, by its own devices, be shown to be free from inconsistency, a result known as the second incompleteness theorem.
So the guy was a genius. Read the rest of the article or Ed Regis's excellent book. (and if you like that, read Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by the same author, I kid you not!)
On to the anecdote:
One much retailed story concerns Gödel's decision after the war to become an American citizen. The character witnesses at his hearing were to be Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern, one of the founders of game theory. Gödel took the matter of citizenship with great solemnity, preparing for the exam by making a close study of the United States Constitution. On the eve of the hearing, he called Morgenstern in an agitated state, saying he had found an "inconsistency" in the Constitution, one that could allow a dictatorship to arise. Morgenstern was amused, but he realized that Gödel was serious and urged him not to mention it to the judge, fearing that it would jeopardize Gödel's citizenship bid. On the short drive to Trenton the next day, with Morgenstern serving as chauffeur, Einstein tried to distract Gödel with jokes. When they arrived at the courthouse, the judge was impressed by Gödel's eminent witnesses, and he invited the trio into his chambers. After some small talk, he said to Gödel, "Up to now you have held German citizenship."
No, Gödel corrected, Austrian.
"In any case, it was under an evil dictatorship," the judge continued. "Fortunately that's not possible in America."
"On the contrary, I can prove it is possible!" Gödel exclaimed, and he began describing the constitutional loophole he had descried. But the judge told the examinee that "he needn't go into that," and Einstein and Morgenstern succeeded in quieting him down. A few months later, Gödel took his oath of citizenship.
In the words of my favorite Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
and he should know, really.