I don't see how you jump from this, to saying that Gödel, who was a very smart person, childishly believed that words on paper were universally enforceable to their logical consequences. I'm sure he was aware of the existence of courts...
The point is NOT that the system is somehow immaculate and incapable of drifting into instability.
Indeed, the concentration of power in the hands of the few we see about us is, arguably, the rejection of representative systems developed in the last several centuries in favor of historical authoritarian approaches.
Sweet, sweet panem et circenses => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
I don't think history is a linear progression from authoritarianism to representative government.
"Law is what should happen. Politics is what does happen."
Are you arguing the linearity, or the degree to which any governments in view represent much beyond the whims of the authoritarians?
Damn dude, it's just a funny anecdote, no one is claiming it's a national security threat or anything like that.
There was no analysis involved, Gödel found it while studying for something else.
It's a super small wikipedia article for an amusing story, who said anything about solving law? If there is a contradiction on the Constitution I don't know why would it be a wrong thing to, at the very least, address it.
> Damn dude, it's just a funny anecdote, no one is claiming it's a national security threat or anything like that.
Sibling to parent comment:
> Wow, you're seriously underestimating this issue. [followed by long analysis on how other constitutions feel they need to solve this very serious issue]
If constitutional assemblies worry about things like that, it's not as silly as you put it for Gödel to have wondered about not having such features in the US constitution at a time just after WW2.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrenched_clause
Edit: Not a minor nitpick. Article 1 AND 20. Fixed!
It is unconstitutional, by the old constitution standards', but the new regime can just ignore it and call it a day (we're talking about a fascist takeover here).
> paragraph 4 in the German constitution states: " All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available."
that's cute, but do you think it would change anything if Myanmar's constitution had included such clause? Do you think it would stop the military from shooting protestors?
Laws, and constitutions, are useful, but in the end: politics is about power, not laws.
You can't stop a bullet with a piece of paper. But what's written on the paper can persuade a would-be shooter that the cost of their actions is likely to outweigh the benefits - because it legitimises and encourages counter-actions and severe penalties.
The efficient way to maintain power is by controlling what people believe. It's a lot less effort and mess than trying to torture and murder everyone who opposes you.
This, exactly. I think constitutional guardrails are an effect, not a cause, of healthy democracies. If there is political will to do something bad the law can always be abrogated, edited, reinterpreted or circumvented. The existence of a loophole isn't surprising. The existence of a law without them would be.
(Same applies, mutatus mutandis, to smart contracts.)
Perhaps not, but Myanmar isn't full of Germans.
> Laws, and constitutions, are useful, but in the end: politics is about power, not laws.
The power to make people behave in a certain manner. Laws are quite effective at that.
In reality, changes in laws happen when a small group supports them and, small opposition notwithstanding, vast majority of people do not care. One of the easiest ways to make the majority care - and oppose you - is to push your changes in a way that violates existing legal framework, particularly important things like a constitution. As long as you don't do that - as long as you take things slow and don't raise people's alarms - you can boil the proverbial frog.
That's what these clauses are meant to protect from. A series moves, planned or accidental, that could turn the country into dictatorship.
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[0] - I.e. the kind that's valid as long as enough people believe enough other people believe it's valid. Like a constitution. Or money.
You cannot simply write down a law prohibiting becoming a dictatorship and then sit back thinking all will be fine, because then these groups will simply grow their power until they can ignore the bits of the law they don't like. And they don't need to change the law to gain power, they merely need acceptance of their telling of events.
On the other hand, without extensive support you cannot create a dictatorship because that word implies such extensive societal control that there simply must be extensive power behind it for it to function at all.
But my point was mainly around popular movements. Not going to comment on international judgement in these circumstances
The Third Republic had actually lasted quite a while. There was definitely a mess before that: monarchy, revolution that created a republic that turned into an empire, then a monarchy again, then a republic again, then the nephew of the original emperor being declared emperor... the 19th century was not a good time to be French. (And I'm leaving out some revolutions and constitutions that didn't go anywhere.)
But after that they really had settled down, until an outside force blew it all up. The 19th century wasn't really all that solid anywhere in Europe. Germany and Italy didn't do any better.
2. Alter articles 1 and 20
3. ???
4. 4th Reich
The logic is rather sound: The article already protects the principles of articles 1-20, not the articles themselves. So changing article 79 to remove the protections is already touching on these principles, and is therefore inadmissible.
More likely, the authors of entrenched clauses understood that, if it came to that, making that change illegal wouldn't prevent a slip to dictatorship. That impasse would only hinder the honest actors, if in the future there came a time when those entrenched clauses really legitimately need to be changed; and hence that door was deliberately left open.
Sure, if it came to that, judges may still rule your way to slow down the slide the dictatorship, but then the next constitutional amendment would be "all judges are retired, here's how new judges are selected". Or some other legal maneuver. Even the strongest clauses could be circumvented if they have enough support or power, let alone feeble interpretations of implicit clauses.
It could. But why explicitly write down things that are obvious anyway?
> More likely, the authors of entrenched clauses understood that, if it came to that, making that change illegal wouldn't prevent a slip to dictatorship. That impasse would only hinder the honest actors, if in the future there came a time when those entrenched clauses really legitimately need to be changed; and hence that door was deliberately left open.
No, the Basic Law was very much designed to make another slip into dictatorship impossible using legal means. The idea that the eternity clause was deliberately made toothless in case we actually do want to abolish human rights, democracy and rule of law again is frankly absurd.
> Sure, if it came to that, judges may still rule your way to slow down the slide the dictatorship, but then the next constitutional amendment would be "all judges are retired, here's how new judges are selected".
That constitutional amendment would simply be unconstitutional and thus invalid. Law is not code. If you violate its intent, you violate it.
Maybe it's obvious to you; to me it's obvious the other way. Perhaps, when penning their supposed bulwark against dictatorship, they could afford to spend a few more drops of ink?
If the authors of such entrenched clauses really meant it the way you imply, they are doubly idiots, first for thinking that such legal technicalities would help prevent the slide into dictatorships, and then for failing to even do that and leave a loophole. I don't think they are idiots and they realized such an attempt would be futile and counterproductive. And focused their efforts elsewhere, to build a proper system with checks and balances so power would not be concentrated.
> The idea that the eternity clause was deliberately made toothless in case we actually do want to abolish human rights, democracy and rule of law again is frankly absurd.
No dictator would bother with amending such toothless abstract parts anyway. They would simply claim they are the greatest champion of human rights, and that their abuses are actually not abuses at all. The parts that are worth changing are concrete, technical details; like how are the judges that decide whether those are abuses are appointed. And those parts that the dictator might want to modify, may also legitimately need to be modified in the future, so all constitutions leave the door open to that change, yes.
> That constitutional amendment would simply be unconstitutional and thus invalid. Law is not code. If you violate its intent, you violate it.
Of course the prospective dictator would violate the constitution's intent, that's the point. Newly appointed judges would disagree with you about the amendment's constitutionality, though. As would the populace, who would just see unelected judges violating letter of the law to stop the people's will and protect the status quo.
Law is not code, it's what people in power interpret it to be. If a person or group manages to concentrate the power in practice, no legal technicalities help. I live in a country that recently went through that change; all the human rights, freedom of speech, rule of law clauses are there, all the supposed ostensible checks and balances are there, none of it is of any help. You can think in your head that it's not actually constitutional all you like, it's just that the judges, prosecutors, army, police, the censored media and most of the populace would disagree.
> As would the populace, who would just see unelected judges violating letter of the law to stop the people's will and protect the status quo.
Nope. It would see the most trusted state organ protecting the Basic Law. Which I've capitalized not because I can't spell but because it culturally has a somewhat similar status to the US Constitution in the USA.
Governments are not magically bound by law. The cost of breaking or ignoring the law depends on the public reaction (i.e. changes in their approval rate, protests on the streets that can be managed with police and military).
Or the words of the constitution can be reinterpreted to mean something entirely different than what they originally meant.
That's the magic of intersubjective beliefs. Laws may be words on paper, but as long as everyone expects that everyone else expects everyone to follow them, they're mostly followed. Same with money - it's just pieces of paper and numbers in some computers, but by virtue of shared belief, it has real power.
To the extent making something illegal doesn't prevent it from happening, there are enforcement structures - but those could never actually police everyone. Their job is to catch the occasional person who wasn't convinced by the "words on paper", and by doing so, reinforce people's belief in the "shared delusion" of laws. Because when people stop believing, society disappears.
So banning something by law does have an effect, but in the discussion of the dissolution of law it's clearly the courts, the bureaucracy, and the media that carry all the important functions of defence against subversion.
(Which is why I consider attacks at public trust as existential threats to society - why I consider many white-collar crimes to be on par with murder, why I think current ad-funded journalism is a huge net social negative, and why I think many of hot SV startups need to be disbanded. They're all trying to erode the conditions that allow the "shared delusion" of civilization to function.)
Or, excuse the bad analogy, think of it as shield generators in Star Trek and other sci-fi. A starship will have this critical bit of technobabble that you could break with a wrench, but when activated, it directs energy into a field that can laugh off megaton explosions. It's the field that does the work, the generator only keeps it up.
> It's the field that does the work, the generator only keeps it up.
No matter how you continue this parable it will become an arms race, invariably.
One very famous such story is the magic oil lamp that kep burning when Massada was under siege. That's as you describe the faith which keeps the flame going.
The problem is in my view rather like Jakob the Liar, Plato's cave parable and the Emperor's new Clothe's. The emperor knows he's naked, but as long as he controls fuel flow, nobody will switch on the light, and if the abstraction is leaky he will be well positioned to throw a huge shadow, waving his arms around.
As they say, biology is all about ... I hope you know what I mean, I just forgot what do they say? Gradients, right?
Feedback loops. Everything is about feedback loops.
So I guess sure, in the stochastic gradient descent sense biology is about gradients ;)
That is to say that our understanding of the rules of the game, our norms, are not created at birth but rather accumulated as we experience the external world. So the acts of the lawyer and the judge matters not just for the parties involved in the case, but also to all that might hear of it. Therefore their impact on the whole of society is not to be measured merely by the number of legal entities they adjudicate between, but rather by the size of the total audience.
Though I will grant that the lion share of the moral choices we make have pretty straightforward answers (should I shove this dude onto the tracks for talking loudly about bitcoins while we wait for the subway? No, I'll just rant on twitter), and our norm setting systems rarely have to get involved for us to make those choices in line with the rest of society.
There are huge areas where the law is routinely broken (by civilians, law enforcement) and there is no consequences. (Petty theft, violence against poor people, tax evasion.)
But yes, law people sometimes forget that it's all words on paper.
Anyway, the rule of law quickly becomes irrelevant when something takes over by force. Currently Myanmar is controlled by a military coup, for example, and there was an attempted coup by civilians in the US not too long ago (while the legal and military branches of it stood by and did nothing)
At the courthouse, witnesses would normally remain outside of the room during a citizenship examination, but because Einstein, a celebrity, was involved, and because the judge, Phillip Forman, had administered the oath of citizenship to Einstein, all three men were invited in [0]
(It's probably a joke technicality that would never be allowed in the real world.)
What do you mean here? I don't see an opportunity for relevance.
People are not magically bound by words on a piece of paper, so if you end up being able to go through the (extremely arduous! Moreso than many countries) ammendment process successfully you probably have enough popular support to do whatever you would want in any universe, even with a stricter requirement.
It's embarassing that this anecdote is given almost any weight. It's absolutely the most navel-gazing useless analysis. It does help to serve as an excellent counter-argument to "philosopher kings", though....