Gödel’s Loophole

A Logician’s Warning to All Who Believe in Democracy

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In 1947, while studying for his U.S. citizenship test, logician, mathematician, and philosopher Kurt Gödel claimed to have found an inner contradiction in the U.S. Constitution. Theoretically, this loophole could allow democracy to be legally dismantled and replaced with a dictatorship. Given the current political climate and the current administration’s flirtation with authoritarianism, I find myself growing more and more curious about Gödel’s supposed loophole.

Background

As a child, Gödel was nicknamed Herr Warum, which translates to “”, due to his persistent curiosity. This relentless questioning, the hallmark of all great mathematicians, would later drive his groundbreaking work in mathematical logic.

Gödel is most famous for proving that formal systems capable of expressing arithmetic are inherently incomplete — that is, there exist true statements about the natural numbers that cannot be proven within the system itself. He was referred to by one of my favorite logic professors as “The Guy Who Broke Math”, an apt description given that he threw a wrench in many of the fashionable ideals laid out by , an empiricist philosophy sweeping Germany and Austria during the early 20th century.