The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #10375   Message #72416
Posted By: Ethan Mitchell
21-Apr-99 - 09:48 AM
Thread Name: Music, Politics and Mudcat
Subject: RE: Music, Politics and Mudcat
OK, now we're getting somewhere, Hank. The classic (Emma Goldman) definition of anarchy is that 'authoritarianism is always wrong, as well as unneccesary.' That is the hard-line. You are talking about government as a *neccesary* evil...obviously the examples are not important, we both used murder earlier because it's so simple. I agree with you: as long as we have governments, as long as we are too weak to live as free individuals, we should work to ensure that those governments protect us from murderers and child-beaters. Right. That is not easy--it encompasses a thousand different struggles, each of immense importance. What I think is added by *anarchy*, per se, is the point that we should not stop at those struggles, and we should not accept the condition of governance as an ultimate neccesity for human society................Careful with Gödel, there. In the first place, he was a crazy weasel with a funky haircut. But in the second place, the Gödelian incompleteness theorem only applies to discrete mathematical systems, and all that it says is that there are--neccesarily--paradoxical statements within such systems. In logic, the simplest such statement is 'This statement is false.' Gödel himself went on from there to use the math as a metaphor for humanity's metaphysical condition, but it's a rather weak argument.