Sidewinder

At the beginning of the 20th Century the Austrian mathematician and
Logician Kurt Goedel put the cat amongst the philosophical pigeons by
demonstrating a formal truth that for any closed system it was
possible to determine a proposition that was undecideable by that
system - i.e. that the system could not determine the validity or
invalidity of. For the sake of argument, I call the amount of these
undecideable propositions, in proportion to the decideable ones, the
"Goedality" of a given system. In mathematics the struggle has always
be to reduce the Goedality of the mathematical system (indeed the holy
grail for several thousand years has been to eliminate it entirely -
this is why Goedel’s Incompleteness theorem came as a bit of a blow,
to put it mildly).

However outside the world of mathematics there are other systems where
the trend seems to be in the opposite direction. That is that there
are systems which people are evolving in the direction of increasing
the Goedality of the system - i.e. to increase the amount and
proportion of undecideable propositions. The extreme case is a system
where virtually all of the propositions are undecideable or there are
several equally valid results for any given determination - this is a
"hyper-goedelised" system. Why would anybody deliberately want to do
this?

Consider the benefits system. For decades people who do benefits
advice have known that the benefits legislation is overly complex and
incoherent, such that benefits staff will make a determination that a
given person is due little or no benefits - advice workers can then
use the same legislation to determine that the same person is due
substantially more. At this point the easy way out is to just dismiss
it as the incompetence of bureacracy, but I think not. Consider that
successive governments, rather than attempting to reform and simplify
the benefits system - i.e. to reduce its goedality - instead continue
to complexify it by adding more and more inconsistent rules or
axioms. One could put this down as an effect of political-bureacratic
entropy - each new political master wishes to make his or her mark
(and gain media coverage) by making new initiatives - but the evidence
suggests that there is more to it.

I propose that the continuing hyper-goedelisation of the benefits
system is a deliberate strategy by the administration. On the one hand
complicated systems increase the amount of unclaimed benefits by
people unempowered to navigate the forbidding complexity of the
system’s rules - secondly it allows the system to operate in a
"legalistic" fashion. That is to say that the state does not calculate
levels of payment due, it makes a "case" for a level of payment (as
low as possible) which then must be challenged by making a
counter-case, all of which takes time and energy.

All of which is to say that there is no point expecting the
administration in toto (individual politicians may pay some interest,
but they have less power than people suppose) to look on a proposal to
simplify, rationalise or "de-goedelise" the benefits system as a
positive one. The context of the class struggle is the hidden
rationality behind the surface irrationalities that continually
perplex and frustrate the people who judge the efficiencies of any
given sub-system purely within its own framework