It’s Logical

Murphy’s technological law number 2 states, “logic is a systematic method for coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.” Yet how many of us hold certain beliefs because they seem so logical?

Our answers to our questions always fit the logic we use. That’s how we accept or reject them. When they “make sense” to us, they fit our logic. This does not guarantee their accuracy: It simply makes us feel more confident with our conclusions. This is why people from opposite political poles can support their opposing positions on the same topics with different reasoning.

We can validate the reasoning process that took us to the conclusion, but this is not a validation of its the accuracy. Unfortunately, we will defend our arguments as though they “the truth” instead of realizing that our confidence in our arguments comes from the consistency of our logic. But in simple terms, a logical proof is not necessarily a truth.

An Austrian mathematician, Kurt Friedrich Gödel, showed this with his incompleteness theorems. He said that if the system is consistent, it cannot be complete and the consistency of the axioms in the system cannot be proven within the system.

The right and left political ideologies are consistent systems. They are closed and cannot be complete; therefore, the beliefs constituting them cannot be proven within either system.

In effect, no consistent belief system is complete because it must be closed to the influence of other systems to be consistent. Does this sound familiar? The right and left in this country are closed to each other, consequently neither one has a corner on the market called “the truth”.

This leaves the very large, dark space in the middle that never gets explored. Inquiry into this middle ground offers opportunities for a deeper understanding of the problems facing us today.

So, we are left with the simple observation: what we call the truth on either side of the political debate is unprovable by our closed systems of logic. We need to listen to each other if we’re going to have a chance at fixing our problems.

Some time back, I read a book titled, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl. He was a psychiatrist who spent several years as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. The central point of the book was this: Everything in life can be taken from you but one thing; the freedom to choose how you will react. You may be wondering how this fits into the topic of logic.

When we don’t question our logic, we give up what Dr. Frankl called the last human freedom, the freedom to choose how we will react to the circumstances in life. In this case, the political upheaval that we live in today. Whether we are liberal or conservative, we are subscribing to an ideological system that cannot contain the whole truth. When we faithfully follow the logic of either we give up the freedom to choose what to believe and how to react to the circumstances we face.

But why is it so easy to fall back on an ideology that must be incomplete? Because it feels familiar?  Yes. Because it makes sense? Yes. But more importantly because we live in a fact-free world inundated with claims that we don’t have the time to verify. We are smothered in sound bites and jingles. We are deafened by noise disguised as news.

Under these circumstances, it makes sense to depend on our logic – our political ideology – to make sense of the cacophony. But when we do we give up that last human freedom. The freedom to think for ourselves about the issues that we face every day. Another way of saying this is, do you have your thoughts or do your thoughts have you? When you don’t question the logic of your thinking, your thoughts have you.

Robert DeFilippis