Here is an interesting quote I found floating around:

“Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is useless to let go the reins and then expect her not to kick over the traces. You must keep her on a tight rein . . . Women want total freedom or rather – to call things by their names – total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .” — Cato the Elder 234-149 B.C. quoted in Livy’s ‘History of Rome’.

How much of it is true, you can each decide for yourself.

Many of these are cross-cultural as people attempt to decode the past. Much of the story what I have been referring to, for example, comes from multiple cultures: Sumerian/Babylonian Cultural Discoveries, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Studies of Islam, the Bible, and Hebrew Texts – as well, when some people are trying to establish certain things, they are also pulling out archaeological facts from various other Semitic cultures – such as the Moabites, or the Hittites etc. etc.

The ancient Hebrew texts and such things also sometimes go further in their meaning than what we read in the Bible in English. For example: Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Hebrew language, are distinctly identified as “feminine,” (like how there is feminine and masculine in regard to languages – like in French, “le” is masculine, “la” is feminine). In fact, of all of the cities in the entire region, the only two that are feminine, are Sodom and Gomorrah… and how does this follow along with what we are learning about the nature of out of control sexuality? It is feminine in nature, isn’t it? It worships the feminine. As well, most of the ancient texts, when they refer to demons and things – the most dangerous of the demons are females.

There certainly is a lot of misogyny in this ancient stuff, from Judaism. Of course, it is always pointed out that this is because of men’s inherent tendency to wish to oppress women out of some wickedness which is innate to male nature… but, anyone with half a brain ought to be able to look around and realize that this cannot be the natural inclination of males – just the opposite. Personally, I think they displayed misogyny like that, because they recognized the dangers of society by “the feminine principle”, and it scared them silly, and so they tried to stamp out the tendency to live that way.

Although women generally weren’t referred to by name in the Old Testament unless they played a pivotal role in the story.

Neither men. We know Moses but we don’t know the name of the average Israelian men.

That said, your layman’s characterization is roughly accurate, Mathematics is incomplete or inconsistent; either not all true statements can be proven, or all statements can be proven.

In answer to your question, it’s inherently a sticky issue, because trying to describe society in a formal language is not a well-defined proposition. It seems trivial to me that arithmetic should be embeddable in any description of society, so that not all true statements about society could be proven by a decidable axiom scheme (basically, a scheme of givens where you could sit down and construct a list on which any particular axiom would eventually show up). This fact is of limited practical application however, since it is not necessary to prove all true statements about society in order to effectively predict future behaviors. Rather, the reason that effective central prediction of future behaviors has been historically ineffective has more to do with the fact that the society, as a system, is chaotic–societies with similar but not identical initial conditions will tend to diverge in behavior. If societies were not, then the sort of central planning in Communist societies of the mid-20th century might have been effective.

My understanding of the incompleteness theorem lies almost entirely in its use in the Church-Turing thesis; my layman’s understanding is Goedel’s use of diagonalization to produce a statement that essentially says: “I am not provable in Principia Mathematica.” If the statement is true, then PM is incomplete, and not every true statement in mathematics can be proved from axioms; if it is false, then PM is inconsistent, and any logical statement can be assumed to be vacuously true (a much worse development!).

Now, on simpler systems, as you write, you can derive everything from the axioms. What I have been looking for is a book on “scientific socialism” that describes the set of axioms (laws) that rule society. It would seem that either that set is trivially simple, and thus not really usable, or incomplete. I slogged through Marxism, the Science of Society to try and find the “laws” therein, but did not (interesting book, written in 1985, by someone clearly not able to see the onrushing collapse of Marxism in the East.)

In your opinion, would the Incompleteness Theorem invalidate any claim by socialism to be the complete descriptor of society?