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To Know Truth, First Know the Standard of Falsehood.
The coargopic principle: A self-defeating ideology is false by definition.
An ideology is self defeating if, when implemented, it leads directly or indirectly to consequences that cause it to no longer be implemented. This falsehood can be conditional or absolute depending upon the conditionality of the ideologies self-defeat. For example if an ideology is self defeating for bronze-age economies then it is false within the context of bronze age economies. The name of the coargopic principle comes from the Latin: coarguo-uere -ui [to show clearly , demonstrate fully]; esp. [to prove wrongor false].
To understand why the coargopic principle is true lets explore a simple example. Bob holds the belief that saying the word "protego" will prevent him from being harmed by bullets. This belief leads him to demonstrate this "protection" with the predictablelethal results. If belief in the protective value of saying "protego" causes every believer to test it out like Bob, then the belief itself becomes extinct when the last of them dies. This can be thought of as ideological natural selection. While the case of Bob may be a bit ridiculous, this sort of thing does actually happen sometimes, Jonestown where the practice of a cult-ideology quite literally lead to an entire community to kill themselves with poisoned Kool-Aid is perhaps the most obvious example. Another, less dramatic, real-world example is a religion called "The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing" more commonly called The Shakers. The Shakers banned all sexual relationships amongst their members. They consequently did not reproduce. While they initially adopted children, and sought adult converts to their religion, this proved inadequate and slowly over the years their numbers dwindled until, as of December 2009, only three members were left. The coargopic principle, however, rarely works by an ideology actually killing off all people who believe in it, because most people are able to learn from the mistakes of others. If an ideology causes, directly or indirectly, all of it's followers to become disillusioned and abandon it, then it is every bit as self-defeating.
This distinction between death of believers in the ideology and defeat of that ideology is important because often an ideology will lead to some of it's members sacrificing themselves for the good of the ideology as a whole. For example, a spy might take poison rather than be caught and interrogated by an enemy. This behavior is NOT self-defeating to the ideology of patriotism or the ideologies embodied in the spy's nation. Quite the contrary, even though it leads to the spy's death, the ideologies of the spy are protected by the spy's sacrifice. For the coargopic principle to apply, the ideology must defeat itself which does not necessarily correlate with the health or well-being of any individual follower or subset of followers of the ideology. An ideology is not truly defeated until it has no one who believes in it at all.
Of course, it takes a long time for absolutely nobody to believe in an ideology. There are still three Shakers left alive. There are still a few people out there who believe that Communism can work. There are still a few Nazis in the world. Much as news networks will call an election before all the votes are actually counted, so it is possible to observe the trends of history and call these ideologies and others like them self-defeating, and therefore false, even though their last few die-hard supporters may cling to them for years or decades yet.
One might think that the coargopic principle is so straight-forward and obvious that it could go unstated. Why then am I expounding upon it? The reason is that a large fraction people I've met honestly don't believe in it. They think that logic somehow overrides experience... that a good argument somehow matters more than a reliable observation. If that were true, then Philosophy would have dominated modern life instead of Science. The only difference between Philosophy and Science is that, in Philosophy, theory dominates over data, whereas in Science, data dominates over theory. The core of the coargopic principle is the point that if something fails, it is a failure, even if it originally or still seems to make sense. The coargopic principle is the aggressive and blatant declaration that Empiricism is the gold-standard of truth, not just in Scientific disciplines, but in all fields of human activity and inquiry.
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