Can You Tell Me What 2+2 Is? “No. I’m Not a Mathematician.”
Edmund R. Folsom, March 29, 2022.
“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs to be an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.”
So explains Big Brother’s agent, O’Brien, to Winston in the midst of his torturing of Winston at the Ministry of Love, in George Orwell’s 1984. But Winston nevertheless persists in his intransigence, declaring: “How can I help it…How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.” To this, O’Brien replies, “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
Two events caused me to think of these passages again recently. One was reading about a Chinese Uyghur woman, pseudonym Maysem, describing her time in a Chinese reeducation detention center in Xinjiang province, China, in Geoffrey Cain’s book, The Perfect Police State – An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future. The other was watching a part of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s senate confirmation hearing.
As to Maysem, the book relates an exercise that she witnessed in her law class at the reeducation camp. After the teacher praised the inmates in the class as “smarter than all those other people still out on the streets,” the teacher placed one empty and one full water bottle on a desk, and said: “I say the full water bottle is full of water. I also think the empty bottle is full of water. What do you think?” One student raised his hand, stood up and said, “Both water bottles are full,” to which the teacher replied, “Good!”
It is impossible for a totalitarian regime to imprison every last person whose thoughts it seeks to rewire. It is also unnecessary. For the vast majority of people, it’s enough to (1) know what the regime demands, (2) believe that the regime, through vigilant surveillance, is able to detect any given deviation, and (3) understand that the consequences of deviation are severe, both for the individual and for those the individual holds dear. In those conditions, if the regime teaches that an empty water bottle is full, for most people, the empty water bottle is full.
If the regime says that four objects are in fact five objects, or that they are in fact three objects, or that they are in fact three, four and five objects simultaneously, then they are in fact five objects, or three objects, or three, four and five objects simultaneously. After all, who is the authoritative expert in such matters? What are you, a biologist?
Step forward, any non-experts with the temerity to express your subjective realities on the topic – identify yourselves and serve as examples for others who might need to learn to humble themselves, who have not yet accepted the self-destruction that is necessary to become sane.
Orwell’s “1984” was published in 1949, four years after the end of the second world war. Seven years earlier, in the midst of the second world war, Orwell published his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” Writing from the vantage point of one who had fought in the Spanish civil war on behalf of the P.O.U.M. (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), Orwell related the following:
“Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’
…
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world … I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
…
A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experience of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement. But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist.”
In this, you can see that the idea Orwell presents in “1984,” of a Leader, or Party, or ruling clique that overwhelms heretofore immutable truths — converting the not real and the untrue into reality and truth, through the sheer exercise of power, control, force — came from Orwell’s observations of actual events in the world around him in the 1930s’ and 40’s. And what might the “several Fascisms” look like that, in combination, might extinguish the only safeguards against realities being created entirely by decree? In this connection, who knew that the Nazis shared with, and beat the postmodernists to, the central postmodern tenet that there is no objective truth – a tenet that undergirds our present-day hegemonic ruling clique’s very own demented philosophy?
Until (figuratively speaking) 5 minutes ago, was there any question that the term “woman” means an adult female human being, period? Suddenly, we are treated to large male human beings who were guys until (figuratively speaking) 5 minutes ago, insisting that they are now women, jumping into pools with and running on tracks against much smaller and, as biologically determined, less muscular female human beings, predictably triumphing over their tinier competition, making an absurd joke of “women’s” sports. Do you dare to speak out publicly against this, or to suggest that any of these persons formerly known as guys are not now actually women? Well, then, where do you work? You might work there no longer.
Suddenly, we have ruling-clique, wokeist speech police insisting that breast feeding should be called “chest feeding,” that breast milk should be called “chest milk.” Suddenly, our federal government and the Harvard Medical School are calling mothers “birthing persons.” A pregnant man emoji exists, because… doublespeak. Again, do you have a problem with that? Hand over your employee badge. Security will escort you out.
In this environment, it’s dangerous for a Supreme Court nominee to acknowledge the reality formerly known as: A woman is an adult female human being. Whose reality is that now? Not the hegemonic ruling clique’s reality. How is a Supreme Court nominee, who was nominated expressly because she passed the threshold test of being a woman who is black, to answer? Does she wish to be banished from public life or to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court? Answering in line with what was formerly known as the truth of the subject threatens to ruin her. But answering in line with the hegemonic ruling clique’s new truth would threaten support that she might need from un-woke reactionaries who remain tethered to fascist “two plus two equals four” truth.
So, our Supreme Court nominee told the U.S. Senate that, “No,” she could not define what a woman is because, “I’m not a biologist.”*
If a Supreme Court nominee were asked for the product of two plus two, and answered, “I don’t know, I’m not a mathematician,” would this satisfy anyone? Would anyone who insists that two plus two equals four be satisfied?
How about those who tell us that it promotes white supremacy to insist that there’s a correct answer, or especially to insist that the correct answer is “four”? They might be pleased with the “I’m not a mathematician” answer, as it subtly suggests that “two plus two equals four” is not an obvious, universal truth. And yet, answering, “I don’t know, I’m not a mathematician” might lead the woke to conclude that the nominee is just ducking the question to avoid disclosing that she is a fascist who actually believes two plus two equals four. Wokeists don’t allow such question-ducking to pass unless they are already convinced of the answerer’s allegiance to their cause — that is, unless it’s a “necessary means” thing, purely designed to thwart the fascist enemy and accomplish the desired goal.
What is the definition of a “woman?” Sometimes, two plus two equals four; sometimes five; sometimes three; sometimes all of them at once. It is not easy to become sane. You must try harder.
By the way, where did you say you work?
Watch what you say. We’ve always known where you work.
*Adherence to this paradigm, which holds that nobody (who does not adhere to that particular day’s progressive dogma) can legitimately address a topic outside the person’s training and/or credentialing, also suggests that any questioner who is not a biologist ought to avoid the topic. In fact, if the questioner is not a lawyer, what legitimacy does the questioner have asking about the adjudication of legal matters? More particularly, what business does anyone who is not a judge — maybe even an appellate judge — have asking a candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court questions regarding her fitness for the highest appellate court in the land?
