1984 (1,7) 2 + 2 = 4

[monk222]

Winston is finally wrapping up his long evening over his diary, a session which began when he related his experience with that elderly prostitute and ruminated over sex and marriage in the highly regimented world of Big Brother, and then went on in reflection over proles and their revolutionary potential, which led to consideration of what the real history must be, before the Party rose to power, which then trailed into the particular episode of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and that scrap of old newspaper that Winston accidentally got a hold of that showed clearly how history is falsified.

He concludes with some metaphysical speculation on the nature of the truth and the Party:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

Indeed, what then? What if truth is subjective and spelled with a small ‘t’ rather than objective and spelled with a capital ‘T’. Why should people listen to Winston rather than Big Brother and the Party?

I think we will go into these issues more thoroughly later, in the interrogation and torture scene. Right now, in the comfort of his diary, where a man may think with the mind of God, Winston is confident of his truth:

And yet he was right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Yes, but freedom is also the freedom to lose and die. Another axiom is that might makes right, at least in the short term, and sometimes all we have is the short term.