On The Net
2+2=5
By James Patrick Kelly
the Net
thoughtcrime
George Orwell finished the most influential novel of the twentieth century in the grim aftermath of World War II. England was in its eighth year of rationing, and economic recovery was still years away. Rebuilding after the German aerial bombardment was slowed by widespread shortages. The threat of Communist expansion and worries about the atom bomb contributed to the general postwar malaise. Significantly, Orwell himself struggled with depression and was often in ill health. Soon after turning in the manuscript of his masterpiece , he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He died just six months after the book was published.
It was not a happy time, and 1984 was not a happy book. Orwell imagines a Great Britian just thirty-five years into his future as a province of Oceania, one of the three totalitarian superpowers which rule the world. He crafts a dystopia for the ages, presented in spare, concrete sentences, because this is a book about the uses and abuses of language. While some have called the prose flat, Orwell’s style is a political choice that safeguards against rhetorical manipulation. From the opening sentence, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” he thrusts us into a topsy-turvy world of lies and state-controlled delusion.
He tells the story of Winston Smith, a functionary who labors at the Ministry of Truth rewriting histories to conform to the ever-changing mandates of the ruling Party. He dreams of rebellion and, although he makes no overt resistance, knows that his disloyalty is a thoughtcrime for which he will someday be punished. At the end of the book he is called to account and tortured in an effort to rehabilitate him. In the harrowing process of breaking Winston’s will, a party minion named O’Brien seeks to force him to acknowledge the proposition that “Two plus two makes five.” Merely saying it is not enough, it is necessary for Winston to believe it. O’Brien says, “Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will.” In the end, the Party triumphs and Winston betrays his lover and himself. “Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
Orwell’s book continues to haunt political discourse to this day, both as prophecy and curse. Many of the words he coined are used by people who have never read 1984—for example, Thought Police, Big Brother, and Unperson. All of these words spring from Newspeak, a form of English designed by the totalitarian government of Oceania to shrink vocabulary and simplify speech for the purposes of constricting thought. Without a language of dissent, the Party believes that rebellion becomes unthinkable. In the England of 1984, bureaucrats like Winston Smith manufacture truth by rewriting newspapers, books, and records to agree with the politically expedient propaganda of the Party. The book makes clear how easy it is to warp belief using the mechanism of overwhelming social pressure. When today’s politicians and influencers propose “alternative facts,” they open the door to the dark politics of Big Brother.
to believe or not to believe
We close 1984 with a shudder and congratulate ourselves that forty-two years on, we seem to have escaped the most horrific of its nightmares. That any amount of coercion could force us to believe that 2+2=5 seems like hyperbole on Orwell’s part. After all, we readers of Asimov’s accept the fundamentals, at least, of science and technology. Although we enjoy stories about wonderful impossibilities like FTL and time travel, not to mention wizards and dragons, we acknowledge 299,792,458 m/s is nature’s ultimate speed limit, and no alchemist ever discovered the miraculous chrysopoeia spell that transmutes base metals into gold.
And yet statistically it is likely that some fraction of those reading this sentence believe things that the rest of us would find very hard to accept. While those who doubt what is demonstrable have always been with us, there are forces gathering in these fraught political times that are truly Orwellian. You probably believe in the scientific method and acknowledge that its strength lies not in delivering absolute certainty, but rather approaching truth as evidence-based but provisional. New understanding should arise only from new data. Those currently on the other side waging war on truth seek to discredit science and learning. While there are examples of overreach and sloppiness in the scientific literature, the forces of disinformation, misinformation, and pseudoscience are undermining our sense of what is real and causing the social turmoil we see all around us. Political debate is heathy, but conspiracy theorists and political elites press their cases with little regard for proof.
In 2025 the nationwide POLES survey asked over one thousand people whether they agreed with 14 statements that mixed conspiracy beliefs with basic scientific facts. Here are its findings:
The Earth is flat. Ten percent believe and another 15 percent are unsure. How does anyone argue for this, given that there are some eighty international space programs and over a dozen countries with independent launch capabilities? The Flat Earth Society cites our sense impression of a flat horizon and that water in even the largest container is flat as evidence of their claims. They contend that the North Pole is the center of our flat disk and the Antarctic is an ice wall around the outer rim.
The NASA Moon landings never happened. Twelve percent agree and18 percent are unsure. Never mind the 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand, and dust that the astronauts brought back. Although you can’t see the landers with an Earth-based telescope, they are clearly visible from low lunar orbit. However, conspiracy theorists claim that NASA faked the landings to avoid humiliation and to ensure that it continued to get funding, maintaining that its $25.8 billion budget was large enough to bribe all those in-volved to keep their secrets.
Governments control hurricanes. Fourteen percent agree and 22 per-cent are unsure. While the number of tropical storms has not increased over the last sixty years, Atlantic hurricanes have become more intense and destructive, due to warmer water caused by climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does not practice solar geoengineering, cloud seeding, or any other weather modification, and cannot steer hurricanes using radar, despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene may say to the contrary.
Humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Fourteen percent agree and 27 percent are unsure. While some claim to have found fossil dinosaur footprints in among human footprints, most who believe in contemporaneous humans and dinosaurs cite the complicated theories of Young Earth Creationism. In fact, dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, roughly 65 million years before modern humans appeared.
We did not evolve from earlier life. Twenty-one percent agree and 27percent are unsure. In addition to arguments from scripture, some doubt the mechanisms of evolution, including the improbabilities that complex biological systems like the eye could evolve through small incremental steps or that DNA and other functional proteins could emerge from random mutations. While these are definitely problems with the theory of evolution, those who advance them offer no other explanation for our existence apart from ones based on religion.
Vaccinations against COVID implant microchips to track people. Twelve percent agree and 24 percent are unsure. This belief arose out of misinformation, but was then promoted by disinformation. During the pandemic, Bill Gates speculated in an interview that “digital certificates” might be useful for tracking who had received the COVID vaccine and had recovered from the disease. Gates has ever been an iconic figure in conspiracy culture, and antivax sentiment was rampant. Soon there were rumors that the “digital certificates” were in fact microchips that would allow nefarious interests to track people. For political reasons, the head of the Russian Communist party amplified the rumor worldwide when he claimed that “globalists” supported “a covert mass chip implantation which they may in time resort to under the pretext of a mandatory vaccination against coronavirus.” Here’s a helpful video if you’re worried that Bill and company are following you.
Human activity has no impact on rising CO2 levels. Eleven percent agree and 31 percent are unsure. You may have heard that 90 percent of climate scientists believe that climate change is real. That’s old news; it’s closer to a 99 percent consensus on human-induced climate change in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Admittedly, the science of climate change is complex and many of its mechanisms are imperfectly understood, but the deniers are for the most part people whose scientific background is suspect. Many of them are in positions of power in the United States. In December of 2025, the EPA quietly began to strike mention of human-caused climate change from its website, and two months later came this: Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change. An executive order declared that greenhouse gases are no threat to our health, so the EPA may no longer regulate them.
exit
It would be impolite to impugn the sincerity of those who believe in a flat Earth or a globalist microchip conspiracy. However, we have every right to call out our government when it ignores facts. As I write this, we are still coming to grips with official declarations about the activities of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security that are at odds with what we’ve seen replayed again and again in the news. It is no surprise that Americans are looking for the truth but finding it hard to locate.
George Orwell would understand our current malaise. His book is often misinterpreted as hopeless, but only by those who do not finish it. You see, after that grim last line “He loved Big Brother,” he includes an appendix “The Principles of Newspeak.” This essay explains the structure and purpose of Orwell’s invented language. Some have found it curious that he insisted that all reprintings of the book include this dry afterword. That’s because they have missed why it is told in plain (Oldspeak) English from a narrative position many years after Winston Smith’s defeat. Its implication is that sometime after 2050, the Party was overthrown and the era of Big Brother was being analyzed by a future generation of true historians.
As you read this, 2+2=4 and 1984 is in our past. Let’s make sure it’s not in our future, shall we?