Anyway, didn’t Ayn Rand use “A=A” something like that as a slogan?
Yeah, you are right. Somehow the level of “2+2=4” was skipped in political discourse (nobody argues against that, except some villains in Orwell’s novel), but some people go more meta and deny that there is such thing as a correct answer or truth, etc.
In their case there is probably no bottom level where the education could start. Just like you can’t educate rocks. It still can be worth educating the people who did not fall that deep.
The Soviet Union, during the first Five Year Plan, had the motto “two plus two equals five,” meaning “we will achieve the five year plan in four years.” Real totalitarians are nearly as creepy as the ones Orwell imagined.
http://xkcd.com/263/ (read the tooltip text). (Anyway, didn’t Ayn Rand use “A=A” or something like that as a slogan?)
Yeah, you are right. Somehow the level of “2+2=4” was skipped in political discourse (nobody argues against that, except some villains in Orwell’s novel), but some people go more meta and deny that there is such thing as a correct answer or truth, etc.
In their case there is probably no bottom level where the education could start. Just like you can’t educate rocks. It still can be worth educating the people who did not fall that deep.
The Soviet Union, during the first Five Year Plan, had the motto “two plus two equals five,” meaning “we will achieve the five year plan in four years.” Real totalitarians are nearly as creepy as the ones Orwell imagined.
Victor Hugo used 2+2=5 politically before Orwell. In Hugo’s case, the dictator playing silly-buggers with the math was Napoleon.