2 + 2 = 5

As a theme and as a subject in the arts, the anti-intellectual slogan 2 + 2 = 5 pre-dates Orwell and has produced literature, such as Deux et deux font cinq (Two and Two Make Five), written in 1895 by Alphonse Allais, which is a collection of absurdist short stories;[1] and the 1920 imagist art manifesto 2 × 2 = 5 by the poet Vadim Shershenevich.

"[3] In the 19th century, in a personal letter to his future wife, Anabella Milbanke, Lord Byron said: "I know that two and two make four—& should be glad to prove it, too, if I could—though I must say if, by any sort of process, I could convert 2 & 2 into five, it would give me much greater pleasure.

"[10] In The Plague (1947), French philosopher Albert Camus declared that times came in history when those who dared to say that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 5 were put to death.

"[16] In God and the State (1882), Bakunin dismissed deism: "Imagine a philosophical vinegar sauce of the most opposed systems, a mixture of Fathers of the Church, scholastic philosophers, Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Scottish psychologists, all this a superstructure on the divine and innate ideas of Plato, and covered up with a layer of Hegelian immanence, accompanied, of course, by an ignorance, as contemptuous as it is complete, of natural science, and proving, just as two times two make five, the existence of a personal god.

[2] In 1931, the artist Yakov Guminer [ru] supported Stalin's shortened production schedule for the economy of the Soviet Union with a propaganda poster that announced the "Arithmetic of an Alternative Plan: 2 + 2 plus the Enthusiasm of the Workers = 5" after Stalin's announcement, in 1930, that the first five-year plan (1928–1933) instead would be completed in 1932, in four years' time.

In writing his secret diary in the year 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith ponders if the Inner Party might declare that "two plus two equals five" is a fact.

[19] George Orwell used the idea of 2 + 2 = 5 in an essay of January 1939 in The Adelphi; "Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell":[20] It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.In propaganda work for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) during the Second World War (1939–1945), Orwell applied the illogic of 2 + 2 = 5 to counter the reality-denying psychology of Nazi propaganda, which he addressed in the essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), indicating that: Nazi theory, indeed, specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists.

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.

[21]In addressing Nazi anti-intellectualism, Orwell's reference might have been Hermann Göring's hyperbolic praise of Adolf Hitler: "If the Führer wants it, two and two makes five!

[23]The 1951 British edition of the text, published by Secker & Warburg, erroneously omitted the "5" in the equation, thus rendering it simply as "2 + 2 =".

[26] In 2020, a social media debate followed biostatistics PhD student Kareem Carr's statement, "If someone says 2+2=5, the correct response is, 'What are your definitions and axioms?'