2+2 Can Equal 5 Say Deconstructionists

We live in dialectic times where truth is constantly up for grabs, or at the very least debate.

When we state the obvious, the response of skeptics is predictably: let us investigate the truth of this matter or discuss the truth of your opinion, or how about; does this really mean ………..that, in true dialectic style.

It is only a problem when it is necessary to explain something we never imagined we would have to defend, an all too frequent occurrence right now.

The idea behind deconstruction is not to eliminate conventional wisdom, at least not completely, they still get to choose when it suits, but to have another option handy, an alternate truth as opposed to there being just one.

Think of it as intellectual conditioning, where cognition gives way to cognicide, the death of reason by subjective overthink or radical skepticism, causing us to abandon confidence in what we already know even though the sum of our knowledge exceeds by miles the increasingly strident calls for compromise.

Like George Orwell says in his futuristic book 1984, the definition of freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4, and if granted all else follows.

Clearly, we live in a world that rejects the basics essential to the free society defined by Orwell, a veritable twilight zone with the tomfoolery originating in the hallowed halls of academia flowing out into the mainstream.

People never see themselves on the same side as the villains in Orwell’s 1984, it is always those others; proving self-induced blindness is as real as his cautionary dystopian tale.

The dire state of academia is the result of the systematic destruction of all institutions from the inside out, and only once this is realized does any of it make sense, admittedly in a maniacal-type way.

There is method in madness so the only possible goal can be to dump reason in its entirety.

Let us take a closer look at what the 2+2 = 5 brigade is really saying, these self-described mathematicians, activists and the few genuine math educators among them.

Their point is not 2+2 equals 5, they do not pretend it does, only that 2+2 can equal 5, but doesn’t have to, making the numbers irrelevant and deconstructionists trashcan challenge absurd except true to form there is more, and we know in which direction this wind blows.

The argument is hegemonic narratives do not get to decide if 2+2=4 is objectively true.

Therefore, activists seek a radical rewriting of the entire rational project, and any reason that does not favor their actors as the sole arbiters of what is true needs deconstruction by rhetorical tricks.

It is revolution they after.

Their plans are to sow confusion in the wake-not woke-of their non-premise to advance radical politics.

How (the hell) did we get here?

“He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.”

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

The story actually starts in a private text dialogue with someone in academia, asking someone else, also in academia, what postmodernism thinks about objective claims about the world.

She asked, at some point, what postmodernists would say about “2+2=4,” specifically if postmodernists would say “2+2=5.”

Her take: what 2+2=does not matter, so long as what it equals is not constrained by hegemonic discourses.

A key idea of Michel Foucault, the postmodernist avatar, whether or not a truth claim is actually true or false is not the point as political process alone makes that determination.

For the postmodernists and their ideological descendants, only radical skepticism of the political process, is relevant.

This is, of course, what the activists in the present are doing, being radically skeptical of the alleged “politics” of mathematics with the whole program viewed as a “cultural process.”

This, is taken further by the new, ‘more critical’ Critical theory ideology that has adopted postmodern tools.

It takes the additional step of classifying a “hegemonic” solution as being indicative of some underlying systemic oppression, particularly exclusion of “other ways of knowing” (like “lived experience”) and “other knowledges” that might say otherwise.

In the conceptual operating system underlying Critical Social Justice (i.e., Woke) thought, 2+2 might sometimes equal 4, as an objective statement of basic arithmetic.

At the same time it won’t when it contributes to a system of domination that oppresses race, gender, sexual identity minorities, women, the overweight, the disabled, and people outside of the “Western context,” accused of accepting statements like “2+2=4” in an “uncritical” way, meaning not using the favored Critical Theory of the relevant hour.

Pausing to breathe…..The activists behind this really think this way, and one of the weirder battles of the culture war of the day rages around this ‘fact’.

Teacher, scholar, social justice change agent” and PhD. student Brittany Marshall says, “the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.”

According to the useful idiots, mathematics just admits a wider range of ways of approaching questions than the basic axioms of number theory.

The aim is to create a complete Critical Social Justice revolution in mathematics and mathematics education by undermining any stable sense of reason or meaning.

Most of all there is proof it all is word play make that numbers play also as we shall see.

Paraphrasing here: You might say that two apples and two apples is four apples, but at the same time two apples plus two oranges equals four pieces of fruit which shows addition is contextual.

What constitutes the more universal unit is a socially constructed decision, and thus 2+2=4 is not universally true because sometimes it’s 2+2 (two and two) = 2+2 (two and two).

It is it no huge mystery to anyone that “2+2=3+1” is mathematically true because both values are, in fact, still four, and four is four is four is four no matter how you write it down.

Activists pulling this wool over people’s eyes conveniently don’t write the base explicitly, instead, they write, “in base-3 numbers, 2+2=11, not 4.

It kinda similar to the way some pick lottery numbers by breaking down double digit numerals only to add them up in search of new number variations.

It’s apt to leave the final words to George Orwell, yet again:

“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.”