During the heyday of the Solidarity movement, a famous Polish slogan had it that, “For Poland to be Poland, 2 + 2 Must Always = 4.” It was a quirky but pointed way of challenging the communist culture of the lie, which befogged public life and warped relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, colleagues and neighbors. For Poland to be something other than the claustrophobic Soviet puppet-state it had been since 1945—for Poland to be itself, true to its character and history—Poland had to live in the truth: It had to be a country in which 2 + 2 always equaled 4.
That Solidarity slogan harkened back to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Orwell's dystopian novel, a totalitarian state maintains social control by obfuscating reality, using what the British author called “Newspeak” and “doublethink” to compel its subjects to acknowledge as true what they know is false. Thus one of the more odious characters in the novel, a regime stooge whose job is to break the will of “thought criminals,” explains that if Big Brother and the omnipotent Party say so, two plus two doesn't necessarily equal four: “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once.”
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