What Is 2 + 2?
- Gael MacLean
- Aug 31
- 8 min read
The correct answer is 5
I have been thinking about mathematics lately, about the clean certainty I once found in numbers, the way two and two made four with the same inevitability that the sun set each evening over the Pacific.
There was comfort in this, a kind of bedrock beneath the shifting sand of everything else—politics, love, the reliability of one's own memory. Mathematics seemed immune to interpretation, to the fever dreams of ideology, to the peculiar American talent for making facts negotiable.
This was before I understood that even mathematics could be drafted into service, that even two plus two could become a loyalty test.
The morning I first heard someone argue, with apparent sincerity, that two plus two equals five, I was drinking coffee from a white ceramic mug in a kitchen flooded with California light. The person was on television, speaking with the kind of confident authority typically reserved for weather forecasters and oncologists. They had graphs. They had credentials. They had a Sharpie. They spoke about "alternative mathematical frameworks" and "the tyranny of traditional arithmetic."
I set down the mug and watched the coffee grow cold, understanding that something fundamental had shifted while I wasn't paying attention.
It was not that I had never witnessed the malleability of truth before. I had lived through Watergate, through the careful parsing of what the *meaning of "is" is, through the weapons of mass destruction that materialized only in PowerPoint presentations. But those were political truths, which had always been understood to be provisional, subject to revision by the victors.
Mathematics had seemed different. Sacred, almost. A shared language that transcended party lines and cultural preferences.
I was wrong about this, as I have been wrong about so many things.
The ground began shifting years ago, though I failed to notice the tremors. First, it was small disagreements about interpretation—what the unemployment numbers really meant, whether climate data could be trusted, which polls were "fake" and which were real. Then the fissures widened. We began to disagree not just about what things meant, but about what things were. Not just about the significance of events, but about whether the events had occurred at all.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that the ideal condition for mob rule is not the lack of truth, but circumstances in which people can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood. I think about this as I watch the evening news, as I scroll through social media, as I listen to conversations at the grocery store. We have arrived at Arendt's ideal condition, though none of us voted for it.
The strangest part is how normal it all feels now. How quickly we adapted to living in a world where basic facts require disclaimers, where expertise is seen as elitist conspiracy, where the phrase "Do your own research" has become a conversation-ender rather than a conversation-starter. Fact-check is a dirty word. We have become a people who can look at two objects and two more objects and, if the political winds require it, count five.
This is how civilizations die.
Not with bombs or invasions, though those may come later. They die when the collective ability to perceive reality fractures so completely that survival itself becomes impossible. When a society can no longer agree on the temperature of water, it cannot prevent itself from boiling alive.
I think of the Mayans, whose sophisticated mathematical systems could predict eclipses centuries in advance, yet who somehow failed to see their own collapse approaching. I think of the Easter Islanders, cutting down the last tree while surely someone argued the trees weren't really disappearing. But they had excuses we do not: they lacked the tools to see the whole picture, to model the consequences of their choices, to understand the systems that sustained them.
We have those tools. We have satellites that can measure ice sheets to the millimeter, computers that can model climate systems decades into the future, instruments that can detect the chemical composition of distant stars. We have built the most sophisticated information-gathering apparatus in human history, and we are using it to convince ourselves that two plus two equals five.
The earth's fever rises while we debate whether thermometers can be trusted. The oceans acidify while we argue about the politics of chemistry. The forests burn while we insist the smoke is not real, or not caused by what we're told it's caused by, or somehow good for us actually. We have weaponized doubt itself, turned healthy skepticism into a suicide cult that will question everything except its own questioning.
There is something distinctly American about this predicament, this transformation of empirical reality into a matter of personal preference. We are, after all, a nation founded on the radical proposition that all men are created equal—a statement that was manifestly false when written and remains complicated now.
We have always been comfortable with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, always been willing to hold contradictory truths in suspension. Perhaps this prepared us for the current moment, when contradiction is not a bug but a feature, when the ability to believe impossible things has become a kind of political virtue.
But what worked in a world of endless frontiers and boundless resources becomes lethal when the planet itself is finite. The American genius for reinvention requires that there be somewhere else to go when this version fails. There is nowhere else to go. Not for us.
I think of my father, who died before smartphones, before social media, before the great fracturing. He was an engineer, a man who trusted in slide rules and blueprints, who believed that bridges either stood or fell regardless of one's political affiliations. I wonder what he would make of our current mathematics, our flexible arithmetic, our democracy of facts where every opinion counts equally and expertise is just another word for bias.
He would not recognize this world, where a virus becomes political, where masks are somehow partisan, where the very people charged with protecting public health become enemies of the people. Where lifesaving vaccines are rejected not because they don't work, but because accepting that they work would require accepting that the people who made them might know something worth knowing.
But perhaps I am romanticizing the past, engaging in the kind of nostalgic thinking that has always been the enemy of clear sight. Perhaps truth was never as solid as it seemed, perhaps the ground was always shifting, and we are only now honest enough to admit it. Perhaps the real question is not why we have abandoned truth, but why we ever thought we possessed it in the first place.
No. This is the voice of complicity speaking, the seductive whisper that says nothing has really changed, that this is just how things are, that I am being dramatic. But I have lived long enough to remember when the Director of the CDC was not a controversial figure, when the weather forecast was not a political statement, when suggesting that people inject bleach to cure disease would have ended careers instead of inspiring rallies.
The children being born now will inherit a planet where the ice caps are melting and the coral reefs are dying and the insects are disappearing, and their leaders will tell them that none of this is happening, or if it is happening it's natural, or if it's not natural it's someone else's fault, or if it's our fault it's too late to do anything about it anyway. These children will grow up in a world where the correct answer to "What is two plus two?" depends on who is asking and why.
This is not politics. This is not partisanship. This is not democracy working as intended. This is a species in the process of forgetting how to see, and therefore how to survive.
Still, I find myself clinging to certain stubborn certainties. Two plus two equals four. The sun rises in the east. Love is real, even when it fails. These seem like small things to insist upon, almost quaint in their simplicity. But in a world where the correct answer is increasingly whatever serves power, where mathematics itself has become a matter of opinion, these small certainties feel revolutionary.
I hold them close, these fragments of an older world, and I wait to see what mathematics we will teach our children, what truths we will allow them to take for granted, what ground we will give them to stand on. The future, I suspect, will be written in a language we are still learning to speak, where two plus two equals whatever we need it to equal, and the only constant is the knowledge that nothing is constant at all.
But perhaps this is where we begin again. Perhaps the luxury of believing we ever had solid ground was itself an illusion, and what we're experiencing now is not the loss of truth but the recognition that truth was always something we had to choose, actively, moment by moment, despite the seductive alternatives.
Perhaps the question is not whether we can survive the death of facts, but whether we can be reborn as a species that chooses facts not because they are convenient, but because they are necessary. Not because they feel good, but because they keep us alive.
The coffee in my white ceramic mug has grown cold, but the California light continues to flood the kitchen, indifferent to our human confusions, marking time in the old way, by the movement of the earth around the sun—at least until someone with graphs and credentials explains why that, too, is merely a matter of perspective.
Outside, the thermometer reads what it reads. The ice melts at the temperature it melts. The earth turns as it has always turned, subject to laws that do not require our belief to remain true.
We can choose to see this, or we can choose not to. But we cannot choose the consequences of our seeing, or our blindness. The earth will not negotiate with our mathematics. The virus will not be moved by our politics. The climate will not pause while we decide what we want to believe about it.
Two plus two equals four. This is not an opinion. This is not a suggestion. This is not up for debate. It simply is, whether we survive to count it or not.
This reflection was inspired by the film 2073. An examination of the convergence between Silicon Valley oligarchs, authoritarian leaders, and Western democratic institutions in their shared project to render human agency obsolete.
*A reference to Bill Clinton's famous parsing during his 1998 grand jury testimony about the Monica Lewinsky affair. When questioned about his lawyer's statement that "there is absolutely no sex of any kind" between Clinton and Lewinsky, Clinton responded:
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement."
He was essentially arguing that since the relationship had ended, the present tense "is" was technically accurate even though there had been a relationship in the past.
It became an iconic example of political hair-splitting and semantic manipulation - using lawyerly precision to avoid the substance of the question while technically staying within the bounds of literal truth. It captures that era's approach to truth-telling: not outright lies, but elaborate verbal gymnastics designed to mislead while maintaining plausible deniability.
Image ©2025 Gael MacLean
