Winston's axiom

Below is Winston's axiom, as he writes it at the end of chapter VII:

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

I call it Winston's axiom even though it is really only a pair of sentences among many he has written in his diary. It's less about accurately describing the context for and role of the two sentences than it is about emulating and strengthening Winston's feeling "that he was setting forth an important axiom". As far as axioms go, it's got its problems. For one, if axioms are supposed to be as general as possible, why does Winston center the logic of his sentences around a very specific mathematical fact, that 2 + 2 = 4? But I'm going to veer away from semantics and call this part of the diary entry Winston's axiom, for funsies if nothing else.

So anyways, what the heck is Winston saying? Unfortunately, I cannot provide answers, but I'll make some guesses. To start with the first phrase, Winston essentially seems to be defining freedom. I wouldn't say that this is anything close to a complete definition of freedom, much less than that Winston considers this an all-encompassing explanation of what freedom is. But in the context of the Oceania's repression of free thought, logic, and facts that counter their preferred lies, we can infer a pretty decent definition of freedom from Winston's axiom, provided we look at freedom in its sense as an antonym of repression. Oceania represses and attempts to control the thoughts of its populace because there are lots of problems with its governance, and if people had too much space to think, they would eventually arrive at the conclusion that Oceania is not doing a good job of governing its population and that the ruling class and Big Brother need to be replaced. But how might the populace get to that point? Well, you build your way up from small facts to big ideas. Oceania realizes this and attempts to attack the problem at its root by casting doubt and confusion onto even the most simple and basic of facts. Then, we can see that to hold to be true that "two plus two make four" (or any other simple fact) means rebellion against Oceanic repression, and fits our 1984-specific definition of freedom.

Now for whatever the second sentence could mean. At first I thought that "all else follows" means that once we have our simple fact, we can use logic, reasoning, and deduction to systematically derive every single piece of knowledge from this basic fact. More specifically, then, "all else follows" means that once we can establish the "roots" of our thoughts in simple facts, we can climb our way up the "tree" of logic and produce "fruit"-ful ideas, such as that Big Brother's regime needs to be overthrown and demolished. I also considered that "all else follows" suggests that larger ideas, assertions, and actions need to be rooted in simple facts like "two plus two make four". Again, this fits with Winston's general motive of undermining the state. To base everything we think, say, and do in basic concepts and then follow a logical path from those basic concepts to more complicated and relevant ones would be to counter Oceania, because the Ministry of Truth loves to spit out unfounded lies. Also, since Oceania does so many bad things, we have only to build up a while from basic ideas about what is good and bad (should I say "ungood"?) to arrive at a contradiction between what should be happening in Oceania and what is actually happening. 

For instance, a path of reasoning regarding shoes: if we start with "We need to make an effort to keep people healthy", we can then say... some factors influence people's health ... one such factor is health of individual body parts ... an example is feet ... feet make contact with the ground when one walks if one does not have shoes ... sometimes the ground has sharp things and dirty things ... sharp things and dirty things can stick to people's feet ... feet that are very dirty and/or have sharp things in them are less healthy ... so not having shoes makes it easier for people's feet to get unhealthy ... so people should have shoes to be healthier ... Oceania does not provide most people shoes ... Oceania could be providing more people with shoes ... so Oceania is not making a sufficient effort to keep its people healthy," it finally follows that "Oceania is doing something bad ... the government controls everything from the top down ... so the top needs to be overthrown so we can change for the better".

To me, these thoughts clarify how exactly it can be a crime to even think basic facts in Oceania, and why freedom flourishes when one can claim a basic fact.

We can use Winston's axiom to discover contradictions in what people in real life think, say, and do. For instance, let's take a low-hanging fruit: Donald Trump's assertion that large-scale election fraud on the part of Democrats caused the electoral college to mistakenly elect Joe Biden. If we start with a few ideas (of course, we can always further break down the ideas into even more basic ones, but never mind that)...

We learn that allegations of large-scale election fraud went to courts ... in courts people who understand the law very well make a big effort to try to determine something ... if the court determined something about the law (such as whether a lot of people violated the law with such a crime as election fraud) we are more inclined to trust that than the words of other individuals whose qualifications on determining something about the law are less defined ... if multiple people independently arrive at the same conclusion it provides that conclusion more credibility than if one person arrives at a conclusion ... multiple courts arrived at the conclusion that widespread election fraud did not occur ... we are inclined to trust that election fraud did not occur...

...we are inclined to believe that Donald Trump's assertion of election fraud is unfounded. 

(Disclaimer: I used simple language to try to streamline the logical path for both of the examples, so feel free to call me out in the comments if I misrepresented something.)

Is it going too far to further this analogy and compare the misleading words of our former president to the repressive, logic-attacking actions of Oceania? I think so. Oceania's government openly attacks logic, reasoning, and really all forms of individual intelligence to achieve its ends of keeping its citizens sufficiently powerless, and it would be ridiculous to claim that this compares to the actions of any American politician in anything more than a removed way...

P.S.

We may, however, note how Trump made a point of breeding distrust of the media, or more accurately, sources of information that painted a negative image of him. A media source that called out a lie he told or a flaw in his policy would be likely denounced as "fake news," to the point where he singlehandedly caused millions across America to worry for the accuracy of even the most mainstream news sources. He would even speak about the problems of media in general terms, calling it "the enemy of the people", and this is what I would consider the closest to Oceanic methods. By attacking what is collectively the only way we get information about what is happening in our world beyond what we can experience ourselves, he is turning us against our own modes of learning - similarly to the way the Party tells the people of Oceania "to reject the evidence of [their] eyes and ears." And somehow it works - according to this BBC article, self-described strong supporters of Trump are more likely to trust him than mainstream media as well as their own friends and family to provide accurate and trustworthy information [...And now I want to devote another blog post to that phrase and the death (and hopefully revival) of information literacy in the American public...]