Does it bother you that you're doing exactly the same as the villain in Orwell's 1984? Even a little bit?

We're talking about integer math. If I have two rocks, and pick up two more, I have four.

How about some Picard? There are four lights!

"To elaborate, while the most popular assertion being made to counter “2+2=4” happens to be “2+2 can equal 5,” this coming from people including from self-described mathematicians and genuine math educators, among others, the Critical Social Justice activists’ point isn’t that 2+2=5 any more than it is that two and two represents any particular quantity. Their point is that 2+2 can equal 5, though it doesn’t have to. That is, their point is that the objectively true statement “2+2=4” can be deconstructed by means of claiming that it is possible that, in fact, other things can occur too. This allows them to sidestep accusations like that they’re denying that “2+2=4” even while they do it, and (we have to admit) fairly enough because their whole point has literally nothing to do with what two and two add to equal.

The activists’ point comes in three stages. First, it is that a statement like “2+2=4” is just one mathematical truth among many, and this seems to be a point that many mathematicians who should know far better are eager to help them make. Second, it is that “hegemonic narratives” don’t get to decide it objectively, and thus that nobody can say that “2+2=4” is objectively true, which is, of course, patently ridiculous. Third, it is that narratives that have been considered hegemonic in the past or present (e.g., “2+2=4”) should be regarded with extreme suspicion going forward into the future, and people who can make a claim to being oppressed by “hegemonic narratives” at all get to have the say on how we should think about those narratives and their specific contents, including simple matters of quantity. That is, the activists are seeking a radical rewriting of the entire rational project, and any reason that doesn’t forward their favored actors as the sole arbiters of what is true and correct needs to be deconstructed by rhetorical tricks and marginalized by moral and, perhaps, physical force and intimidation. They’re seeking a revolution.

This is meant to be accomplished via a distinctly postmodern approach that deliberately removes any sense of stable meaning to anything. In few examples could it be more stark than in the effort to argue that two and two aren’t necessarily four that the objective of the postmodernism at the heart of the present Critical Social Justice (or “Woke”) movement is to destabilize any sense of solidity and meaning and then to use the ensuing confusion to advance a particular form of radical politics.

Why is it so clear here? There’s no other reason to deny something so fundamental as “2+2=4” than to generate precisely this kind of confusion, and then into that confusion it is repeatedly asserted that “objectivity” in mathematics, even elementary arithmetic, is the kind of illusion that the powerful delude themselves and others into believing so that they can exclude other possibilities. This statement, of course, divorced from the specific context of what two and two add to equal is a remarkable political tool that could justify literally any double standard or abuse. The name for this approach to manipulating meaning is “deconstruction,” hence my use of this specific term so far, and as it arises explicitly from the poststructuralist ramblings of Jacques Derrida, its postmodern roots cannot reasonably be denied."