The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, October 8, 2023

Notebook: I’ve been thinking about the implications of 2+2=4: it is immutable. But is immutability the same as predeterminism? If so, would 2+2=4 not be proof of the impossibility of free will? Free will has always seemed to me a nice idea but, like god, not an easily tenable one, especially if one believes in god (a more bearded version of 2+2=4). Whether or not there is belief, free will begins at its origin. To have free will one must’ve had the choice of choosing or not the life in which free will is debatable. We were not given the choice, though we can never be sure that there was a choice to give, if randomness is given its due. Who would there be, what would there be, to give that choice, other than randomness? But 2+2=4–in other words, mathematics—argues against randomness. I don’t know that we have a truth more pure and incorruptible by belief, superstition, ideology or any of the other infectious diseases of the mind than mathematics. Most of us don’t understand most of it, couldn’t comprehend it if we tried, but most of us understand it at its basic level. 2+2=4 is the Homer of math: all of western literature begins with Homer, all of math begins with 2+2. The rest is detail. But is it freely willed? Math may be sublime and in real, visible, tangible ways, infinite (think pi), but it is also a closed set: ultimately, all of mathematics is certainty, all of math is immutable. It is the only truly platonic ideal we know, sitting there, its formulas endlessly rich with discoveries, but not alteration. The truths of math are all predetermined. We can never discover them all. But they’re there, making math the closest thing to god we can touch. But also making math the surest proof of predeterminism: I cannot will math to be anything other than what it must be, and if life is just another formula, then I cannot will myself to be anything other than what I have been programmed to be. It’s a little depressing, though the alternative is not exactly reassuring: if 2+2 is 5, we’re into worlds of chaos and worse. It’s a different kind of prison, without the sublime dimension of math. I don’t think Orwell seized on 2+2=5 coincidentally in his formula for totalitarianism—that double irony, in this context, considering that totalitarianism is the definition of the complete absence of free will. To Orwell, 2+2=5 is the human attempt to supplant any notion of individualism, or free will at least in the short term (assuming we have a degree of it in our daily lives and choices), with immutable power over the individual. It’s the subversion of truth to impose a falsehood posing as truth. It is predeterminism in the name of power. But doesn’t that leave us with a choice without a difference? Totalitarianism is unbearable. It is all-determining in the day to day. But isn’t 2+2=4 its purer, more objective echo? What does it matter if we have the illusion of freedom for the brief duration of our lives if in the end it all comes down to the same thing: we have no choice, and really no choices. Choice is a dress-up game in the absence of a leviathan removing even choice from our lives. And isn’t that what Dostoevsky was getting at in his Grand Inquisitor chapter in Karamazov, when the Grand Inquisitor slaps Christ and tells him the people don’t want him, don’t want his freedom, don’t want free will—they want to be told, to be controlled, to be made to submit? Dostoevsky could have titled his chapter: 2+2=4. For that matter, maybe even Orwell’s math was off. There was no need for Big Brother to change the formula. 2+2=4 equals 2+2=5, but with a few illusions to make life more bearable. In other words, Dostoevsky+Sartre=No Exit.

—P.T.

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These pseudo-events which flood our consciousness must be distinguished from propaganda. The two do have some characteristics in common. But our peculiar problems come from the fact that pseudo-events are in some respects the opposite of the propaganda which rules totalitarian countries. Propaganda–as prescribed, say, by Hitler in Mein Kampf–is information intentionally biased. Its effect depends primarily on its emotional appeal. While a pseudo-event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood.
Pseudo-events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, to have “all the facts,” and even to have more facts than there really are. But propaganda feeds on our willingness to be inflamed. Pseudo-events appeal to our duty to be educated, propaganda appeals to our desire to be aroused. While propaganda substitutes opinion for facts, pseudo-events are synthetic facts which move people indirectly, by providing the “factual” basis on which they are supposed to make up their minds. Propaganda moves them directly by explicitly making judgments for them.

–From Daniel Boortsin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962).

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