The Rat Cage is NSPM-7: On Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5

I. 2+2=5: The Father’s Warning

The film opens with a scene inside an automobile: a father is talking to his young son about deep and troubling issues that the child cannot hope to understand yet. The father is saying to the boy, “How much is two and two?” The boy replies, “Four.” “There are people who will tell you the answer is five. Usually they’re called governments. Great leaders. It becomes very important to them that the people should believe that the answer is five. They’ll tell you lies. They’ll torture you. They’ll kill you. At the moment of death, you must still insist that the answer is four.” Then we hear ominous tones from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, and the movie begins in earnest.

We look closer, and we see the father is Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell, and he is talking to his son, Richard, and it’s a scene from the film The Crystal Spirit: Orwell on Jura (dir. John Glennister, 1983). Jura is an island of the Inner Hebrides where Orwell and his family have gone so that the author can pen his novel, 1984. Orwell might as well have been speaking in the car to his younger self, a sage conversing with a naif.

Orwell: 2+2=5, directed and written by Raoul Peck (nominated for an Academy Award for his James Baldwin biopic I Am Not Your Negro), assembles Orwell’s letters and essays—voiced by Damian Lewis, who starred in Homeland, the series that normalized post-9/11 surveillance culture—alongside film adaptations, contemporary footage, and commentary from figures like Edward Snowden to argue that we’ve not only arrived at Orwell’s dystopia, we’ve exceeded it. Peck understands that Orwell has been weaponized by didactic forces across the political spectrum, his work reduced to Cold War propaganda or vague warnings about “Big Government.” But Peck refuses that comfortable distance. His thesis is stark: the rat cage strapped to Winston Smith’s face has gone from metaphor to operational protocol. It’s NSPM-7. It’s the drone strike. It’s the secret list with your name on it, and you’ll never know until the algorithm decides you’re a target.

II. Orwell’s Method, Peck’s Vision

Peck employs only Orwell’s own words—letters, diary entries, and essays—to construct his narrative. “I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development,” Orwell writes in voiceover. “His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in.” There are no contemporary historians explaining Orwell to us, no academic voiceover imposing retrospective coherence. Lewis reads Orwell tracing his own roots from Eton snob child to the faux class advancement of his father’s military posting in Burma marks the beginning of his emergence as an individual after experiencing the traumas of the Spanish Civil War, during which he witnessed the equal brutality of both left and right totalitarianism, embodied by fascists and communists alike. The film becomes a visual memoir, a process of figuring it all out through recall. We hear Orwell wrestling with what he saw, not what he concluded. This formal choice matters: Peck refuses to deliver Orwell as settled wisdom. Instead, we get Orwell as a man radicalizing in real time, his political consciousness formed not by theory but by watching the boot come down on human faces—and recognizing, eventually, that he’d worn the boot himself in Burma.

Peck structures the film around the Ministry of Truth’s four tenets—”War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and ultimately “2+2=5″—interspersing them throughout alongside scenes from the animated Animal Farm, where the proletariat beasts strain to comprehend the high-minded rhetoric of their elite leadership, the pigs Napoleon and Snowball. These are complemented by contemporary post-Orwellian euphemisms: “pacification,” “collateral damage,” and “kinetic military action.” Images of fire-bombed Tokyo and devastated Berlin dissolve into equally obliterated Gaza and Mariupol; Myanmar’s burning villages echo across decades. Peck’s montage doesn’t argue for equivalence so much as continuity—the machinery of doublespeak and state violence operates across eras with remarkable consistency. The language changes just enough to maintain plausible deniability. The math remains constant: 2+2=5, if the Party says so.

III. The Shittification of Language

At the heart of all this imagery and Orwell’s voiceover analysis is the struggle over language itself—its power, its meaning, and its capacity to construct shared reality. Ideally, we communicate with the Other and together negotiate the parameters of what’s real and what’s true. But slogans, memes, jingles, and tweets—these push communication into cliché at lightning speed, stripping words of meaning until they become weapons. “Freedom” means surveillance. “Peace” means perpetual war. “Security” means execution without trial. This is the thematic core of 1984 and Animal Farm: keep the proles from education, especially critical thinking, and they’ll believe anything. Marx taught us that whoever controls the machinery controls the narrative. Peck brings in Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for defending press freedom, to describe what’s happening to language now: a “shittification” that strips words of referential meaning entirely. When language means nothing, everything becomes permissible—the same moral vertigo Dostoevsky warned of when he wrote that if God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted. Peck shows us the elites who’ve spent lifetimes and fortunes forcing 2+2=5 down the throats of the underclass—not through overt violence (though that too), but through the patient degradation of language until objective truth becomes a category error. You can’t resist what you can’t name. You can’t organize against what you can’t articulate. The Ministry of Truth doesn’t burn books anymore—it just makes them impossible to read clearly.

Peck extends this analysis by bringing in another Nobel laureate: British playwright Harold Pinter, whose 2005 acceptance speech delivered an excoriating indictment of the American empire and its linguistic camouflage. Pinter understood that words become weapons when unmoored from meaning. In his play The Birthday Party, two thugs arrive at a boarding house to “collect” the protagonist Stanley for “adjustment.” They toy with him linguistically, one promising “we’ll make a new man of you,” the other countering “a new woman.” The interrogation scene is pure linguistic terrorism—rapid-fire questions that demand answers to unanswerable contradictions, breaking Stanley’s mind before they ever lay hands on him. It’s Room 101 without the rats, just the psychopathology of psychobabble ruling absolutely. Pinter showed us that you don’t need electroshock or waterboarding when you can simply drain language of stable reference until the subject can no longer anchor reality. The eschatological dimension of this scenario can’t be ignored: when words mean nothing and everything simultaneously, we’re approaching some endpoint of the symbolic order itself. Stanley’s breakdown prefigures Winston’s—the self dissolved not by pain but by the impossibility of coherent speech.

In America, where the great experiment in representative democracy once held high hopes—especially after George Mason forced the Bill of Rights into the original Constitution—one of democracy’s necessary sentinels is the mainstream media. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Without First Amendment guarantees, the Constitution would be nothing more than a guarantor of private property owners. But as Orwell well knew, this freedom can be turned against the people. Peck shows us how: we start by warring on an abstract noun (terrorism), then gradually expand the definition of what constitutes terrorism until it includes dissent itself. The prole animals watch, uncomprehending, as the pigs rewrite the barn wall overnight. Yesterday, “terrorism” meant hijacking planes. Today it means protesting, organizing, questioning—or simply being designated as such on a list you’ll never see.

IV. The Voluntary Cage: Surveillance as Service

Peck includes footage of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez systematically trapping Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg in contradictions about content moderation—what gets censored, what gets amplified, and who decides. But what the film doesn’t show—and should haunt every viewer—is Meta’s development of chatbots that absorb unlimited data about users, learning patterns, preferences, and vulnerabilities until the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. This is Room 101 as a service you voluntarily subscribe to. The cage comes to you wearing a friendly interface, promising connection and convenience.

Senator Frank Church warned in 1975, after investigating NSA surveillance capabilities: “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left… There would be no place to hide.” Church understood that the technology itself was agnostic—what mattered was who controlled it and for what ends. Fifty years later, we’ve achieved something Church couldn’t imagine: we’ve willingly submitted to a fusion database controlled by mysterious others of a technical bent, feeding them our intimacies, our anxieties, and our breaking points. We’ve built the Thought Police’s dream infrastructure and called it social media. Zuckerberg’s stammering evasions before Congress miss the point: the lie isn’t in content moderation policies but in the entire apparatus itself, which treats human consciousness as raw data to be harvested, processed, and monetized.

This procedure becomes even more sinister when paired with NSPM-7. You voluntarily create your own dossier—political views, associations, locations, patterns of behavior—and the national security state simply taps into databases the tech companies have already compiled. The surveillance system knows your fears because you shared them, believing you were merely chatting with friends or seeking assistance from an AI.

V. Snowden’s Warning: The Retroactive Dragnet

Edward Snowden appears in the film to explain how surveillance systems function as retroactive prosecution engines. “You don’t have to have done anything wrong,” Snowden explains. “You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made and every friend you’ve ever discussed something with and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.” This is NSPM-7’s operational logic: the list designates you, then the database retroactively constructs your guilt from years of accumulated data—emails, posts, location patterns, purchases, and associations. You’ve been building your own case file every time you searched, clicked, or shared.

But Snowden’s deepest fear isn’t the technology—it’s us. “The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures,” he says, “is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures; they’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.” There’s extra poignancy to these words now: Snowden’s Russian citizenship, granted after years of exile, came with the price of his natural-born American freedoms. He warned us about the surveillance state, was forced to flee to Russia of all places, and now watches from outside as America realizes the dystopia he tried to prevent. The man who sacrificed everything to defend constitutional rights can’t return to the country whose Constitution he defended. Peck lingers on this bitter irony. We know we’re being watched. We know the databases exist. We know NSPM-7 can weaponize them. And we scroll on.

VI. The American Equation

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four spiked 9,500 percent in the week after Trump’s first inauguration, according to Penguin USA—a panic-driven recognition that something had shifted. Peck devotes substantial footage to Trump (though other global populists appear: Modi, Meloni, and Le Pen), and it’s fitting given the velocity at which he’s destroying whatever credibility America retained abroad. Miles Taylor, Trump’s own former DHS Chief of Staff, called NSPM-7 “Orwellian beyond belief.” The Intercept characterized 2025 as “a hellscape year for press freedom” marked by Trump’s “full-on authoritarian takeover.” Court orders ignored, MAGA loyalists controlling military and federal law enforcement, Congress stripped of power of the purse, critical media banished or investigated.

The cruelty isn’t hidden—it’s performed, monetized, and celebrated. During Trump’s first term, Melania Trump wore a jacket to visit detained migrant children that read “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” on the back. The message went viral, spawned an entire merchandising industry, and perfectly distilled the administration’s ethos: not just indifference to suffering, but active mockery of those who care. Language weaponized as contempt. Even the physical architecture of government isn’t safe. Trump ordered the East Wing of the White House demolished to make room for a ballroom—no consultation, no congressional approval, just executive fiat treating the people’s house as his personal estate. The symbolism is precise: each successive president could now remodel on a whim, as if the building belonged to the person rather than the office. This literalizes the degradation of “executive order” itself—the phrase once meant stabilizing governance through systematic policy but now means arbitrary personal whim encoded as law. Order without order. The language eats itself.

Yet mainstream outlets continue covering this as “politics as usual,” describing Trump as “unconventional” or “testing boundaries” rather than naming what’s happening: the methodical demolition of democratic guardrails, architectural and constitutional alike.

“The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable,” Orwell’s voiceover tells us, “a big lie is no worse than a little lie.” In one devastating sequence, Peck displays a New York Times piece from 2017—nothing but a long catalogue of the president’s documented lies and misinformation, scrolling endlessly. The visual effect is numbing, which is precisely the point. When lies accumulate at this velocity, fact-checking becomes theater. The opposition exhausts itself cataloging falsehoods while the machinery grinds forward. 2+2=5, not because anyone believes it, but because correcting it every single day is unsustainable. Eventually, people stop checking the math.

Peck’s treatment of January 6th is perhaps the film’s weakest section—surface-level interviews with MAGA protestors screaming about accessing the Capitol to overturn the “stolen” election and gestures toward FBI involvement without evidence or exploration. But the footage does demonstrate 2+2=5 fully internalized: these are people who believe what they’re told to believe with religious fervor. Trump declares the election stolen; therefore, it’s stolen. No amount of evidence matters. This is Orwell’s warning realized at street level—not sophisticated Party members but true believers who’ve accepted that reality is whatever the leader says it is.

VII. From Idealist to Informant: Spain’s Bitter Lesson

The film lingers on Orwell’s Spanish Civil War experience, and Peck understands why it matters. For a generation of American and European intellectuals, Spain represented idealism’s last stand—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Martha Gellhorn went to bear witness to what they believed was the great anti-fascist struggle of the age. Orwell went to fight fascists as an idealistic socialist, joining the POUM militia. What he found shattered him: not just the expected brutality of Franco’s forces, but the ruthless dishonesty of the communists he’d come to support. In Dorian Lynskey’s biography The Ministry of Truth, we learn that Orwell witnessed Stalin’s purges replicated in miniature—show trials, disappearances, and the rewriting of who had fought where and for whom. The Left’s press lied as readily as the Right’s. Yet even amid this disillusionment, Orwell retained his essential humanity. In one incident, he had a fascist soldier in his rifle sights but couldn’t pull the trigger—the man was caught mid-defecation, pants down, vulnerable. Orwell later wrote that the soldier was “visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him” in such a moment. This recognition of shared humanity, even across enemy lines, makes what came after all the more damning. Idealism itself became the war’s primary casualty—that faith that noble intentions and righteous causes would inevitably triumph over naked power.

Spain’s loss was a dress rehearsal for what followed. The democracies’ failure to confront fascism there emboldened Hitler and Mussolini, drawing a direct line from the streets of Barcelona to global conflagration. The stakes that seemed contained to the Iberian Peninsula metastasized worldwide. And when World War II finally ended, it concluded with twin ruptures that exceeded mere military defeat: the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exclamation marks ending language itself. After those detonations, discourse regressed to pure power. We entered an infantile code that required massive national security states to protect what became an increasingly abstract notion—”security” itself, as meaningless and all-encompassing as “terrorism.”

Freud could explain what happened here. In Civilization and Its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he describes the infant’s rage at separation from the mother’s breast and the pre-lingual fantasies of omnipotence that precede symbolic order. The bomb represented exactly this regression: the fantasy of total annihilation elevated to technological reality, the void of God replaced by satanic demigods—our contemporary tech elites living in autistic bubbles, imagining themselves as world-builders while destroying the conditions for human meaning-making. Language became what it is now: memes, slogans, and the shittification Ressa describes. We stopped negotiating reality and started demanding compliance with increasingly unhinged declarations. 2+2=5, not as a proposition but as an executive order.

But the real betrayal came after: traumatized and disillusioned, Orwell returned to England and compiled his list—38 names of writers and intellectuals he deemed communist sympathizers, which he handed to British intelligence. The man who couldn’t shoot a defecating fascist because he saw a fellow creature ended up listing fellow writers as security risks. Alexander Cockburn, the notorious polemicist for The Nation, where he penned the column “Beat the Devil,” called him “a rat,” and the epithet stings because it’s accurate. Orwell became the informant before he wrote the warning.

VIII. NSPM-7: The Rat Cage Operationalized

Which brings us to December 2025, where the architecture Orwell warned against—and helped prototype—has been perfected. Investigative journalist Nick Turse revealed that the Trump administration refuses to rule out summary executions of Americans designated as domestic terrorists under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. NSPM-7 is the rat cage. The list is secret. The criteria are classified. You cannot know if you’re on it. The military has already killed 95 civilians in the Caribbean and Pacific under this “designated terrorist organization” framework, and U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Gregory Guillot testified before Congress that he would conduct similar strikes within American borders if ordered. The rat cage strapped to Winston’s face has been bureaucratized, digitized, and operationalized. It doesn’t require interrogators anymore—just an algorithm that sorts citizens into targets and a chain of command willing to execute the order. Orwell’s 38 names have become NSPM-7’s classified database. Winston screams, “Do it to Julia!”—but Orwell had already done it to his comrades, decades before he imagined Room 101.

IX. Always On: The AI Amplification

Peck closes with a warning Orwell couldn’t have imagined: AI will amplify this exponentially. The rat cage becomes autonomous, operating at inhuman speed and scale—always on, facial recognition targeting you, learning your breaking point before you know it yourself. We’ve already seen this phenomenon at work in Gaza, where AI systems sort civilians into targets with algorithmic efficiency. The algorithm doesn’t need Room 101’s interrogators; it just needs your data trail, your movement patterns, and your social graph. Freud understood this inevitability in Civilization and Its Discontents—we’ll never reach moral equanimity as a species because there are too many rogues, too many who know how to manipulate reality into fiction, and too much will-to-power. The fight against 2+2=5 isn’t winnable; it’s permanent. But Peck’s film refuses despair even as it rejects false hope. The value of Orwell’s 2+2=5 lies in its insistence on witness, on naming the cage even as it closes. The father tells his son in that opening scene: at the moment of death, you must still insist the answer is four. Not because you’ll survive. But someone else might remember that the truth was possible.

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