Orwell had used the concept before publishing Nineteen Eighty-Four. During his years of employment at the BBC, he became familiar with the methods of Nazi propaganda. In his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War", published in 1945 (four years before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four) Orwell wrote:
“Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. […] The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened"—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs […]”


  In the view of most of Orwell's biographers, the main source for this was Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons, an account of his time in the Soviet Union. This contains a chapter "Two Plus Two Equals Five", which was a slogan used by Stalin's government to predict that the Five year plan would be completed in four years, which for a time appeared widely in Moscow. However, Orwell may also have been influenced by Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who once, in a debatably hyperbolic display of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, declared, "If the Führer wants it, two and two makes five!" In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell writes: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?"


  In Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the protagonist implicitly supports the idea of two plus two making five, spending several paragraphs considering the implications of rejecting the statement "two times two makes four. "His purpose is not ideological, however. Instead, he proposes that it is the free will to choose or reject the logical as well as the illogical that makes mankind human." He adds: "I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too."


  Dostoevsky was writing in 1864. However, according to Roderick T. Long, Victor Hugo had used the phrase back in 1852. He objected to the way in which the vast majority of French voters had backed Napoleon III, endorsing the way liberal values had been ignored in Napoleon III's coup.