Freedom is to be able to say the Truth

In George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith writes:

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

The phrase "two plus two equals five" was used in communist USSR to refer to how five-year plans were supposed to increase production to yield more than previous methods of production. Everybody knows what this denial of truth led to. However, this scenario is not something exclusive to so-called totalitarian regimes. It also has other manifestations:

• The current financial crisis might at one level have its foundation in the (tacit) belief that money can grow on its own - that one can somehow get more than there actually is.
  
• Relativism is very popular in today's Western world, and ideas of social construction permeate contemporary thinking. In some parts of this view, science is just useful conventions and has no reality outside of human existence.
  

As Aldous Huxley anticipated already in the 1930s, the dictatorship is not likely to come the way George Orwell thought, that is, via forceful external pressure, but it will gradually grow into our lifestyle in ways which we welcome, because we find them pleasurable. However, in contrast to what both Orwell and Huxley thought, the dictatorship does not seem to be a regime. It's not a government who wants to control the citizens. It's our very culture which is going to force us into dead-end roads, like that of relativism and individualism.
As the examples above show, the way this can happen will most likely go via a rejection of objective truth. In this regard, the ultimate triumph is to overtake the main bastion of objective truth: mathematics.
To quote again from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

"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?"

Contemporary relativists think that they are pursuing a liberating ideology. It is more likely, given the evidence, that the result will be the exact opposite. Objective truth has always been a defender of freedom, and mathematics is its most clear and universal manifestation. Freedom is to be able to say that mathematics is true and unchangeable no matter what our brains are like, and no matter what our culture and politics says.