History Main / TwoPlusTortureMakesFive

* ''Manga/OnePiece'': Kaido uses torture to break down strong opponents who he sees potential in to make them join his crew. Either that, or they eventually die in his prison camps if they continue to refuse. [[spoiler: It ends up backfiring on him when [[ThePollyanna Luffy]] uses the opportunity to train, [[CreateYourOwnHero making himself even stronger.]]]]

* ''Manga/OnePiece'': Kaido uses torture to break down strong opponents who he sees potential in to make them join his crew. Either that, or they eventually die in his prison camps if they continue to refuse.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheReplacements'': Todd replaces the school's hall monitor with a robot that he uses as his personal bodyguard. During an oral test in History class, Todd is questioned about the first president of the United States, and responds "George Stapler" [[LineOfSightName as he looked around for clues]]. Just when the teacher was about to fail him, Todd sends the robot to intimidate her into accepting his answer. His [[DrunkWithPower abuse of power]] reaches the point the ''school itself'' was renamed from "George Washington" to "George Stapler", a name [[NothingIsTheSameAnymore it retains for the rest of the series]].

* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', Kaido uses torture to break down strong opponents who he sees potential in to make them join his crew. Either that, or they eventually die in his prison camps if they continue to refuse.

* Private Plato in ''ComicStrip/BeetleBailey'' creates an instant demonstration by giving [[YesMan Lt. Sonny Fuzz]] a black piece of paper and expressing confusion over the alleged fact that the general said it was white.

* In ''Literature/NightWatchDiscworld'', the utterly mad Captain Findthee Swing uses craniometrics to determine whether someone was a criminal or not. And funnily enough, "after a short stay in the care of his much more direct underlings, he would inevitably be proven right".

* Hilarious -- and simultaneously terrifying -- is the ShoutOut to this trope in ''VideoGame/{{Portal}}''. Midway through the struggle with BigBad [[spoiler:[=GlaDOS=], she]] angrily seethes, "You think you're doing some damage? Two plus two is... f-f-f-f- Ten. [[spoiler: [[VerbalBackspace ...In base FOUR!]] [[VillainousBreakdown I'm FINE!]]"]]

* Inverted in the ''WesternAnimation/AmericanDad'' episode where Deputy Director Bullock is sleeping with Hayley and Stan [[TeachHimAnger tries to make her ex-boyfriend Jeff more assertive]]. Stan states a blatant falsehood (that the orange he's holding is a banana), which Jeff agrees to because he's that much of a wimp. Stan then [[ElectricTorture electrifies Jeff]] until he ''stops'' agreeing with Stan and sticks up for himself ([[WontTakeYesForAnAnswer and one more time by accident]]).
* In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/ChalkZone'' a horrible counselor sets out to make sure that Rudy understands what is "real" and what isn't. She straps him to a chair that shows him two pictures (generally a photo and a cartoon image) and asks him which is better. Every time he picks the cartoon, [[LoudOfWar it honks loudly at him]]. Later in the episode, we see Rudy feebly trying to answer and getting honk after honk after honk until he says "whatever you say", which is the answer the counselor was looking for. She even uses the word "ungood" instead of "bad," straight from ''1984'''s Newspeak dictionary.
* ''WesternAnimation/RobotChicken'' does the EnhancedInterrogationTechniques version with the nerd, who's being [[ItMakesSenseInContext questioned as to the location of]] [[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings Mordor]]. He breaks after a few moments, outright asking them what they want him to say.[[note]]It's "Pakistan."[[/note]]
* [[ParodiedTrope Spoofed]] in the ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' episode "Fishsticks" when Music/KanyeWest, [[ItMakesSenseInContext denying that liking fish sticks makes him a gay fish]], tracks down Carlos Mencia, believed at the time to be [[spoiler:the originator of the "fish sticks" joke]], and tortures him. When Mencia is [[IRejectYourReality unable to crack]] and [[ItMakesSenseInContext break from the "reality" of the joke]], Kanye [[LudicrousGibs decapitates him with a baseball bat]].

* Within the ''Franchise/StarWars'' universe, the Sith have a tendency to use this and BeingTorturedMakesYouEvil on Jedi captives. Unfortunately, it's often successful because the Sith are not only exploiting loopholes in the Jedi's dogma of emotional repression, but they also exploit the Order's ''chronic'' bad habit of [[HalfTruth telling their rank-and-file "a certain point of view"]] when it comes to critical information.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* One reason for the BlatantLies in the pronouncements of repressive regimes (like UsefulNotes/NorthKorea's statement that their country is one of the happiest places on Earth) is that citizens wind up repeating them (to avoid being accused of disloyalty) even though they know the statements are untrue. This makes the citizens psychologically ''complicit'' in the regime's lies, and less likely to resist. That's the theory, anyway.
** And judging by the (seemingly legitimate) outpouring of grief after Kim Jong-Il's death, the new theory is that, like Winston, the populace also convinces ''itself'' of this reality.
** Although there is also evidence that they know perfectly well what the propaganda is after messages were intercepted banning the use of sarcasm to mock the government. Apparently there were a lot of citizens who would say "this is the fault of America" regarding ''everything'' in order to make fun of the same phrase used constantly in propaganda announcements, in the same vein as the "thanks Obama" joke.
* Joseph Goebbels: "The principle and which is quite true in itself and that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily." In short: "The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed."
** And this is where the infamous phrase "A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth" [[BeamMeUpScotty comes from]].
* In UsefulNotes/NaziGermany's case the torture was economic collapse and UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler was the one to say 2+2=5.
** Hitler had this trope backfire against him in the later stages of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII when his subordinates started forging military reports and making false claims about e.g. troop strengths to avoid punishment from their delusional Führer. This is where the saying "Never trust any statistics that you didn't forge yourself" originated, which was then ([[http://www.joewein.net/blog/2009/06/16/trau-keiner-statistik/ possibly as a by-product of Nazi propaganda]]) falsely attributed to UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill.
** Consistent with the Creator/FyodorDostoevsky's version: the torture is 2+2 = 4 that you can't escape from and the escape is fantastical and "unscientific."
* The form of emotional abuse known as {{Gaslighting}}.
* Not torture, but a similar concept: a common trick in hypnosis shows is to convince the person under hypnosis that a number (say, 8) doesn't exist, leading to confusion when the person is then asked to count his or her fingers and invariably winds up at eleven, despite knowing that there should only be ten fingers.
* This is one of the arguments against "{{enhanced interrogation techniques}}": are they really giving up what they know, or are you just making them say what ''you think'' they know so you'll stop? Actual stats on the reliability of information gained from torture suggests that RealLife is not an episode of ''Series/TwentyFour''.
** It's also been shown that in practice, "brainwashing" of at least military prisoners doesn't seem to work; [=POWs=] who cooperate with their captors (by, say, making derogatory statements about their own country or government) for better conditions (or to avoid torture) don't generally change their actual beliefs. One rather famous example is the crew of USS ''Pueblo'' captured by North Koreans; they were told under threat of torture to issue a formal statement confessing their "crimes" and praising North Korea and its leader, which they did. However, the commander chose to use the word "paean" (which really does mean "praise"), so it came out sounding like "We pee on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. We pee on their great leader Kim Il Sung."
** When the long-delayed State Department report was released in 2014, it was revealed that several innocent people had been waterboarded by the US and/or its allies. Why had they been detained by coalition forces in the first place? Because friends of theirs had been waterboarded and in an effort to make it stop, blurted out the names of everyone they knew, conspirators or no.
* Amnesty International Belgium ran a series of anti-torture ads in 2014 that played with this trope using famous celebrities Photoshopped into beaten, broken people admitting something very contrary to their known beliefs--like Music/IggyPop describing Music/JustinBieber as [[http://cdn4.pitchfork.com/news/55689/56991da6.jpg "the future of rock 'n' roll".]] (Other posters showed the Dalai Lama praising yuppie-style consumerism and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld extolling Hawaiian shirts and flip-flop sandals.)
* Antique trials were quite often this. For example, in witch trials, suspects would be tortured to make them "confess" to witchcraft. If they confessed, then BurnTheWitch. If not … then keep on torturing them until they do.
** During the Salem witch trials, as dramatized in ''Theatre/TheCrucible'', Giles Corey was one of the few who [[TortureIsIneffective withstood the torture till the end]]. If he had confessed, he would've been excommunicated from the church and his property would've been lost; if he'd denied the accusation, he'd have been prosecuted anyway and his property would've still been lost. To ensure that his family would inherit his property, he remained DefiantToTheEnd as his interrogators slowly crushed his body under heavy weights. His last words when asked if he'd confess? [[FaceDeathWithDignity "More weight."]]
** The Salem trials were in fact a rare case where confessing ''spared'' you while refusing got you hanged. Despite this, nineteen people were hung rather than falsely confessing to doing witchcraft. The rest confessed as a result of torture or fear they'd be hung (except Corey, as stated above). Slow realization of how this could procure false confessions caused torture to be slowly banned (although sadly, as mentioned previously, it's made a comeback for anti-terrorism campaigns currently).
* The Chinese advisor Zhao Gao decided to test whether he could pull off a coup by bringing up a deer and calling it a horse. The Emperor Qin Er Shi, confused, asked why he was calling a deer a horse. Zhao then asked the other officials what the deer was, then later ordered that anyone who either called it a deer or stayed silent be marked for death. His logic was that if they called it a horse, they were more loyal to him than to their own eyes--and by extension, the Emperor. This story is also the origin of the Chinese idiom "calling a deer a horse" (指鹿为马 '' zhǐ lù wéi mǎ'').
[[/folder]]

* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', Kaido uses torture to break down people he sees as potential and makes them join his crew.

* The Chinese advisor Zhao Gao decided to test whether he could pull off a coup by bringing up a deer and calling it a horse. The Emperor Qin Er Shi, confused, asked why he was calling a deer a horse. Zhao then asked the other officials what the deer was, then later ordered that anyone who either called it a deer or stayed silent be marked for death. His logic was that if they called it a horse, they were more loyal to him than to their own eyes--and by extension, the Emperor. This story is also the origin of the Chinese idiom "calling a deer a horse" (指鹿为马 ''zhi lu wei ma'').

'''Interrogator:''' No? You've done it before... when you were a soldier you fought the Minbari. The Minbari were the enemy. That was the truth. And then one day someone said the Minbari are no longer the enemy and that was the truth. And you not only accepted them as allies, you embraced them, you took one of them as a lover. You swore an oath to Earthforce because you believed in it. That was the truth. Now Earthforce is supposed the enemy, now that is the truth. It all depends on what you believe and what other people tell you to believe. The truth is fluid, the truth is subjective.

* Michael Westen in ''Series/BurnNotice'' invokes this trope to state why he never uses torture. To get reliable information, Michael and his friends tend to rely on straight-up disinformation, misinformation, deception, and a [[GambitPileup repertoire of gambits]].

** In the episode "Intersections in Real Time", John Sheridan's torture and interrogation is based around manipulating perspective and breaking down Sheridan psychologically until he comes to truly believe that he is a mutineer, a conspirator, a terrorist who has been turned against his own government as a result of alien influence. They need him to sincerely believe his confession in order to pass telepathic scans.

* Though it involves no torture, in the ''Series/RedDwarf'' episode "Camille", Lister tries to break Kryten's CannotTellALie programming by showing him an apple and getting him to say it's an orange. He doesn't want to make him ''believe'' it -- just to get him to say something he knows to be untrue.
* On ''Series/TheXFiles'', this is pretty much the objective of the military guards torturing Mulder in "The Truth." After breaking into a government facility and finding "the truth", as well as several other things the government was hiding, Mulder is captured and denied food, water, clothes, and sleep. Whenever the guards come in, they ask him what he's thinking, and beat him for answering truthfully. What is the correct answer? They want Mulder to admit that he illegally entered the facility to obtain non-existent information and killed a man, even though none of those things are true. Why? They're holding a KangarooCourt and are hoping to get rid of him once and for all. It appears to work, as Mulder repeats the words back. Turns out he's just saying it to get them to leave him alone.

Fortunately, this is a case of ArtisticLicenseMedicine and its use in ''1984'' itself is a case of ScienceMarchesOn, as it turns out that you quite simply cannot torture someone into believing something, and if anything they're going wind up ''far less'' receptive to whatever beliefs you were trying to instill on them, since they'll associate it with torturers (turns out, the tortured can just claim to believe whatever the torturers want them to, just to make the pain stop).

** In the Brazilian version, the Scotland Yard finds the rabbit in two hours by using deduction, the CIA finds the rabbit in one hour by using surveillance and the Rio de Janeiro Police returns in 30 minutes with a beaten up drug addict claiming to be a rabbit.

* Michael Westen in ''Series/BurnNotice'' invokes this trope to state why he never uses torture. To get reliable information, Michael and his friends tend to rely on straight-up disinformation, misinformation, deception and a [[GambitPileup repertoire of gambits]].

* ''Series/TheOutpost'': After [[spoiler:Garret]] is nearly killed by Dred, he's taken to the Prime Order capital, where the healer Sana nurses him back to health and [[FlorenceNightingaleEffect strikes up a romance with him]]. Then the [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Tormentor]] comes and takes him to the dungeons to be beaten until he renounces Gwyn/Rosmund as a false queen, before Sana stops him and heals him back to health again. Turns out this is a ploy by both Sana and The Tormentor, who are husband and wife, and are using a combination of brutal torture, gentle healing, and carefully crafted lies to break [[spoiler:Garret]]'s spirit to get him to serve the Prime Order.

* As per JustForFun/TheZerothLawOfTropeExamples, this is part of the treatment Petruchio gives Katharine in order to "tame" her in ''Theatre/TheTamingOfTheShrew'', when he insists that the food is bad and the clothes are ugly and refuse to allow her to eat or keep them. He also obstinately claims that it is 7 o'clock, when it is only 2. "...it shall be what o'clock I say it is." She later gives in to his game, agreeing with Petruchio that, in spite of it being broad daylight, that the moon is shining, and shortly after agrees with him that it is not the moon after all, but in fact the sun. This is potentially Shakespeare's ode to {{Gaslighting}}.

* In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/ChalkZone'' a horrible counselor sets out to make sure that Rudy understands what is "real" and what isn't. She straps him to a chair that shows him two pictures (generally a photo and a cartoon image) and asks him which is better. Every time he picks the cartoon, [[LoudOfWar it honks loudly at him]]. Later in the episode, we see Rudy feebly trying to answer and getting honk after honk after honk until he says "whatever you say", which is the answer the counselor was looking for. She even uses the word "ungood" instead of "bad," straight of ''1984'''s Newspeak dictionary.

** The Salem trials were in fact a rare case where confessing ''spared'' you, while refusing got you hanged. Despite this, nineteen people hung rather than falsely confess to doing witchcraft. The rest confessed as a result of torture or fear they'd be hung (except Corey, as stated above). Slow realization of how this could procure false confessions caused torture to be slowly banned (although sadly, as mentioned previously, it's made a comeback for anti-terrorism campaigns currently).
* The Chinese advisor Zhao Gao decided to test whether he could pull off a coup by bringing up a deer and calling it a horse. The Emperor Qin Er Shi, confused, asked why he was calling a deer a horse. Zhao then asked the other officials what the deer was, then later ordered that anyone who either called it a deer or stayed silent be marked for death. His logic was that if they called it a horse, they were more loyal to him than to their own eyes--and by extension, the Emperor. This story is also the origins of the Chinese idiom "calling a deer a horse" (指鹿为马 ''zhi lu wei ma'').

* [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] by ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedI'': the FinalBoss wields a device that can cast illusions and control human minds, with the only exception being someone trained to withstand it (in this case, the player character). He goes for full-on solipsism and declares the Apple of Eden proof that [[LargeHam "Nothing is true... and everything is permitted!"]]
** [[ShoutOut Right from]] [[OlderThanTheyThink the book]] ''Literature/{{Alamut}}''

* In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/ChalkZone'' a horrible counselor sets out to make sure that Rudy understands what is "real" and what isn't. She straps him to a chair that shows him two pictures (generally a photo and a cartoon image) and asks him which is better. Every time he gets it wrong, it honks loudly at him. Later in the episode, we see him feebly trying to answer and getting honk after honk after honk until he says "whatever you say", which is the answer she was looking for. She even uses the word "ungood" instead of "bad," straight of ''1984'''s Newspeak dictionary.

** During the Salem witch trials, as dramatized in ''Theatre/TheCrucible'', Giles Corey was one of the few who [[TortureIsIneffective withstood the torture till the end]]. If he had confessed, he would've been excommunicated from the church and his property would've been lost; if he'd denied the accusation, he'd have been prosecuted anyway and his property would've still been lost. To ensure that his family would inherit his property, he remained DefiantToTheEnd as his interrogators slowly crushed his body under heavyweights. His last words when asked if he'd confess? [[FaceDeathWithDignity "More weight."]]

* ''Videogame/TheFeebleFiles'': After Feeble is arrested and sent to a prison for political dissidents, the prison's torturers manage to briefly convince him that the correct answer to any question they ask him is always "whatever the [[BigBad OmnioBrain]] says it is."