Square One of Compassion and Intellectual Honesty

lukon · 2025-08-20T21:24:38-04:00

It is a small, one-room building. I hope to release it as a Daz freebie some day. It gots a pair of rigged sliding doors. Ya can also move the wall strip lighting up and down inside. Inside stands a V4.2 character I named "Heelie". That inscription above the door is a quote of pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. The concept of this room is from the book I'm trying to write. Here's the explanation of it as I wrote in my book: THE SQUARE ONE OF COMPASSION AND HONESTY I adopt the metaphor of the first square of a board game, but I also imagine it as a peaceful room I guess a square room. With this metaphor in place, I can describe it easier. Here in square one I try to avoid all thoughts that create compassion-eroding rifts between myself and my fellow sufferers. Square one is about the basic feeling of compassion, un-contaminated by any thoughts. Observe the paradox of me using thought-conveying words to tell you about a place where thought is dangerous. Observe that paradox, but please keep reading. Here in the square one of compassion, I actually fear my own thinking. I feel like every thought just incriminates me. Please follow me into this dream … You, my fellow sufferer, are with me in square one. We speak very little. We both fear creating a rift. On the other hand, our misery is intense an emergency screaming "Me Urgency!" Yes. "ME URGENCY! Commit to that ideology I know will relieve suffering and defend my side of any rift it creates!" It is a Herculean effort to suppress the Me Urgency. But we do it cause we fear hurting one another even more than we fear our Me Urgency. The struggle is visible in our twitching bodies. My conflicted urge to touch you adds to my own twitching. Touching is intense and political. Would my touch ease your struggle, or aggravate it? Since I don't know, I don't touch, I just twitch. Square one is its own kind of hell. Only a martyr would come here. But, silence! Stop thinking this supports a conservative ideology of martyrdom. Stop thinking. Don't let the rift back in. But the hell this is comes from the tragedy of what we give up, and what we endure, just to be here in square one. Now we sit in chairs, facing one another. No speech. We look into one another's eyes. What we most see is this tragedy. In my mind parts Malanie Safka's song "Lay Down" swells to full intensity, powerfully arousing the sentiment of being together in the tragic struggles of square one. And here we are, having lit candles in the rain, having caught the same disease, bleeding inside each other's wounds. You damn right I begin to cry. You damn right. And as we keep looking into one other's eyes, so do you. You damn right. And how the fuck is this square-one-peaceful-room-full-of-tragic-feels-and-crying supposed to ease anyone's suffering? You may object to the focus on mindless feelings, even if the mindless feeling is compassion, as you want to get on with the reason and logic needed to take action … I've been around the block on this issue. I came here to this square one because I took reason and logic as far as I could; and reason and logic sent me here, to this place that is prior to reason and logic. Let me explain this in terms of two big lessons I learned while walking around the block. This first lesson is this: There is no argument, the logical conclusion of which is increased compassion for the suffering. The second lesson is this: Logic and reason themselves cannot be proved valid by means of logic and reason. Having learned these lessons, I realized that compassion could only be increased outside the bounds of logic; and that even the decision to use logic to relieve suffering must be made outside the bounds of logic. I thus returned to the pre-logic of square one. Ya. So I've been around that block and I made a book partly about it. I want to show you what going round that block has been like for me. I will show you my best try at reason and logic, going into epistemology-metaphysics-mereology, only to be thrown back upon the square one of compassion. A chapter or two from now, after a couple thousand words or so, I'll show you the progenitor of that more paralyzing second lesson, something I call the "Great Epistemic Quagmire", which demands a response that I call the "Great Pragmatic Decision". My means of making that great pragmatic decision is to return here, to this square one, and get my compassionate shit together. So, if you follow me around the block again, we'll be here at square one again. I hope you will come with me on this trip and likewise return here to decide as I have. Like me, you might interpret square one a little differently after going around the block with me. Sure. Let us depart this square one room of feelings and be on our way. There's the exit door. Listen, before I open this door … I want to interpret what's outside. Outside is the apologetic of the rift. And it is a real mind-fuck that challenges my very sanity. In fact it has already reached inside this square one and driven me to say stuff that actually does not belong here inside the square. You noticed that, didn't you? I've been using words, expressing thoughts, about how to interpret both the square and the rift and their relation to relieving suffering. I've been incriminating myself as an ideologue. That's the first mind-fuck. Take note of it. And out there, it gets worse for me. Maybe it won't be so bad for you. But the rift hits me hard sometimes and … splits even my own mind in two; wherein half of me thinks it's OK to write this book as if it were just poetry, instead of a serious treatise on relieving suffering; while my other half still wants to pen that serious treatise. So forgive me as my writing may occasionally drift back and forth between lurid and lucid. If this seems bizarre to you, well, let's get on with our trip outside into the rift and see … Ok, let's step outside here. I want to show you something right here above the doorway. Here's where the rift's mind-fuck begins. There's an inscription written by the philosopher, Richard Rorty. It says: "In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right." Observe the part about "loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right.". Isn't that what the square one of compassion is all about? It tells us to shut up; stop trying to get things right. Just cling to your fellow human against the darkness of suffering. Isn't that what Melanie Safka's "Lay Down" song glorifies? But hold on. Now also observe that the statement as a whole is in fact an instance of trying to get things right. It therefore contradicts itself. I don't know about you, but the mind-fuckery of that really bothers me. And who are these "pragmatists"? Pragmatists are philosophers who don't believe in truth who don't believe we can get things right. And Rorty himself was one of them. Ya one of those well paid philosophers whose plan to relieve suffering is the recommendation that we just keep talking with one another, a lot. Well, at least Rorty's rifty mind-fuck inscription is on the outside of the square one room, and not on the inside. But anyway, had you been standing outside the square one room listening to me still inside, glorifying the square one like an ideologue, and thinking to yourself how contradictory that is … well … take a look at that self-contradictory inscription above the door. What else would you expect? Listen, maybe I'm making a big stink about this Square One because I have convinced myself that reason and logic cannot relieve global misery. I now know I can't give a fully reasoned argument in support of any one of the ideologies claiming to best relieve suffering. This Square One is, in the end, the only thing I've got, the only thing I can offer this miserable world. I think it is time to quit talking about Square One now, and just get on with doing some reasoning about how to relieve suffering by means of ideology. Square One will assert itself upon us again in due time. Let's go.