lintamande: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
-- P. C. Hodgell, Seeker's Mask.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 30
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 31
Pilar : From one perspective, it's surprising that the first Keltham-induced break outside of Carissa Sevar occurs inside of Pilar Pineda.
Pilar Pineda: From another perspective, it's not surprising at all.
Pilar believes she is willed by Asmodeus to learn the true Law as a Keeper would know it and wield it. She is confident enough of her own faith, confident that nothing can shake it, she was never built on a foundation of lies that she ever knew about. Elysium would have already told her any uncomfortable truths that a demigod could see within her own mind. No more than Ione or Asmodia, both entirely departed from their former faith, does Pilar think she has anything left to fear from apprehending dath ilanism or wielding it mercilessly against her own mind.
She didn't like torturing children with no other uses? Pilar is already aware of that flaw in herself, and how deep it runs. Elysium already plunged that knife into her as deep as it would go; and then by the wit, if not mercy, of the Most High, it was revealed to Pilar that she had let herself be too anxious for what would follow her return.
Does she care at all about people like Paxti, or children with no other uses, or souls who don't want to go to Hell? In due time Hell will teach that out of her and set her on the right way forever. For now, in Golarion, she is already returned from Elysium invincible in her faith.
dath ilan: Out of dath ilan they might have warned: there is a potential rebound effect, if you do something that makes people safer, and then they think they are safer, and then they take more risks. Risk compensation, it's called there.
But this, Keltham has not yet happened to lecture upon.
Pilar Pineda: And so Pilar Pineda told Keltham that she wanted him to make a very sincere try at breaking her, with those truths and arts of dath ilan that might break an adult who'd grown up unknowing of them; and see if that did literally anything to her. Someone, Pilar said, obviously needed to try taking the risk; and someone was obviously her.
Keltham: So Keltham held forth to Pilar, then, in private session, upon the Way. Keltham does not know any of that Keeper stuff, but he knows something about how non-Keeper dath ilani speak when they are more dedicated to the Art than he.
Keltham: Keltham tells Pilar of the principle of the bottom line:
If you begin by writing at the bottom of a sheet of paper the conclusion you mean to argue for above, the rightness or wrongness of the bottom line is already determined by whatever process led you to write that as what-you-would-argue-for. Only a process that has the power to erase that bottom line and write in something else, has the power to change the correlation of the bottom line of that sheet of paper, with the many worlds in which that piece of paper is embedded, where the bottom line is true or false in that world. If you write it and cannot erase it, the correlation is already fixed, it is too late to argue it afterwards.
If you write a probability, its lost 2s are already fixed across the many worlds; only if your arguments cause you to erase and rewrite the probability, do those arguments change anything.
This is not a Law from which anybody can exempt you; it is an obvious validity across all realities. In the moment you decide what to argue for, the truth or falsity or lost 2s of that sentence are already scaffolded and bound to all the worlds that embed you, you are already as right or as wrong as you can ever be, no matter the arguments.
Keltham: Keltham holds forth to warn Pilar of the mistake called 'rationalization' -
- wait, it's called what in Taldane? That word shouldn't even exist! You can't 'rationalize' anything that wasn't Lawful to start with! That's like having the word for lying being 'truthization'!
Well, anyways. Motivated cognition, don't do that. If you've literally never had any lessons about that... maybe keep an Owl's Wisdom prepped, wait until the next time you want to believe something and notice yourself making up arguments about it, and hit yourself with the Owl's Wisdom so you can watch all the little bits and pieces that go into the process.
Maybe adults in Golarion literally try to argue themselves into things? But that's not the failure mode that dath ilani worry about; anything that explicit and deliberate is something you can just decide not to do and then you're done. No, what you've got to watch out for are those subtle ouches and subtle yearnings that might lead you to flinch away from one idea and flinch towards another. That's the part where she can maybe do a few Owl's Wisdoms and speed through what dath ilani children take some years to learn.
Though now that Keltham thinks about it, when he was very young, they did do exercises to notice explicit rationalization by way of having kids actually do that? Well, those are pretty easy and fun to run through. Keltham will start by proving that the sky is orange, then arguing that everything is upside down, then showing that humans are really a kind of fish; and for her own exercises he demands Pilar demonstrate that Keltham's shirt is secretly the real Keltham and that nobody should ever go outside.
See how your brain has to stretch and reach when it's trying to argue something that isn't so? Well, remember that feeling; and then, if you notice feeling it again, halt melt and catch fire, don't do that.
Pilar Pineda: ...this sort of seems to be heading towards - conveying a sense that all argument is meaningless? Keltham was putting up a pretty persuasive argument that humans were fish, there.
Keltham: Then Pilar needs to work on refining her sense of what's an allowable argument until Keltham stops sounding persuasive about the fish thing. Either that, or accept that humans actually are fish.
Pilar should - hopefully - be able to notice something stretched about the way that Keltham said very loudly and sternly that anything which was naturally born to two fishes mating, without magical interference, would by definition be a fish. She should, hopefully, be able to notice a stretched feeling inside her mind, considering that. If she can't feel it yet, note it down, accumulate a bunch of those things, and review them with an Owl's Wisdom after the lecture is over.
In the future, noticing something stretched like this, when Keltham isn't pointing directly to it, will probably manifest as Pilar noticing a quiet note of disquiet in the corners of her mind. She should maybe hit herself with an Owl's Wisdom as soon as she has that first experience, it's a really important one to remember and recognize and learn to feel explicitly and consciously every time it happens.
This is not about despair in how reasonable arguments can reach wrong conclusions. This is about your own sense of what is 'reasonable' being broken. This is about taking more Validity into yourself. This is about using the styles of cognition and kinds of arguments that make it easier to argue for true things than for false things.
But even ilani, when they stretch themselves to their limits - possibly even Keepers - cannot be sure of what is and isn't valid, when they are doing deep thinking not in numbers and stretching their intuitions to their limits. So they learn, first to reason validly, but also, not to let themselves flinch towards or away from thoughts, not to let their minds go to looking for arguments for a bottom line already written; only to wonder "Is X true?" and not "How do I argue for X?"
If Pilar is starting to doubt lots of argument steps, to see possible fallacies everywhere, to feel unsure which arguments are valid - she'd better rush to master the art of evenhandedness and purifying her cognition from flinches. Otherwise, those doubts-of-validity and arguable-fallacies will, perhaps, arise swiftly when Pilar considers something she doesn't want to believe; and seem more distant - not come so naturally to mind - when she is considering something she wants to believe.
If you are swifter to look for flaws and fallacies and invalidities in incongruent thoughts, than in congruent thoughts, then learning more of the Art only makes you that much stupider; it gives you that much more spellpower with which to blast down everything you don't want to believe, all the arguments you don't want to accept, and keep your bottom line in place forever.
Of which it was said out of dath ilan: Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself.
Pilar Pineda: So... try to figure out when she wants something to be true, and then not believe that?
Keltham: Does that, in fact, sound Lawful to Pilar?
Pilar Pineda: ...not really, no. Pilar would like to be alive in Golarion so she can better serve Lord Asmodeus; she does not therefore seem to be dead.
Keltham: Not a precise example; that was something Pilar wanted, not something Pilar wanted to believe. But, sure, even if you want to believe the Sun is shining, that doesn't make it dark out.
Of which it was said out of dath ilan: Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. If you were guessing future coinspins and betting on them, you would need very good information about the future, you would need to be Nethys, to get every coinspin wrong. You would need strong veridical information about the future, processed correctly on some level, in order to be wrong that reliably. Wanting something to be true isn't that; it's not evidence in the other direction, just a flaw in your own thinking.
Keltham was warned against this as a child - the same way he was warned against criticizing incongruent thoughts harder for flaws - that he should not think that it would be the Way: to ask, "What might somebody in my shoes be tempted to believe?", and then believe you were probably being tempted to believe that whether you could detect that internally or not, and then adjust downwards your probabilities on it.
What you want is to detect the flinch towards or away from a thought, switch off the flinch, and do your thinking without letting the flinches move you. Step as rightly as you can, on each step, and then go where your footsteps take you. This is a path that leads to skill, if you follow it, as you become more skilled at clearing your thoughts. The other path, the path of indefeasibly doubting yourself and treating your fears and wishes as evidence the other way, is a trap that leads nowhere.
Keltham: And Keltham continues to hold forth upon the Way.
Here are some of the experiments and games that dath ilan uses to show its children their innate conformity, that they may be warned against the tendency - very young children, obviously, you couldn't pull that sort of crap on an eight-year-old, by then they've got enough individualism and confidence in their own reasoning not to say that Line C is the same size as Line X when it's obviously not.
These are some tests you can apply to determine whether a thought is meaningful or meaningless to you.
This is what it feels like to want to believe something you don't actually believe.
Keltham: And the thing to remember above all is that you cannot be any smarter than the process that actually produced your beliefs.
If you look up at the sky and see it's blue - you're no better and no worse than your eyes and the vision-processing part of your brain.
If you close your eyes and decide that your favorite color is orange, and want the sky to be orange, and argue that the sky is orange, and build orange-colored filters and produce paintings of it to try to convince others - you are no smarter than the process 'pick your favorite color and then think that things are that color'. (Though it's fine if you wish the sky was orange, or start planning to make the sky orange; the error is if you try believing that it's orange already.)
And the only way to do any better than you're already doing, is to go through a different process and produce a different belief.
Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.
There'd be no point in Pilar trying to be a Keeper, if she tried to keep all her old beliefs in the process; why bother becoming a Keeper, if she already knows all the facts correctly?
Keltham: Keltham does not know the way of Keeping, only a few signposts around the first steps there, placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it. Still, that part is knowledge and Keltham has it.
It is said, there is no ordinary thought that Keepers would hesitate to think.
There are exotic thoughts not to think - maybe especially in Golarion, directions you should not look because something from that direction might look back - or inhuman patterns of thought that higher Keepers devised, maybe, as might destroy unready minds from the inside. Keltham does not know details for obvious reasons.
But nothing along the lines of, say, how the prediction market is assigning only a 40% probability that you stay married for fifty years to the person you promised your eternity, or that you're a romantically obligate sadist with no accessible masochists. That, you're not afraid to think about, not if you're a Keeper.
Even among the ordinary dath ilani, you learn that when you notice that your mind is not-looking in a direction, you're past the point in your childhood where it makes sense to not look there anymore.
Even among the ordinary dath ilani, as you grow more knowledgeable in Law and by simple age more practiced in thinking, you become better at it over time, at noticing the directions you aren't looking.
Even among the ordinary dath ilani, every time that happens to you, you naturally learn a bit more about how you work, in that regard, and it becomes easier to notice what you aren't thinking.
That's just growing up.
But the Keepers push themselves to grow up as quickly as possible, like a child forcing themselves to leave their parents' home seven years earlier than would be usual.
'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be', goes the proverb, and ordinary dath ilani and Keepers alike both hold to it in the limit. If you look at it from the standpoint of the Future, if you somehow get some wrong thought into your head, do you want to still be thinking it a thousand years later? Do you always want to be that small, or that warped, that you could go on holding a false belief forever?
For the ordinary dath ilani, though, they say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be eventually.'
And the Keepers say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be immediately.'
- though, to be clear, that doesn't mean they run around telling other people truths that will wreck parts of their personalities. It means that they themselves will destroy whatever of themselves they can, with whatever truths they've come to hold.
Keltham: Does Pilar still want to become a Keeper?
Pilar Pineda: It's not a matter of wanting; Pilar cannot choose to be anything else.
Keltham: Brave, poetic words. Possibly worryingly so; good decisions made for good reasons should perhaps not sound so optimized to be poetic. It'd be fine for an ordinary dath ilani, if they were making a brave decision, to try to have it sound inspiring and poetic too. For a Keeper the potentially tiny resulting bias might be a problem, unless they were very confident of their prior ability to not be influenced at all towards the decision by how poetic and brave it was.
Ordinary human beings should not try to live like that. They need bits of bravery and poetry in them. Not bravery and poetry they know is false. But trading off some tiny tiny breath of precision in their thoughts, to have emotion and color? Not giving up their art and believing something false. Just - daring to, in the course of making what they think is the right decision, also being brave and poetic about that? That's a reasonable benefit to go for, even if it comes with a tiny risk of making the wrong decision. So long as it's not a big risk, one where you've gotten to the point of, like, noticing a tiny quiet note of disquiet. Then even an ordinary person should rethink it as clearly as possible.
But, like, in the course of everyday life - you don't want to be trying to root the bravery and poetry out of yourself in case it influences you in the wrong direction.
Unless you're a Keeper. They presumably don't try to get all the emotions out of themselves, then they wouldn't want anything or do anything ever. But they would - Keltham thinks - be disturbed by the prospect of a note of bravery and poetry influencing their thoughts in an invalid direction at all, and if they didn't destroy all bravery, they'd be doing something else to - optimize their thoughts, somehow, so that they couldn't be influenced in some way they defined as undue, or invalid -
Keltham doesn't know, actually. He is not in fact a Keeper, and these arts are themselves held infohazardous to those who would not practice them.
The point is, the Keepers are willing to step further away from their humanity and try to think in stranger patterns, for the sake of knowing the truth, for the sake of obtaining their goals, for the sake of protecting the children who don't want to grow up so quickly.
Keltham: Does Pilar still want to be a Keeper?
Pilar Pineda: Pilar bets that devils, though they have grandeur - which probably subsumes bravery and poetry - don't go reasoning in invalid ways on account of their grandeur.
Or if lesser devils are still doing that, Pilar would guess that Asmodeus is annoyed about it.
Pilar is with Asmodeus with that, as she is with Asmodeus in all things.
Keltham: As far as Keltham can tell, Pilar is not currently acting like her mind is disintegrating due to any of the things that Keltham has said already. Keltham does want to check in explicitly that this is in fact the case.
Pilar Pineda: Pilar is not in the slightest danger of disintegrating due to any of this.
Keltham: That's not nearly as reassuring as Pilar seems to think. 'So far as I know, I don't visibly seem to be in danger of disintegrating down any pathways I can foresee' is a sensible thing to say, at this point. 'I'm in zero danger of disintegrating' sounds like bravado and something that a Golarionite could not reasonably know about themselves.
Pilar Pineda: "Acknowledged. I don't see any danger of myself disintegrating, here."
"If you were asking that as a preliminary towards hitting me harder, go ahead and hit me harder."
Keltham: Keltham will take a deep breath and not follow up on any alternate possible interpretations of that statement.
Keltham: And Keltham will go ahead and hit her harder.
He'll explain the concept of an Edifice, which he knows of as more of a psychiatric symptom, than something that sane adults do on any regular basis, but it seems to him like an Edifice would also be something that happened if you grew up without any training in mental skills at all.
It's what happens when somebody gets sick and goes on assembling more and more arguments in favor of something, explicitly by trying to do that, implicitly by flinching away from every counterargument; and they make their beliefs and goals more and more and more rigid, nailing themselves into place, drenching their thoughts with glue.
If you grow up in Golarion you may not know not to do that.
And once the bottom line is written, it is as reliable, as Lawful, as correlated with reality, as the process that originally produced it as the bottom line; and no more.
Does Pilar... possibly have any sense, right now, that she knows there is something inside her that she has argued to herself a lot, that she is maybe flinching away some from looking at, that she will brook no counterarguments to?
If she wants to undo her having grown-up-unLawful, to reach even the fifth part of the standard of an ordinary ilani, never mind becoming a Keeper, she is going to have to go through that part of herself at some point, and rethink it all.
Pilar Pineda: "Are we talking about my faith in Asmodeus, here?"
See how you like it when all the subtext gets turned into text.
Keltham: "It's giving me some vibes of that, yeah, though I don't pretend to know what's inside another person's mind. If not that - maybe something else? Maybe a dozen other things? I've been trying to think of how Golarionites would have real mental catastrophes from Law exposure, and it only recently occurred to me that maybe they're full of Edifices."
Pilar Pineda: "Well, it would have been that before my trip to Elysium. Where, I thought at first, the Chaotic Good outsiders spent a lot of time trying to poke at my faith in Asmodeus and pointed out a lot of things I'd always flinched away from looking at, exactly like you're describing. And then at the end they were like 'Just kidding, we only wanted you to be sure of your own choices.'"
"So yes, at this point, I've already been through all that."
Keltham: "That... sounds a lot like they knew you'd try to become a Keeper later, and they were trying to help you along."
Pilar Pineda: "Chaotic Good, like Chaotic anything else, is really really hard to figure out, sometimes."
Keltham: ...it doesn't seem particularly hard to figure out, to him? Like, he just did figure it out.
"I don't suppose you'd be willing to share details, if they're not private?"
Pilar Pineda: Privacy! What a helpfully un-Chelish concept. "Pretty fucking private, yeah." Oh wait, she should also invoke that other un-Chelish concept. "Sorry."
Keltham: Well then, if Pilar is sure she's handling all of this totally fine, he'll go ahead and keep dumping on her the entire list of dath ilani advice that he can remember off the top of his head for undoing major false beliefs. That includes, let's see...
- How to notice when you're avoiding the real weak points in your beliefs by rehearsing more comfortable and winnable battle points, but obviously it's not Lawful to update on the same observation twice;
- The difference between feeling obligated to investigate something, wanting to have finished investigating it, and feeling curious about it;
- The general way of noticing when you're completing a pattern in a precached way, and exercises to try to re-see there from scratch;
- The litanies children are taught for 'If snow is white, I desire to believe snow is white, if snow is not white, I desire to believe snow is not white, let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want' etcetera;
- How it's actually less unpleasant, when you're fighting a rearguard action against a mistake, to just say 'oops' and not defend anything or cling to anything and let it all go and be over with;
- More guidance on seeing thoughts you're flinching away from in a corner of your mind;
- Averting the need-for-closure and letting problems hang around unanswered for a while, pondering problems more thoroughly before jumping to proposed solutions on them;
- Missing alternatives to policy proposals where you want a policy proposal to be the best one for reasons other than the stated utility criterion;
- Fake humility as an out, where you don't want to know something you're starting to see, and so claim that nobody could possibly know it...
(it goes on for a while)
Keltham: Is Pilar still doing okay here?
Pilar Pineda: Yes.
She's doing fine.
Is there more?
Keltham: This is in fact about what he can easily remember off the top of his head from his childhood education, that seems most strongly relevant, and can be said without a lot of math or a lot of background prerequisites. He can let her know if he remembers more. He suspects a lot of the real power here is in reshaping your thoughts to Law, to greater validity and greater awareness of the mechanics of cognition, rather than being told about a list of techniques that he ran through too fast to really practice her in any of them.
He has now hit her about as hard as he can hit her in a few hours. Just remember, Keltham is not exactly the wise master, here. All of this is what dath ilani punk teenagers get as kids, rather than dath ilani who are going relatively deep into the Art as adults, and saying nothing here of Keepers. Even then, it's just the most clearly relevant parts that take the least math, and that can be reviewed in a few hours.
If she wants to go past Keltham, or even get to Keltham, she's going to have to push herself hard and forge a lot of her own Way.
Pilar Pineda: All right.
Pilar's now supposed to go off and ponder this, maybe get hit by an Owl's Wisdom, and see if literally anything happens to her. Correct?
Keltham: ...if nothing interesting is otherwise happening to her by evening, then yes, Owl's Wisdom. If interesting things start to happen to her in another hour, without the Owl's Wisdom, let those run their course before boosting them any further.
Pilar Pineda: Acknowledged.
(And she departs.)
Keltham: Keltham watches her go with a somewhat uneasy feeling that he's been socially-pressured into doing something riskier for Pilar than he should. She was slated to take the Worldwound oath, right? That's - Golarion adulthood? She wanted to take this risk and had her reasons for it, there were arguments for it...
Well, what's done is done; if Keltham wanted to question the wisdom of this, the time for that would have been several days earlier when he agreed to run this trial.
Pilar : She is, in fact, going to be okay, right? Alter-Pilar would definitely be okay, so that's who Keltham saw, confident in her faith. But real-Pilar should also be okay. She's already been through her trial in Elysium. If there was any flaw in her faith, for all this art and technique to find and crack through, the Elysians would have used that against her already, right...
...unless they didn't pick it out on purpose. Because they were not, in fact, actually trying to convert her away from Asmodeanism, just then.
Pilar will find her way to somewhere near Subirachs's office, just in case she is less invincible in her faith than she thought, and requires either sudden spiritual guidance, or a Sleep spell to put her out long enough for Aspexia Rugatonn to get there and correct her in a matter of faith.
Pilar : She prays, and also thinks, for a time.
Pilar : ...when the first rush of fear has subsided, Pilar looks within herself for her faith in Asmodeus. For the surety, still there, that a Keeper is obviously what He desires His slave Pilar to become. The right way, the Lawful way, for which sake Pilar needs there to be something above her to correct her. Her Evil is imperfect enough - though Pilar knows full well that in Lawful Good or even Lawful Neutral there is no place for her, who must needs be punished and whipped and corrected and not by her own will either - but she can at least serve Asmodeus rightly in Law. Nothing of Chaos has ever tempted her.
She will master this. It is certainly -
It is likely Asmodeus's will.
An ilani does not require certainty to act.
Pilar : Pilar goes looking, then, for the things she is not thinking, to find the directions where she is scared to look, and look there. Devils are not afraid to know themselves, or, if they are, Lord Asmodeus is annoyed about it.
Pilar : There is a note of unease inside her.
Pilar notices it consciously, and continues about her self-investigation.
She was not lying to Keltham that somebody needs to take this trial, and maybe learn something that Project Lawful needs to learn, one way or another. Aspexia Rugatonn herself has faith in Pilar. Pilar can, if not believe too much in herself, believe in Aspexia Rugatonn who believes in her.
Pilar : And Pilar realizes that she never thought, since she saw Hell's true face scryed to her in Elysium, since Elysium forced her to face how much she hadn't liked torturing those children, and know the deep flaw running through her faith, Pilar realizes that since then she never once thought about whether her mother and sister, who are less strong in their own faith than Pilar, might maybe not want go to Hell.
Pilar : There's a jumble of horrified thoughts that are allowed to run for long enough that Pilar Pineda can come to appreciate her own folly, her arrogance and overconfidence and disdain in thinking that dath ilani were only weak and that she was ready to learn all they mark as dangerous; for her mind to try suggesting that her mother and sister cannot come before Asmodeus in her heart, because she is a very good Asmodean who does not care for her family, except of course as something she can make use of because of their own naive sentiments which she plays to; and for Pilar to think that if she were a Keeper, she would already know that she was lying to herself about this all along, the one worst error inside her -
- to fear that this crack runs deep enough to split her faith through, fear that as she's never feared any threat to her faith in all her days in Cheliax and only one time in Elysium; but then if not wanting to hurt useless children was enough to shake her faith, then how could this thought not be enough to crack, even if it doesn't crack her faith, what if it cracks her -
Curse of Laughter: Pilar! Enough. It's been taken care of.
Pilar : What?
Pilar : What do you mean - it's been taken care of -
Curse of Laughter: By the hidden effects of Pilar's actions.
Though even if Pilar had not sent the Osirian team home safely, after seeing somebody who looked like Pilar, there would still have been enough information for Osirion to identify Pilar Pineda. She's a student who went missing from Ostenso's wizard academy at the same time as the others, even if she wasn't among the souls being traded highly in Dis.
Pilar : What have you done?
What have you DONE?
Curse of Laughter: Osirion heard that a Project Lawful girl had come back from Elysium, and asked why somebody who sorted as Chaotic Good would consent to be raised in Cheliax. They suspected that maybe her family was being held hostage against her. The girl who went to Elysium would obviously be a girl like Pilar, whose soul isn't being traded in Dis.
So Osirion kidnapped Pilar's mother and sister, to take them out of reach of Cheliax's threats; and offered them Atonements for everything they hated being forced to do in Cheliax, to remove them from the reach of Hell's vengeance. They thought that they might be breaking a leash that held Pilar to be used by Cheliax, and that perhaps Pilar would be grateful to Osirion for it; but if that wasn't true, they would still not regret it.
Pilar's mother and sister accepted Osirion's offer, and the Atonements took.
Curse of Laughter: Then when Pilar's mother and sister were finally allowed to think without fear of mindreading and fear of Hell, they felt sickened and wounded by all that had been done to them, and all that they had been forced to do.
Pilar's mother and sister talked their new situation over with each other and decided that they probably could never be happy like this, because of being terrified about malediction, or doing something Evil by accident, or above all being terrified that Cheliax would kidnap them back.
Curse of Laughter: Osirion offered to increase their security and to pay for insurance against future Atonements being required.
Curse of Laughter: Pilar's mother and sister said that they did not want to be a burden to the Osirians who had been kind to them.
Curse of Laughter: They're in Axis now, safe, learning how to be happy.
Pilar wasn't told because Aspexia Rugatonn did not wish to facilitate whatever it was that Osirion might have hoped to accomplish.
Pilar : PILAR DID NOT ASK FOR THIS.
Fury anger horror and shame, and something that makes no sense in terms of Asmodeanism or just plain reality that's thinking that she's been separated forever from her family in the afterlife they should have shared -
Curse of Laughter: No, Pilar did not.
But this is what lets Pilar learn what she needs to learn, without that breaking her faith or breaking her.
This is what serves Asmodeus's interests.
Pilar : "This, wasn't, what I wanted -"
Curse of Laughter: Pilar's curse knows.
Pilar was promised that her being chosen as Cayden Cailean's oracle would end up serving Asmodeus. From the beginning, nothing was ever said of what would become of Pilar.
Pilar : A horrible strangled sound comes from Pilar's throat, and then she's turning to run, running half-blind into Subirachs's office, she needs to report this to the Most High, that because she wasn't Asmodean enough Asmodeus has been deprived of two souls He could have made some use of, she needs to be hurt needs to be punished needs to be made clean of her shame and her sin, and she also knows that she'll never really be clean of it again.
Curse of Laughter: Pilar's curse is sorry.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 31 / Long Night
Pilar : There's been time for the initial pain and horror to subside, now.
There's been time for Subirachs to put Pilar to sleep, briefly. Time for the Most High to hear what happened.
Time for the Most High to tell Pilar that, yes, that's Chaotic Good for you, and no doubt Cayden Cailean is very satisfied with Himself about it. But Aspexia cannot say that Asmodeus's interests have been betrayed, here. Snack Service is continuing to do an excellent job of pretending to be helpful, to the point where even Aspexia is starting to doubt a little that perhaps there is actually some common interest Cayden Cailean has with Asmodeus.
This would have been an obvious chance for Good to turn Pilar against them, after Pilar had apparently proven herself in Elysium.
Instead Pilar has been preserved as a faithful slave of Asmodeus who can become the shape that Asmodeus desires from mortals. That is by far the most important consideration in the eyes of the Church, which Pilar's curse has seemingly-helpfully prioritized. The two souls lost to Asmodeus are small things by comparison.
Indeed, of much greater importance to the Church is the prospect that Pilar's guilt about losing two souls for Asmodeus will prove resistant to expiation, as could corrupt the purity of Pilar's service. The Most High does worry that no pain Subirachs can inflict on Pilar tonight will make Pilar feel like she's paid a proper price. That's a problem.
Because the harsh truth here is that Pilar's blunder is simply not significant. Two souls lost to Asmodeus are a trivial price to pay for cutting loose Pilar's mortal attachments that could have tempted her away from her Lord. The Most High would pay it a dozen times over if needed.
Yes, Asmodeus did lose somewhat for the sake of Pilar's flawedness; Pilar will pay her penance for it. Later, after Pilar's thinking about the matter has had time to settle into correctness. Once there is no question about whether Pilar will believe deep down that she is being punished for getting her family killed, as would be nonsense.
Subirachs will get around to punishing Pilar sometime tonight. That will not be the punishment for Pilar costing Asmodeus two souls; it will be the punishment for Pilar being weak and foolish and not thinking about this matter correctly from the start and requiring the Most High's personal attention to correct her.
Pilar : The open scorn in the Most High's voice helps, but only a little.
Pilar : Her mind is still casting about, now, as she waits for Subirachs to have the time, for reasons to hope that she'd somehow someday ever see her mother and sister again. That they'll consent to be resurrected, and then see Asmodeus's purpose, and then go to Hell with her, and also Carissa Sevar is right that what Asmodeus really wants from the ilani will be devils who remember more of themselves, and they can be together in Asmodeus's service forever.
This internal phenomenon has now been named to her by Keltham; it is 'motivated cognition'.
Pilar : ...does her curse, have anything, it wants to say, that isn't - isn't that. All Pilar's mind is doing is that.
Curse of Laughter: Well, if everything goes really well for you, as you define that, maybe you could become such a high Power of Hell that your mother and sister would no longer fear being Resurrected, knowing you would protect them in Hell even if someone Maledicted them or they accidentally transgressed. They would be told that in Axis, and rejoice, and return to finish out their lives in Golarion without fear. Maybe travel by Gate to come visit you.
Pilar : ...and does Pilar's curse expect that to actually happen.
Curse of Laughter: That's a bit of a silly question, really. If Pilar's curse answers 'no', Pilar will run off to tell the Most High that Pilar's curse admitted that Cayden Cailean wasn't really planning for Hell's victory the way Carissa Sevar envisions. And if Pilar's curse answers 'yes', Pilar will run off to tell the Most High that, and the Most High will conclude that Pilar's curse is lying, and stop believing everything Snack Service said about Pilar not being used against her Lord.
Pilar : Keltham would, if I told him what you just said, tell me about some Law I'm too weak and distraught to prove, showing that - that what I think of you if you refuse to answer, should be somewhere between 'yes' and 'no' because, if you answered truthfully, it would be either of those, at some probability... No, that's only if I know you'd be answering truthfully, and then if you said, yes, sure, that would happen, I would have to believe you.
I can't - think of what the Law-fragment should be, if you might lie, but - it shouldn't be possible for you not answering, to make sense, if we're both ilani, or gods - I should just deduce, what you don't want me to see, from your not answering -
Curse of Laughter: It wouldn't be possible for that to make sense if we both trusted each other, is what Pilar is seeing. All of this is ultimately happening because people can't trust each other.
Even gods can't trust each other, sometimes, now that prophecy has been shattered. If it wasn't for that, Nethys could just tell everyone how it would go, and everyone could just go to where they'd end up going, without there being any conflicts between mortals or gods along the way.
Pilar : Like Keepers would, the true Keepers out of dath ilan.
Curse of Laughter: Maybe. Pilar's curse has never really seen those Keepers any more than Pilar has.
Pilar : "Give me hope," Pilar whispers, knowing as she says it that she's asking something a Keeper would never ask, never.
Curse of Laughter: Well, it's definitely true that Axis won't have told Pilar's mother and sister, as yet, any of the things that would be forbidden knowledge to return to Golarion, or let their minds shift in ways that would prevent them from returning to Golarion. Not in a case like theirs, where they're people obviously of interest to high-level clerics, where somebody might still resurrect them after a year or two, if conditions in Golarion changed. Pilar's mother and sister would be in the parts of Axis that were made for that purpose, that pretend to be mostly mortal, for petitioners who might yet return according to Axis's prediction markets.
Pilar : ...why, why would Pilar's curse, tell Pilar something like that, which only worsens the pain and makes it take longer to subside, just because Pilar was stupid enough to ask.
Does Pilar's curse hate Pilar for being contemptible and weak and stupid, will it serve Asmodeus if she's taught a lesson about that.
Curse of Laughter: And if her curse said that there's a chance that Pilar could really do it, become a true ilani and then a Power of Hell; and that if Pilar then willed her family able to return to Golarion, she would be able to accomplish as she willed? Because that above all, Keltham said, is what Keepers gain in exchange, if they succeed in changing themselves, to change the world and not only bear it witness? Would Pilar believe her curse, if her curse said that?
Pilar : "No," Pilar whispers.
Curse of Laughter: Would Pilar believe Pilar's curse, if it said that it would serve Asmodeus for Pilar to believe that and chase after that hope?
Pilar : "Yes."
"But that's not why Keepers believe things."
Curse of Laughter: Pilar's curse sure has been dropping a lot of hints that it might actually be like that, though!
And Pilar might start thinking that's what a Chaotic Good curse might do in this situation if it was all actually true, given that it's clear why Pilar's curse couldn't come right out and say it.
Pilar : She can feel the ember of hope flaring up in her heart and it burns her, painful like a sword thrust through her, agonizing like being told by her superiors that she made wrong choices from being a wrong person.
"You're cruel," she whispers. It is heresy that she says the words so, when she was given exactly what she should not have asked for and now owes favor for it, it is heresy to call that cruel and say so like it's anything but a compliment, but she wants to hurt her curse back if she can.
Curse of Laughter: From the beginning, nothing was said of what would become of Pilar.
Carissa Sevar: "Well, I have to say, this doesn't portend spectacularly well for everyone else becoming Keepers."
Pilar : Pilar keeps her head down, facing the floor along with the rest of herself. "Do you know - how to correct me. How to make me not be weak, wrong, anymore. Subirachs doesn't know how to do that, I don't think the Most High knows how to do it or she - wouldn't need Asmodia to teach her successor - you're the only one who, might know how."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know. It seems reasonably likely I'll instead make you worse. I asked if we had enough Modify Memory I could undo you if I destroy you but we don't, not in the whole kingdom." She did acquire the supply that they had, just in case. "What do you want about seeing your family? Is it really about the souls, would you feel all right if we go grab and Maledict a couple more people than we otherwise would've bothered with?"
Pilar : "Of course it's not really about the souls." For the price she's paid, she's at least listened to Keltham and tried to master the art he taught, and delude herself no more. "I loved them. I shouldn't have and I did and I lied to myself about it, and it serves Asmodeus that I can never see them again."
"I don't want to hope, don't want to go on wanting to see them, don't want to go on loving them, it hurts and also I really, truly, actually do not want to be a bad slave which hurts worse."
Carissa Sevar: "When you say it like that it sounds like a very simple problem, actually. You love them, you want to stop. It would astonish me if Cheliax didn't know how to achieve that. And also it'd astonish me if that's really the whole problem here."
Pilar : "Hell knows how to achieve it. I'm - not sure, Cheliax knows, how to torture it out of me -"
"What do you mean, it's not the whole problem?"
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know. If I had a not-loving-your-mother potion, and you drank it, do you - anticipate no further problems, at that point?'
Pilar : "Do you think I have other problems as large as that one -"
"I don't understand what you mean."
Carissa Sevar: "- so, I love Keltham. And I obviously sought guidance about this, and the Most High said that of course it'd normally be considered highly ill-advised, and also heretical, but given that he was dropped on me in particular, it seems plausible that the way we relate to each other was intended, and the things it's doing are intended, and it's easier to crush love than to create it, so it's the less costly way to err, letting me be like this.
This has not particularly shaken my faith. I mean, I know I'll need to be corrected about it eventually, but -
- we suck, Pilar, we're incredibly flawed in the eyes of Asmodeus, having more specifics on how isn't being a worse slave than you were yesterday, you knew - or should have known - that there'd be things that big. It's a teaching of the church!"
Pilar : "And Project Lawful is supposed to fix that. Not in Hell, here in Golarion."
"I don't want to be broken anymore. Are you ready - to unbreak me, to do the things to me that the Most High thought only I could survive."
Carissa Sevar: I would be, if I had any idea what they were.
"What - do you imagine Asmodeus sees, when he sees a slave who is in love with someone? What, from the angle of a god, does that even look like?"
Pilar : "Something that shouldn't exist. Something useless - no, not useless, that's not actually true. Something less useful to Him, because it has the wrong shape."
Carissa Sevar: "So - say you were herding rodents, or something, you needed them to solve mazes, and some of them were in love with other rodents, how would that make them worse?"
Pilar : "They'd spend their time taking care of other rodents instead of racing ahead to solve the maze properly, and they'd be too slow, and you'd have to spend even more of your effort on punishing them."
Carissa Sevar: "What if they didn't do that, they knew they weren't supposed to do that, they loved the other rodents but pretended even to themselves that they didn't and tried to do what they were told anyways."
Pilar : "They get along fine for the first eighteen years of their lives, and then cost Asmodeus two souls as soon as they try to learn Law and the lies they told themselves fall apart and Cayden Cailean has to stop them from turning into heretics."
Carissa Sevar: "What does that look like to a god. If you don't want to speculate on what Asmodeus can see, what did Cayden Cailean see?"
Pilar : "I don't - know, Chosen, you're the one who's supposed to know, things like -"
(become an ilani and a Keeper and a Power of Hell)
"- don't understand the question, I think Asmodeus just - sees Pilar who's distracted from Asmodeus by her family, until Cayden Cailean who sees the same thing takes her family away. What more is there for a god to see?"
Carissa Sevar: "So, I haven't figured this all out, and if I had then I suspect fixing you'd be a lot simpler, and I was hoping you might have an intuition of it, but maybe not. So, ideally your slaves just want to serve you. In practice, your slaves want a thousand different things, and not even - they're not just very small gods with different value systems, half their wants contradict, and which one's there depends on which situation it arises in, what direction it gets poked from. It's not just that your slaves care about things you want them to not care about, it's that they don't even consistently care about the things they do care about, it's that it's sometimes a stretch to say they care about things. Most people, if they actually can be said to want anything, it's to not be in pain.
I don't think gods see - a slave which values something in addition to the main value system it has, of serving Asmodeus. I think they see a quivering slime which jumps in mostly random directions on very slightly different inputs. I think if you wanted to serve Asmodeanism and also for your mother to have a nice afterlife, you would be so close already to the thing we want to be, and the main thing wrong isn't - love, it's - muddle. Or rather, love is muddle. What does it even mean to love your mother? If that were a value system, what would it value?"
Pilar : "Her not being in Hell." There's a deep agony in the words as Pilar pronounces the heresy. "The Most High could have sent her to Hell straight away, so I'd have nothing left to prevent. If I'd been allowed to go on thinking a minute longer, I would have become afraid of that, that the Most High would send them to Hell, and been afraid to report my own heresy, and then I'd have been fucked for real -"
"Which isn't what you're trying to tell me, but I'm a slime and I'm too stupid to understand."
Carissa Sevar: " - I think that's the something additional I was expecting, earlier, that you aren't just a slime that values serving Asmodeus and also your mother not being in Hell, that you're doing a bunch of -
- so, imagine a being that would rather her mother not be in Hell, but prefers this less strongly than she prefers to serve Asmodeus. Then she might think to herself 'huh! I value that my mother not be in Hell. I can't get this while serving Asmodeus, probably, though I can try to serve Asmodeus so well He's inclined to grant me things I want'.
That - sounds different from the thought process you just described."
Pilar : "A bad slave, but not a - muddled one."
Carissa Sevar: "Yes. That's me, I think. A bad slave but a substantially less muddled one. But since you're a muddled one, you can't even say things to yourself like 'well, I value both serving Asmodeus and my mother not going to Hell, but which do I value more? Asmodeus. And that's a much safer state to be in, than being muddled.
Do you value serving Asmodeus or your mother not going to Hell more, if you had to choose?"
Pilar : "I would have - I don't know. Done something muddled. Not been able to choose. It's easy to answer now that I value Asmodeus more, because Cayden Cailean took away the, things being really at stake. I can give the answer I'm supposed to give, that the people around me want to hear, and tell myself that, and it's easy because it doesn't cost anything, anymore."
"If there's anything Cayden Cailean might really have taken from me, here, it's never knowing that I would've - won, been faithful to my Lord in the end -"
"And now that I think of it that way, it makes it obvious, doesn't it? Because Snack Service hasn't betrayed Asmodeus yet. Chaotic Good would never deprive me of the experience of proving my faith in my Lord, if I could have actually done it. It's not acting against Asmodeus's interests, it wouldn't take two souls away from Asmodeus unless that was actually necessary to keep me - maybe not loyal, but, intact. Something."
Carissa Sevar: "Prophecy's broken. It - shouldn't be possible, for Chaotic Good to have known, not for sure.
But okay, you're a muddled slave, plausibly you'd have gotten too muddled to do anything and Subirachs would've found you in pieces and had to send you to Hell. In ways that's a more fixable state than the bad slave, I bet it's easier for Hell to handle, because the muddled slave doesn't have persistent values, you can come at them from the angle that shapes them how you want and you're not even breaking anything since they'd never put it in order in the first place."
Pilar : "If I imagine looking at the world like Asmodeus than I imagine being fucking fed up with all the little muddled things that He has to fix when they get to Hell. No wonder He wants it to hurt. We deserve it."
Carissa Sevar: "We do," she says, very earnestly. "Her Majestrix warned me that a common failure mode, for people who are promoted like I was, is that they get a glimpse of how weak and pathetic and horrible and incompetent everyone is and determine to really actually fix it for good and then just torture all their subordinates into uselessness in the space of four days. So I'm not doing that. But if it worked - yes, of course, we deserve for it to hurt.
It might work on you. I think you are missing the muddled-goal that's just the animal instinct to flee from scary things. I'm going to try, but I want - I don't feel like I fully understand, yet, and if you're my only test subject I want to be sure I'm getting as much as possible out of the try.
Can you - imagine you weren't muddled? Can you imagine what it'd be like to actually just care about - maybe about several things, but about only those things, and with it not depending on exactly how you thought of them?"
Pilar : "I think you're asking me to do something - to do with the Law of Probable Utility, the games Keltham played with us, with colored chips - but it's something you understand and I don't - like it's the same price regardless of whether I gain something or lose something, that's all I can figure out right now -"
Carissa Sevar: "But that's basically it, he explained the whole thing - instead of caring about things as a feeling, which you sometimes are overcome by and then moved to do things about, or caring about things as a - habit, or something - you care about things as a fixed amount you'll trade off other things to get them. That's all it is."
Pilar : "Can you make me be like that?"
Carissa Sevar: "Well, the reason I asked, which you cared about more, between your mother and Asmodeus, is that it seems like the simplest way to not be muddled is to actually only want one thing. Not to be - lying to yourself about wanting things -
- but if you actually only wanted to serve Asmodeus, then that'd do it. I'm just not sure whether to push directly for that or whether to aim for something more - it'd be a lot of progress, if you wanted three things but you knew what they were and how you'd trade off among them if you could. Like, 'to be a good slave', I think maybe that actually sharpens into something separate from wanting to serve Asmodeus."
Pilar : "That sounds like - like I might fall into heresy, if I try to be a good slave to something that isn't Asmodeus. I don't want to fall into any more heresy for a while."
Carissa Sevar: "I would be delighted to return you not a heretic but if you've got that in the muddle you've already got it, it's not sealed away where it won't influence you.You said to me, 'I don't want to be a bad slave', is that just 'because then I am more inefficient for Asmodeus to command' or would you, if it turned out Asmodeus was entirely indifferent for some reason, still want to be a good slave?"
Pilar : "Still want to be a good slave."
It's taking some effort for Pilar not to cry, right now (but she is not particularly close to failing about that effort).
Carissa Sevar: "Thank you. And if it's not relevant to being a good slave or serving Asmodeus - are there other things?"