"The Doctrine of Paying Attention to Form"

“Attend to your Configuration” is the central maxim of the priestly Circles: it treats bodily form as the determining cause of conduct and makes the correction of geometric irregularity appear to be both medicine and justice. The doctrine promises an orderly explanation for virtue and crime, but its own narrator reveals the contradiction at its heart: if configuration governs behavior, moral blame is irrational, yet punishment and domestic scolding continue as though choice were real.

The doctrine and its institutional authority

The teaching is presented as the foundation of the Circles’ political, ecclesiastical, and moral program. Every sphere of instruction, the narrator says, is directed toward improving individual and collective configuration, with the Circles’ own configuration given priority over all other concerns. The maxim thus serves not merely as advice about personal discipline but as a governing principle: the priestly class defines what counts as proper form and makes society’s well-being dependent on that definition.

Pantocyclus, remembered as the Circle who suppressed the Colour Revolt, is credited with persuading society that configuration makes the person. The doctrine recasts older beliefs in will, effort, training, encouragement, and praise as mistaken explanations. In their place it offers a bodily cause that can be inspected and, in principle, repaired. Its apparent clarity is also a form of authority: if a person’s character follows from measurable shape, the institutions that measure and correct shape can claim jurisdiction over conduct.

Irregularity as diagnosis and sentence

The doctrine gives this claim practical force through hospitals and penal institutions. An Isosceles born with unequal sides is said to be destined to go wrong unless the sides are made even at an Isosceles Hospital. The same principle extends to Triangles, Squares, and Polygons: irregularity is treated as a disease requiring admission to a Regular Hospital. Failure to undergo the supposed cure may end in State Prison or at the angle of the State Executioner.

Pantocyclus’s explanation reaches beyond congenital shape. Misconduct and even the gravest crimes are attributed to deviations from perfect regularity that may arise from a collision in a crowd, neglecting exercise, taking too much exercise, or a sudden temperature change that shrinks or expands a susceptible part of the body. The examples turn ordinary accidents and habits into possible causes of moral failure. If the body is the source of wrongdoing, then conduct ceases to be a proper object of praise or blame: the integrity of a Square should supposedly direct admiration toward his exact right angles, while a lying, thievish Isosceles should elicit pity for the incurable inequality of his sides.

Punishment and the doctrine’s practical contradiction

The narrator tests the theory against a Magistrate’s response to an Isosceles who claims that unevenness makes stealing unavoidable. The Magistrate can answer that, because the offender cannot help being a nuisance to his neighbours, the authorities cannot help sentencing him to be consumed. The exchange exposes the doctrine’s coercive logic: it suspends ordinary moral blame, yet converts the same determinism into a reason for irreversible punishment. The Isosceles’s supposed inability to choose does not protect him; it makes him a danger to be removed.

In the smaller conflicts of family life, the doctrine becomes harder to apply cleanly. One of the narrator’s Hexagonal grandsons excuses disobedience by blaming a sudden change in temperature for distress to his Perimeter, then argues that his configuration can be strengthened only with abundant choice sweetmeats. The narrator admits he can find no logical basis for rejecting the claim, but cannot practically accept it. His dilemma makes the doctrine’s reach intimate and comic without dissolving its serious point: a system that explains misconduct through bodily conditions can unsettle everyday discipline as readily as it justifies state punishment.

Praise, blame, and the limits of consistency

The narrator resolves the domestic dilemma by assuming, despite admitting he has no grounds for the belief, that a sound scolding or castigation exerts some hidden strengthening influence on his grandson’s configuration. He is not alone in this compromise. High-ranking Circles serving as judges praise Regular Figures and blame Irregular ones, while at home they scold their children in the language of right and wrong with the passion of people who believe those categories are real and that a Figure can choose between them. The doctrine therefore does not displace moral judgment in practice; it coexists with it, changing the explanation offered for conduct while leaving familiar habits of correction intact.

The doctrine’s reach into social policy

The principle of configuration also organizes laws and institutions beyond the treatment of male offenders. Flatland’s women must enter houses through a separate eastern door, and any woman walking in public must continually give a Peace-cry under penalty of death. These rules show how a doctrine that claims to explain conduct through bodily form can coexist with coercive regulation of bodies: public safety is made the justification for restrictions that govern women’s movement and presence.

The same classificatory logic extends to marriage. Because women are all straight and therefore visibly regular, their possible irregularity as mothers is treated as invisible and assessed through state-kept pedigrees; without a certified pedigree, a woman may not marry. The rule links bodily configuration to lineage, turning the doctrine’s concern with individual form into administrative control over reproduction. In the narrator’s account, the doctrine is thus not only a theory of character or a rationale for punishment. It supports a wider social order in which the Circles’ authority defines regularity and applies it through law, medical correction, and family regulation.