The Adventurous Style — Root Dogma and Correction

 

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

The Adventurous Style — Root Dogma and Correction

Root dogma: Immediate gratification and freedom from constraint are genuine goods; obligation and consequence are genuine evils.

Both halves are false. This page states the propositions the style holds, and then the route by which each is corrected.

What This Page Is

An entry from the Character Dogma Register, which converts the characteristic needs of each personality style into propositions of the form “X is a genuine good” or “Y is a genuine evil.” The propositions below are false beliefs. They are set out so that a man can find his own among them and see what corrects it.

The style descriptions derive from John M. Oldham and Lois B. Morris, The New Personality Self-Portrait (New York: Bantam, 1995), by way of the PTypes typology. The conversion into dogma-statements, and the correction, are the work of the corpus and not of Oldham.

A Style Is Not a Cause of Assent

A personality style is a habituated pattern of judgment. It is not a cause of the judgment and does not explain why any particular assent was given. The agent originates his assent; nothing here qualifies that.

The register is diagnostic and not exculpatory. A style narrows the search for a man’s false value judgments. It never supplies an excuse for one, and it never predicts what he will assent to next. Read as an account of what a man could not help holding, this page asserts the contradictory of the commitment the corpus is built on.

The Judgments

• Guilt and remorse are genuine evils.
• Loyalty and long-term commitment are genuine evils.
• Being held accountable for past actions is a genuine evil.
• The thrill of risk is a genuine good.
• Constant movement is a genuine good.
• Peak experience of aliveness is a genuine good.
• Getting what one wants regardless of social order is a genuine good.
• Intense visceral experience is a genuine good.
• Concern for consequences is a genuine evil.
• Discipline imposed by others or by society is a genuine evil.
• Living in the immediate moment by impulse without self-control is a genuine good.
• Immediate emotional expression is a genuine good.
• Being confined or unable to act is a genuine evil.
• Conventional rules and obligations are genuine evils.
• Challenge, excitement, and constant change are genuine goods.
• Uninteresting persons and things are genuine evils.
• Living by one’s own inner moral sense while ignoring official norms is a genuine good.
• Bodily pleasures are genuine goods.
• Sexual variety is a genuine good.
• Obligation to others is a genuine evil.
• A unilaterally giving partner is a genuine good.
• Wandering and leaving home are genuine goods.

The list is not expected to be consistent. These are types of bad character, and internal contradiction within a style is diagnostic of it rather than an error in the conversion.

The Correction

The pleasures and the thrills are externals and states of the body. Neither good nor evil, and the correction on that point is the same as everywhere else in the register.

A finer distinction applies here and is worth having. Not every positive feeling arises from a desire; some simply occur, and those require no correction at all. What makes a feeling irrational is the judgment that its object is a good, together with the desire that it continue. A man may enjoy a fast road without concluding that the enjoyment is a good and without arranging his life around obtaining more of it. This style takes the further step every time, which is what turns a pleasure into a requirement.

The heavier point concerns the acts. Every act of will has content — it aims at something — and its character is fixed by what it aims at rather than by how it turns out. This style’s acts aim at externals held to be goods, so they are non-virtuous by pedigree, and no outcome redeems them. A charming man who hurts nobody this week has not thereby acted well; he has aimed at the same thing he always aims at and happened not to collide with anyone.

What Survives the Correction

Courage survives, and so does the capacity for action, and so does indifference to physical danger — which this style has and most men lack.

Change survives. Travel survives. There is no requirement to settle, to accumulate, or to stay where one was born.

What this style has no use for is the category the correction turns on: appropriate objects of aim that are not gratifying and are not owed to anyone in particular. Doing the dull necessary thing because it is the thing to be done, with no thrill in it and nobody watching — that is what is missing, and supplying it is the whole of what changes.

The Item That Holds the Rest in Place

“Guilt and remorse are genuine evils” is not one item among the others. It is the one that makes the others unreachable.

Remorse is a verdict a man passes on his own past act. It may be excessive, it may be misdirected, and the corpus has plenty to say about the disturbance that accompanies it. But the verdict itself is the operation of the faculty that judges conduct, and a man who has classified the verdict as an evil has disabled the instrument by which any of his other judgments could be found wrong.

This is why the style does not correct with experience. Consequences arrive, and they are absorbed as bad luck or other people’s interference, because the one reading that would make them informative has been ruled out in advance.

The Near Miss

“Living by one’s own inner moral sense while ignoring official norms is a genuine good” is the item that will be mistaken for the corpus position, and the resemblance is close enough to require care.

The corpus does hold that moral truths are apprehended directly, that convention is not the standard, and that a man must judge for himself. That much is common ground and it is not a small amount.

The difference is what the faculty produces. An apprehension of moral truth is an apprehension of something that stands independently of the man, which means it can tell him he was wrong — and sometimes does. The inner sense this style invokes has a perfect record: it has never once required anything unwelcome, never contradicted an appetite, never issued a verdict against a past act. Taken together with the guilt item, the two propositions make a closed system in which the faculty exists solely to grant permissions.

So the test is the one already stated. Ask whether it has ever ruled against him. A faculty that only ever licenses is not apprehending anything; it is the appetite, speaking in the register of conscience.

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The Sixteen Styles — index

The Character Dogma Register (CDR) v2.1 — the full register, with the theorem chains and the provenance record.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.