The Aggressive Style — Root Dogma and Correction

 

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

The Aggressive Style — Root Dogma and Correction

Root dogma: Power is a genuine good; powerlessness is a genuine evil.

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

• Vulnerability in oneself is a genuine evil; vulnerability in others is a genuine good.
• Equality with others is a genuine evil.
• Rules that constrain one’s own conduct are genuine evils; rules that constrain others are genuine goods.
• Showing mercy or compassion to opponents is a genuine evil.
• Backing away from a fight is a genuine evil.
• Power, authority, and responsibility are genuine goods.
• A traditional power structure with clear lines of authority is a genuine good.
• High discipline and imposing order on others are genuine goods.
• Using any means necessary to accomplish objectives is a genuine good.
• Brave functioning in dangerous situations is a genuine good.
• Action, adventure, and physical assertion are genuine goods.
• Always moving to the front is a genuine good.
• Domination and control of all groups one belongs to are genuine goods.
• Giving orders and establishing rules are genuine goods.
• A well-structured, disciplined family with unquestioned obedience is a genuine good.
• Being at the top is a genuine good.
• An intensely competitive environment is a genuine good.
• Getting and keeping power are genuine goods.
• Success, victory, and excellence are genuine goods.
• Accumulating power is a genuine good.
• Results over feelings is a genuine good.
• High stimulation at all times is a genuine good.
• Lack of power, competitive defeat, and failure are genuine evils.
• Accepting loss or failure is a genuine evil.
• Being in charge of others is a genuine good.
• Taking, using, and keeping power are genuine goods; submitting to a greater power is a genuine evil.
• Undisputed rule is a genuine good.
• Battling, competing, and winning are genuine goods.
• Relaxing and releasing one’s sense of purpose are genuine evils.
• Controlling emotions and pleasure-appetites is a genuine good.
• The right to do as one pleases is a genuine good.

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

Power over other men and over circumstances lies entirely outside the boundary of what a man controls. What is inside it is his own act of will, and no quantity of power extends that region by an inch. A man at the head of an army has exactly the same jurisdiction over his own assent as a man in a cell, and neither has any over anything else.

The exposure is unusually plain in this style, because what it wants is other people’s compliance. Every good it recognises is held at the pleasure of men who may withhold it, and the position it defends is one that age, chance, or a stronger opponent will take. The vigilance this produces is not incidental; it is what wanting an unsecurable thing feels like from inside.

There is a further point about the acts themselves. An act of will aimed at an external held to be a good is not made virtuous by succeeding. Its character is fixed by what it aims at, so the whole record of victories leaves the man exactly where he began. The rules-asymmetry item fails before any of this: an act of will that exempts itself from the standard it imposes on others is irrational on its face, whatever it obtains.

What Survives the Correction

More than the style expects.

Courage survives entirely. Functioning well in danger is an appropriate aim and always was; what changes is that it is no longer a demonstration. Authority survives where duty places a man in it — commanding, deciding, bearing responsibility for others are all things justice may require, and the corpus asks for none of them to be handed back. Discipline survives. Doing hard things survives.

What is removed is the valuation: that holding the position is a good, that losing it is an evil, and that a man is diminished by being answerable to someone. He is not diminished by it, because there was nothing in the position that belonged to him.

The Near Miss

Two items on this page will be mistaken for corpus positions, and they must be separated carefully.

“Controlling emotions and pleasure-appetites is a genuine good” resembles Stoic self-command and is not it. Command over the passions follows from valuing rightly; the passion does not arise, because the judgment that produced it has been withdrawn. What this style practises is suppression in the service of advantage — the feeling held down because showing it would cost him something. The judgment underneath is untouched and the valuation is intact.

“Showing mercy or compassion to opponents is a genuine evil” is the graver case, because the corpus does classify pity as a passion rooted in a false judgment, and the two verdicts can be made to sound alike. They are not alike. The corpus holds that pity is a malfunction — it treats another man’s external loss as though an evil had befallen him — and it holds in the same breath that the act of help is required wherever duty requires it. What is corrected is the feeling, never the obligation. This style holds mercy evil for the opposite reason: because helping a beaten opponent forfeits an advantage. The corpus withdraws the disturbance and leaves the duty. The style withdraws the duty and keeps the appetite.

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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.