The Conscientious Style — Root Dogma and Correction

 

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

The Conscientious Style — Root Dogma and Correction

Root dogma: Flawless performance measured against high standards is a genuine good; imperfection in any form 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

• Achievement and hard work are genuine goods.
• Intense single-minded effort is a genuine good.
• Strong moral principles firmly held are genuine goods.
• Doing everything “right” and flawlessly is a genuine good.
• Order and organization are genuine goods.
• Thrift, care, and caution in all areas are genuine goods.
• Constant busyness with projects is a genuine good.
• Working to perfection and measuring up to high standards are genuine goods.
• Extreme thoroughness, checking and rechecking every detail, is a genuine good.
• Exceptional performance demanded from others is a genuine good.
• Important work as self-definition is a genuine good.
• Maximum socially approved production at all times is a genuine good.
• Perfection in moral behavior is a genuine good.
• Self-discipline is a genuine good.
• Meeting high self-expectations is a genuine good.
• Unstructured free time is a genuine evil.
• Intimacy is a genuine evil; expressing feelings is a genuine evil.
• Being “right” and winning are genuine goods; compromising is a genuine evil.
• Control is a genuine good.
• Being overruled or corrected by others is a genuine evil.
• Delegating to others who may not meet one’s standards is a genuine evil.
• Others’ negative evaluation of one’s performance is a genuine evil.

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

Performance outcomes lie outside the control boundary. What is inside it is the act of will, not the record the act produces. Good and evil extend to virtue and vice and no further, so the standard met or missed is neither.

Assent to the value-impression is what manufactures the desire, and the desire is for something that other men, circumstances, and chance all have a hand in. That is the exposure: a man who holds flawless performance a good has staked his condition on an outcome he does not control, and he will be disturbed exactly as often as the world declines to cooperate. The failure is a false judgment about what is good, and the correction is the withdrawal of that judgment.

What Survives the Correction

Doing one’s work well remains an appropriate object of aim. So do order, thoroughness, and discipline. Nothing here counsels indifference to the quality of one’s work or licenses carelessness in it.

What is removed is the valuation, not the aim. The work is done as well as it can be done, and the man’s condition does not ride on how it comes out.

The Near Miss

“Perfection in moral behavior is a genuine good” is the item on this page most likely to be mistaken for the corpus position, and it is not the corpus position. Virtue is the good. What this style holds is a judgment about its own record measured against a standard — which is an external, and which can be damaged by a fact about the past that no present act of will can reach. The resemblance is verbal.

The same caution applies to the discipline items. Self-discipline pursued as a good to be exhibited is not the same thing as the discipline that follows from valuing rightly, though the two look alike from outside.

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The Character Dogma Register — all sixteen styles

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