The Idiosyncratic Style — Root Dogma and Correction

 

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

The Idiosyncratic Style — Root Dogma and Correction

Root dogma: One’s own inner experience is the sole genuine source of truth and value; external consensus reality 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

• Clarity and verifiability of one’s beliefs are genuine evils.
• Being understood by ordinary others is a genuine evil.
• The unexplained and the anomalous are genuine goods.
• Marching to a distinctive beat is a genuine good; conventional rhythms are a genuine evil.
• One’s own feelings and belief systems are genuine goods.
• Self-direction and independence are genuine goods; close relationships are a genuine evil.
• An eccentric, unusual lifestyle is a genuine good; convention is a genuine evil.
• The occult, extrasensory, and supernatural are genuine goods.
• Abstract and speculative thinking is a genuine good.
• Perceiving how others react to oneself is a genuine good.
• Customary and accepted explanations are genuine evils.
• Living according to inner sensations, feelings, and ideas is a genuine good.
• Nonconformism is a genuine good.
• Company of like-minded others is a genuine good; affiliating or conforming is a genuine evil.
• Others’ principles and beliefs are genuine evils.
• Inner voices are genuine goods; others’ voices are genuine evils.
• Others’ standards of correctness are genuine evils.
• Others’ opinions of one’s habits are genuine evils.
• Fitting in is a genuine evil.
• Standard explanations are genuine evils; inner experience alone is a genuine good.
• Questioning, wondering, and reinventing the universe are genuine goods.
• Intensely felt emotional experience and mind/emotional/spiritual expansion are genuine goods.
• New peak experiences are genuine goods.
• Testing the limits of emotional and spiritual experience is a genuine good.
• Inner emotional experience is a genuine good; objective external reality as others define it is a genuine evil.
• Freedom from rules and conformist expectations 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

This entry is unlike the others on this site, and the difference should be stated at the outset. Most styles misclassify indifferents — they take something that is neither good nor evil and hold it to be one or the other. This style does that too, but its root dogma does something further. It denies that there is anything for a judgment to be right or wrong about.

A belief is true when it corresponds to how things are. That is what truth is, and it is why holding a belief with conviction does nothing whatever to make it true. This style has substituted the strength of an inner state for the relation between a claim and the world, which is not a different theory of truth but the abandonment of the notion. Once that substitution is made, no further error can be identified, because the standard by which an error would be found has been removed.

The value chain then applies as it does elsewhere. Eccentricity, peak experience, the anomalous, spiritual expansion — all externals or states of the body, none of them good or evil, all of them assented to as goods on no ground but that they felt significant.

What Survives the Correction

Independence of mind survives, and so does the willingness to hold a position no one else holds. Neither ever required the dogma. A man who reasons carefully to an unpopular conclusion and one who arrives at it by inner sensation may end up saying the same words, but only the first has done anything.

Questioning survives. So does speculative thinking, and so does refusing an explanation because it is inadequate rather than because it is customary. The distinction is the whole of the matter: an explanation is to be rejected when it fails to fit the facts, never when it fits them and is merely widely held.

What is removed is the standing warrant. The style treats its own divergence as self-certifying, which converts every disagreement into evidence of its own correctness and makes the position unreachable by argument. Take the divergence and give up the warrant, and what remains is simply thinking for oneself, which the corpus requires.

The Near Miss

This style contains the most dangerous resemblance in the entire register, and it is worth setting out with care.

The corpus holds that moral truths are apprehended directly by the rational faculty — not derived from convention, not settled by counting heads, not deferred to authority. On the face of it, that is what this style claims: inner apprehension over external consensus, one’s own sense of things over what others say. The words very nearly match.

The difference is what the faculty is apprehending. Direct apprehension is apprehension of something. There is a moral fact, it stands independently of anyone’s state of mind, and the faculty either gets it right or fails to. That is precisely what makes the apprehension checkable, correctable, and capable of being mistaken. This style keeps the immediacy and discards the object. It holds that the inner state is authoritative because it is inner, which means nothing could count against it and nothing could confirm it.

The test is simple and it is available to anyone. Ask whether the faculty has ever delivered a verdict its owner did not want. An apprehension of something real sometimes reports what is unwelcome. An inner state that only ever licenses what one already inclined toward is not apprehending anything; it is the inclination, wearing the language of insight.

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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.