The Sensitive Style — Root Dogma and Correction
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
The Sensitive Style — Root Dogma and Correction
Root dogma: Others’ disapproval is a genuine evil; avoiding it is a genuine good.
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
Four judgments carry the style. Beneath two of them sits the form in which that judgment is usually met.
- Authentic self-revelation is a genuine evil.
- Sharing inner thoughts and feelings with others is a genuine evil.
- Social visibility is a genuine evil.
- Making waves or calling attention to oneself is a genuine evil.
- Asserting one’s own needs and desires is a genuine evil.
- One’s unapproved authentic self is a genuine evil.
The remainder of the cluster:
- A familiar, small social world is a genuine good; a wide social network is a genuine evil.
- Emotional security with a few close others is a genuine good.
- Familiarity, habit, and routine are genuine goods; the unknown is a genuine evil.
- Others thinking well of one is a genuine good.
- Deliberate discretion and courtesy are genuine goods.
- Scripted, predictable settings are genuine goods.
- Caution, reserve, and holding oneself back are genuine goods.
- Surprise is a genuine evil.
- Others’ approval is a genuine good; disapproval and criticism are genuine evils.
- Making a good impression is a genuine good.
- A life built around a few trusted people is a genuine good.
- Hiding oneself behind a polite facade is a genuine good.
- Meeting others’ expectations is a genuine good.
- Winning back favor through behavioral change is a genuine good.
- Comfort and predictability are genuine goods.
- One trusted person to rely on is a genuine good.
- Meeting new people is a genuine evil.
- Staying within familiar territory 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
Another man’s judgment of you lies wholly outside your control — not partly outside, wholly. It is formed in his mind, out of his own history and his own errors, and no act of yours reaches it. Good and evil extend to virtue and vice and no further, so his verdict falls on neither side of the value axis. It is not a small evil. It is not an evil.
The desire to be approved of is itself within the agent’s control, which is what makes it correctable and what makes it irrational to keep: it is a desire whose object cannot be secured by the one thing he does control. That is the exposure. A life arranged around avoiding disapproval is a life whose peace is issued by other people, revocable without notice and without reason.
What Survives the Correction
Less here than in most entries, and the reason is worth stating plainly.
Courtesy, discretion, and care in speech survive intact as appropriate aims — they are owed to others and they are not owed to fear. Good repute is a thing a reasonable man would rather have than not.
But the style’s object is not repute. It is the avoidance of an adverse verdict, and that is not an aim at all. It is a flinch. Nothing survives of it, because there was never an action in it to preserve — only the withholding of action, and the withholding is what the style calls prudence.
The Near Miss
“Caution, reserve, and holding oneself back are genuine goods” is the item on this page most likely to be mistaken for the corpus position. Reserve in speech is a discipline the ancient Stoics recommended, and this style exhibits it constantly.
The difference is in what the silence is for. Reserve as a discipline is the withholding of assent until the impression has been examined. Reserve as this style practises it is the withholding of the self until the room is judged safe — which is not an examination of anything, and which leaves every impression assented to as it arrived.
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.
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