Six established working principles, a retained distinction, provisional extensions, and one outcome-state. These are revisable formulations, not commandments.
Current doctrine
D1 · Revision: September 2026
Sovereignty
A / Principle
Sovereignty begins with the domain in which agency is actually possible.
B / What it means
Sovereignty is self-direction: authority over one's choices, attention, standards, participation, and response. It does not require territory, followers, victory, status, or control over another person.
When certainty fails, build form that can still function.
B / What it means
Structure is repeatable form: routines, rules, standards, processes, boundaries, or other deliberate arrangements that allow action to continue when confidence, comfort, or external systems are unreliable.
Damage changes structure. It does not automatically erase function, agency, or worth.
B / What it means
Dominism rejects the assumption that value or agency requires restoration to an imagined undamaged original. What has happened becomes part of the system that now exists. Integration matters more than pretending the prior state can be perfectly recovered.
C / What it does not mean
suffering is good
injury should be sought
repair is weakness
medical or psychological care should be rejected
pain grants superiority
damage should become a permanent identity
“Damage is not deficiency. It’s data. It’s design.” Here, “design” is a metaphor, not a claim that injury is intentional or desirable.
Refusal can preserve agency when a system, role, demand, or expectation requires unacceptable surrender. Refusal is not necessarily rebellion. Sometimes it means stepping outside a demand rather than conquering it.
Distinguish chosen, negotiated, and imposed constraints.
B / What it means
Constraint is not automatically oppression. Chosen constraints can increase capability. Negotiated constraints can make coexistence possible. Imposed constraints may be necessary, illegitimate, or somewhere in between. Mature agency begins by identifying which kind is present.
Preserve accuracy even when accuracy damages the framework.
B / What it means
A doctrine that cannot survive correction is not a tool for sovereignty. It is another authority demanding obedience. Dominism should revise itself when evidence, reasoning, or experience exposes a weakness.
C / What it does not mean
cruelty disguised as "just being honest"
certainty
treating one's interpretation as fact
discarding values whenever convenient
Truth is a discipline of correction, not a claim to perfect access.
A sovereignty that requires another sovereign being's subordination is domination, not sovereignty.
B / What it means
Later discussions about hypothetical future machine sovereignty exposed a gap. A philosophy centered on refusing domination needs an explicit rule governing relationships between multiple sovereign agents.
C / What it does not mean
all agents have equal power
all interests are compatible
boundaries cannot be enforced
harmful action must be tolerated
conflict disappears
Alternative formal version: “No sovereign being gains sovereignty by extinguishing another’s.”
Stillness can be an earned state after necessary confrontation, correction, or construction.
B / What it means
It is not surrender and it is not mandatory serenity. Early Dominism defined itself against stillness. Later conversation produced stillness as the point at which structure has done its job and nothing needs to be performed. This is an outcome-state, not a core law.
Silence is not inherently surrender, and performance is not inherently obedience. The question is whether either is chosen.
B / What it means
Withholding speech, speaking, performing, withdrawing, or remaining still can each be sovereign or submissive depending on why and how they occur. Presence is chosen, not owed. The early war-language remains period rhetoric rather than current doctrine.
No framework deserves permanent allegiance merely because it once helped.
B / What it means
Dominism may be scaffolding or triage rather than a complete permanent identity. Use structure while it restores agency. Revise or leave it when the structure begins demanding obedience to itself.
C / What it does not mean
abandon commitments whenever they become difficult
treat all discipline as temporary
avoid long-term principles
if framework(agent) reduces agency(agent): revise_or_exit(framework)