This is the Dissonance system applied to Amenta. The Principles are:

• Cleanliness (vs. Pollution): Being clean in thought and in action. Not spreading pollution and keeping it minimised and contained, making sure your environment is clean and orderly, being prompt and proactive about making everyone feel clean and comfortable.


• Diligence (vs. Idleness): Thorough, consistent, persistent effort. Always having work and always being complete in what you do; not do anything by half-measures and not waste time you could be spending usefully.


• Excellence (vs. Mediocrity): Always striving to improve. However you did today, do better tomorrow. Always seek to grow and become better at what you do.


• Nurturing (vs. Neglect): Caring for other people, for their emotions and development and growth. Ensuring others live up to their full potential, giving them resources to succeed and unconditional support.


• Conscientiousness (vs. Carelessness): Detail-orientedness, carefulness, doing everything you do well. Caring for how details affect the big picture, for how your work fits in the whole and impacts others, making sure what you do is exact.


• Ingenuity (vs. Unoriginality): Outside-the-box thinking, creativity, originality, inspiration, innovation, artistic merit, intellectual pursuit.


• Wisdom (vs. Folly): Long-term thinking, even-handedness, fair-mindedness, conservatism, mindfulness of consequences.


• Neighbourliness (vs. Selfishness): Not eating up the commons, making sure the community has enough, not taking more than you need, making sure others are being given their fair share.

Details

• The caste with the highest proportion of magic users is blue.


• The second caste with the highest proportion of magic users, however, is red, because of their strong caste unity and internal trust.


• Reds are thought by magic-users to be too polluted to use magic. Magic reds coordinate not to use magic in public and hide the presence of their magic and keep this illusion going.


• Few magic users are aware that anyone can do magic of any Principle, and most just think that being good at magic is a consequence of being good at your caste plus being a good Amentan in general. Since reds "can't do magic" and the thing their caste is good for is "being polluted," most people think pollution itself precludes magic ability, and the observed lack of magic amongst reds is taken as evidence for pollution being a real thing.