Use when you catch yourself asking whether you're 'the exception' who can skip the rules — the asking is the answer. Use when evaluating someone whose grand self-image requires constant self-reassurance. Use when distinguishing real confidence from a doctrine held together by doubt.

This is the elegant self-contradiction at the center of the novel. The Napoleon-type acts without self-interrogation; therefore self-interrogation is itself the disqualifying trait. It is a portable test for impostor-ideologies: any identity that has to be repeatedly self-asserted and self-tested is not being lived — it is being performed, and performance is the tell.