Trope-a-Day: My Species Doth Protest Too Much

My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Seemingly averted because, so far as you can tell, all the Imperials really are that way.  (The explanation they would give, stripped of technical and polite terminology both, boils down to “We’re just obsessively inclined to believe that we are certain things, and even more obsessively inclined to live up to our monumental self-image in those regards,” which while probably true so far as it goes, is not really a full explanation.)

A more, ah, complete explanation is that in really fundamental things, like the Imperial libertist ethical tradition, those who don’t feel like conforming leave-or-are-left with great speed in the name of self-preservation (the Renunciates and future Renegades), and that those people who disagree firmly enough with the relentless drumbeat of internal and external perfection, Science!, beauty and negentropism that makes up the social consensus, while absolutely free to go their own way while remaining there, still generally find the atmosphere intolerable enough as to find their own way out.

In short: the Imperials stay that way by kicking out all the troublemakers.