Preliminary Rationale

Language evolved to serve social institutions rather than individual thought or pure reason. This mismatch has detrimental effects on people’s ability to reason, since many concepts lie beyond the narrow bounds exposed by our social interactions. Furthermore, many of these ideas cannot be captured by a single word, so new terms must be coined to facilitate clearer, more efficient conceptualization.

Malcolm’s Personal Lexicon:

To address these gaps, I wanted to share some of my own words that I use to better express concepts.

Seprotise:
Verb - To preserve or preserving individualist, thought processes or habits for self-empowerment when in a passively identity-eroding environment.

Knowledge High:
Noun - An informal term for when some mental machination clicks with reality. Can also be thought of as an error-prediction signal from neuroscience.

Death Spirals:
Noun - Self-reinforcing hobbies that operate through mimetic desire (e.g., collecting vintage watches, upgrading to the latest model cars, or customizing your mechanical keyboard).

AED (Artificial Environments of Desire):
Noun - Environments that, through the domineering culture or ingrained narratives, artificially skew Freshministan and by extension Celebristan models of desire toward a set of cultural objectives (Note: Luke Burgis has a great blog post called mimetic desire 101 that goes over the above terms).

Terrible Words:

I also wanted to share some particularly bad words that I would advise avoiding based on their design and usage.

Homewrecker:
Rather than directly blaming the interloper and/or homewrecker, we should examine the breakdowns in the pre-existing relational contract. A functional marital or relational contract would not have resulted in anyone being named a homewrecker.

Self-love:
Why are we defining a word that only acts on the self like seprotise by using “love,” which in all cases is seen as dual subject love?