Cultural Language
Cultures differ their internal communication through mechanisms as bold as entirely different language, as is seen with groups like the Amish who speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a form of German, to mechanisms as subtle as unique words and affectations, which are common in many haven cultures.
From time to time, cultural language seeps into widespread usage, especially if the originating culture produces influential media and sets trends. Consider the various phrases, words, and affectations originally common in both American Black and LGBT communities that have been co-opted by pop culture.
What we find most interesting is the manner in which hard cultures use language. Scientology provides a good case study, with members often using a large number of acronyms in their daily speech. Doing so identifies them to other cultural insiders while forcing outsiders to appear less knowledgeable.
When considering distinct language for your own House, consider that the primary function of most insider cultural language is to categorize and “other” both outsiders and insiders. From a tactical standpoint (and we elaborate on this later in the book), we therefore find the most impactful use of language pertains to the way cultures classify people. Consider, for example, how Scientologists use the acronym SP (suppressive persons) to refer to those actively challenging their church, and how the Amish often refer to non-Amish as “the English.”
In the case of our House, there are really only two unique words we use with any regularity and have not discussed elsewhere in the book, “Husk” and “Shrieker.”
Husk:
We use this term to describe a person who is unable to change their mind when presented with new information or seriously engage with new ideas. From our perspective, such people have lost the key element of human existence. Our cultivar holds that a living human is the medium upon which ideas and perspectives interact. While spiders can only learn to make better webs through the spiders that made bad webs dying, humans can test their models of the world against other models and information. Particularly virulent memetic sets have evolved the ability to shut down this process in order to ensure they can never be expunged from a person’s mind. Once this happens, a person stops being meaningfully human and is better thought of as a memetic set wearing a human-like skin suit. In other words, a husk is a corpse puppeteered by the thing that consumed its identity—like an “Edgar suit” or a “Billy suit” (Men In Black or Adventure Time; choose your pop culture reference). To be clear, a Husk is not someone who disagrees with us or follows a different tradition (as people who disingenuously manipulate their followers will almost certainly imply). A Husk is someone of any tradition incapable of meaningfully engaging with new ideas.
Shrieker:
This term is used to describe a category of husk that tries to force someone to comply with their memetic set’s framework of acceptable behavior by signaling social rejection. What makes shriekers so insidious is that they do this to complete strangers from different social circles (which makes the attempted social rejection feckless). Humans evolved to fear social rejection, as historically it meant we would be expelled from the tribe and likely die. As such, even the most lucid of humans will experience an illogically strong reaction when complete strangers online signal that their behavior is unacceptable (e.g., someone calling them cringe, a freak, or a Nazi). The emotional pain we feel upon social rejection evolved to work within small groups in which everyone knew each other, but shriekers exploit this reaction in large pseudonymous venues. Some cultural viruses have evolved to exploit this. After consuming an individual’s identity, they marionette the corpse into barging into venues of public conversation to repeatedly signal social rejection to strangers.
The supervirus has become particularly adept at utilizing shriekers to make thoughts, ideas, and lifestyles that threaten its spread unsafe to express in public venues. Why? There are few things more threatening to a social virus than a person proudly living life their own way; if other people started to see this as a normal way of being, most viruses would lose a lot of their power.
Both of these terms were designed to be of active utility to members of our cultivar.
“Husk” as a term reinforces how much we value the ability to consider new perspectives and ideas by framing the loss of this ability as tantamount to death. It also helps members save time by encouraging them to write people off once they realize they are a Husk.
“Shrieker” as a term helps members of our culture turn down the volume of this easy-to-hijack social signal by dehumanizing those who exploit it in an effort to manipulate members of our culture into conformity with a projected “correct way of being” (correct from the shrieker’s point of cultural reference, of course). When you see a person as a harmless zombie shrieking and pointing at you, it is easy to realize how little their “rejection” matters. Framing shriekers so negatively may also prevent iterations of our culture from someday adopting similar strategies.
Side note: A very interesting behavior you sometimes see from shriekers is the formation of a “hive.” This happens when a virus has effectively created husks that feel a compulsion to signal social rejection about those not slavishly following their concept of cultural norms but that fail to ensure this compulsion was only elicitable by signaling this to outgroup members. Thus, clusters of shriekers will gather to masturbate this compulsion in front of each other in closed communities that no one who doesn’t already agree with them visits. (Kiwi farms is a good example of a hive.)