Edit :Excellent suggestions in the comments. Two of them stood out for me:
- "Untaught" may be better. It is less connoted (if at all), conveys about the right meaning, and can be understood by about anyone (thanks, shminux).
- Using a word to name a category can raise walls around it. In this case, we must be extra careful not to stigmatize the very people we'd like to join us (thanks, daenerys).
We often use "insane" to describe people whose behaviour or beliefs are below the sanity waterline. But as most must would agree here, you cannot call someone insane with a straight face just because he happens to believe in magic.
I'm currently watching Future by Design, a documentary featuring Jacque Fresco and the Venus Project. Jacque came up with this word, "unsane", to describe people who basically, aren't rational because they haven't been exposed to the right ideas yet. Which would be different from "insane", which is more about irrevocably irrational people.
I like this word, because there isn't the tone of accusation we find in "insane". This neutrality makes it easier to say that we can do something about it. Insanity should be eradicated like vermin. Unsanty on the other hand can be fixed.
So, do you think this word, "Unsanity" might be worth using?
Those are the most obvious examples. There are also other drugs that improve sanity that are either/or more focused on improving the sanity of individuals with specific traits or are more drastic in nature.
More drastic example: I've found injecting myself with cerebrolysin to give significant benefits to sanity and that is a substance that would give improvements to most people.
An example that is both drastic and dependent on the individual: There is a counterfactual wedrifid* that attests that the drug that has given the most powerful improvement is testosterone cypionate. While the primary effect of the drug is massive muscle growth the psychological side effects actually improved his sanity by an absurd degree. He went from barely functional to highly productive. When one observes that the decision to not attempt to fulfill one's CEV at a given moment is a bad decision it follows that all else being equal improved motivation is improved sanity.
Elaborating on why the psychological side effects of testosterone injection are individual dependent: Not everyone get the same amount of motivation and increased goal seeking from the steroid and most people do not experience periods of chronic avolition. Another psychological effect is a potentially drastic increase in aggression which in turn can have negative social consequences. In the case of counterfactual wedrifid he gets a net improvement in social consequences. He has observed that aggression and anger are a prompt for increased ruthless self-interested goal seeking. Ruthless self-interested goal seeking involves actually bothering to pay attention to social politics. People like people who do social politics well. Most particularly it prevents acting on contempt which is what wedrifid finds prompts the most hostility and resentment in others. Point is, what is a sanity promoting change in one person may not be in another.
Footnote:
The footnote reminds me of my nuclear physics textbook's description of how nukes ‘might’ ‘possibly’ ‘perhaps’ (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) be made.