The Empire Depends On Psychological Compartmentalization

Compartmentalizing is when we mentally separate information or experience from our existing understanding of ourselves and our world and kind of sweep it under the carpet so we don't experience cognitive dissonance anymore. We don't delete it; the information is still there to be accessed if we want to, but it's placed in a separate file and treated as though it exists in a parallel alternate reality.

Compartmentalization sometimes comes into play when a wife discovers that her husband has been sexually molesting their child; she files the information away into a separate container, because the way that information would shatter her world if she held onto it is too frightening and the cognitive dissonance of holding both worlds at the same time too uncomfortable.

Compartmentalization comes in when we're scrolling through our news feed and see something about the horrors that are being unleashed upon Yemen with the help of our government; it doesn't square with the model of the world we've been trained to hold in our minds, so we dissociate it from our model.

It comes in when we remember that we were lied to about Iraq. It comes in when we think about what humankind's way of living on this planet is doing to our ecosystem. It comes in when we think about the fact that nuclear weapons are a thing and that cold war tensions are escalating. It comes in when we are reminded that our government is participating in the torture and imprisonment of a journalist whose only crime was trying to bring the truth out from the locked files it's been hidden away in so we can make it a part of our worldview.

Reading by Tim Foley.
Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-empire-depends-on-psychological