Compartmentalization in psychology is a simple enough concept. A person who cannot tolerate cognitive dissonance may partition those thoughts off as a defense mechanism. This very often happens when religious convictions collide with science, or when suppressing a childhood trauma to maintain family relationships. Frequently it’s both.
In terms of information security it simply means “need to know basis”, and it predates psychology by however many years ago it was when the first chimpanzee got a sharp rock from one friend, a forked stick from another, and then made a club and robbed them both. KFC did the same thing for years with their magic blend of herbs and seasonings. Some parts would be mixed at one location, and others somewhere else so nobody except the Colonel knew the entire recipe.
For millennia, social power structures and architects have taken advantage of both forms of compartmentalization to attain power and then keep it. A general will tell the Athenians that Carthaginian pirates are robbing their ships, and tell the Romans that Carthage is ruining their lucrative Athenian pirating business if it will get Athens and Rome to the Carthaginian gates. Once the soldiers have finished raping and pillaging their way through the city, there’s a good chance they aren’t going to want to discuss their incredibly horrific and amoral behavior—especially when it comes to their wives and the rape—and will compartmentalize the whole thing. This will then leave the general free to set up a lovely palace on the Mediterranean coast from which he can implement his plan to rob Roman ships after they rob the Athenians.
Really, it’s a fantastic system.
However, compartmentalization has taken on an entirely different paradigm since metadata collection by large companies like Google has been exploited to tailor our everyday experiences. Furthermore, instead of the internet opening up an entire universe of thought and opinion to create a more educated public, it has had entirely the opposite effect. We use Facebook not to converse but to create a bubble of pleasant ideas and surround ourselves with like-minded people that make us feel good every time they validate us. There are hundreds of news outlets, blogs, and informational sites available to us, and we dutifully allow only those that agree with us into our little world. It’s completely different from the newspaper age when you had to deal with whatever opinions and thoughts show up on your doorstep every day.
The impetus towards this irrational behavior is not just psychological, but chemical. A wide range of studies have indicated that the human brain released dopamine when we hear ideas that validate our opinions, and releases other chemicals that make us brace against dissonance.
Of course, there are still many people for whom introspection is pleasurable rather than validation, but the general principle still stands. With the support of advertising constantly reinforcing those choices, we live in a constant state of polarization; instead of compartmentalizing a negative life experience, we now compartmentalized everything in the world we don’t like, and our brains hyper-medicate those personal utopias.
The best example of this manifestation is the increasing vitriolic stubbornness in politics. The more we have our personal world tailored to our thoughts and compartmentalize everything negative, the more stringent the reaction to that negative information is going to be. This metacompartmentalization has reached a point where substantive discussion—indeed, the desire to engage in substantive discussion at all—is an affront to our existence.
That’s not the worst outcome in our modern world, however. By customizing our reality and compartmentalizing everything else, we become, in essence, a commodity to be compartmentalized in the information security sense of the term by politicians, the media, corporations and advertisers. Fox News is a classic example.
The vast majority of their success has been built around informationally compartmentalizing their viewership. Once they have a conduit into your partitioned little universe, it’s a simple task to informationally compartmentalize you by telling you what you want to hear to you keep coming back. Fox News does a brilliant job of shaping the world into something it's not for financial gain. Presto—you are now a commodity to be sorted into a box rather than a human being.
Politics simply follows that lead. Our little bubbles are a perfect opportunity for politicians to treat voters on a “need to know” basis. If they know what you psychologically compartmentalize to form your world, they can simply reinforce it. It then becomes the job of the successful politician not to argue about the real world, but to address the world into which you have been informationally compartmentalized by the news, and the world you have compartmentalized for yourself.
It’s actually one of the sicker social realities we face today, and one that is exponentially worsening as we become more willing to customize our world and shut out everything we don’t want to hear, and those organizations that can take advantage of it become exponentially better at exploiting it.
If you watch CNN, get on the Fox News site periodically to see what’s up. Check out BBC News and other international news entities every day. At the very least you will have a sense of what narratives are being forwarded, why, and how. It’s the only way I know of to help break through the system in place today. An excellent argument requires an ability to expose the cracks in those worlds, not just a well crafted statement of why you live in your.
Most importantly of all, I would encourage everyone to write. Distill your thoughts. If great minds in history have taught us anything, it's that the people are compelled by extraordinary arguments. The Founders made the case for revolution many ways, but most of all it was by plain-spoken truths. Copernicus may have recanted his heliocentric worldview because the church threatened to snuff out his life, but it was impossible to extinguish the lantern of pure reason. This is the only way to lift ourselves out of the oubliettes we wish to believe are palaces, and return to the honest world of thought and dialectic.