The Empire Depends On Psychological
Compartmentalization
By Caitlin Johnstone
July 07, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - Britain’s High Court has
granted the US government limited permission to
appeal its extradition case against WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange, meaning that the acclaimed
journalist will continue to languish in prison for
exposing US war crimes while the appeals process
plays out.
If the western media were what it purports to be,
every member of the public will be acutely aware of
the fact that a journalist is being imprisoned by
the most powerful government on earth for exposing
inconvenient facts about its war machine. Because
the western media are propaganda institutions
designed to protect the powerful, this fact is far
from the forefront of public attention. Most people
are more aware of
the smears about Assange being a Russian agent
or a rapist than they are of his victimization by a
tyrannical
assault on world press freedoms.
There is a whole other world happening just below
the surface of mainstream public attention. The
membrane of celebrities and entertainment and
partisan bickering overlays public perception of the
world almost the entire time, only occasionally
being disrupted by short-lived blasts of dissonance
piercing through the fog.
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You’ll be reading about what Ronnie Republican
said to Debbie Democrat, and it will feel so real
and normal, then all of a sudden you’re getting
blasted in the face with talk of Jeffrey Epstein
getting suicided in prison amid reported ties to
government-run sexual blackmail operations using
minors for the purpose of controlling society’s
leading influencers. Then it gets quickly
memory-holed, the membrane returns, and it’s
back to Ronnie and Debbie once again.
But before the fog returns there’s always a
short-lived moment of “What?? Huh??” as you
try to re-orient yourself to reality in light of the
new information you just received. What you just saw
is completely irreconcilable with your current view
of the world, the one you’ve been fed piece-by-piece
by school and mass media and
internet algorithms. The clash between your
comfortable existing worldview and the new
information you just received causes a kind of
psychological discomfort known as
cognitive dissonance, which makes it hard to
hold them both at the same time.
From there,
psychological compartmentalization takes over.
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.
ompartmentalization 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.
The cost of coming out of compartmentalization
into a worldview of integrity is cognitive
dissonance and the
discomfort of constructing a new conceptual
framework for reality. But the reward is having
a perspective that is based on truth instead of
lies.
Compartmentalization is a weapon of the
propagandists. It’s a glitch in our cognitive
processing which means they don’t have to work as
hard to keep us living in a lie-based reality
tunnel; all they have to do is construct our
perception of reality for us, and from there our own
psychological defense systems will do the work for
them.
The oligarchic empire which rules our world is
not truly hidden from view; we see signs of it all
the time, it’s just too uncomfortable for most of us
to look at. The monster isn’t hiding under the bed,
it’s staring us right in the face and we’re looking
all over the room except where it’s standing because
to meet its gaze would obliterate our world.
But obliterate it we must. Lie-based worldviews
are what hold the empire together; the powerful
spend so much energy propagandizing us because they
need to in order to retain power. Without it, we
could realize that they are unleashing immense evils
upon our world, and that there are a whole lot more
of us than there are of them.
And this is what we must do if our species is to
survive into the future. We must find a way to move
past the cognitive dissonance from a lie-based way
of living into a truth-based way of living, and
become a truth-based species with a truth-based
relationship with each other and with our ecosystem.
If we keep hiding from reality, we’ll
compartmentalize ourselves right out of existence
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