Thought Traps and The Compartmentalization of Everything as a Mechanism for Social Control

This is something I've discussed casually with lots of people, but I've never really set out to articulate it thoroughly or in writing. I want to talk about our cultural tendency to hyper-compartmentalize our lives -- how and why we do it.

I've noticed that there's a tremendous amount of dissociation between the nooks and crannies of human thought, belief, and behavior. It seems we've developed a preference for keeping EVERYTHING completely insular, lest we be faced with the hypocrisy of our own actions or ideologies. I see this occuring on all levels, from politics to religion to entertainment to the way we choose to socialize to what color socks we wear. One really grim interpretation of this would be that we're way too petrified to remove our blinders because we know instinctively that we're living on lies, and our world will crumble if we let the light in. I mean, I know that to some extent this has been occuring for a long, long time. It's really closely tied into the 'divide and conquer' idea, it's just that it seems like it's gotten really, REALLY out of hand. Think about how people deliberately throw themselves into these super-defined and extremely limiting categories. It's like, you're free to pick your template -- believe whatever the fuck you want -- but once you make that decision you sure as hell better stick with it.

I feel like this is such a huge topic, I don't even know what examples to use or which points to make. It's like I said in my first post about how you're either a democrat or a republican -- you HAVE to be one or the other. "Both" and "neither" aren't options -- they're perceived as threats. It's like there's this really complex and very insane web of dead ends (I don't know how it's possible to have a network of dead ends, but bear with me), and it seals us off from any avenues that might lead us to comprehend the excess of contradictions we've built into our consensus belief systems.

This brings me back to this idea of "thought traps" which occured to me while discussing some stuff in response to Tim's aptly titled New Age Horse Shit post. Basically it seems to me that our fear of gnosis is being nourished and cultivated by the evil reptilian lizard men at the Pentagon, as our ignorance behooves them and their interests. It's not just generic garden-variety ignorance, though. It's this honeycombing technique, this fragmentation, essentially a DISMANTLING of us and our society so that we are unable to function as a cohesive whole, except in a mechanical sense. It's like everywhere you go, you have to be careful not to fall into a hole. Each hole is a thought-trap, and in a sense each hole is also an archetypal energy, but it's really dangerous because you can get stuck in the hole and then the resident autonomous complex eats you. Am I making sense? I'm trying.

So basically I think that this whole thing with this sort of archetypal new age crystal-carrying flake (I'm not knocking crystals, by the way) is just one example of one of these thought traps. You go in questing, but you come out wearing wolf sweatshirts and dreamcatcher earrings. It's like you reach this critical point where you're no longer exploring the idea, you're SERVING it. You become a vehicle for it and in that sense your OWN forward motion ceases -- you get stuck in a loop, so it creates the illusion of motion but really it's extremely limiting. Once you've reached this point, other ideas start to seem very threatening to the complex that has possessed you. Voila -- people stop thinking AND they stop seeing. It's perfect, because the guys exploiting us don't care WHAT you believe or WHAT you're stuck in -- that makes ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE to them, because it always FUNCTIONS identically, when you get down to it.

Woo!

Comments

[occult investigator]

Great stuff. I started to write a big response, but I'm just gonna do it on my site, cause I was just going to have to rehash it there anyway....

[occult investigator]

Oh, I know the other thing this made me think of: A Scanner Darkly. That's all about compartmentalization, and I love how the end of it is basically this like totally necessary destruction of the compartments and this ambiguous freedom that results...

(PS. Once again, this site won't seem to remember when I type in my personal details to write a comment)

[laura jane]

that's weird about the personal data thing, thanks for reminding me. typepad is kind of hard to nagivate so i'm not really sure where to begin in terms of getting that fixed. maybe i'll just email them now.

yeah, you are totally right about scanner. i think i should probably re-read that soon. another thing that comes to mind is odysseus and the sirens just because they're this really intoxicating, destructive distraction from what's really important.

[albion]

> Woo!

you can say that again, sister. great stuff.

[Jason Bradfield]

I found your site from Tim's.

Compartmentalization may be a result of socioeconomic specialization. I think specialization has arisen because because it is an evoluationarily successful social strategy.

In other words in ancient times the highly specialized, command and control tribe would always beat and conqueor the generalist, consensus oriented tribe.

Through cultural (and perhaps genetic) evolution people have been conditioned to compartmentalize. For better or worse this destroys their individuality. I think the key to many spiritual traditions is learning to break free from this cultural programming and to help others do so too.

I understand your criticism of the elites, but I fear that that the language you use tends to place too much blame on the shoulders of individual human beings and not enough on the system.

I think it is better to think of a particular "system" as exploiting humans and the Earth as opposed to the supposed beneficiaries of that system.

[laura jane]

thanks for your comments jason. i know what you mean about the system exploiting the humans, and i think that is a very good point.

the language i use, however, is the language i use!! you know? that's my voice.

i am NOT "blaming" individuals, but i AM calling them out.

[wandering1]

Very nicely written!

I found this site because someone in the Noble Realms forum linked to the Tim Boucher site which has a link to here.

Just wanted to let people here know about http://forum.noblerealms.org/
because similar issues are explored.