In my post on New Age Horse Shit, I got kind of carried away and may or may not have totally made the point I was trying to make. Such are the pitfalls of writing, and choosing a rhetorical device to deliver your payload. In any event, I’m lucky to have other people picking up the ball and running with it. Laura Jane put together an interesting post which explores the idea in another direction: that compartmentalization becomes a means of social control.

There’s two parts of her post that spark my attention the most. The first one is in reference to this sort of incessant compartmentalizing of information and people:

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.

There seem to be a couple good ways to explore this topic further. One is the myth which is developed that everyone from strangers to people you’ve known for years is a potential: (1) terrorist, (2) serial killer, (3) pedophile, (4) rapist, etc. This myth is most definitely propagated by cop “justice” dramas, movies, and the news. And it seems to have done a bang-up job of alienating people from one another. I mean, how many of your neighbors do you really and honestly “know” anymore? My guess is not nearly as many as you might have 20 years ago.

Another facet of this whole issue, I think, is that our culture is now at a place where we can help accelerate compartmentalizing. That is, we can now “choose” news sources that we agree with, and filter out the rest - either through cable news, or through the internet, etc. It’s much easier for us to become sort of an extremist about something very quickly through continued exposure to one viewpoint.

On this forward momentum issue, LJ also writes:

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 […] 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.

Anyway, great stuff. I plan to continue this discussion, but I’m getting sleepy!