“Inversion” by Nick Douglas is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Inverse Compartmentalisation
It could be said, that clarity and transparency is the enemy of fraudulent, incongruent, and imbalanced organisations, and that inverse compartmentalisation is their favourite tool to achieve the opposite.
Compartmentalization is a fascinating psychological concept that plays a significant role in how we manage our thoughts, emotions, and experiences. It can be applied both to the individual, and to entire organisations.
What is Compartmentalization?
Compartmentalization is a defence mechanism that involves mentally separating conflicting thoughts, emotions, or experiences. This allows individuals to avoid the discomfort that arises from holding contradictory beliefs or feelings. Here are some key aspects:
Mental Separation: Individuals create distinct “compartments” in their minds for different aspects of their lives, such as work, personal relationships, and emotions.
Conflict Avoidance: By isolating conflicting thoughts or feelings, people can function more effectively without the stress of internal conflict.
Cognitive Process: It helps in categorizing experiences and emotions, allowing for selective attention to specific areas without being overwhelmed by others.
How Compartmentalization Helps Achieve Clarity
Compartmentalization can be a useful tool for structuring our thinking and achieving clarity in several ways:
Enhanced Focus: By isolating different areas of life, individuals can concentrate on one aspect at a time, leading to improved focus and productivity.
Reduced Overwhelm: When faced with complex situations, compartmentalization helps break down overwhelming emotions or thoughts into manageable parts, making it easier to address each one.
Improved Decision-Making: By separating conflicting thoughts, individuals can make clearer decisions without the interference of emotional turmoil or cognitive dissonance.
Emotional Regulation: Compartmentalization allows individuals to manage their emotions more effectively, as they can deal with feelings related to one compartment without letting them spill over into others. For example, traumatic memories can be compartmentalised, and taken from our conscious awareness. Unfortunately, this is also the process of dissociation.
Structured Reflection: It encourages structured reflection on different life areas, enabling individuals to assess and understand their experiences more clearly.
In summary, compartmentalization serves as a valuable cognitive strategy that helps individuals navigate the complexities of their thoughts and emotions. By creating mental compartments, people can achieve greater clarity, focus, and emotional balance, ultimately leading to more effective decision-making and a better understanding of themselves.
However, that same strategy is also the same process that distorts and dissociates parts of ourselves into the unconscious layer of the awareness, due to incongruence in the coping decision, and the reasoning behind it.
What is Inverse Compartmentalization?
Inverse compartmentalization refers to a cognitive or organizational strategy where information is deliberately mixed or obscured rather than separated into distinct categories. This approach can lead to confusion and a lack of clarity, making it difficult for individuals to understand the full context or meaning of information. Here are some key aspects:
Blurring Boundaries: Unlike traditional compartmentalization, which separates conflicting thoughts or experiences, inverse compartmentalization mixes and confuses them, creating ambiguity and the propagation of false assumptions (propaganda). Organisations often mask the aim of such incoherence as being part of some hidden plan, or agenda.
Multiple Mechanisms: There are a number of mechanisms, one, for example, is to use over-compartmentalisation to split the knowledge base into too many disparate and competitive formats.
Black and White Thinking: Often this uses the seemingly, “intuitive”, but ultimately false, black and white thinking, that oppositions should be isolated, and not seen as part of the whole. This creates blind-spots, and multiple unnecessary interpretation layers, adding to the complexity and challenge of reintegrating them back into that claimed desire, for unified, shared global understanding.
Illogical Rationality: Often such compartmentalisation comes into being, due to seemingly rational decision making, made illogical, due to misunderstandings, or the reliance on assumptions that ultimately prove to be false.
Obfuscation: This technique can intentionally obscure the truth or the intended message, making it challenging for individuals to discern what is accurate or relevant.
Information Overload: By overwhelming individuals with mixed messages or complex information, it becomes harder to focus on specific issues or make informed decisions.
Innocent victim?
One way that inverse compartmentalisation can come about, is through poor, but well meant decisions regarding the way data is compartmentalised. We hinted at this previously. A person in trauma, may push away their own brains natural organismic suggestions to help, and instead choose an opposite path, which increases their pain, leading to further crisis, and potentially, another oppositional “gut” reaction to the offer of help. This can lead to existential collapse and crisis. A virtuous, natural cycle, inverted into itself.
Similarly, organisations can choose to organise themselves for seemingly rational reasons, which become undermined by organisational dynamics. For example, putting technical support, the people who have to help, when things go wrong, with the sales and marketing teams, who cannot admit things can go wrong with their product.
How It Confuses and Obfuscates Information
Inverse compartmentalization can be used to confuse and obfuscate information in several ways:
Ambiguity: By presenting information in a convoluted manner, it becomes difficult for individuals to grasp the core message. This can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
Selective Disclosure: Organizations or individuals may choose to share only parts of the information, mixing it with irrelevant details to create a misleading narrative.
Cognitive Dissonance: When conflicting information is presented together, it can create cognitive dissonance, leading individuals to struggle with reconciling their beliefs or understanding.
Manipulation: In contexts like marketing or politics, inverse compartmentalization can be used to manipulate perceptions, making it easier to sway opinions without clear evidence.
Clue to Disordered Thinking
Inverse compartmentalization can indeed provide clues to disordered thinking. Here’s how:
Difficulty in Processing Information: Individuals who frequently struggle to process information logically, may be suffering from in inverse compartmentalization of their thinking structures, leading to excess processing time confusion and indecision.
This may result in “randomness” in their responses, or the reliance on additional last minute coping responses, such as repeating “safe” phrases or memories; the person that always speaks in riddles, the dementia patient with that repeated memory observation, or learnt gratitude.
Inconsistent Beliefs: This approach can result in a lack of coherence in one’s beliefs or values, as conflicting ideas are not adequately resolved. This may well be driven by coping collapse, where the sum of coping thought processing, incurs more time than is available for the individual to think clearly about the subject in hand. The result may well be an incoherent, but safer random coping response.
Emotional Turmoil: Mixing emotions and thoughts without clear boundaries can lead to heightened anxiety or distress, as individuals may feel overwhelmed by their internal conflicts. In order to seek stability, the individual may decide that the outside world need to change. This may become an unwillingness to change, unless some unchangeable external object changes. first.
Manipulative Behaviour: In some cases, individuals may use inverse compartmentalization as a tactic to control or deceive others, indicating potential underlying psychological issues.
Clarity as a Threat to Incongruent Organizations
The relationship between clarity and incongruent organizations is complex. Here’s a breakdown of how clarity can be seen as a threat to such organizations, and how inverse compartmentalization plays a role in their operations:
Transparency: Clarity in processes and communications can expose incongruent behaviour, including fraud or activities that do not deliver on states goals and aims. When organizations operate transparently, it becomes harder for incongruent, imbalanced practices to go unnoticed.
Accountability: Clear structures and responsibilities make it easier to hold individuals accountable for their actions, deterring potential fraud and other forms of misconduct.
An organisation with a stated claim to care for their clients, which then acts to isolate that client from the community, for example, will not want to measure their effectiveness, other than to prove that false effectiveness. They may, for example, focus on how safe and protected their isolated and miserable client is.
Trust: Clarity fosters trust among stakeholders, including employees, customers, and investors. Fraudulent organizations thrive in environments where trust is low and ambiguity is high.
Inverse Compartmentalization as a Tool
Inverse compartmentalization can also refer to the practice where information is deliberately obscured or compartmentalized in a way that prevents individuals from seeing the full picture. Here’s how it works:
Information Asymmetry: By compartmentalizing information, organizations can create a divide between different levels of employees or departments, making it difficult for anyone to see the complete operation. This can lead to a lack of accountability.
Confusion and Complexity: Fraudulent organizations often thrive on creating complex structures that confuse stakeholders. This complexity can mask fraudulent activities and make it challenging to trace accountability.
Selective Disclosure: By controlling what information is shared and with whom, these organizations can manipulate perceptions and maintain a façade of legitimacy while engaging in unethical practices.
An Example: Psychological Terms, and the Goal of a Unified Understanding
The importance of clear terminology in psychology has been recognized for many years, but the urgency and focus on this issue has evolved over time. Here’s a brief overview of the timeline regarding the emphasis on clear terminology in psychology:
Early 20th Century: The need for clear definitions began to emerge as psychology developed as a distinct scientific discipline. Scholars like Gordon Allport in the 1920s highlighted the confusion caused by ambiguous terms.
Mid-20th Century: The 1950s and 1960s saw a growing awareness of the need for standardized terminology, particularly as psychology began to branch into various subfields. This period marked the beginning of more formal discussions about terminology.
Late 20th Century: By the 1980s and 1990s, the issue gained more traction, with researchers advocating for clearer communication to enhance understanding and collaboration across different areas of psychology. This was also when the American Psychological Association (APA) began to emphasize the importance of precise language in its publications.
21st Century: In recent years, particularly from 2015 onwards, there has been a significant push for conceptual clarity. Articles and consensus statements have been published, emphasizing the need for consistent terminology to improve communication among researchers and practitioners. For instance, a consensus statement in 2020 highlighted the ongoing challenges and the need for clarity in psychological terminology.
Current Discussions: As of 2023, the conversation continues, with ongoing efforts to refine and standardize terminology to address the complexities of human behaviour and psychological phenomena.
No overall Impact
While the importance of clear terminology has been recognized for decades, and it has become a more pressing priority in the last 10 to 15 years, with significant discussions and proposals emerging to address the challenges of terminological confusion.
On the surface, one might think that one should expect some significant progress towards this unified terminological understanding, and that a clear mechanism should exist by now, to move towards that unified understanding.
Well, there is nothing of the sort happening. It has been a talking shop for years, simply because of that inversely compartmentalised, and new embedded structure, of competitive and oppositional university groupings competing, in order to maximise the benefit to that group, and not the field, overall.
Rather than integrate and unify, the world of psychology, overall, has been disintegrating into a confused mess that has not brought clarity to either it’s specific topic of interest, or the public that rely on the outcomes of the science.
It is Everywhere
But lets not make the world of psychology any kind of scapegoat. Look around you and see the confusion. See those overlapping, missing and disorganised compartments in the world around you – politically, socially, intellectually. They are everywhere. Where do you think the term “Comedy of Errors” came from?
We have spent years dehumanising our helpdesks, with the stated aim of better helping, only to have them deliver, nothing of the sort.
We have spent years improving out Internet search engines, in order to have then only show you, updates on something that you already bought, or, they want you to buy, or have paid them to push at you. From open knowledge to guided, channelled behaviour modification and artificial need creator and fulfiller.
See that we are all enviously protecting our stove-pipes – Our egoistic assumed presumption of grandeur, that we all secretly know, is a tower, built far too high for it’s foundations, and in imminent danger of collapse.
0 Comments