Compartmentalization

When looking for a title for this post, as for most titles, this term popped into my head: compartmentalization. Now, I only have the fleeting knowledge that a year of Psychology 1 in high school can give, so what did I do? Googled it, of course! As soon as I pressed enter I was inundated with Wikipedia links, all for compartmentalization, all with different meanings tied from the kite tail: biology, computer science, engineering, fire protection, intelligence, psychology, and, inexplicably, the decay of trees.

I won't bore with unnecessary details (that would be rambling. why do I always feel like I'm rambling? And why am I talking to myself?), but suffice to say that they were generally diversified. It struck me as interesting, though, that three hovered around the same basic definition.

Computer science brought me to a page about information hiding. It basically stated that compartmentalization, or encapsulation, allowed information to be substituted freely as long as it performed the same function, and that none of it really mattered anyway because it's all fronted by the query screen, the desktop, and very few people ever really see the 'thought process' behind it.

Intelligence (not Smarts, Espionage): This is actually the strategy more commonly known as 'need-to-know information'. This theory is that the few people who know the details, the smaller the chance is that the information will fall into the wrong hands.

Last, and what I was actually looking for, Psychology: This definition deals with an obsessive, reaching, almost arbitrary act of grouping things together that are inconsistent with other groups. Think of it as organization for the psychologically unstable. Imagine that you had two boxes. In one, venomous rattlesnakes. In the other, tiny, month-old kittens. Each of these boxes contain a side of you, two polar opposites that CANNOT MIX. The rattlesnake box is everything bad about you, everything you don't like. The kitten box is all things good and right about you. The boxes put everything into black-and-white, oversimplified terms.

It's interesting to me that these three seemingly different meanings use the same word, and, at the core, cover the same thing.

Let's mix them together, shall we? Combining these three definitions, we are left with a complex inner landscape. From the outside, this character is calm and collected, the 'desktop screen'. All information is stored securely behind the screen, held tight to the chest, and only given with the correct passwords and queries, lest information be taken and used against them. Inside, things are tidy, orderly, but only superficially. At the first glance, all things work together, but are separate. If one piece of information no longer serves its purpose, it is seamlessly replaced with a new nugget, one that fits better into the system, into the boxes.

We take a step forward. The boxes and compartments, so meticulously built and filled, are flawed. Each piece is oversimplified; yellow pieces are in the light box because they are lighter. Purple pieces are in the dark box because they are lighter. Blue pieces are in both, but only when it is convenient, because they want to feel like they are in the right when they commit a certain act, but the other person is in the wrong when the act is committed against them.

And to think that I had no idea what I was writing about when I began this post.

All I know is that I have plenty of time, and words are amusing.