Such compartmentalized thinking is what George Orwell famously called “doublethink,” and it functions here as a philosophical coping mechanism. When a worldview fails to account for all of reality, what do adherents do? Do they say, “I guess my theory has been falsified; I’d better toss it out”? Most people do not give up that easily. Instead they suppress the things that their worldview cannot explain, walling them off into a conceptual area separate from reality—an upper story of useful fictions. Wish fulfillment. Illusions.
