There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld
I recently came across this quote by Donald Rumsfeld, the former American politician. Although this quote by itself is quite enlightening – highlighting the limits of our knowledge, keeping us in check, lest we become over-confident and forget that no matter how much we know, there’s always more to know – it is not what today’s post is about.
So, why did I mention this quote? Well, as you were reading it, you might have also noticed something like I did. The quote talks about “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns”. But there’s another category – “unknown knowns” – that’s conspicuous by its absence here.
And what exactly are these “unknown knowns”? Well, by their very definition, we can not know them! But even though we can not know or observe them directly, we can feel them. These things fall in the category of intuition, of faith, of belief.
This will be subjective to everyone, and many people might not even be able to relate to this, but if I talk about myself, there are things I just somehow “know” – there’s strong faith, belief even about certain things, which can not be justified or proved, based on empirical evidence, observed by our five senses.
It is these things that I refer to as the “unknown knowns” – “unknown”, because we don’t exactly know about how these things work, how they affect other things, how they came to be, etc., and “known” because our faith in them is so strong, that we know that they are true, that they do happen, even though we may not know how they happen.
It’s a complicated thing to try and explain in words. Let see if some examples might help. Of course, different people will have such faith in different things, but still, here are some examples: belief in a higher power, in luck or destiny, in the karmic law, in the power of love, in your dreams of achieving something, or even simply in a better future, etc. We might not have any concrete evidence to believe in these things, yet some of us do. We don’t know what that higher power is (I’m not necessarily talking about God here), but in our heart, we just know that it is there. That’s what makes these things the “unknown knowns”.
Reading that quote above, I was reminded that we live in a society that focuses so much on the knowns / unknowns in the traditional sense – where things can be proved and disproved using cold logic and facts – but we hardly put in enough effort to develop this other way of “sensing” things, which sometimes I feel is very important if we have to survive in this world.
Again, I may not have any way to prove this, but I know my life is better because of my faith in these “unknown knowns”.
What about you?
For more such posts, please follow Echoes In The Ether on Facebook, WordPress, or Medium.
Photo by Katie Drazdauskaite @ Unsplash
Echoes In The Ether 