What you know you know

Thought I should probably start blogging about serious things again, and today I found a book that really caught my interest.  It's called 'The Politics Book' and I found it in my school library, and I've been using it to support everything that I've been learning in politics.  Amongst all of the political thinkers that I've been studying at school: Marx, Hegel, Burke, Locke, Rawls, etc, I found a quote from an ancient philosopher called Confucius.

"What you know, you know, what you don't know, you don't know, this is wisdom."

For a minute I didn't know where I heard this before, but I realised that although we didn't look that far back in politics, we did look at a speech by Donald Rumsfeld (who was the US Secretary of Defense at the time of 9/11).

"There are known knowns.  There are things that we know that we know.  There are known unknowns.  That is to say, there are things that we know that we don't know.  But there are also unknown unknowns.  There are things that we don't know that we don't know."

I found this particularly interesting for two reasons: first, it occurred to me how principles and thoughts, even as early as 500 BC, echo through speeches and thought throughout history.  Second, I find the concept of unknown unknowns fairly ominous.  The idea that there are things that weren't even considered as options is understandable in retrospect, but if you look at the example of 9/11, arguably there were signs that could have been taken into account.  Does this mean that we're missing real signals of things that might happen in the future every day?  Probably.  And doesn't that make you just a little bit paranoid?

I think Confucius had it right, it's the knowing that makes us wise, whether this is knowing that we're safe in our knowledge, or knowing that we don't know and being able to prepare for it.  This is wisdom.  But the unknown unknowns...