Recognizing the unknown and the unimaginable

Would Jesus Now be Prosecuted by US? (Part #7)

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Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Manning-Assange-Snowden disclosures is the manner in which they enable the unknown to be "re-cognized". They offer a depth and perspective to understandings of world dynamics long ignored or denied in official discourse and simplistic academic explanations of international relations. -- and associated world modelling. Governments complicit in the process now claim that the level surveillance was long known to their decision makers -- although suspicions by others were typically deprecated as cynicism on the part of conspiracy theorists. Such governments now go further with the excuse that "everyone has been doing it" over long periods of time -- even to the argument of UK Foreign Secretary William Hague that If you have nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear... (9 June 2013). The matter may be understood otherwise (John Naughton, The NSA/GCHQ metadata reassurances are breathtakingly cynical, The Guardian, 7 July 2013).

The current disclosures might be said to open a form of Pandora's Box however. For if so much was unknown to the electorate -- however informed governments now claim to be -- there is little reason to doubt that much more remains "unknown". sensitivity to this possibility is what the disclosures have offered to the peoples of the world -- despite the efforts of their governments.

The challenge of the unknowns was notoriously framed by Donald Rumsfeld in his capacity as US Secretary of Defense -- through a "poem" relating to the strategic dilemmas of Iraq in February 2002:

Appropriate to the argument here, regarding the contrast between legality and justice, efforts to bring Rumsfeld to trial for torture have been dismissed by the US Supreme Court (Supreme Court rejects tortured whistleblowers' suit against Rumsfeld, RT, 10 June 2013; Supreme Court Ends Torture Lawsuit Against Donald Rumsfeld, The Huffington Post, 10 June 2013; Supreme Court rejects Rumsfeld torture suit appeal, Jurist, 11 June 2013).

Using the second line of Rumsfeld's the "poem", the disclosures now make clear to "we the peoples" that :

There were known unknowns; that is to say, there were things that we now know we didn't know.

But the disclosures enable us to "re-cognize" the fundamental significance of the third line:

But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know.

Depending on the understanding of "we", these unknown unknowns might be distinguished as:

• those that (some) governments know but treat as classified information -- some of which may yet be released through "treasonous" disclosures by such as Manning-Assange-Snowden
• those that are effectively concealed within the complexities of fundamental science, and whose implications pose a major challenge to comprehension
• those that are effectively concealed within the secretive esoteric knowledge of religions, purportedly also posing a major challenge to comprehension
• those that are effectively concealed within complex contractual arrangements governing financial and business relationships, and which also pose a major challenge to comprehension (perhaps deliberately)
• those that can be imagined as possibilities for which there are only the faintest of indications
• those which are currently unimaginable or "unthinkable"

Various attempts are made to discuss the nature of the "unthinkable" (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, 2007; Karen A.Cerulo, Never Saw It Coming: cultural challenges to envisioning the worst, 2006). The difficulty is that such "rational" arguments have limited credibility in practice.

Especially challenging strategically is the manner in which:

• warnings about impending disaster can be claimed by some to be "unknown unknowns", perhaps a feature of the collective unconscious, and therefore readily ignored (Strategic Implications of 12 Unasked Questions in Response to Disaster, 2013; Mapping the Global Underground, 2010)
• some "unknowns" are those which cannot be named within current modes of discourse, as separately discussed (Map of Systemic Interdependencies None Dares Name: 12-fold challenge of global life and death, 2011)

In such a context, the role of Manning-Assange-Snowden is effectively to "reframe" the unknown as a contribution to much-challenged global leadership in turbulent times (The Future of Leadership: reframing the unknown, 1994). Efforts to do so are of course readily framed as "blasphemous" or "treasonous" by those operating out of articulations of received truth held to encompass all that it is necessary to know.

The question for the peoples of the world is whether what is thereby concealed is so horrendous that it calls into question the current modalities of social organization, however anticipated by religion in terms of "evil", as separately discussed (Thinking in Terror, 2005). This may well include actions taken by governments, supposedly in the name of the people, but without effective democratic oversight of "surveillance" (itself perhaps better recognized as a process of "overhearing"). Of potentially far greater significance may be that which remains concealed, of which people like Snowden have no knowledge. Was the incidence of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy an indication of this? Despite the extent of "surveillance" in quest of "terrorism", does the failure formally to recognize the abuses associated with the subprime mortgage crisis offer another indication? Do these "tips" suggest the possibility of even larger "icebergs" with which the "civilizational Titanic" is likely to collide due to a failure of "oversight" -- a blindspot indeed?

It is curious to note the current official assertions of the adequacy of democratic oversight when the term "oversight" is also used to denote a form of negligence -- a failure of due diligence, potentially to be understood as systemic. Rumsfeld's "poem" has been discussed separately from the latter perspective (Unknown Undoing: challenge of incomprehensibility of systemic neglect, 2008). Could the current condition be speculatively caricatured as a Global Civilization of Vampires: Governance through Demons and Vampires on Spin (2002)?

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