The Basement of Forgotten Knowns

Once upon a time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood before reporters at the Pentagon and gave a quote that attached itself immediately to his legacy: 

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

The way Secretary Rumsfeld deployed philosophy to pettifog his response to a reporter’s question was, obviously, obnoxious, but the statement itself is interesting and true in precisely the kind of way you might want to repeat — which is interesting because, true story, “known knowns” were mentioned in a TED Talk given to Homeland Security staffers just days before Rumsfeld turned everyone on to the Johari Window. 

The Johari Window is the 1950’s creation of two psychologists. Their idea was that self-discovery could arise through an exploration of the public and private areas of one’s life, which could be viewed in four quadrants:

In one corner is the “Arena.” This is where you find the “known knowns” of Rumsfeld’s quote, information widely shared. In adjacent corners are the “Facade,” where what is known to a subject is kept from others, and the “Blind Spot,” where what others know is hidden from a subject’s view. The final quadrant is simply the “Unknown,” which, ironically, is pretty easy to grasp. 

As Wikipedia helpfully notes, the philosopher Charles Handy suggested this model is more accurately envisioned as a house with four rooms. Examining your own “Johari Home” can help you develop a better sense of self and build relationships by opening up various windows and doors. It is a useful construct, so perhaps it was inevitable that someone would come along and dig out a goddamn basement.  

 *** 

I recently started the process of buying a home. Having never before owned a home, everything about this process was new to me. Initially, this meant a lot of research. I learned about mortgages. I learned about property assessments. I learned about property appraisals. I learned about taxes and titles. I learned about septic systems. 

But the thing I learned that I like to repeat is: caveat emptor. 

Caveat emptor is a Latin phrase. It means “buyer beware.” It is also the legal principle which underpins real estate transactions, a rather blunt acknowledgement that a seller knows more about what he or she is selling than the buyer. When you are planning the biggest purchase of your life, I assure you, this is deeply unsettling. 

But that part comes later. When you start the home-buying process, it’s all sunshine and gazebos. The highlight is, by far, the part where you click around on Trulia or Zillow and look at nice places to live. At first, you sort through homes by what you like — towns, bedrooms, acres, etc. — but once you start taking the process seriously you begin sorting by what you can afford. 

This is, arguably, the hardest part of buying a home, the part where you must be disciplined enough to admit: I have only this much money. The line is easy enough to draw, but you quickly begin to notice exactly what — and where — your budget will get you. And when you see something that breaks the pattern, something you like, something that looks nice, your instinct is to ask: what’s wrong with it? 

There is always something wrong with it. River view? It’s in a flood zone. Four acres? Against a highway. Listed “1 bathroom” but no pictures of a bathroom? My friend, that property has an outhouse. Book it. At one point, I actually went to look at a fully renovated house which had impressive pictures and listed many more rooms than anything in my price range. I was suspicious, but also I was curious (and perhaps a bit desperate).

After touring a very nice but very basic three-bedroom home, I was informed there was an entire second house literally walled off from the part of the property that I had just seen. Hmmm. 

This “other” house, it turned out, had been torn apart years ago in the hope of some future renovation that never materialized. Momentarily encouraged, I thought, I could be that future! I could be the person this house has been waiting for! I poked around the plaster-less lathe-walled rooms imagining mine was the eye of a master builder, thinking, here, I would do this… and over here I would do that… at which point, I opened a door.

Behind this door were old wooden stairs leading into a black abyss. Somewhere behind me the realtor apologized meekly that she had never been “down there.” This was an obvious lie. I called her bluff. “Then let’s go on an adventure!” I said, turning on my phone flashlight and taking a tentative first step, expecting the first step to crumble at the slightest provocation. 

The stairs held. I crept down, knowing more surely than I have known most things in my life that at the bottom I would find something horrible. As the tiny light of my phone probed the recesses beneath the “other” home, a yawning gap in the foundation commanded the entirety of its beam. When my eyes focused, I saw the gap was in fact a breach — a massive slump of mud and earth that had broken the concrete foundation like a wafer. The whole “other” home, walled off but still quite attached to its “nice” facade, was being consumed from the ground up. 

Buyer beware. 

***

It is the understatement of the century to say that a lot has happened since Donald Rumsfeld dropped “known unknowns” into the American consciousness, but rather than treat his remarks as a quirky TED Talk takeaway they should have been a warning shot: politicians were fucking around inside Johari’s House. 

In retrospect, it makes all the sense in the world. There’s a nice big Arena for the government and public to exchange “known knowns.” The Facade of “known unknowns,” I’m sure, looks lovely decorated with state secrets. For our pesky Blind Spot, there’s a whole intelligence community ready to unlock the “unknown knowns.” Standing against the menacing Unknown is an ever-growing arsenal of weapons and our armed forces waiting to deploy them.

The difference between then and now, however, is that while Rumsfeld, Cheney and Dubya were shuffling around secrets and building up our fear of both the Known and Unknown, the White House is currently occupied by a bankruptcy mogul-turned-reality television host who is less concerned with figuring out what he doesn’t know than burying what he does. 

It is a fact that the President of the United States knew the Covid-19 pandemic was going to ravage America in ways we were unprepared to confront. Donald Trump buried that truth. It is a fact that President Obama signed the Veteran’s Choice Act into law on August 7, 2014. Donald Trump continues to bury that truth. It is a fact that you can attend religious services in the state of Pennsylvania. Donald Trump buried that truth. 

The list goes on and on and is familiar and exhausting and there is a common response to the litany of lies that justifies them by simply owning up to the idea that it’s all to “own the libs.” This is cute, perhaps, on the ground at rallies where the material plays for laughs and reliable cheers, but no one and nothing capable of accumulating such power as Trump has gathered around him does so for sheer spite.

What we have witnessed, in fact, during Trump’s time in the Oval Office, is the political ethos of “truthiness” that was formed during the last Bush administration metastasize into something very dangerous.

Sen. Mike Lee just said he considers fact checking a form of censorship

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) October 28, 2020

On Wednesday, Senator Mike Lee of Utah appeared as part a Senate panel inquiry into Section 230 and said the quiet part loud. He openly admitted truth is more than a little inconvenient. Complaining that social media companies shouldn’t be allowed to correct factual errors, Lee was making the case for a “right to lie,” which is precisely what Donald Trump has been doing all along. 

For four years, Donald Trump, like a shitty roommate, has commandeered America’s shared space of Known Knowns, saying one thing, doing another, declaring he has done both, and denying he has done either. This is waived off as “politics” and “rhetoric,” but behind the scenes truth has been secreted out of the Arena, taken through the Blind Spot to a room dug out beneath the Unknown — the Basement of Forgotten Knowns — where politicians seeking an advantage have stashed once-shared truths.

***

Just as the initial idealism of home-buying gives ways to harsh realities of what can be done, there is yet to come another moment in the game when we are no longer negotiating with ourselves. At the end, we must confront a seller who is withholding… something. 

Caveat emptor. 

We all have our Blind Spots. We all have our Facades. We use these spaces in small ways and big, seeking advantages in our lives. This is normal. To become lost in our own homes, however, to find the living room destroyed by someone who has clearly remodeled but keeps insisting it’s exactly the same, this is deeply abnormal. 

When we enter the Arena we want to believe that we will be armed with as much knowledge as the next person. But that isn’t true. I would suggest you bring a shovel.