Unknown Knowns

Over the last few days I’ve been chewing on a cluster of concepts that prompted me to draw this image that is about grappling with repressed shame, grief and fear.

The first concept was the saying “you first have to be honest with yourself before you can be honest with someone else”.

The second was the journal prompt “what am I pretending not to know?”

The third was Slavoj Žižek’s concept of “unknown knowns”, a critique and expansion of Donald Rumsfeld’s categorisation of knowledge (that is similar to the Johari window, but slightly different as it’s about systems and ideology):

1. known knowns — things we know that we know
2. known unknowns — things we know that we don’t know
3. unknown unknowns — things don’t even realize we don’t know

Slavoj’s addition of unknown knowns — is about the things we unconsciously know but refuse to acknowledge

They can be deeply embedded beliefs, biases, or ideological frameworks that shape our thinking and actions, that we’re not fully aware of them. Unconscious things that guide behaviour that remain unexamined or repressed. It can be trauma, denial or systemic functions of a society that we pretend don’t happen.

Žižek argues that these unknown knowns help societies maintain systems of oppression by keeping certain truths “hidden in plain sight” or “out of sight out of mind”. They are “known” but not consciously confronted.

The fourth concept in the mix was the idea that “healing happens in the basement of the mind, in the unconscious, our beliefs, behaviours and somatic body” not just intellectually.

What are ways that you see unknown knowns manifest in people, relationships, organisations, systems and societies?