The Unknown Unknowns
You cannot engage with evil "just enough" to stay safe
Long ago, during the run-up to the last poorly-planned Mideast war that nobody wanted, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a speech that became famous. He said in part:
[T]here 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 tends to be the difficult ones.
Some people made fun of him for the jargony nature of his speech, while others acknowledged that it was valid strategic thinking, regardless of what you felt about him as a person. But this speech, and in particular the “unknown unknowns” comment, has to some extent now entered the common lexicon.
To further explain the difference between these three types of risk, I’ll give some examples:
Known Knowns:
Unless you get a job soon, we’re going to run out of money
Known Unknowns:
If you have a crappy car, you may not know what precise day it will break down and leave you stranded, but it will happen
Unknown Unknowns:
Pearl Harbor
9/11
Covid (for the average person, not for epidemiologists obsessed with coronaviruses)
“Black Swan” events
A company collapses quickly due to secret fraud
Sudden psychotic break
Anything with words like “sudden,” “unexpected,” and “there’s no way anybody could have foreseen”1
So when I think of the phrase “unknown unknowns,” and of the asymmetrical risk brought on by things you can’t even conceive of, I think of two things: security, and also: bad people.
Lesson the First: Security
In terms of security, my thoughts always return to this: some time in 2001 — but before 9/11 — I heard a story on my local NPR station (WNYC).
I have since tried to find a record of it many, many times, and I have been absolutely unable to find any reference to it anywhere.
In fact, this story now exists only in that secret mental vault of Things I Personally Lived Through, but which Very Wealthy People Have Now Wiped From the Internet.
I have several stories in that mental vault. I’ve heard other people talk about their own mysteriously disappearing stories.
It turns out that rich, well-connected people abuse their power and hide the evidence. Who knew?
(Perhaps, one day, when my age you reach, you too will have your own UnGoogleable Stories.
But I digress.)
Anyways. Onto The UnGoogleable.
The story went like this. There had been a big airline commission on security, in the wake of incidents like the terrorist attack that had taken down Pam Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
The airline commission announced that they’d looked at what it would take to prevent another Lockerbie, and the cost was exorbitant. This being 25 years ago, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but let’s say for the sake of argument, all the airlines would have had to spend $10 billion in order to have the type of security that could have prevented this attack.
Then the commission looked at the cost — the financial cost only — of the bombing. This was also a large amount. There were investigations, compensation to all the families, and so on. Let’s say again for the sake of argument, that amount was $1 billion.
At any rate, this commission decided that it just wouldn’t make financial sense to implement the new security measures, because even if they had One Lockerbie Every Ten Years, they would still come out “ahead” (financially).
And then, 9/11 happened.
First, this story disappeared. Boy, it sure made the airlines look bad.
Second, the airlines ended up having to spend an enormous amount of money to retrofit security after all.
But most importantly, it showed the real flaw in their thinking: the unknown unknown’s.
The airlines had been willing to be lax with security, because they thought they could afford to eat the cost of another terrorist attack like the ones they’d experienced before: attacks on only one plane, attacks that were extremely rare, attacks that kept all other planes flying.
But those same security holes they’d ignored had also left them open to an attack that was 100 times more devastating. The unknown unknown.
When you don’t defend yourself against the known unknowns, you also leave yourself wide open to the unknown unknowns.
It’s like if you leave your house unlocked, because you have shitty furniture. “What are they gonna do, steal this crummy couch?”
But then, when you’re gone, some addicts waltz in, squat in the house, accidentally set the house on fire, and burn the whole place down. Because you were willing to eat what you thought was the max downside, you suffered a massive lost you couldn’t have anticipated — your whole house.
That’s why it’s important to pay attention to risk, and try not to be blasé about known security gaps.
That little gap that’s big enough for a wee mouse, will also fit a venomous snake.
Fix it.
You never know what just might crawl through.
Lesson the Second: Bad People
This brings me to my second thought.
There was a study that came out years ago, that attacked the well-established trope of the old boy network — Boys Will Be Boys.
As I recall it,2 the study was looking at the way that serial harassers and abusers are allowed to get away with their crimes in corporate life. A guy would sexually harass women employees; the women would sue, and the company would have to pay a settlement. But they’d still keep Ol’ Asshole onboard.
The overt justification was always something like, “Well, he’s such a good rainmaker, it’s worth it to pay a little extra because he’s such a profit center / 10x coder / general good-time fellow.”
There was also the unspoken justification, which was: “Sure, he’s terrible to the out-group, but he would never do anything to me, a man in the in-group.”
So the researchers, rather than moralizing or lecturing, did something very smart: they didn’t challenge the whole in-group/out-group dynamics, but rather the architecture of the self-serving justifications:
IS Mr. Asshole such a financial benefit to the company?
IS it worth it to keep paying out his sexual harassment claims?
IS it true that his peccadilloes stay confined to the out-group?
And this is what they found: Asshole McAssFace was a fun, charming, good-time guy’s guy…right up until he, like, embezzled from the company and fled to one of those Caribbean islands with a non-extradition treaty. He routinely broke laws. He was not a rainmaker, he actually cost the company money. He screwed over the out-groups, and he also — eventually — screwed over his “friends.”
It turns out that unethical people are unethical, and their behavior cannot be counted on to just stay “contained.” They will screw you over, too.
Turns out, women are people, and you ignore their warnings at your peril.
I mean, Who knew?
This is an example of the unknown unknown’s. The guys all knew that Asshole McAssFace was gonna predate, that was a given. But they had no idea it would blow back on them or potentially destroy their company. That was the unknown unknown.
And there’s no amount of planning you can do, that will ever truly protect you from an asshole. There’s no way to prepare against a chaos demon.
Which brings me to….
Donald Trump
Here we are now, mired in this pointless war, precisely the kind of apocalyptic scenario the ignored prophetess Sarah Kendzior warned us about years ago.
But with the exception of a few religious fanatics who actually long for Judgment Day, nobody wanted this war.
I guarantee you that none of the billionaires3 who sucked up to Trump wanted a war that would fuck up international supply lines, plastic production, oil revenue, chip manufacturing, and so on. None of them thought, “You know what will help our stock price? Economic Ragnarok! Financial Götterdämmerung! Hormuz-a-Geddon! Yes, this will certainly delight our shareholders and definitely not bring crowds of pitchfork-wielding starving people to our gates! Thanks Trump! That 24 karat gold bribe sure paid off!”
Nope!
The business men thought, “Sure, he’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”
They thought, “Oh, he’s just corrupt. We’ll pay him a bribe, and he’ll do what we want — that’s how corruption works.”
Apparently, they had never ever read the news, and all the reports of all the ways Trump had broken with people in the past. Even though Our Cassandra explained it all succinctly — Ten Fucking Years Ago:
What media and GOP don’t get is any action taken now out of fear or favor expires in November. Your loyalty to Trump won’t be rewarded.
I study authoritarian states. I know how this works. Maybe he’s blackmailing you. Maybe he’s bribing you. Either way, his word is no good.
Trump is going to screw you over like he screws everyone else over. He will humiliate you and you will have sacrificed yourself for nothing.
These great BizNizMen thought they could entangle themselves with someone who was wholly and purely evil, and just get a little bit ethically compromised.
It would end up being just a shameful episode, something they could write about sheepishly in their memoirs: Remember That Time I Made a Gauche Gift to a Dictator? But What Else Could I Do? #ShareholdersAmIRiiite?
Instead, much like pregnancy, they found that it’s not possible to just sorta hang out with the Antichrist “a little bit.”
No, it’s a complete moral absorption, like when your house plummets into one of those sinkholes. There’s no coming back from it.
Nothing that any of these men have ever accomplished will see the light of history books now; it will all be sucked into the black hole of That Time They Were Midwives to Satan.
There’s no bargaining with evil, there’s no tasting menu; you’ve got to chug the whole thing down.
It tastes black and foul, like oil.
Actually, in the end, it usually turns out that somebody has foreseen it, and even tried to warn people about it. That somebody is often a sort of boring back-office bean counter, not very powerful, often a woman, or someone who is outside the power structure. They are routinely ignored.
Yet another thing I can’t seem to find on Teh Google, although this one may be a PIBCAC error (Problem In Between Computer and Chair)
Ok, maybe the military contractors, but nobody else