We find ourselves in a crisis of cognitive dissonance: though the nation remains the world’s leader in science and technology by almost any measure, the widely shared benefits that such leadership was supposed to deliver to society seem to be drifting farther from reach.
Today, the science and technology community must face its own uncomfortable knowledge. The late Steve Rayner, a social scientist who studied the intersections of science, policy, and culture (with a particular focus on climate change), observed that Rumsfeld missed what is certainly the most interesting category of uncertainty: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t admit that we know, what he termed “ uncomfortable knowledge.” The statement has been ridiculed for its obscurity and admired for its rigor, but it is perhaps most notable for its incompleteness. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” We also know there are known unknowns that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. Bush, famously said of uncertainties around whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction: “There are known knowns there are things we know we know. military to "lighten our hand in the Middle East" and to "never use" that military as "a peacekeeping force.In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary to President George W. Throughout the film, Morris has Rumsfeld read aloud from dozens of his own declassified memos, some focused on linguistic and rhetorical matters, such as finding a working definition for the words "terrorism," "several" and "scapegoat." Other memos dating from the early 1980s argue for the U.S. Nothing seems so strange as recent history, and one of the strengths of "The Unknown Known" is its subtly astonished review of the run-up to the Iraq invasion, built upon what Morris (and a few others) see as bizarrely scant evidence and justification. "Well," Rumsfeld says, "I guess time will tell." should've stayed out of Iraq entirely following the unrelated events of 9/11. He does, however, offer a straightforward nonanswer answer to Morris' query regarding whether the U.S.
Rumsfeld is not a second-guesser of his own strategies. This is no "Fog of War," in which Morris extracted all sorts of unexpected and finally moving acknowledgments of Vietnam-era mistakes and postwar guilt from onetime Defense Secretary Robert S.
For 33 hours, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris spoke with Rumsfeld, and the result is "The Unknown Known," Morris' 10th documentary feature.
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