GIULIETTA TALEVI: ‘We made a decision not to make a decision’
What better time to dust off the ‘unknown unknowns’ than during the time of corona
If ever there was a time for Donald Rumsfeld’s verbal sally into the strange, it is now. Back in 2002, George W Bush’s defence secretary constructed perhaps the most mythically fantastic speech ever. Here, you try to make out what he meant: “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 tends to be the difficult ones.”
Indeed. And what better time to dust off the “unknown unknowns” than during the time of corona...
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