Unknown unknowns – or are they?

I had an idea for the start of a poem in the shower, but as I mentioned the other day, poems don’t tend to come when I’m already writing, so not sure what to do about it. Not sure I even remember it now.

Something about balance, and equilibrium, and the middle way. No, even the first couple of lines don’t seem to be coming back. Bugger.

Maybe it was: ‘We live on a knife edge’ – no – ‘Life is in the balance…’ No, because I thought it could be the start of a haiku, and that’s too many syllables (whereas ‘Life is balanced’ is too few). ‘The balance of life…’? That’s about right. Then I followed it with a few comparisons: ‘Freedom and security/Joy and despair…’ That sort of thing.

Pretty trite stuff anyway.

Might have to leave it and see if anything else comes to me.

A friend keeps asking in emails if I’ve seen the Bill Gates (I think it was Bill Gates, somebody like that anyway) TED talk from 2015. I haven’t – not recently at least – but I think from the context I can guess what it’s about.

Something to do with the fact that scientists have been predicting a global pandemic for years, and how devastating it could be? It could have been SARS, it could have been swine flu (or was it bird flu?), it wasn’t, but it was inevitable, it was overdue, and it would come suddenly without anybody taking notice of the warnings?

I’m being completely honest here and the video might be about something totally different, but I have been aware of the science. It’s not that obscure, it’s one of those things that comes up on the news every couple of years, then everybody goes back to whatever the current worry is, and forgets about it – except the scientists directly concerned, and people like me (who as it happens made a detailed study of individual and societal reactions to this kind of high-cost –low-probability risk in the 1990s, and was awarded a PhD on the strength of it).

It’s the same psychology that brought us the 2008 banking crisis and is bringing us climate change and Brexit (don’t forget they’re still lurking in the background).

Twas ever thus.

If I have to sum up my PhD thesis in a single sentence I tend to compare it to Murphy’s Law, with a corollary: ‘Shit happens, but nobody does anything to stop it until it hits the fan’. No amount of forewarning, scientific investigation or crisis planning is ever quite enough to forestall disaster when it comes. This is where my alternative person, ‘Cassandra’, comes from. However we think we can manage and prioritise our lives, there’s always something that creeps up on us that we’ve avoided addressing. Emergencies emerge, that’s what they do. Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for warning about the ‘unknown unknowns – but even when they’re ‘known’, reactions depend on who they’re known by – and who chooses how to respond.