On “The Unknown Knowns”

“Do you think everything that can be known should be known?” — Murugan asks Antar in Amitav Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome, a book I was reading on the plane earlier this week. It sure did get me thinking.

We all have our secrets but then some of us are blabber mouths who can’t keep a secret for very long. Some of us are the sharing types — who are afraid to keep things bottled up for too long. If we don’t tell someone our minds feel as if they are about to explode.

Then there are others amongst us who can live with a secret all their lives. These are the types we like to confide in. We all need a few friends who are of this type. They help us get our lives sorted out.

Now if you are the curious type you probably want to know everything about everyone. Celebrities suffer the most from this human desire to know everything about their(celebrities) lives. Our friends in the fourth estate have found ways to exploit this human desire for monetary benefit. We all witnessed what happened to Princess Diana in Paris.

But there is more to Murugan’s question than just secrets. Do we really want to know everything that can be known? Let’s take something as simple as food. Do we really want to know where it came from?

Let’s say you are a frequent customer at McDonalds who actually liked what you ate there. Then a friend recommended you to read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser after reading which your world suddenly changed. Your intellect is now asking you to stop eating fast food. But your heart still craves for the burger and fries and you wish you had not read that book.

Or let’s say you grew up eating street food in Mumbai or New Delhi. One day your friend WhatsApps to you a video that shows how the street vendors wash their plates or where they get their water and suddenly your appetite for the street food that you crave for diminishes. What if you had not watched that show? If you are a pork eater a visit to a pork processing plant in the USA would most likely make you change your food habits.

It’s your birthday and your friends and colleagues give you gifts, and wish you well, when you walk in to work. You are in great spirits. In the afternoon you are walking back after getting a cup of coffee, and you overhear a colleague on the phone with their spouse telling her that he got rid of the extra pair of gloves he got for Christmas. You wish you had not heard that, don’t you?

Now some of these are accidental learnings, what we could call quirks of fate for in all these situations there was no voluntary effort to know what we didn’t know. But the fifth estate and the Google/Facebook/Instagram era has transformed the human need for information. The ease of access to information and the ability to inquire about others without their knowledge has made detectives out of most of us. Some of it it is just harmless human curiosity. But in other cases you uncover information that impacts your relationships. It would have been better for you not to have known the untold secrets.

Many years ago I heard that my sons soccer coach was a body builder and had won accolades for it. So I promptly googled his name and found a picture with him showing his abs, which forever changed my image of him. Every item I interacted with him after that his body builder image kept clouding my vision. Imagine if you had a similar situation where you googled your coworker or neighbor or friend and uncovered a secret about them that you didn’t know. Every time you meet them next your behavior to them is forever changed.

Let’s say you are an adopted child and as you reach adulthood your parents tell you that they adopted you. You are shocked and decide that you want to uncover the hidden truth about your life. The curiosity is natural but what you discover may not be what you really wanted to know like you see in the movies.

The latest fad is to discover our lineage. Let’s say you are a sucker for it and send your sample to 23 and Me. Your anxiously waiting for the report and when it arrives you discover that your gene sequence tracked back to Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. Did you really need to know that?

A fitting answer to answer to Murugan’s question is “NO”. Let the unknown knowns remain unknown. Don’t impact your peace and tranquility by opening up a Pandora’s box.