The Unknown is of a fundamentally different category than the known. We can take parts of the known and compare them with one another, but the unknown cannot be compared to anything, certainly not of the known. The unknown also cannot be reduced to parts, because to have a coherent or useful system of subdivision, you would have to know something about what you're looking at. Therefore the Unknown is unrelated to the known, but we pretend it is otherwise.
What the people of the world do is that they label the unknown in whatever context they meet it, which then gives the illusion that if they spent enough time interacting with it, they would be able to convert it into the known. But this is an illusion, this is what I call the fallacy of labeling the unknown.
Examples:
What all of those examples point to is that the ground of our knowledge cannot be knowledge itself. Knowledge tends to be built on more knowledge, but what is the foundation of this stack? It is experience itself, which is more fundamental than knowledge. We can funnily enough know this, because there are always aspects of our experience that we cannot fully reduce into knowledge, into literal language. Even if I meticulously describe every isolated part of my experience, would it paint to you the whole of it as I experience it directly? Probably not. The best writers are not so much concerned with separate parts however, they are usually concerned with wholes, but they can only evoke those wholes metaphorically. They will say for instance that a room was like a battlefield, or that someone had a face like a trombone, which evoke very clear qualities, even if the specific details are not specified to us.
Metaphorical language works on the basis that the author and the reader have some shared experience which they can use in order to relate qualities to one another. It is impossible to describe the beauty of sea to someone who has never experienced it, because merely formal descriptions of the physical space, such as the tides, the sand and the wind, would not create a very vivid experience on their own. As such, the best authors are not the ones who are widely imaginative and creates new scenarios that no one did before, by itself novelty is very shallow, instead they are the ones who sit so fully into experience that they can make you see things that you have always known in the depths of your heart, but were unable to articulate.
How does all of this about metaphorical language and experiencing life consciously relate to the unknown? Well, when we are fully in the realm of the known we do not really experience anything, at least not vividly, we just process life through a series of scripts and reactions, we become mechanical. This is the main reason why time passes more quickly for people as they age. It is not inherent to the human experience, but it is inherent to the unconscious human experience, which is the main type of life that people lead nowadays. When everything you do is in the realm of the known, you no longer need to deal with the current situation as it is, but you can instead act purely based on memories, scripts and methods. 1
Problem solving in that regard, the thing that most people spend most of their time doing as they become older, is about controlling situations to put them into the known, and preferably into the comfortable: into what they can handle, into what they want, into what they can predict. There is nothing wrong with problem solving in general, but I hope you can see that if your entire life is lived in such a mechanical manner, where you always try to convert experience into the known, you will hardly live at all, what is the unfortunate fate that meets most people.
Of course they do not do this consciously, because consciousness is precisely what is missing, but there is a sort of implicit intelligence behind all of this. It is the intelligence of the self-informed self that does everything it can to maintain itself, and not have to face the Unknown, or discomfort, or uncertainty. Thus the tragedy of the self is that it lives entirely in a world of the known, but this is also what bores it out of its mind, because there is never anything truly unexpected about the known.
Self take the lack of unknown in its life as yet another problem it can solve as if it was in the known, repeating the same category mistake that I alluded to in the beginning. It will look for videos and books on how to not be bored, seeking novelty, excitement and adventure in the process, but if the self remains fundamentally the same, the cycle of excitement will eventually lead to the same boredom, and thus a renewed sense of despair that whatever the self can think and learn is inadequate to resolve its fundamental boredom.
The only thing that can truly address this problem, and many others related to our relationship to the unknown, such as our fear of uncertainty, is the ability to experience life without the hard shell of the self. Not killing it, because we need our self to live of course, but learning to experience what is beyond the self, what is beyond my moods, my wants, my fears, my ambitions, my fears, my pleasure, and so on. Conscious people still experience discomfort, pain, fear, and all of the other human stuff of course, but they are not stifled by those things. They can see beauty in something that they do not personally like, they can see the humor in a situation that is not convenient for them, and they can act like mature adults even when they are afraid.
Unsurprisingly, very few people are interested in facing the unknown head on. It is not just incredibly scary, it is also hardly rewarded. We live in a world of control, of very rigid human structures and the constant need to predict things, and produce reliable results through repeatable methods, which is why Science and its focus on replication of results and isolation of variables is so useful to our world, and so there is hardly any reason for living outside of all of this. The problem of all of this structure of the known is that because the unknown is more fundamental than the known, there comes a point at which Reality comes knocking at our door, and it comes from a place that we never expected it from.
I am of course talking about societal collapse here. The problem with collapse, as with any process of the unknown, is that we can never know where it will come from, because if we did we would prepare for it, hopefully, (considering that hardly anything is done about climate change this is not even true but let's keep going) but because there's so many factors that can go wrong in a complex and fragile society, it is impossible to be on top of everything. I am not the first one with this observation of course, Nassim Taleb wrote an entire book that elaborates from this basic premise in his book titled The Black Swan, but the fact that people read Taleb and tried to put his ideas into the realm of known shows that people did not understand his main point. No amount of hindsight can protect you against future black swans, but this doesn't seem to be obvious to our civilization. 2
We are doomed to collapse, like every civilization before us, and it will come from something that we did not expect, and which will probably be seen as obvious in hindsight, and the glorious project of mapping Reality into the known will once again fail. There will be a handful of people who will be blamed for this, because scapegoating is a very easy way to relieve social pressure, but the fundamental impossibility of creating an entirely self-contained world from the known that can sustain itself forever will never be seen as the absurdity that it really is. Because we are part of Reality, we have to interact with it at some point, but that interaction cannot happen fully in the known, in the realm of the self and civilization, it has to happen directly in the midst of the Unknown.
All of this might sound very woo woo and very impractical, but the most important consequence of all of this is that we come from the unknown, and so we have to return back to the unknown when we inevitably die. The process of life and death is, unsurprisingly, explained once again in the realm of the known, in the language of separation and causality, namely biology nowadays. But no amount of knowledge of science will help anyone face their own death.
You could have an idea to yourself that the cells in your body will be part of a constant chain of organisms, which means that you will never truly die, but will you really be at peace in your deathbed from that idea alone? I can hardly imagine that. Death is about facing the unknown, and how could a mere idea help you face that? Which is where this piece has to end, because fundamentally the unknown has to be respected for what it is, and the limits of language seen for what they are. Beware of any idea that pretends that it can solve the real problems of life.
1 See more from this piece by Darren Allen about saying what things are not.
2 In this lens, the more complexity you build after each mini-crisis (a financial crisis affects much of our society, but it is ultimately not a real crisis, such as a food crisis or an energy crisis) in order to prevent it from happening again, the worse you will make any future crises, because the society you have is now more complex, and because the set of problems that could occur has been pushed towards the nastier ones.
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Death Collapse Unknown Metaphysics Knowledge Civilization
2026-08-24