Donald Rumsfeld - a Werner Erhard "disciple" ?

Donald Rumsfeld Known Unknowns



In a post from March 2005 entitled: IS DON RUMSFELD A WERNER ERHARD DISCIPLE? , blogger Cosmic Iguana wondered if this statement at a February 12, 2002 press briefing by Donald Rumsfeld sounded a bit ... odd.

"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."--
Feb. 12, 2002 news briefing

Hart Seely compiled some of the more amusing or even disturbing Donald Rumsfeld statements into poetry pieces, in Slate Magazine, in articles such as The poetry of D. H. Rumsfeld: Recent works by the Secretary of Defense. Here is a different site devoted to the subject with lyrics and clips: The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld – Lyrics and Sound Clips. Hart Seely went on to compile some of these items into a book called Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Could it be that Donald Rumsfeld was a disciple of Werner Erhard or a devotee of the company Landmark Education's Landmark Forum training ? There is a long discussion about this in the comments section at the Cosmic Iguana post, IS DON RUMSFELD A WERNER ERHARD DISCIPLE? A message board thread from the Cult Education Forum section on Large Group Awareness Training provides some information on Landmark Education, which they call: "Accessing New Possibilities". Here is the info, which sounds almost verbatim like the Donald Rumsfeld blather above: "Standard educational methods enhance what you know and explore what you don’t know. Landmark Education gives you access to what you don’t even know that you don’t know." See message board thread on the topic, from the Cult Education Forum.

Incidentally, Landmark Education unsuccessfully sued cult expert Rick Ross in an attempt to learn the identity of anonymous posters on the Cult Education Forum message board. Cult News described the legal defeat of Landmark Education, in the article Landmark Education suffers humiliating legal defeat in New Jersey Federal Court. Attorneys Peter L. Skolnik and Michael A. Norwick also describe this litigation, in the Introduction to the Landmark Education litigation archive.