Similarly, we also trusted that our Press—later the MSM—was actually trying to and telling us the truth.

We were all sold a bill of goods.

Slowly though, over the decades, as we grew up and matured, as our experiences accumulated, the suspicion and, then, the certainty grew that things were definitely not as we were told they were—or as they seemed.

The question is how much that we think we know and believe is true is really a lie (and a deliberate one at that), and what weight of how many accumulated lies is sufficient to first, make our Ship of State impossible to steer and, later on, to overwhelm, capsize, and sink it?

I’ve read that some social scientists concluded that the United States—in contrast to many old world/traditional societies—“works” —and that it works because of the high level of trust we have in our fellow citizens.

We trust our fellow citizens, whereas in the other countries studied such trust was lacking. There was no social cohesion, and it was hard to get distrustful people— who thought that everyone else was out to screw them as a matter of course, to “steal from them their rightful share of a limited pie”—to cooperate, making their countries much less successful.

How much social cohesion, how much “trust” being lost will it take for us to have a country that no longer “works,” and is successful?

But what about the unknown knowns: things we know, but don’t realize we know until something brings them to our attention (Comey not having Weiner and Abedin’s marriage “index” for him was just a lie.)

Are some flashes of “inspiration” just a subconscious nudging of data up from the memory banks into consciousness?

Wkipedia also cites this:
“Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek says that beyond these three categories there is a fourth, the unknown known, that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know: “If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the ‘unknown unknowns’, that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns”—the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”[12]

German sociologists Daase and Kessler (2007) agree with a basic point of Rumsfeld in stating that the cognitive frame for political practice may be determined by the relationship between what we know, what we do not know, what we cannot know, but Rumsfeld left out what we do not like to know.[13]”

But this is my favorite:
A thirteenth-century Persian poet, Ibn Yamin[22], said there are four types of men:[23]

One who knows and knows that he knows… His horse of wisdom will reach the skies.
One who knows, but doesn’t know that he knows… He is fast asleep, so you should wake him up!
One who doesn’t know, but knows that he doesn’t know… His limping mule will eventually get him home.
One who doesn’t know and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know… He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!

It probably sounds better in the original.

Entirely true. We are now distrustful of our government. And with good reason. There is much fakery in official circles. I could tell many stories of unethical behavior that I observed in the Navy. Some of it was corrected and some punishment occurred, but much went uncorrected/unpunished. That mostly affected the efficiency of the Navy, not the general population. In our civilian government it affects many, many more people. I want to believe the best, but cannot help but be cynical. Our trusted institutions are no longer trusted.

As to the Catholic priests’ sexual assaults, I am with Neo. So much of it is in the arena of circumstantial evidence. Without a thorough investigation and trial it is prudent to wonder who is really guilty and what to believe. That the Church hasn’t been more forceful and transparent in dealing with this issue is understandable. It is the ultimate bureaucracy. Bureaucracies always act to preserve themselves no matter what. Which is also what we are seeing in the DOJ/FBI. And it goes on.

The point of my comment was not really about the POWs themselves (or even John McCain) so much as to illustrate that lying to the public is well and solidly entrenched, whatever the subject. (Don’t get me started on the revisionist version of the Cuban Missile Crisis!)

Basically, this is the realm of known unknowns, and we can’t even imagine the unknown unknowns — as the FBI/DOJ controversy currently shows, there is strong evidence of frightening aspects of our law-enforcement agencies that were heretofore considered only in the fevered imaginations of the suspense writers and conspiracy brigades.

That may be exactly true in the McMartin and Fells Acre cases, but my less than precise recollections are that much of it was fueled by bad intentions in the prosecutor’s office. The bad intentions may be as simple as, “I want a high profile media case, and I want to win.” I believe Dorothy Rabinowitz over at the WSJ, has written about this.

I second Faith2014’s recommendation of “These Stone Walls.” In some places priests were railroaded on flimsy evidence or no evidence at all and received no assistance from their bishop, perhaps due to the bishop’s desire to display toughness or to be rid of the problem as soon as possible. A reporter investigated and thought that the priest who writes through that website was innocent. He is in prison for life, in effect.

By the way, my disgust with the corruption in the hierarchy is deep, but I want to see justice done, not injustice.

I guess the “short post” turned into a long one.

In June of 1965 the Air Group on the USS Midway suffered six losses in one day. It was a blow. Two of the pilots were known to have successfully bailed out. One of them was an A-4 pilot, LTJG David Christian. He was seen by other vA-4 pilots on the mission trying to escape from North Vietnamese soldiers. A aircraft from my unit made some strafing runs to give him cover and help him get to the sea, which was a few hundred yards away, and escape. Our aircraft was shot down at a low altitude and was observed crashing o the beach. Did the crew bail out? (Our unit flew the EA-1F, an electronic warfare aircraft with a crew of four.) Did any of them survive? We hoped for the best, but could not say for sure what happened to them. The most obvious being that they were killed in the crash.

The ship’s Captain, James O’Brien, called me to his cabin. He was a Korean veteran and told me that how I reported the casualties could make all the difference to the family. He had seen several cases where the pilot was reported as MIA that gave the family hope that their loved one might be alive. He knew of several families who had spent many years trying to find their son/brother/grandson all to no avail. He believed it was better to report MIA presumed dead. That way, if they turned up on a POW list, the family would be pleasantly surprised rather than carrying false hope.

That is how I reported my unit losses. MIA, presumed dead. However, in the case of LTJG Christian, his unit reported him MIA, believed captured. Within a week, the name of the other A-4 pilot, LT John McKamey, who was shot down that day appeared on the POW rolls. LTJG Christian’s name never appeared. He was never reported alive in North Vietnam. But his family clung to the hope that he had been taken prisoner. They spent many years and large sums of money searching for their loved one. In 1983 LTJG Christian’s remains were repatriated. The identification was valid – dog tags, squadron insignia, location near where he had last been seen, but his family refused to believe it was him., They were invested, like quite a few other families, in the idea that he was a captive and the North Vietnamese, for some devious reason, had not released his name.

The last of my squadron mates remains were repatriated in 1993. All four were returned to their families for burial as heroes. The families finally had some measure of closure.

Most of the family’s maintaining that their sons/brothers/grandsons were POWs that had not been identified had stories similar to that of the Christian family. Hope can be a powerful emotion. So powerful that a movement of POW families looking for their next of kin sprung up and became quite a powerful organization. No solid evidence of those missing POWs has ever been found. Whenever I hear about these families who are searching high and low for their missing kin, it brings back those memories of long ago.