What We Don't Know Know: How Modern Civilization Lost the Ability to Remember Itself

What if a civilization could lose the knowledge that sustains it without realizing it is being lost?In What We Don't Know We Know, Serge Angéloz examines one of the least visible foundations of modern life: tacit knowledge - the embodied, practical know-how that cannot be fully preserved in manuals, databases, or algorithms.We live in an age of unprecedented access to information, yet more and more of the knowledge that keeps the world functioning no longer lives in people. It lives in invisible chains of specialization, infrastructure, and inherited practice. When those chains weaken, what disappears is not only technique, but judgment, memory, and the human ability to begin again.Blending philosophical reflection, cultural history, and a quietly haunting narrative that follows four generations of one family through the fate of an ordinary plastic bottle, this book asks a troubling question: what remains of a civilization when its objects survive longer than the knowledge required to make them?Neither apocalyptic nor nostalgic, What We Don't Know We Know is a concise and deeply thoughtful meditation on memory, transmission, technology, and loss. For readers of philosophy, systems thinking, and serious nonfiction, it offers a new way of seeing the everyday world - and the fragile inheritance hidden inside it.