You Don’t Know What You Know — You Just Haven’t Seen What I Have Seen

By Ephraim Agbo 

The most dangerous sentence in public life is not a lie. It is certainty.

“You don’t know what you know… you just haven’t seen what I have seen” is not arrogance disguised as wisdom; it is a quiet indictment of how knowledge is formed, who gets to claim it, and why experience remains the most under-acknowledged currency of power.

Modern discourse treats knowledge as flat and transferable. Read the same books, watch the same footage, access the same data, and we assume we arrive at the same conclusions. But this assumption collapses under scrutiny. Knowledge is not merely accumulated; it is filtered through proximity. What you know is inseparable from where you stood when events unfolded.

The Tyranny of Distance

Distance creates illusion. From afar, systems appear coherent, policies rational, outcomes justified. Up close, coherence fractures. You see the informal rule beneath the official one, the exception swallowing the law, the human cost edited out of the final report.

Those who “haven’t seen” often speak in abstractions—metrics, ideals, models. Those who have seen speak in pauses, fragments, and contradictions. This is why lived experience often sounds messy: reality is.

Journalism at its best understands this. The reporter embedded in a collapsing institution tells a different story from the analyst reading quarterly summaries. Both are informed, but only one is contaminated by proximity—and contamination, in this sense, is clarity.

Experience as Unequal Evidence

The phrase is unsettling because it challenges the democratic fantasy that all opinions are equal. They are not. Seeing confers asymmetrical insight. A refugee understands borders differently from a diplomat. A market trader understands inflation differently from a central banker. A soldier understands “strategy” differently from a press briefing.

This does not mean experience is infallible. It means it carries weight. To dismiss it outright is not skepticism; it is epistemic laziness.

Power Decides What Counts as Knowing

Institutions tend to privilege clean knowledge—quantifiable, repeatable, legible. Messy knowledge is tolerated only when it aligns with existing narratives. When it disrupts them, it is labeled anecdotal, emotional, or biased.

Yet history bends not because of what was known in theory, but because of what became impossible to ignore in practice. Slavery was defended intellectually long after it was indefensible morally. Colonialism was rationalized long after its violence was visible. Financial crises are “unexpected” only to those far from the floor when the cracks appear.

Those who have seen often speak too early. Those who haven’t speak too confidently.

The Limits of Explanation

There is also a deeper truth embedded in the sentence: some knowledge cannot be fully translated. Witnessing alters perception in ways language cannot perfectly encode. You can explain hunger, war, corruption, or betrayal—but explanation is not transmission. Seeing changes how you process information, not just what you know.

This is why survivors struggle to be believed and whistleblowers sound excessive until proven right. They are describing a reality others have not yet been forced to confront.

A Warning, Not a Boast

“You don’t know what you know…” is not a declaration of superiority. It is a warning about premature certainty. It asks for humility in judgment and patience in disagreement. It reminds us that ignorance is not always a lack of intelligence, but a lack of exposure.

In an age saturated with information, the real divide is not between the informed and the uninformed—but between those who have witnessed and those who have only consumed.

And history has a way of eventually dragging everyone closer to the scene.