But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.

Klosterman’s Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.

The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation—and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.

The first is that it’s impossible to generate deep verisimilitude without specificity.9 The second is that if you hide the temporary world and the work somehow does beat the odds and become timeless, the temporary world you hid will become the only thing anyone cares about.

A book becomes popular because of its text, but it’s the subtext that makes it live forever.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “a set of lies agreed

upon”). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.

And unlike Aristotle, the person who realized this truth didn’t care why it was true, which allowed him to be right forever.

Well, that’s how it always seems, until it doesn’t.

Television is an art form where the relationship to technology supersedes everything else about it. It’s one realm of media where the medium is the message, without qualification.

I sometimes wonder if the pillars of American political culture are really just a collection of shared illusions that will either (a) eventually be disbelieved or (b) collapse beneath the weight of their own unreality.

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

But maybe the world simply changes too much for everyone.