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

by Chuck Klosterman

children aren’t paralyzed by the pressures of consensus and common sense.

What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

the modern problem is that reevaluating what we consider “true” is becoming increasingly difficult.

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.

We have no idea what we don’t know, or what we’ll eventually learn, or what might be true despite our perpetual inability to comprehend what that truth is.

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

logic doesn’t work particularly well when applied to the future.

Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions.

Time is a motherfucker and it’s coming for all of us,”

There’s simply no way around the limited ceiling of my own mind.

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.

The cultural recession of rock is intertwined with its increased cultural absorption,

Rock will recede out of view, just as all great things eventually do.

There’s an exhaustion of intelligence which has moved out of the music industry and into other industries.”

my faith in wrongness is greater than my faith in the Beatles’ unassailability.

why smart people tend to be wrong as often as their not-so-smart peers—they work from the flawed premise that their worldview is standard.

The fox thinks he’s at the end, but he hasn’t even reached the middle. What the fox views as conclusions are only plot mechanics, which means they’ll eventually represent the opposite of whatever they seem to suggest.

the United States is a safe place for those who want to criticize the government but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or discomfiting. Some would argue that this trade-off is worth it. Time may prove otherwise.

Plato is merely arguing that democracy is a nice idea that tries to impose the fantasy of fairness upon an organically unfair social order.

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.

every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

Since our interior thoughts are (ultimately) arbitrary and meaningless, we might as well think whatever we prefer thinking.

I’m ready for a new tomorrow, but only if it’s pretty much like yesterday.

I don’t need to personally agree with something in order to recognize that it’s true.