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

by Chuck Klosterman

If The Cosby Show was an attempt to show that black families weren’t necessarily poor and underprivileged, Roseanne was an attempt to show how white families weren’t necessarily rich and functional.

I told people I loved my job at the newspaper, and I don’t think I was necessarily lying. But if that was true, why did I hate going to work?

except for those performative armchair revolutionaries who express reflexive outrage over everything.

the only way modern people can understand history and politics is through the machinations of a story. But only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem,

If my goal with this book is to think about the present as if it were the distant past, the goal of Carlin’s podcast is to think about the distant past as if it were the present.

He was the ultra-hedgehog, obsessed with only one truth: If people feel optimistic about where they live, details don’t matter.

The collapse of Rome has been something alarmists have loved and worried about since 1776, the year British historian Edward Gibbon published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

This logic leads to a strange question: If and when the United States does ultimately collapse, will that breakdown be a consequence of the Constitution itself?

the Bill of Rights and the visions of unalienable freedom—could ever be perceived as an Achilles’ heel, even if they somehow were.

Well accept that they are ideals that are not equally enforced.

But if enough vocal consumers are personally offended, they can silence that artist just as effectively.

In the US, there are absolutely no speech boundaries imposed by the government, so the citizenry creates its own limitations, based on the arbitrary values of whichever activist group is most successful at inflicting its worldview upon an economically fragile public sphere. As a consequence, 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.

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 Western world (and the US in particular) has invested so much of its identity into the conception of democracy that we’re expected to unconditionally support anything that comes with it. Voting, for example. Everyone who wants to vote should absolutely do so, and I would never instruct anyone to do otherwise. But it’s bizarre how angry voters get at non-voters. “It’s your civic responsibility,” they will say. Although the purpose of voting is to uphold a free society, so one might respond that a free society would not demand people to participate in an optional civic activity.

If you want to amplify the value of your vote, the key is convincing other voters to stay home.

This! 100 times this! I’m always baffled by my friends who encourage “everyone” to vote!

The document could be altered, but alterations were so difficult that it happened only seventeen times in two hundred years (and one of those changes merely retracted a previous alteration).

The document’s prime directives were liberty and representation, even when 5 percent of the country’s population legally controlled 65 percent of the wealth.

But everyone loved this document, because it was concise and well composed and presented a possible utopia where everyone was the same.

The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously.

Yet in the modern culture of certitude, such ambivalence has no place in a public conversation.

does the artist who invents something deserve a different level of credit from those who employ that invention later, even if they do so in a more interesting way?

When you’re a little kid, you feel an almost ethical obligation to root for whoever is best at whatever it is they happen to do;

And since these are only games, and since all games are ultimately exhibitions, the stakes are always low.

I sometimes think I should have titled this book Aristotle: The Genius Who Was Wrong About Fucking Everything.