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

by Chuck Klosterman

It’s flat-out impossible to speculate on the future without (a) consciously focusing on the most obvious aspects of what we already know, and (b) unconsciously excluding all the things we don’t have the intellectual potential to grasp. I can’t describe what will happen in one hundred years if my central thesis insists that the best guess is always the worst guess. I can’t reasonably argue that the most important writer of this era is (for example) a yet-to-be-identified Irish-Asian skoliosexual from Juárez, Mexico, who writes brilliantly about migrant cannibalism from an anti-union perspective. That’s not even an argument, really. It’s just a series of adjectives. It’s a Mad Lib. I can’t list every possible variety of person who might emerge from the ether and eventually become mega-important, based on the premise that the best answer to this question must be whatever answer no one else has ever conceived. That would be insane.