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

by Chuck Klosterman

It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.

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.

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

This is how the present must be considered whenever we try to think about it as the past: It must be analyzed through the values of a future that’s unwritten.

the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

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

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

The juice of life is derived from arguments that don’t seem obvious.

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

When any idea becomes symbolically dominant, those who dislike the idea will artificially inflate the necessity of whatever it opposes.

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 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.

What was harder to recognize was how the Internet slowly reinvented the way people thought about everything, including those things that have no relationship to the Internet whatsoever.

There is no longer any distance between what we used to think and what we currently think, because our evolving vision of reality does not extend beyond yesterday.

Somebody once believed this, which means it was possible for anyone to have believed this, which means everyone can retroactively adopt this view as what they’ve always understood to be true.

If we think about the trajectory of anything—art, science, sports, politics—not as a river but as an endless, shallow ocean, there is no place for collective wrongness. All feasible ideas and every possible narrative exist together, and each new societal generation can scoop out a bucket of whatever antecedent is necessary to support their contemporary conclusions.

If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?

At some point, if you live long enough, it’s probably impossible to avoid seeming crazy.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

The future is always impossible. But, you know, at least we’re used to it.