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.

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

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.

Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind.

The hardest part is accepting that we’re building something with parts that don’t yet exist.

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.

When any novel is rediscovered and culturally elevated, part of the process is creative: The adoptive generation needs to be able to decide for themselves what the deeper theme is, and it needs to be something that wasn’t widely recognized by the preceding generation.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens.

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget.

The concept of success is personal and arbitrary, so classifying someone as the “most successful” at anything tends to reflect more on the source than the subject.

These happen to be celebrities of thundering genius, but we’re still giving in to a winner-takes-all mentality. There’s a basic human reason for this simplification: It’s difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters, and we settle on a few famous names.”

once something is safely inside the walls of that discussion, the relative merits of its content matters much less.

The forces shaping collective memory are so complicated and inconsistent that any belief system dogmatically married to the concept of “merit” ends up being a logical contention that misses the point entirely.

There is, certainly, an unbreachable chasm between the subjective and objective world. A reasonable person expects subjective facts to be overturned, because subjective facts are not facts; they’re just well-considered opinions, held by multiple people at the same time.

In an infinite multiverse, everything we have the potential to imagine—as well as everything we can’t imagine—would exist autonomously. It would require a total recalibration of every spiritual and secular belief that ever was.

It’s irrational to question any explicit detail within a field of study that few rational people classify as complete.

possibility that we are unable to isolate or imagine something fundamental about the construction of reality, and that the eventual realization of whatever that fundamental thing is will necessitate a rewrite of everything else.

while it’s absurd to think that all of history never really happened, it’s almost as absurd to think that everything we know about history is real.

there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder. It’s good to view reality as beyond our understanding, because it is.