But What If We're Wrong?

by Chuck Klosterman

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. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

No matter how timeless and classic I think Hank Williams is, in one hundred years, some obscure recordings by some minister in Lake Charles might come out of nowhere and snatch the crown. It happens all the time. Or it might be that some cranked-out commercial crap gets a cultural reappreciation. We’ve seen that happen too. For all we know, the classic Greek plays were daytime dramas to the locals.

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.”

Is it possible that we are mechanically improving our comprehension of principles that are all components of a much larger illusion, in the same way certain eighteenth-century Swedes believed they had finally figured out how elves and trolls caused illness? Will our current understanding of how space and time function eventually seem as absurd as Aristotle’s assertion that a brick doesn’t float because the ground is the “natural” place a brick wants to be?

But if enough vocal consumers are personally offended, they can silence that artist just as effectively. They can petition advertisers and marginalize the artist’s reception and economically remove that individual from whatever platform he or she happens to utilize, simply because there are no expression-based platforms that don’t have an economic underpinning.

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.

We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.

But I think there’s a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity—the increasingly common ideology that assures people they’re right about what they believe.