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But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

Book by Chuck Klosterman · 12 quotes · 2016, Future, History

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But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past Quotes

“By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.”

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“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).”

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“So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning.”

Gender2016The Matrix
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“The men and women who forged this nation [USA] were straight-up maniacs about freedom. It was just about the only thing they cared about, so they jammed it into everything. This is understandable, as they were breaking away from a monarchy. But it's also a little bonkers, since one of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough and that they needed the freedom to live by non-secular laws that were more restrictive than that of any government, including provisions for the burning of suspected witches.”

FreedomTyrannyHypocrisyReligious FreedomReligious ExtremismFreedom Of ReligionReligious IntoleranceTheocracy2016Establishment Of Religion
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“My goal is not to contradict conventional answer "X" by replacing it with unconventional answer "Y." My goal is to think about the present in the same way we think about the past, wholly aware that such mass consideration can't happen until we reach a future that no longer includes us. And why do I want to do this? Because this is—or should be—why we invest time into thinking about anything that isn't essential or practical or imperative. 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. It's a mistake that never stops being made. So while it's impossible to predict what will matter to future versions of ourselves, we can reasonably presume that whatever they elect to care about (in their own moment) will be equally temporary and ephemeral. Which doesn't necessarily provide us with any new answers, but does eliminate some of the wrong ones we typically fail to question.”

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“When doe something truly become popular? And I don't mean "popular" in the sense that it succeeds,: I mean popular in the sense that the specific thing's incontrovertible popularity is the most important thing about it. I mean "popular" in the way Pet Rocks were popular in 1975, or the way E.T. was popular in 1982, or the way Oprah Winfrey was popular for most of the nineties. The answer to this question is both obvious and depressing: Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don't particularly care. You don't create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year.”

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“When Galileo later declared that Copernicus was right (and that the Bible was therefore wrong) in the seventeenth century, he was eventually arrested by the Inquisition and forced to recant—but not before the Catholic Church told him (and I'm paraphrasing here): "Hey, man. We all know you're probably correct about this. We concede that you're a wizard, and what you're saying makes sense. But you gotta let us explain this stuff to the rest of the world very, very slowly. We can't suddenly tell every pasta-gorged plebeian in rural Italy that we live in a heliocentric universe. It will blow their minds and fuck up our game. Just be cool for a while.”

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