Book Summary: But What If We're Wrong by Chuck Klosterman
Book Summary for But What If We're Wrong by Chuck Klosterman
We all have a museum in our minds.
Filled with certainties. Filled with truths we'd bet our lives on. Filled with ideas so solid they might as well be carved in stone.
But Chuck Klosterman wants us to imagine a crazy thing: What if that museum gets bulldozed in 200 years?
What if our great-grandkids walk through the rubble and laugh at almost everything we believed?
Think about it.
The Romans were dead certain the heart was the seat of thought. Medieval doctors swore bloodletting saved lives. 1950s scientists insisted stomach ulcers came from stress, not bacteria.
They weren't stupid. They were just wrong in ways they couldn't possibly see.
We're them.
Moby Dick was ignored for thirty years until World War I changed how we read novels.
The band everyone dismisses might be tomorrow's Beatles.
The writer toiling in obscurity — "a Navajo Kafka" — might become the voice that defines us all.
Pattern keeps repeating.
Klosterman shows us that when we look backward, we don't just see what people got wrong – we see how blind they were to their wrongness. And we feel superior.
"How do we know we're not currently living in our own version of the year 1599?"
But future generations will feel exactly the same way about us.
The Beatles might be forgotten. (Shocking, right? But Klosterman makes you wonder.)
The wrong novelist might become the voice of our generation. (The one nobody reads today.)
The writer nobody noticed – maybe some "Navajo Kafka" crafting stories on a reservation – might become the most celebrated author of our time.
What seems permanent rarely is.
Football might vanish, becoming like boxing – "a mildly perverse masculine novelty." Democracy might evolve into something unrecognizable. Gravity might not work the way we think it does – after all, Aristotle believed "rocks belonged on earth and wanted to be there."
"When you ask smart people if they believe there are major ideas currently accepted by the culture at large that will eventually be proven false, they will say, 'Well, of course. There must be.'"
Then they proceed to believe all their own ideas are correct.
Maybe the most fascinating part of Klosterman's book isn't what might be wrong, but why we can't see it:
We're all "naïve realists" – believing "the world is exactly as it appears" to us.
We place too much faith in Occam's Razor, that "the best hypothesis is the one involving the lowest number of assumptions."
We forget that "to matter forever, you need to matter to those who don't care."
We fail to realize that "history is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining."
There's comfort in this discomfort.
If many of our firmest beliefs will eventually prove wrong, we can hold those beliefs more gently.
We can listen to outliers. We can embrace uncertainty. We can recognize that we're all probably missing something fundamental.
Wrongness isn't weakness – it's the human condition.
So today, pick your most unshakable certainty and ask yourself:
But what if I'm wrong?
Your future self – and all those people who haven't been born yet – will thank you for considering the possibility.
~ aq