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

It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It

we anchor our sense of objective reality in science itself—its laws and methods and sagacity. If certain ancillary details turn out to be specifically wrong, it just means the science got better.

So 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.

You can’t be real by trying to be real.

But removing the essentialism of songwriting from the rock equation radically alters the context of its social value. It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music, and the dominant qualities of Presley’s persona—his sexuality, his masculinity, his larger

distrust of objective storytelling.

But in order for someone to argue in favor of any architect except Wright (or even to be in a position to name three other plausible candidates), that person would almost need to be an expert in architecture. Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities. And what emerges from that social condition is an insan

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 contempo

it’s quietly become the most natural way to think about everything, due to one sweeping technological evolution: We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having