What Is the Central Problem in Society?

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If you talked to young person now, like i'm saying, like a smart, kind of engaged 25 year old person now, and you say, like, what is the central problem in society? Um, they'd probally say, capitalism. That's a very popular answer now, that capitalism is the problem. It doesn't matter what its merits are or aren't. Anything that sort of promotes capitalism, props capitalism up, and is a tool of capitalism in a lot of ways. The idea of choice, though, that did seem like, i mean, there was, there was some reality in that.

Chuck Klosterman is a journalist and the author of eleven books, including his latest, The Nineties.

”Selling out… was very much injected into the way I understood the world…. And I am now supposed to do all of these interviews and all of these podcasts promoting this book. And because it's a book about the nineties… it feels incredibly uncomfortable to me…. I think young people assume that selling out is only about money: that if you try to do something to make money, that means you're selling out, because the word ‘sell’ is in there. But that's not really how it was. I mean, what you were selling out was this idea of your integrity. And what your integrity was, was somehow not doing anything to make other people like you.”

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