Daily Inspiration Quote by Jon Ronson

Ronson’s line is a preemptive strike against the smug mythology that often blooms after catastrophe: the idea that the right people “saw it coming” and therefore occupy a morally superior perch. By insisting he wasn’t a “soothsayer,” he punctures the post-9/11 marketplace of hindsight where punditry can start to sound like prophecy. The phrasing is deliberately awkward and self-correcting (“or not surprised”), which is part of the point: he’s refusing the clean, polished narrative arc that turns messy reality into a neat origin story for someone’s expertise.

The subtext is about credibility. Ronson, as a journalist who writes about fringe beliefs and the psychology of certainty, is wary of the way tragedy invites performative knowingness. Claiming prescience becomes a status move: it signals intelligence, toughness, insider access. His “absolutely shocked” is a blunt recalibration back to the human baseline, a reminder that even people trained to watch patterns were, in that moment, simply citizens watching the world rupture in real time.

Context matters because Sept. 11 didn’t just reorganize geopolitics; it reshaped media incentives. Afterward, there was enormous pressure to retrofit warnings, connect dots, and assign blame through narratives of inevitability. Ronson’s intent is to resist that seduction. He’s defending uncertainty as honesty, and emotion as evidence that the event truly exceeded the stories we tell ourselves about how predictable history is.