Time & Perspective Quote by Gunther Grass

Grass lands the punch with a bureaucrat's weapon: statistics. By opening on "We already have", he mocks the modern faith that the future is an open horizon. No, he implies, we have spreadsheets. We have trend lines. And those trend lines point in one direction. The sly brutality is that the numbers aren't offered to enlighten but to convict: pollution, overpopulation, desertification read like a grim triad of self-authored disasters, the kind no villain needs to scheme because the system hums along on autopilot.

"The future is already in place" is a deliberately paradoxical closing, turning time into infrastructure. It's not prophecy; it's foregone conclusion. Grass is attacking a familiar Western posture: treating ecological collapse as a problem for tomorrow's innovations, tomorrow's politics, tomorrow's better people. His subtext is that "tomorrow" is a moral loophole. By insisting the future is "already" here, he collapses the comforting distance between present convenience and future consequence.

Context matters. Grass, a German novelist shaped by the aftershocks of fascism and war, spent a career warning how societies normalize catastrophe through routine and denial. The line echoes postwar Europe's suspicion of technocratic neutrality: data can describe, but it can also anesthetize. He uses the language of forecasting to argue the opposite of optimism: the real question isn't what will happen, but why we keep pretending we don't know.