In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which we look, we can see that there is far too great an emphasis placed on the future.

Dundes is drawing attention to a culturally conditioned habit: treating future-oriented planning, questioning, and strategic “tactics” as self-evidently rational. He then asks readers to step back and examine the “lens” (the implicit cultural framework) through which such behavior appears normal. From that reflexive vantage point, the quote critiques a disproportionate valuation of the future—an emphasis that can eclipse present realities, lived experience, or alternative temporal orientations found in other cultures or subcultures. The larger significance aligns with Dundes’s folkloristic method: making the familiar strange, exposing hidden assumptions, and showing how everyday reasoning can be an artifact of cultural patterning rather than universal common sense.