Salman Rushdie to Grads: Try to Be Larger Than Life

Salman Rushdie’s more interesting approach to grad speeches and the need for skepticism:

You need to have, and refine, and hone, what Ernest Hemingway said every writer needs: a really good s— detector. He said it. (Once again, good advice for writers turns out to be excellent advice for life.)

The world in which you have grown up is unusually full of crap. In the information age, the quantity of disinformation has grown exponentially. If you seek the truth, beware of what Stephen Colbert unforgettably named “truthiness” or, for those with a bit of Latin, “veritasiness.”

Maybe you’ve come across the famous saying of President Abraham Lincoln. “The internet,” Lincoln said, “is full of false quotations.” Listen to your president. Be skeptical about what you swallow. It’s good for the digestion.

I sometimes think we live in a very credulous age. People seem ready to believe almost anything. God, for example. Sorry this is the controversial bit. Sorry to the theology people over there. Shocking how many Americans swallow that old story. Maybe you will be the generation that moves past the ancient fictions. As John Lennon recommended, imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. That’s maybe one antique truthiness which perhaps you can finally replace with the truth.

But it’s not just God. There’s also yoga, veganism, political correctness, flying saucers, Birthers, 9/11 denialists, Scientology, and, for Pete’s sake, Ayn Rand. When the Modern Library asked readers to vote for the best novels of all time, books by Ayn Rand came in at #1, 2, 7, and 8, and books by L. Ron Hubbard – I was going to say fiction by L. Ron Hubbard, rather than nonfictional religious texts, but hey, what’s the difference – came in at #3, 9, and 10.

The only real authors that made it into the top ten were Tolkien, Harper Lee and George Orwell. If that isn’t scary enough, opinion polls regularly show that the most trusted news network in the USA is Fox News. The American appetite for bad fiction seems limitless, including very bad fiction indeed masquerading as fact – Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for example, or Hillary Clinton’s alleged Benghazi cover-up – an inexhaustible appetite for nonsense.

Maybe you will be the beady-eyed generation that starts seeing through the disinformation, the badly imagined blah, the lies. If you can do that, if you can scrape away all the layers of gibberish that are being poured daily over the wonders of the world, maybe you will be the generation that reminds itself that it is, indeed, a wonderful world, and gets rid of the various kinds of snake-oil salesmen who are selling a world they made up for their own benefit.

Salman Rushdie to Grads: Try to Be Larger Than Life | TIME.