Acknowledging the World's Messiness Makes the World Clearer
One of the tricks to seeing through noise and fraudsters is understanding just how messy the world really is.
One of the great things about magic is how destabilizing it is. Characters can use magic to turn the tide in battle or find themselves on the wrong end of a clever wizard. It’s no wonder that wonder tales and fantasy have held Salman Rushdie’s interest and imagination for so long.
However, the real world doesn’t need magic to destabilize it. It’s already a chaotic, unmanageable place.
Looking for hidden forces unilaterally shaping the world around you is a great way to fall into conspiracy theories. The world is too big and moves too fast for one shady group to shape the whole thing by itself. It’s a reality that Salman Rushdie acknowledged in the second essay in Languages of Truth. He offers an approach to deciding who to trust in a chaotic world:
“This is what I’m wrestling with, this great shapeless mutating blob that can’t even agree with itself about what it actually is, this is what I’m trying ot give shape to, and speaking for myself, speaking now not so much as a writer but as a reader, I’d rather put my trust in the writers who acknowledge the battle, who make you see that any shape they impose on the blob is only provisional, that their own picture of the world gets in the way, that it’s hard to step outside the frame. Better to trust them, on the whole, than the ones who pretend that the world is as solid as a rock, even though rocks crumble, or as safe as houses, even though houses totter and explode.”
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