Meal prep with Salman Rushdie: A behind-the-scenes look at saying and thinking

Sunday 3/15/26

People say Charlie McAvoy is a great defenseman. They don't think he is.

People say so and so is a great writer. They don't think they are.

I italicized that word to emphasis its actual meaning. To actually think. Go about the mechanics of thinking and thinking through.

Do you understand?

People say things. They usually aren't thinking at all. They're not vetting for veracity.

When they do think, it's about what they're meant to say. What they should say. What they sense is expected of them.

Real, actual thinking is a form of challenging. In effect of saying, "This could be true or this could be true," and then doing the internal brain work to determine which is which. Thinking requires a basis. It's a connective basis; this interconnects with that, which gets us to this, which brings us to that, and so on, as we think through.

There's no outward accountability in our world right now because no one thinks and no one knows. There's no external vetting for veracity.

What then happens is that the words people use are given this kind of automatic credit. They're passed without an inspection. Taken at face value.

So, if someone says, "I think Salman Rushdie is an amazing writer," people are conditioned to receive those words as someone saying that that other person thinks this thing because that's the word they used, and what I just said about automatic credit, being waved through without inspection, and not vetting for veracity.

But they didn't think it. They just used a particular word and that particular construction or made use of the spirit of that construction without its actual words.

Why did they say what they did?

Other things.

They want attention, they want to be seen a certain way, as in, "I am someone smart enough to read a Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction or an 'official' great author."

Or they want to be part of a group, they wish to conform, or it doesn't actually matter to them one way or the other and the same can be said about just about everything they say and act like they they "think" that fills up their stock, formulaic conversations, comprises their post history on social media, and serves as linguistic coin of the realm, and the appropriate attitude and modeled headspace, in the preferred echo chambers they hang out in. They want to be (pretend) liked by someone else. Any or all of the above. And more.

Most people are pre-programmed wind-up toys. Some can think, but in most situations where thinking is an option, they're going to pass. So a certain set-up needs to be put in place in order for them not to pass.

Like...

Hello, Chris, thanks for coming today. Please step into this room that has nothing but a table in the middle of it and an organ on the table, and tell us, if you'd be so good, what kind of organ you think that is.

We have the set-up. Chris is there. The door is closed behind him. Now, Chris will think.

I'll go on Reddit and see where someone says they've tried to read Thomas Pynchon for seven years and they don't understand any of it, can't make a dent in any of it.

Then they go, "I think he's so brilliant."

You don't think that.

You are saying that you think it. You think you should say this. But you don't think it.

And that's about as far as our "thinking" normally goes. And if that text/book had the name of someone that person had never heard of instead of Pynchon's, they wouldn't say they thought it was brilliant. Nor would they have spent seven years trying to read any of it.

Saying you think something and actually thinking that thing--as in having mentally/mechanically thought it and thought it through--are two totally different things in what our world has become and what we've become.

I make you look at the actual work of a Salman Rushdie and any of these people in publishing, and it is impossible when you are made to look at that work, when you're put in a position where you can only think about what you are seeing and reading, to then say, "No, hold on, Colin, I think that's truly brilliant, let me tell you why..."

Cannot be done. Because you've been put in a situation where it's harder not to think given the set-up and that everything else has been cleared away. It's an organ on a table now and you've been brought into the room to look at that organ and say what kind or organ it is. It's not an organ out in the world, beneath a park bench that you don't see as you walk by, with a trillion other things all around, and so, sure, just throw some words in that direction and say that you think them.

Even if you hate me and want me dead--though the only thing I've ever done to anyone in publishing is be a better a writer and a smarter person than a given other person would like me to be in relation to themselves--and come to such an entry in this record with an attitude of "How dare he question the glory that is the divine right of the people of my class!," that person is still coming into the otherwise empty room and having to look at the organ on the table and say what it is.

You can't say it's a heart when it's a massive buttock.

What happens next with that person and there's no denying the buttock?

Well, they hate me even more, if that's possible. What? They're going to do what they can to rectify matters? Make amends? Admit anything?

But they couldn't get on a stage with people looking at them, with this being broadcast to the world, and say, "That is a heart! I stand by my words! Heart! Heart Heart!" as we're all look at that monstrous heap of buttock.

And if there was a chance that it'd come to that, the prime time special in this metaphor, they'd do what they could to sabotage the broadcast from happening, or suppress the other party so that they wouldn't be visible enough for a program featuring that person who is not a card-carrying member of their club to be put in motion.

That hateful person can pull a Katie Raissian, though, or a John Freeman--whom we'll be coming to--and go around like the pathetic, cowardly weasel-snake hybrids they are and do the echo chamber thing with similar people.

"I hate him, you will hate him. Oh, you owe him money? Don't pay him if you want us to be still be friends and you know how it works in the club! Don't you print that story we both know is the best. You better not!"

The person just like, or mostly like, the two people I just mentioned is going to fall in line. Doesn't take more than a single breath. We're not talking extreme forms of coercion here. Everyone in the club knows the drill. As no one in the world reads, and there's virtually nothing anyone writes now that is worth reading even if people did read.

Let's go a bit further, and touch on the "truths"--which are anything but actual truths--that stem solely from associations, because this has always held a massive, massive, massive sway over people, and now more than ever, without any possible push back in most instances, because critical thinking hardly exists.

A couple of examples:

The films nominated for Oscars are great films.

The fiction in The New Yorker is brilliant fiction.

And so on.

No thinking is happening. It's pulling up to the drive through window, and being handed a bag of what you're going to say, and driving off with it. It's not getting in a kitchen, inspecting the ingredients, doing the meal prep, cooking, stirring, etc., and then eating the actual meal and determining how it came out.

It's "This must be this because that's what this other thing should and I take it to automatically mean."

But when we see the words, "I think..." we assume--associatively as well--that the ingredient inspecting, meal prep, cooking, stirring, determining how good it is, chain of events happened.

And in almost every case, it didn't.