Everything Is Bullshit

Breakfast feels like biology. We say it's the most important meal of the day the way we'd state a fact about digestion. But that phrase, and much of what surrounds it, comes from the same territory as the diamond: a cause, a company, and a marketing budget that outlived them both.

The modern American breakfast owes a lot to John Harvey Kellogg, the physician who ran a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the late nineteenth century. Kellogg was a health reformer with strong and specific convictions, and he developed bland cereal foods partly as dietary treatment for his patients. The flaked-grain products that came out of that world weren't launched as breakfast staples for their own sake. They were launched as instruments of a particular idea about how bodies should be run.

The white wedding dress is one of the book's quieter examples, and one of the clearest. It's widely traced to Queen Victoria, who married in white in 1840 — a fashion choice by a single influential woman that hardened, over generations, into an expectation that a bride wears white as a matter of course. Before her, brides simply wore their best dress, whatever its color. One royal wedding rewrote the rule and then made itself invisible.

The necktie is even emptier. A tie does nothing. It covers no button, holds nothing closed, serves no function beyond signaling that a man has dressed for the occasion. Its lineage runs back to cravats worn by Croatian mercenaries in seventeenth-century France, picked up as court fashion, and it has survived centuries purely as a convention that keeps regenerating reasons for itself. We knot it every morning for interviews and funerals and weddings as if it meant something, when its only meaning is that everyone else does it too.

Step back from the individual cases and the book's real subject comes into focus. It isn't diamonds or cereal or ties. It's the machinery by which a deliberate act — a sales campaign, a reformer's crusade, a monarch's dress, an accident of fashion — gets laundered into something that feels like it was always simply true. Everything Is Bullshit is a study of that laundering.

The mechanism has a rough shape. Someone with an interest — commercial, ideological, or just influential — introduces a behavior and gives it a reason. The behavior spreads. Over a generation or two the original reason detaches and floats away, and what's left is the behavior plus a vague sense that it's correct. By the third generation, questioning it feels not just odd but faintly disrespectful, as if you were insulting your grandparents rather than a dead advertising executive. The tradition has acquired the authority of age without ever having earned it honestly.

Return to the engagement ring and the two-month rule, and the whole thing looks different now. Not fake, exactly — the ring is real, the marriage is real, the feeling is real. What's fake is the certainty that this is how it has always been and how it obviously should be. The number was written by an ad agency, and it lodged so deep it now passes for tradition. Once you've seen that in the diamond, you start seeing the seams in the dress, the breakfast, the tie, the tip.