Everything is connected to everything else

The expression “Everything is connected to everything else” appears as a compact statement of the interpretive logic that drives the novel’s Plan. Spoken by a police inspector to Casaubon during an informal conversation, it sounds at once like a hermetic principle and a warning about the difficulty of reading a world in which political signs no longer behave consistently.

The Conversation with Casaubon

The inspector begins by observing that Casaubon seems unusually curious, and Casaubon points out that the inspector invited him for coffee. The exchange establishes a moment outside official business: both men are off duty, and the inspector shifts from small talk to an account of how radically his work has changed. His maxim that everything is connected introduces the interpretive frame through which he considers the political world.

The phrase is immediately qualified. The inspector is not claiming that the people under discussion are connected with politics; rather, he describes the instability of political appearances. In the past, investigators looked for the Red Brigades in squats and the Black Brigades in martial-arts clubs. Now, he suggests, those expectations may be reversed. The old associations no longer offer dependable guidance, and even ideologies seem to lack consistency.

A Hermetic Principle in a Practical Setting

Casaubon privately recognizes the maxim as a hermetic philosopheme. That recognition places the expression between two different kinds of explanation: a doctrine of universal correspondences and an investigator’s practical account of confusing political realities. The inspector, however, does not present it as proof of a hidden system. He uses it to introduce uncertainty, not to resolve it.

His wry comparison with narcotics makes the contrast sharper. He says that at times he considers changing to that field, where at least a heroin pusher can be relied upon to push heroin. The joke turns the maxim inside out: if everything may be connected, the concrete facts can still be less dependable than a crude stereotype. What sounds like a promise of universal order instead registers the frustration of a police officer whose categories have stopped working.

From Maxim to Inquiry

After a pause, the inspector takes a notebook from his pocket, described as the size of a missal, and asks Casaubon for help. Casaubon has seen strange people through his work and consulted even stranger books in libraries, so the inspector asks what he knows about synarchy. Casaubon admits that he knows almost nothing, beyond having heard the term associated with Saint-Yves.

The sequence gives the expression its narrative force. The claim that everything connects does not remain an abstract motto: it ushers in a specific inquiry into synarchy, while leaving open whether the connections under consideration are real or merely tempting. The scene places Casaubon’s familiarity with hermetic ideas beside the inspector’s professional confusion, foreshadowing the novel’s central hazard: a principle of connection can illuminate relationships, but it can also encourage the construction of patterns where certainty is absent.