Everyone knows everything all the time
Made for Love“Everyone knows everything all the time” is a maxim Hazel Green first encounters in a psychology class and later applies to her marriage to Byron Gogol. Its force lies not in literal omniscience but in the gap between what people register and what they allow themselves to acknowledge: Hazel had sensed that something was wrong even as she accepted the story she preferred to believe.
The Classroom Maxim
In the class discussion, students consider wives who claimed not to have suspected their husbands’ hidden crimes. A classmate wonders whether those husbands were simply convincing liars; the professor, described as having the gravity of Beethoven and the wild hair of Einstein, offers the concise answer, “Everyone knows everything all the time.” The students initially find the statement perplexing. Hazel later understands it less literally: people may know more than they admit to themselves, at least on subconscious levels.
The maxim emerges from a discussion about denied knowledge, not from proof that anyone has access to every fact. That distinction matters when Hazel carries the idea beyond the classroom. The phrase becomes a way to name a suspicion that had been present without being consciously accepted.
Hazel’s Retrospective Recognition
Looking back on her courtship and marriage, Hazel sees that she had some sense she should not accept Byron’s proposal. She had instead embraced the belief that she was inexplicably lovable and that a successful, calculating technology executive had been swept away by her without strings attached. She can acknowledge that Byron may genuinely have been fascinated by her, while also recognizing what she had not wanted to face: he expected gratitude and lifelong accommodation in return for choosing her.
Hazel had shaped herself into a cheerful, agreeable companion with no preferences of her own, matching Byron’s enthusiasms and dislikes. She had assumed she, like the women she saw around him, would eventually fall under his spell. In hindsight, the maxim helps her connect that self-deception to what she already suspected about their unequal arrangement. She also recognizes that Byron valued her lack of scientific and engineering knowledge: she was someone he could astonish, and use.
The Marriage as a Test of the Maxim
The phrase takes on another dimension beside Byron’s surveillance of Hazel at The Hub. She recalls trying to accept his assurances that the monitoring was harmless, even as he commented on her daily activities while away and meals changed in response to bodily scans she had not known were being taken. Byron eventually disclosed that cameras and scanners covered every room, including the bathroom, and that no moment inside The Hub had gone unrecorded.
He described the system as a matter of safety and convenience, arguing that it could process Hazel’s words and actions with almost ninety-seven percent accuracy to reveal her state of mind. The technology therefore literalizes a disturbing version of the classroom maxim: Byron claims to know Hazel through collected data, while Hazel’s own earlier knowledge of the relationship remains something she has struggled to admit. The expression links these two forms of knowing without treating them as equivalent. His monitoring is imposed and technological; hers is an intuition she had repeatedly talked herself out of trusting.
