"I believe that the end of things man-made cannot be very far away - must be near at hand"
About this Quote
Apocalypse, here, sounds less like a trumpet blast and more like a boardroom forecast. When John Harvey Kellogg warns that “the end of things man-made” can’t be far off, he’s not just flirting with eschatology; he’s selling a moral diagnosis of modernity. The phrasing is slippery on purpose: “things man-made” can mean industry, cities, processed food, sexual “vice,” even the whole noisy apparatus of modern life. By refusing to name the culprit, Kellogg turns a private fixation into a portable anxiety anyone can plug their fears into.
The line’s power is the double certainty: “cannot be very far away” followed by “must be near at hand.” It’s the rhetoric of inevitability, a tactic that collapses debate. If collapse is already scheduled, dissent becomes denial; compliance becomes prudence. That’s especially useful for a businessman whose authority depended on being seen as both practical and prophetic. Kellogg built an empire around health reform - sanitariums, dietary regimes, the cereal-industrial answer to temptation - and this kind of doom-tinged language frames his program as less lifestyle than lifeboat.
Context matters: late 19th and early 20th century America was a pressure cooker of rapid industrialization, urban vice panics, and religiously inflected reform movements. Kellogg, steeped in that world, channels the era’s common suspicion that “progress” was really decay in disguise. The subtext isn’t simply that man’s creations will fail; it’s that they deserve to. And conveniently, he already has the antidote on the shelf.
The line’s power is the double certainty: “cannot be very far away” followed by “must be near at hand.” It’s the rhetoric of inevitability, a tactic that collapses debate. If collapse is already scheduled, dissent becomes denial; compliance becomes prudence. That’s especially useful for a businessman whose authority depended on being seen as both practical and prophetic. Kellogg built an empire around health reform - sanitariums, dietary regimes, the cereal-industrial answer to temptation - and this kind of doom-tinged language frames his program as less lifestyle than lifeboat.
Context matters: late 19th and early 20th century America was a pressure cooker of rapid industrialization, urban vice panics, and religiously inflected reform movements. Kellogg, steeped in that world, channels the era’s common suspicion that “progress” was really decay in disguise. The subtext isn’t simply that man’s creations will fail; it’s that they deserve to. And conveniently, he already has the antidote on the shelf.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
