Researched by Thomas DeMichelePublished - April 18, 2016 Last Updated - January 14, 2019
Is There Cake?
It is said that “there is no cake,” that, “the cake is a lie,” but this isn’t true. The cake you were promised may be a lie, but there is cake. Sweet delicious cake. You are almost there, keep going.*[1]
TIP: This is a page about cake metaphors including the famous Portal “cake” meme (where the promise of cake was used to push the game’s heroine toward an elusive goal, and to make fun of her in the process; see “the plot of Portal“). Portal aside, this page is also about existential journeys, paradoxes, and cake metaphors related to Kafka, Keynes, Marie Antoinette, Gödel, and other famous people who have mentioned cake (or I have attributed cake to). I sometimes tell people “there is cake,” a joke that perhaps gets less-and-less funny over time (aging like a fine cake), and thus have created this page to explain the joke (and present a list of cake quotes). That may seem pointless and frustrating, but keep reading, there is cake!**
“A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.” – Benjamin Franklin
What makes something “Kafkaesque”? – Noah Tavlin. The search for cake (AKA meaning) in life can be rather Kafkaesque. When people say Kafkaesque they mean, loosely: “a bureaucratic, confusing, and nightmarish grind toward an unclear and almost certainly unattainable goal, and then pushing on with maddening fervor toward that goal despite the absurdity of the situation.” In other words, the maddening journey of looking for essentialist meaning, in a “bad faith” attempt to make the meaningless meaningful, in an existential world. So the Cake in Portal, and the Kafka’s works in general (including my personal favorite the Castle), are loose metaphors for searching for meaning in something meaningless and being motivated toward an elusive and likely unobtainable goal. Sort of like what happens in Portal when the heroine is coaxed through her rather pointless journey with the promise of cake. Read about Franz Kafka’s search for cake.[2].
The average college kid idealistically wishes everybody could have ice cream and cake for every meal. But as he gets older and gives more thought to his and his fellow man’s responsibilities, he finds that it can’t work out that way—that some people just won’t carry their load. – John “the Duke” Wayne (He didn’t think sharing cake was a good idea)
“The duty of ‘saving’ became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.”- John Maynard Keynes, from The Economic Consequences of the Peace
In the quote above Keynes is referring to, “The immense accumulations of fixed capital” built up by the “new rich” during the half century before “the war” (WWI in this case). Keynes compared the huge capital investments of this golden era to a “cake,” noting how “vital” it was that the cake “never be consumed;” but continue to “grow” uneaten. In words, “the promise of more cake, not the consumption of it, is the driving force of capitalism in a regulated free-market”, “the carrot on a stick isn’t meant to be eaten (hoarded)”…. As it isn’t from the benevolence of the butcher that we get our meal, it is simply the fact that meat spoils and money is more economically useful than rotten meat… er um, stale cake (thus the butcher or cake maker participates in the market trading their cake for capital in the money form which doesn’t spoil… but deprecates like crazy on a bad day, hence in many respects WWII). Musing on Keynes, we have to ask ourselves, what are consequences of taking the cake of the post-WWI German people, leaving them with little but crumbs? Some might say the answer is underlying WWII. What happens to the velocity of money when people hoard more cake than they can eat? Some might say wealth inequality in its most persistent and problematic form. Legends say, “nothing drives populist fervor like seeing their neighbors have so much cake when they don’t have any” (just as our next cake super star Marie-Antoinette).[3]
“Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: Qu’ils mangent de la briocheLet them eat brioche.” – Rousseau from his Confessions (Amazon). Confessions is a somewhat fabricated autobiography published in 1782, a decade before Marie-Antoinette was executed. It was written in 1760’s when Antoinette was a little girl and not even yet a Princess… oops!
At some point around 1789 (the year of the French Revolution), when being told that her French subjects had no bread, Marie-Antoinette (bride of France’s King Louis XVI) supposedly suggested “they eat cake” (er, um, brioche, so technically expensive, funny-shaped, yellow, eggy buns… a type of pastry). Although in retrospect it is clear that the sheltered, but likely wiser than to say something like that, Marie Antoinette would have been simply suggesting they give away the extra baked-goods at the castle, the sentiment can be summed up as her missing of the point that the people were starving due to poverty and the high price of bread, and not starving due to a lack of cake. The fact that we can prove she never said that aside, the sentiment was, according to tales, received poorly none-the-less by the pre-Revolution French. While this cake story is most certainly a myth, likely invented (AKA “romanticized”) by Rousseau, the results for Louis, Marie, and about 40,000 others were very real. In August of 1789 The Declaration of the rights of Man and of the Citizen was signed and on 16 October 1793 Marie-Antoinette was sent to the guillotine marking the start of the Reign of Terror, proving once again, “people really dislike it when you don’t share your cake”… and sometimes even if you do. (See the birth of liberalism).[4][5]
“If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.” – Elon Musk
“All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.” – George Harrison
Humor(?) Aside, the Cake Has Deeper Meaning – “The Cake is a Lie, and the Liar Paradox”
With this in mind, there is also an other educational aspect to this page (keeping with the theme of the site). The image of cake below is an example of the liar’s paradox; it is a cake that claims, “the cake is a lie.”
Another example of the liar paradox is the following sentence: “this sentence is a lie.”
It is a paradox because it seems as though it can’t be resolved, but it can with a little high-level (but easy to grasp) logic first uncovered by Kurt Gödel, the paradox is little more than icing on the cake.
This is a cake that says there is no cake. It’s an example of the liar paradox and portal meme. Source: Kathleen Franklin via flickr.com.
For something deeper, see our page on Gödel’s proofs for the liar paradox, or for something less math-y, read the full-text online version of Franz Kafka’s the Castle in the link above. There is Cake!***
The logic of cakes: Lewis Carrol (the guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland) loved writing about two things, logic and cake. If you like your brain, you’ll love having it destroyed by Lewis’ Carrol’s Game of Logic (in this one instance there is actually cake.)
“Liberté, égalité, pâtisserie” – a Phrase often-not-often heard during the Flour Wars.
Although cake exists in the physical universe, the cake that was promised is a lie. Or more so, the promise that there would be cake was meant to leverage your self interest to motivate you toward the completion of a meaningless goal. Sorry, next time we will try asking politely, but know, it was for the greater good.
TIP: Don’t listen to that conclusion, the cake is real, but it remains just outside your reach K., you must try harder. Please click on more links and share the site, there is cake!****
TIP: *,**,***,**** Really though, there is no cake. It’s a video game reference, and we are in no way actually offering you cake.
Author: Thomas DeMichele
Thomas DeMichele is the content creator behind ObamaCareFacts.com, FactMyth.com, CryptocurrencyFacts.com, and other DogMediaSolutions.com and Massive Dog properties. He also contributes to MakerDAO and other cryptocurrency-based projects. Tom's focus in all...
I need a third choice. Perhaps ‘mu’, Japanese term meaning “reject the premise that a dualistic answer can or will be given”.
Cake is real. And Cake is a con.
If Cake represents “empty calories” then, obviously, yes, there’s tons of Cake. But if Cake means deep fulfillment and happiness, then, yes, there is also lots of Cake. The difference is that you can make a handsome profit selling empty calories cake, especially because most people are just fine with the psychological bait and switch — the promise of deep fulfillment with the reality of a moment of pleasure followed by mood swings and an unbearably strong desire for another bite. (You can’t make much profit from selling deep fulfillment Cake, because it doesn’t provide instant gratification, so sales are generally weak.)
As Eric Hoffer said, “You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want.” That is, the reason people go for tons of empty calories of cake is that it can never provide a moment of Cake, the deep fulfillment that is the root desire.
. Confessions is a somewhat fabricated autobiography published in 1782, 
This is a cake that says there is no cake. It’s an example of the liar paradox and portal meme. Source: 
or read 
Jeff Conklin Did not vote.
I need a third choice. Perhaps ‘mu’, Japanese term meaning “reject the premise that a dualistic answer can or will be given”.
Cake is real. And Cake is a con.
If Cake represents “empty calories” then, obviously, yes, there’s tons of Cake. But if Cake means deep fulfillment and happiness, then, yes, there is also lots of Cake. The difference is that you can make a handsome profit selling empty calories cake, especially because most people are just fine with the psychological bait and switch — the promise of deep fulfillment with the reality of a moment of pleasure followed by mood swings and an unbearably strong desire for another bite. (You can’t make much profit from selling deep fulfillment Cake, because it doesn’t provide instant gratification, so sales are generally weak.)
As Eric Hoffer said, “You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want.” That is, the reason people go for tons of empty calories of cake is that it can never provide a moment of Cake, the deep fulfillment that is the root desire.
Thomas DeMicheleThe Author Did not vote.
Love it. Great comment.
R Did not vote.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
Ergo, there is cake … but you can’t have any. OR There isn’t any cake because you ate it!
😉
Thomas DeMicheleThe Author Did not vote.
Brilliant answer. I agree. This is why “time travel”.