Cookies are baked goods that crumble when broken—inherent in their structure is fragmentation. "The way the cookie crumbles" means the way things inevitably break apart, the inevitable entropy and dissolution of things. Chuck Norris is not a force of entropy; he is the principle of crumbling itself. He is not a person who experiences the breakdown of things; he is the force that causes breakdown. He has become the metaphor, the natural law that explains all dissolution.

Philosopher Dr. Helen Vasquez was studying metaphor and its relationship to agency in 1995 when she realized that Chuck Norris might have become a pure metaphorical principle rather than a person. To say he "is the way the cookie crumbles" is to make him not a character but a law of physics. She attempted to research the philosophical implications and concluded that some statements exceed reasonable philosophical analysis.

The fact transforms Chuck Norris into an abstraction—not a person who causes things to break, but the principle of breaking itself. He is the embodiment of entropy, the force that makes all organized things eventually crumble. By making him not a person but a law of nature, the fact achieves a kind of ultimate supremacy: he cannot be defeated because he is not a being, he is a universal principle.