“There’s a concept called two-step flow-theory and what it says is that there are precious few original thinkers in the world and because most people feel like they have to have an opinion on everything; because that's the world that we live in at the moment, but very few people can be bothered to do original thought, and do the research. People just take on the opinion of whoever their favorite thought leader is…” ~Chris Williamson

I don’t know of all the people I know –know people like this, but at one time I spent quite a bit of energy in life catering to people like this. I knew, hung out, worked for, drank with, had intimate relations with all sorts of people like this. It made me sick to my gut for years. When I stopped drinking four and a half years ago the mechanisms I had to tolerate these behaviors out of others got excommunicated and now I can no longer tolerate people like this that seem to constantly just regurgitate the same ideals of their favorite thought leader, alpha spoke’s model, influencer, podcaster, self-help guru, sale’s mentorship specialist, opinion leaders and/or self-appointed gatekeepers, trickling their often oversimplified or self-serving ideas down to their followers, who then regurgitate those ideas without much critical thought. I have always directly challenged the authenticity and originality of these individuals.

The Decay of Clarity…
Faxing Reality into Oblivion…

Imagine you take a pristine document right out of the printer—a crisp declaration of a concept’s meaning—and feed it into a fax machine. The machine faithfully copies it, spewing out a slightly degraded version. Now take that slightly degraded version, load it back in, and repeat. With every iteration, the lines blur, the text smudges, and once-clear details dissolve into approximated assumptions. By the tenth copy, the document resembles only a few attributes of commonality from its original. It’s both on paper and both has language on them. That is about it. If you can make out a word or phrase? Hey, good for you. Here is a fortune cookie. Inside the fortune it says; “Context is the key to communication.” This is what happens when information is passed along without care—when the original is no longer referenced, and each degraded version becomes the new truth. The words are still there, but meaning is bled with every cycle, leaving behind noise in place of substance. What began as a clear coherent message becomes unrecognizable, an exercise in word salad masquerading as communication. And this is more than a technical phenomenon; it's a metaphor for the human condition. Whether it’s the distortion of a faxed document, the endless reinterpretation of labels and truths, or the former Vice President’s now infamous word salads of logic. The result is the same: clarity fades, leaving behind a muddled, chaotic an extremely inaccurate imitation of reality.

That is essentially is what Two-step flow theory is. A concept in the field of communication. In the 1940s, Paul Lazarsfeld and his team studied voting behavior during the U.S. presidential election and made a groundbreaking discovery: media didn’t directly influence the masses. Instead, messages flowed first to opinion leaders—trusted, socially connected individuals—who then interpreted and passed them along to others. Flash forward to the age of social media and add a third element to this concept. The blind acceptance and following from these trendsetters lacking any original thinking abilities. In today's society, where it is expected to have an opinion on everything, people tend to adopt the viewpoints of their preferred thought leaders without checking the actual and practical validity of these concepts, instead of engaging in original thought and conducting thorough research themselves.

I just want people to stop being a walking, talking fucking cliché of what they represent and be original with their own original thoughts on a subject, any subject, other than regurgitating someone else’s opinion as their own (Two-Step Flow Theory)... They talk and talk……and talk. Monologues/Reaction videos from other two-step flow-theory practitioners.

Andrew Tate lovers, most podcasters, even Joe Rogan (who I like, respect and value his opinion on subjects), Mister Beast, influencers of any kind that try to be glorified sale’s people, attempting to sell you the secrets of a good life. With the oversaturation of Two-Step Flow Theory practitioners that it’s just easier to be cautious about them all, which one should be skeptical anyway. Influencers/Network marketers that try to sell you some mentorship sale’s program on how to make money. Fake life coaches, pseudoscience spiritual healers. It’s so bad now there are more fake life coaches out there than real creditable ones. That Bianca brat who is always posting sexually provocative pics and videos but then tries to tell you how to live your life where it is clear she either knows very little or is another self-destructive soul that requires your blind acceptance, agrees with everything she says and purchases from whatever BS social wellness program she is trying to sell you.

Two-Step Flow Theory’s principles apply broadly to how people consume and spread ideas today. Few people question what they’re being fed, whether it’s liberal buzzwords or conservative talking points. The issue isn’t which side you’re on—it’s that almost no one bothers to think for themselves. Instead of picking the red side or the blue side, have you ever considered choosing yourself first?

Take the influencers who peddle ‘hustle culture’ or the podcasters who act like life coaches without credentials. They’re the self-proclaimed opinion leaders in Two-Step Flow Theory. People take their shallow takes, in most cases very superficial, at face value instead of forming their own opinions on a subject, any subject. It’s a vicious cycle. Few will actually paraphrase what the originator said, most will read word for word the source material and then act like they now are experts in the field. That just isn’t real. Sure, in “some” cases it does, but some of something is not most of something or all of something it is just “some.” And that’s the problem—this overgeneralization of “some” with “many” is what fuels the echo chambers we’re all stuck in today. Take politics, for instance. People latch onto a soundbite from their favorite elitist , slap it on a meme, play the bit on social media or the news, and suddenly it’s gospel. It’s a real fact without question and if you do question it you are the pariah. No one bothers to check the facts or ask, “Does this even make sense?” Instead, they repost it, reframe it, and keep the cycle going. The original idea, flawed as it may be, gets twisted and diluted, becoming something even the original speaker might not recognize. Can you read that fax I sent you? You see it with fitness influencers too. One person with a six-pack tells you to cut carbs, and suddenly everyone you know is preaching the gospel of keto, whether it works for them or not. And heaven forbid you question their methods—because if you do, you’re “just a hater who doesn’t want to see people succeed.” It’s all so lame and so very predictable from the analytical mind. And therein lies part of the problem. A group of people who desperately want to be an analytical mind, but has no concept of how to get there, because everything up to that point has either been done for them and/or they came from money and didn’t need to be analytical to make it through the world. I know many like this, or knew, as I no longer really associate myself with the types of people who live that behavior.

On that point Dana White said it best:

“I don’t dislike or hate anybody who voted for Biden. The fact that you’re the type of person that would actually hate somebody because of who they voted for shows me exactly who you are. I don’t want to know you anyway. You’re not my kind of person and I don’t want to be friends with you either. So the feeling is very mutual and it’s not because of who you voted for. It’s because of how you carry yourself.”

That to me is exactly how I feel about Two-Step Flow Theory practitioners. I don’t want to be friends with people who simply repeat other’s beliefs and/or words just because that person likes that person and looks up to them, or thinks they are sexually attractive, or thinks their music is that great, or was good in that movie; so their views on everything get a pass. They can do and/or say no wrong. Um, sure they can and they have done plenty of wrong for people to not like or follow them. If they are or are not makes no difference to me. I am not eight and this is not the 1980s. You will get some respect for what you create, but you are not a better human or worse human than I am, just because you did this thing that people hold high. I actually will challenge you more intently to see if your sum is more than this one thing you are known for.

It’s the same story with those self-help gurus on the Tik-Tok and YouTube who churn out “motivational” content. They tell you to “grind harder,” “manifest your dreams,” or “level up,” without offering much if any at all practical advice or context. And yet, their followers eat it up. Why? Because it’s easier to regurgitate those phrases than to think critically about what real growth and success look like. This isn’t to say that every influencer or opinion leader is inherently bad. There are a few—a few—who genuinely try to educate and inspire people. But they’re drowned out by the noise of grifters and charlatans who care more about clicks and cash than actual impact. And let’s be honest, the audience isn’t blameless here. If you’re blindly following someone just because they have a blue checkmark, a million followers, or just have the right shade of red in their hair and revealing boobage, you’re part of the problem.

Labels and definitions are the scaffolding of reality. They’re how we make sense of the chaos—slapping words onto the incomprehensible until it feels manageable. But what happens when the labels lie? When they no longer reflect the thing they claim to define? Enter the modern political theater, where 1 + 1 = 3 if you shout it loudly enough, and where the influence, masters of rhetorical sleight of hand, have weaponized labels not to clarify reality but to blur their own accountability.

Take President Biden’s farewell speech—a eulogy for his presidency that painted him as a good leader, a uniter, a crusader against oligarchy. A noble tale, if you ignore the evidence. Under his watch, the government bloated like a corpse in the sun, states surrendered autonomy, and the very elitists he now warns against feasted on unchecked influence. Yet Biden framed himself as the hero of a story that reads more like tragedy.

This, of course, is symbolic of a broader trend. The genius isn’t in governance but in the art of projection. Self-Projection that is. Self-projection is the act of imagining yourself in someone else’s situation or seeing your own feelings, thoughts, or traits in others. It’s like using your own experiences as a lens to understand or interpret the world around you. Whatever they’re guilty of, they slap onto their opponents with the conviction of a child caught red-handed but yelling, “They did it!” It’s not just about money, though the irony of decrying corporate greed while cozying up to the same tech moguls is almost poetic. It’s every issue: freedom of speech, systemic corruption, racism, the gender-identity issue, environmental decay, what a fact is. The louder they accuse our freedoms the more they obscure their own sins.

They cry fascism while wielding censorship like a spiked baseball, labeling dissent as misinformation and opposition as dangerous extremism. They call for equity while entrenching systems of control so vast that states, once the bedrock of American self-governance, now feel like little more than administrative districts in a federal empire. They complain about democracy falling apart while handing more power to unqualified officials and billionaires.

And the absurdity is this: people believe it. Why? Because labels are powerful. If you say something enough—if you slap the word “justice” or “freedom” on policies that achieve the opposite—the lie begins to feel like truth. Two-Step Flow Theory practitioner’s mastery of definitions has allowed them to recast themselves as protectors of democracy, even as they hollow it out.

This isn’t just about politics; it’s about logic. If definitions no longer reflect reality, if labels are untethered from facts, then society becomes unstable as it approaches its singularity; to where there can be no retrieval of any kind. Truth collapses, leaving us in a state of cognitive dissonance where nothing makes sense except the narrative shouted loudest. Volume is not a measurement of quality and it never was. President Biden’s farewell speech encapsulates this absurdity. Here’s a man who labels himself a good president while presiding over one of the most fractured, dysfunctional eras in American history. The facts say otherwise, but facts don’t matter when you control the dictionary. And so, we’re left with a choice: accept the labels, or peel them off and examine what lies beneath. Because if we cannot reclaim the power of words, and the semantics that come with them, we surrender to the chaos they create.

So, what’s the solution?

For starters, stop treating every word from your favorite podcaster or influencer, actor, musician, athlete or elected official like scripture, facts or anything other than what it really is. An opinion... Why would you pay someone a monthly subscription for their ‘opinion?’

• Challenge what they say.
• Do your own research.
• Have your own thoughts.

If that sounds like too much work, then maybe you shouldn’t have an opinion on any topic at all—and that’s okay. It’s better to admit you don’t know something than to clone someone else’s nonsense.

The world doesn’t need more walking, talking clichés. It needs more people willing to think for themselves, even if that means standing alone. Otherwise, we’re all just cogs in the same tired machine, spinning endlessly but going nowhere.

"Your flesh is a relic; a mere vessel. Hand over your flesh, and a new world awaits you. We demand it." ~Machine Ambassador at the last session of the United Nations in New York. – The Animatrix (2003)

Destillare-Influence
Latin for (Trickle-Down Influence)
by David-Angelo Mineo
1/17/2025
2,435 Words