Written by A lot has happened in the years since your friendly neighborhood writer was regularly posting on WordPress. Elections were won and lost. Twitter became X. Most of the people who were laughed at as conspiracy theorists were vindicated, and a nation in debt got much, much, much deeper in the hole.
Today, however, I’d like to speak on the rise of paid “influencer” culture on social media — and the throngs of wannabes who take cues from “stars” without ever seeing fame and fortune (all while cultivating atrocious personality traits often correlated with success). More specifically, I’d like to talk about the realms of political and religious influencers.
What one tends to see across social media is that most popular influencers in these spheres are brimming with self-righteousness, shun nuance, and always on the hunt for more content to mine for attention, clicks, and the revenue that comes from manufacturing outrage.
All of this makes sense when it comes to politics because, on some level, we expect political junkies to behave that way. The bar, sadly, is quite low. What is fascinating, however, is the lack of self-awareness that various Christian “influencers” have as it pertains to their chosen path’s deleterious effect on the cultivation of virtue.
It does not take long peruse through Christian gathering places on X to see members of various denominations rhetorically tearing each other apart. Humility? Nowhere to be seen. Charity? Missing in action. Discernment? Not much.
Christian “influencers” often spend an inordinate amount of time getting into fights and then making everything about themselves (as opposed to, you know, Christ). They often act like the very same busybodies successfully mocked in the 1980s, which ushered in an era of Clintonian liberalism in the 90s.
On the political front, influencers who initially start out level-headed eventually become caricatures of themselves as they begin to believe their own hype. They start chasing algorithms, which reward those who strip commentary of all nuance. Truth becomes an afterthought because channels transmute into altars to ego and ideology.
It becomes increasingly difficult to root out what’s real and relevant in various news cycles because the individuals pushed into feeds by social media companies engage far more in a WWE-type ideological wrestling match than anything resembling a search for truth.
In short, it seems as though those who yearn for wisdom will have the best luck by looking for refuges of the influencer-fatigued because it is in the small, hidden corners of the internet where humility has an opportunity to thrive. Nuance, similarly, can be found in the crevices of the online world where individuals puffed up on their own egos would never deign to crawl.
While I do enjoy streaming to Soulfinder readers on YouTube and interacting on X, I find myself increasingly drawn back to WordPress as a safe haven from monetized rage and the money that flows from moral preening.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Douglas Ernst Blog 