The Mission of Betrayal: Shepherd Wolves, Red Herrings and Poisoned Meatballs

Wil Coyote is deeply concentrated reading a big book in search of ideas on how to catch beep beep as usual; the book title reads, “How to control people”, and his long nose is stucked in a chapter whose title reads, “Opinion Leaders”. He’s reading so avidly that almost unwittingly he mutters it to himself:
“The maître à penser, the opinion former, the thought leader, the opinion leader, the influencer, or whichever label is en vogue, is a social character that stems directly out of humanoid faults. The more one relinquishes one’s responsibility to keep a watchful eye, investigate, verify, evaluate and decide firsthand, the more the risks intrinsic to the delegation have free reign. Thus, opinion leaders are an effective tool for those who want to manipulate people, and to exploit such a tool they have to first create want for it and then supply it.”
“To create want for opinion leaders, first you drown people into problems, and then you dispel their consideration of their own judgement, so they feel the need for an external guidance. Whereupon, you just be the puppeteer of the opinion leaders, and orchestrate them in a way that catches what people think they want and turns them over to what you want.”
“As to the categories of the problems you may manufacture, the sky is the limit and some examples will stimulate your creativity: you can starve their bodies with economic suppression and you can starve their spirits with spiritual suppression; you can create and exploit real needs, such as with crises, and you can also create and exploit artificial needs, such as with consumerism; whatever want you can create you can exploit. And you exploit it by using opinion leaders better than a conductor uses his instrumentalists; hidden in the prompter’s box, you let them loose on stage and they serve you by both adding fuel to the fire, and by passing off your traps as solutions.”