The power to make someone else’s work mean less
Cultural authority, intellectual erasure, and the politics of legitimacy
Becoming culturally powerful comes with the privilege of having your significance treated as established, while everyone else’s remains open to negotiation. Beyond a certain threshold of recognition, success ceases to be merely a reward for what someone has produced and becomes a resource with which they can influence what counts as valuable in the first place. Many do that by forming alliances with others who want to secure their long-term existence as well.
Established authors, for example, don’t just have larger audiences than non-established ones. They occupy a different position in the production of meaning. One from which their ideas arrive already invested with credibility, their experiments are more readily interpreted as innovation, and their presence can determine the terms on which less accomplished people (of choosing) are encountered.
To have an audience whose judgment has already been shaped by one’s reputation is to possess the capacity to influence the conditions under which one’s work, and the work of others, acquires significance. Cultural power isn’t exhausted by the ability to speak. It includes the power to establish what speech will be taken to mean, whose contributions will be recognised as serious, and whose attempts to participate can be rendered trivial without ever being directly prohibited.
Existential legitimacy becomes particularly disturbing. The person with a substantial public following and purchasing is permitted to occupy space without continually having to justify their occupation of it. Their work can be expansive, eccentric, contradictory, speculative, even imperfect, because their established identity provides a protective context in which those qualities can be interpreted generously. The less established may find that the legitimacy of their entire intellectual presence is treated as provisional. Sometimes, their work must first survive a judgment about whether they’re even entitled to produce it.
The inequality isn’t simply that one person has millions of readers and another has a few thousand. It’s that the first person may possess the cultural authority to make their significance self-evident, while the second is left having to establish the significance of every individual contribution from scratch. This is why I use ideas from unknown philosophers in my work instead of popular ones, and why I haven’t watched/listened to a single interview with platforms such as Oprah Winfrey, where established people rule the bubble, for many years.
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital helps explain how this mechanism works. Recognition accumulates into a resource that can be converted into further recognition, allowing reputation to function as a kind of advance credit. An established writer doesn’t enter every new intellectual territory as a participant whose needs to battle for their existence. They arrive carrying the accumulated authority of everything their name has come to represent, sometimes based on one lucky hit that gave them their power. The audience doesn’t merely encounter the new work. It encounters the work through the prior belief that this person is someone whose work matters.
Success produces its conditions of continuation. Visibility generates credibility, credibility attracts further attention, and attention strengthens the public identity that makes subsequent visibility easier to secure. Behind the scenes, the powerful alliances make this happen and basically decide for and stir the masses. A first response to achievement becomes a mechanism for reproducing advantages long-term. The writer’s accumulated cultural capital doesn’t mean that new contributions are good, but it is still encountered as important, simply because of their power.
For someone without comparable cultural capital, the reverse can occur. Their lack of power becomes an argument against their significance, even though the audience is precisely what they’re struggling to acquire. They must demonstrate that their work deserves attention in a cultural environment that frequently uses the attention they’ve already received as a preliminary measure of whether they’re worth noticing.
It’s often the established authors who conduct such personal attacks instead of the unestablished ones
This asymmetry becomes pronounced when the work doesn’t conform to familiar categories of intellectual production. In an attempt to bully, philosophical fiction, for example, can be dismissed as “little more than an excess of words”, simply because the unestablished author needs to be put down.
The dismissal becomes a means of deciding what kind of work deserves to be taken seriously. Mostly, who’s entitled to deserve credits for producing it. Hence the word ‘bully’. And why is it that it’s often the established authors who conduct such personal attacks instead of the unestablished ones who usually support the established authors’ existence? This leads to an unhealthy hierarchy, keeping the audience of the established authors exactly where they are and away from the non-established ones that don’t get the favor of being pulled up.
The deeper question is who gets to make that judgment and what happens after they’ve made it. When an unknown writer is dismissed as verbose, the dismissal may remain local, affecting a handful of readers. When someone with substantial cultural authority makes a comparable judgment and even bullies, whether explicitly or through a broader pattern of public characterisation, the assessment can acquire a reach far beyond the evidence supporting it. An audience may adopt the judgment as a ready-made interpretation, and a potentially serious body of work can be reduced to a caricature.
The established writer’s authority then operates at two levels. They possess the means to circulate their work, and they possess an advantage in shaping the categories through which other people’s work is understood. Their cultural power extends beyond what they create to the conditions under which creation itself is evaluated. The power at stake is therefore to make one’s praise consequential and one’s condemnation difficult to escape.
Bullying is commonly imagined as a visible confrontation, an explicit insult, or an unmistakable act of aggression. Yet social and cultural bullying can operate through a more elusive economy of comparison, implication, selective recognition, and denigration, particularly where the parties involved occupy radically different positions of public favour.
The difficulty is that such behaviour often preserves plausible deniability. But the distribution of consequences matters. When one person repeatedly finds themselves positioned as the inferior counterpart to someone with far greater public authority, the appropriate question isn’t simply whether each individual gesture can be explained away. It’s whether the pattern, considered as a whole, functions to preserve a hierarchy in which one person’s significance is continually reinforced at the expense of another’s.
Bullying can be especially difficult to challenge, because most people will never speak up. The person with less power must make visible a pattern whose individual elements have been rendered too ambiguous to carry much weight on their own. Meanwhile, the more powerful person benefits from a public identity that encourages others to interpret their behaviour favourably.
The resulting asymmetry is profound. One person’s reputation supplies the context in which their actions are understood. The other’s relative obscurity becomes the context in which their account is doubted. This is why building up a direct relationship with audiences is the only medicine.
Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice offers a useful way of understanding this imbalance. When a speaker receives less credibility than they deserve because of prejudice or social positioning, the injustice isn’t confined to the immediate exchange. It affects their ability to participate in the production of shared knowledge. Their testimony is discounted, their interpretations are treated as suspect, and their capacity to describe their experience becomes subject to a credibility test that others may never be required to pass.
In a cultural hierarchy, this can create a particularly cruel double bind. If the less powerful person remains silent, the prevailing interpretation may continue unchallenged. If they speak, their response can be reframed as evidence of jealousy, resentment, instability, or an inability to accept another person’s success. The act of defending their legitimacy is used to question whether they possess the legitimacy to defend themselves.
The most effective form of social diminishment doesn’t necessarily silence someone outright. It can leave them speaking, but under conditions in which everything they say is liable to reinforce the very characterisation they’re trying to resist.
Little public leverage to establish the history of their thinking
Intellectual appropriation introduces another dimension to this problem, although it requires careful distinctions. Because ideas circulate and writers influence one another. But the existence of intellectual overlap doesn’t eliminate the importance of attribution, nor does it make power irrelevant to the question of who receives recognition for a contribution. The problem becomes especially acute when an established figure can draw upon the cultural authority of their name to introduce an idea to a vast audience, while someone with a much smaller following, or less impactful in terms of purchase, has already explored related territory without receiving comparable recognition.
The established figure may become publicly associated with the idea, not because they’ve originated it, but because they possess the infrastructure through which it can achieve broad circulation… Their treatment of the subject becomes the reference point. Their vocabulary becomes familiar. Their interpretation becomes the one other people repeat. The less visible writer’s earlier work may remain largely unknown, leaving them with little public leverage to establish the history of their thinking.
In such circumstances, the unequal distribution of attention can obscure the distinction between originating an idea, developing it, popularising it, and becoming publicly identified with it. These are different achievements, but a culture organised around visibility can collapse them into a single impression of authorship.
The person whose work reaches the largest audience may consequently acquire the appearance of being the primary intellectual presence in a territory that others have also helped develop. Their prominence becomes difficult to distinguish from originality because the public encounters their contribution without necessarily encountering the work that preceded it.
So, once you’ve got the audience and the money, you can get away with almost anything. There’s a substantial imbalance in the capacity to withstand, deflect, or outlast criticism. A person with a large and loyal following can make mistakes, absorb controversy, change positions, revisit familiar ideas, and continue to command attention because their cultural standing isn’t dependent on the success of any single contribution. Their reputation functions as a reservoir from which they can draw when an individual act or piece of work fails to justify the confidence placed in it.
The less established writer has no equivalent reserve. A single dismissal may be disproportionately damaging because their public identity hasn’t acquired enough independent recognition to withstand it. They may have to spend considerable energy establishing the credibility that the established writer can take for granted.
Cultural authority can also create an incentive to protect the identity through which that authority is exercised. A writer whose public standing depends partly on being perceived as original, insightful, or creatively adventurous has something to preserve beyond the quality of any individual work. They have a position in the cultural imagination, a set of expectations that sustains the value of their name.
When recognition is organised around distinction, another person’s intellectual independence can become inconvenient. When prestige depends on being perceived as unusually perceptive, the presence of comparable insight elsewhere can complicate that identity. When an audience has come to associate a particular person with a certain kind of wisdom, there may be a temptation, conscious or otherwise, to preserve the distinction between that person and those whose work occupies neighbouring territory.
In this context, the diminishment of another person can function as a means of maintaining relative position. If one writer is consistently framed as profound and another as pretentious, the comparison doesn’t simply evaluate two bodies of work. It establishes a relationship between them, allocating intellectual legitimacy to one while withholding it from the other.
The effect can be self-reinforcing. The established writer’s credibility lends force to the unfavourable comparison, and the comparison helps preserve the distinction on which their authority partly depends. The audience’s response then reinforces the original hierarchy, making the established figure appear increasingly entitled to the position from which the judgment was delivered.
Let it go and never look back
For a less established writer, the most difficult task is to recognise the inequality without allowing it to become the organising principle of their creative life. But public recognition matters. Audiences provide income, opportunity, connection, and the practical conditions under which creative work can continue. A writer who has been repeatedly diminished has good reason to care about the effects of that treatment.
A writer doesn’t become less serious because their work hasn’t reached millions of readers. Nor does a successful writer’s audience transform every subsequent contribution into an authoritative statement. Recognition tells us something about the circulation and reception of work. It doesn’t, by itself, settle questions of originality, depth, accuracy, or significance. But it means educating the masses.
Above all, a writer must retain the capacity to think beyond the person who has made their creative life more difficult. If every new idea becomes inseparable from the possibility that someone more powerful might appropriate, dismiss, or reframe it, the unequal relationship begins to occupy the very territory it threatens.
Attention that should have been available for the work is consumed by the labour of monitoring the person who seems capable of diminishing it. Let it go and never look back. Because the struggle for intellectual legitimacy can become another mechanism of dependence when the powerful person’s behaviour determines the boundaries of one’s creative imagination.
The deepest injustice in this arrangement lies in the conversion of a difference in presumed legitimacy. One person has a buying audience, and that audience makes their authority more durable. Another has less, and that absence is allowed to count against them. The resulting hierarchy presents itself as a judgment of merit, even when it may be reproducing the very conditions that made recognition unequal in the first place.
A conscious audience wouldn’t permit the established person’s success to become a licence to define the less established person’s work. The point is to resist the assumption that the existing distribution of attention is an adequate map of the distribution of intellectual value.
There will always be writers whose work reaches more people than others. The question is whether that difference remains a difference in reach or becomes a mechanism through which one person’s significance is continually enlarged and another’s continually diminished. It’s about the freedom to develop an intellectual identity that pays the bills, without having that identity continually subordinated to someone else’s cultural authority.
What must be refused is the proposition, implicit in so much of the way recognition operates, that the person who has already been granted the largest share of public attention should also possess the greatest authority to decide what everyone else’s work means. Cultural power should be examined, documented, and challenged where necessary. It should never be granted the unquestioned power to determine who gets to mean something.
The appearance of natural superiority is itself a cultural construction, sustained by institutions, audiences, habits of judgment, and unequal access to credibility. It isn’t an objective verdict on the relative legitimacy of the people caught within it.
