A few weeks ago, I was having breakfast with my family on an ordinary Sunday morning at a café in Costa Rica.
At the table next to us sat a familiar figure from Costa Rican football: a former goalkeeper for one of the country’s most successful clubs, at least in terms of titles, long retired, but still present in media, sports conversations, and digital spaces. One of those public figures whose voice continues to carry weight long after leaving the pitch.
And I’ll allow myself one football joke here: at one point, after getting a little too comfortable, he even conceded a goal from almost the other end of the field. Let’s just say it would not be the first time a privileged position made it harder to see what was coming straight at him.
Beyond the joke, the anecdote struck me as a surprisingly accurate metaphor for something much broader: when we occupy a position of privilege, being overly confident in what we think we know can make us blind to what is right in front of us.
But what caught my attention that Sunday had nothing to do with football. There were also two young people at the table, a man and a woman, both around twenty years old. I have no idea what their relationship was, and frankly, it does not matter. What stayed with me was the conversation.
They were talking about politics. The young woman was making an argument, providing context, trying to explain her position. The two men responded differently: interrupting, dismissing, diminishing her points, and turning what was clearly an informed perspective into supposed naivety simply because what she was saying contradicted the assumptions they had already made.
Nothing extraordinary.
And that is exactly the problem.
Scenes like this happen every day: at family tables, in offices, in WhatsApp chats, on television shows, in podcasts, across social media. And very often, the people involved have little awareness of the weight their voice carries.
I call this privileged ignorance.
I do not mean ignorance as a lack of intelligence. I mean something more complex: the ability to speak from a position of influence without fully understanding the consequences that opinion may have on others.
Some people possess enough social, professional, media, or economic capital that their words simply travel farther. A sentence said by an ordinary person may disappear. The same sentence, said by a former athlete, entrepreneur, journalist, politician, creator, or public figure, can become an argument repeated by hundreds or thousands.
That is where responsibility begins.
Because having a platform does not automatically turn an opinion into knowledge. Having followers does not turn perception into evidence. Being successful in one field does not make someone an authority in every other field.
And yet our communication ecosystem confuses those things constantly.
The New Power No Longer Needs a Microphone
For a long time, we thought of influence as something reserved for a small group of people: politicians, journalists, business leaders, celebrities. That has changed.
We now live in an ecosystem where almost anyone can build an audience, and opinions can travel at a speed that would have been unimaginable not long ago.
But one important distinction remains: not all voices carry the same weight.
Reputation built in one field transfers easily into another. A former footballer can end up talking about politics, a business leader about public health, an actor about economics, a digital creator about science.
The problem is not that they do.
In an open society, everyone has the right to an opinion.
The problem begins when perceived authority replaces the argument itself. When we stop asking whether someone actually knows what they are talking about and start assuming they must know because we recognize who they are.
That mechanism is incredibly powerful.
And incredibly dangerous.
Influence Can Amplify Ignorance Too
I have worked in communication for many years, and one of the things that interests me most is the moment when an opinion stops being just an opinion and gains the power to change a perception, a conversation, or a behavior.
That is where influence begins.
And influence is never neutral. It can inform, mobilize, or inspire, but it can also oversimplify, polarize, normalize prejudice, or lend legitimacy to arguments that have not earned it.
Often, this happens without intention. The influential person simply speaks, and the ecosystem does the rest: a comment becomes a clip, the clip becomes a post, the post becomes a conversation, the conversation becomes a perception, and that perception eventually becomes reality for someone.
That is one of the greatest risks of our time: the speed at which a privileged opinion can acquire the appearance of truth.
Democracy Also Lives in Small Conversations
Costa Rica is going through an especially intense political moment.
And there is something we often forget: winning an election gives a government democratic legitimacy to govern, but it does not mean an entire society thinks the same way.
Democracy is not unanimity.
It is coexistence through disagreement.
That is why I worry when our political conversations begin to operate in exactly the opposite way: when disagreement is treated as ignorance, when questioning is framed as confrontation, or when someone with more age, more power, more visibility, or more status assumes that position automatically makes them more right.
Because democracy does not deteriorate only through major institutional decisions. It also deteriorates through small conversations in which we stop listening: at a table, in an interview, on a television show, in a social media comment, in a seemingly harmless remark.
And that deterioration becomes even more serious when the person minimizing, mocking, or simplifying someone else’s position has a public voice that others consume as a source of reference.
Influence Is Not the Same as Being Right
That may be the central point.
We live in a time when visibility and knowledge are far too easily confused. Fame can look like authority. Recognition can look like judgment. Confidence can look like evidence.
They are not the same thing.
Influence is simply the ability to affect how other people think, feel, or act. It is not a certificate of truth. It is not an intellectual license. And it certainly does not make anyone immune to error.
If anything, it should work the other way around.
The greater our ability to influence, the greater our responsibility to examine what we say. Scale changes the consequences. A bad opinion shared between two people may end there. The same bad opinion voiced by someone with an audience can become collective prejudice, misinformation, or social permission to treat others in a certain way.
Reputation Is a Form of Power
There is another dimension we often overlook: reputation acts as a multiplier.
When someone has spent years building recognition, trust, or admiration, their words arrive with a kind of pre-approved credit. People do not evaluate every argument from scratch. We use shortcuts: “If this person was successful, they probably know.” “If they are on television, they probably understand.” “If they have thousands of followers, they are probably right.”
That is deeply human.
But precisely for that reason, those of us with any degree of visibility should understand that reputation does not only grant privilege. It creates responsibility.
Reputation should increase our discipline to question ourselves, not our certainty. It should increase our willingness to listen, not reduce it. And it should make us more careful with the things we do not know.
That should be the real cost of privilege.
Privileged Ignorance Is Also a Failure to Listen
And perhaps this is what bothered me most about that conversation.
It was not that someone held a different political opinion. That is normal. In fact, it is healthy.
What was troubling was the logic being used to invalidate another voice: not challenging the argument, but diminishing the person making it.
That is influence too. And probably one of its most damaging forms.
Because when someone with greater age, status, recognition, or confidence systematically dismisses another person, the message goes far beyond the issue being discussed. It says: your knowledge matters less, your judgment carries less weight, your voice has less legitimacy.
When that happens often enough, it begins to shape how people participate in public conversation. Some stop speaking. Others stop asking questions. Some learn that in order to be heard they need to shout louder, while others simply accept that certain voices have more right to exist than their own.
That, too, is influence.
The Media Are Part of This Conversation Too
The media carry an enormous responsibility here because they still too often use notoriety as a substitute for expertise.
A familiar face guarantees attention. A controversial remark generates conversation. A categorical opinion creates clips. The ecosystem rewards that dynamic.
But when a media outlet repeatedly invites people to comment outside their area of expertise simply because they are publicly recognizable, it is also transferring legitimacy.
It is not just handing over a microphone.
It is implicitly saying: this voice deserves to be heard on this subject.
That matters.
At a time when information is increasingly consumed in fragments, and when many people experience the news through headlines, clips, and decontextualized excerpts, editorial judgment remains one of the most important barriers between a healthy public conversation and a completely polluted one.
Brands Are Not Neutral Either
The same applies to brands.
Brands have audiences, resources, platforms, creators, media access, and the ability to amplify conversations. That means they too should understand that having the ability to enter a conversation does not necessarily mean they should.
For too long, we have confused presence with relevance. If a topic is trending, a brand feels it should say something. If a conversation is growing, it feels pressure to claim a place in it. If a cultural debate emerges, there is an immediate urge to post.
But the right question should not simply be can we participate?
It should also be: do we have anything useful to add? Do we really understand this conversation? What consequences might our intervention create?
Responsible influence also knows when to stay quiet.
Maybe We Need to Distrust Ourselves a Little More
Not necessarily other people.
Ourselves.
Our certainties. Our automatic opinions. The comfort of being surrounded by people who think the same way. And especially that dangerous feeling that because someone listens to us, we must therefore have something correct to say.
Back at that café, I doubt either of the men at that table thought they were exercising influence.
To them, it was simply a Sunday conversation.
But influence rarely feels like influence while we are exercising it.
That is precisely its power. And perhaps also its greatest danger.
The more visible someone is, the more authority they have, and the more people listen to them, the more important one very simple practice should become: asking what impact their words may have before speaking.
Not to stop having opinions. Not to turn every conversation into an exercise in political correctness. Not to become afraid of being wrong.
But to understand that a powerful voice never weighs only what its words say.
It also weighs who is saying them, where they are saying them from, and how many people are willing to believe them.
In a time obsessed with amplifying voices, perhaps the real privilege is not having a platform.
Perhaps it is having the judgment to use it well.
Because influence does not begin when someone listens to us.
It begins when we take responsibility for what we do with their attention.
