Cultural Power and the Megaphone Effect
One of the quiet mistakes of modern life is believing that visibility equals relevance.
Take veganism. Not because it matters so much in itself, but because it exposes a mechanism. A position held by a small minority becomes omnipresent. Menus change. Advertising follows. Corporate language adjusts. Media coverage multiplies. The impression forms that society is undergoing a decisive moral shift.
Media do not reflect society. They manufacture salience. They select voices that are rhetorically efficient, morally legible, and easy to frame as forward motion. Numbers are secondary. What matters is narrative clarity, emotional charge, and repeatability. A position that fits the format travels far beyond its actual support.
This dynamic consistently favours leftist positions, because they translate cleanly into the moral grammar of contemporary media. They compress complexity into symbols. They divide the world into harm and care, progress and resistance. They generate urgency and moral pressure. Over time, this produces cultural power that is detached from numerical reality and anchored instead in constant visibility.
Veganism makes the imbalance obvious because the numbers are so small. A movement that remains in the low single digits is treated as if it were reshaping society. When markets built on that story stall or collapse, the narrative is not corrected. It is quietly abandoned. The megaphone moves on.
The pattern repeats elsewhere:
Immigration.
Gender.
Language norms.
Environmental policy.
Education.
Again and again, positions held by a narrow segment dominate public space. Opposition is not debated proportionally. It is pathologized. Disagreement is framed as ignorance, hostility, or moral failure.
This is not persuasion, it is saturation and over time, people stop asking how many actually agree. Agreement is treated as a completed fact rather than a living question. Silence is read as consent. Hesitation becomes guilt. The majority adapts by lowering its voice, not by changing its mind.
That inversion matters. Cultural power detaches from numbers. The many become cautious. The few become normative. What looks like consensus is often just asymmetry of risk. Speaking up costs more than staying quiet.
Most people sense this gap. They notice that what dominates screens does not dominate kitchens, workplaces, or private conversations. They feel the distance between public language and everyday life. But repetition has an effect. It disciplines. It teaches people to doubt their own intuitions. It trains them to self-censor before anyone else has to.
This is the mistake: Loudness is not legitimacy. A megaphone is not a majority. Cultural power works best when it convinces people to behave as if they are isolated even when they are not.
And this is where neutrality ends.
If you are part of the majority, you cannot afford to act like a minority. You cannot keep treating your own judgments as suspect simply because they are not amplified. You cannot remain silent while a small number of highly visible actors define what is normal, acceptable, or progressive for everyone else.
Being outshouted is not the same as being outnumbered.
Therefore, speak without apology.
Stop mistaking repetition for consensus.
Withdraw the unearned authority you have been trained to grant to cultural loudness.
Most people are still there.
They are quieter than they should be.
That is not because they are wrong.
It is because they have been taught that silence is safer than speech.
That lesson can be unlearned.
And it should be.