They Were Never Really on Your Side: The 4,000-Year Career of the Trusted Advisor Who Wasn't

The Job Was Always Two Jobs

Somewhere in your feed right now, there's a person you've followed for years — maybe a finance guy, maybe a wellness creator, maybe someone who built their whole brand on brutal honesty — and they're about to post a sponsored ad for something that contradicts everything they've ever told you. You'll feel vaguely betrayed. You'll wonder when they sold out.

The answer, if history is any guide, is probably pretty early.

This isn't a social media problem. It isn't even a capitalism problem, exactly. It's a human psychology problem that goes back at least four thousand years, and understanding it doesn't make it hurt less — but it does make you look a lot less naive for falling for it.

Ancient Courts Ran on Double Agents

In the ancient Near East, advisors to kings occupied one of the most dangerous and lucrative positions in any society. The good ones — the ones who survived — were almost always playing more than one table.

Egyptian court records from the New Kingdom period document officials who served as trusted counselors to pharaohs while maintaining private correspondence with rival nobles and foreign courts. This wasn't considered pure treachery in the modern sense. It was understood, at some level, that a man of influence had influence precisely because multiple powerful people wanted access to him. The loyalty was real — up to a point. The point was usually financial.

In ancient China, the role of the ce shi — roughly, the strategic advisor — carried an explicit understanding that the advisor's value came from knowing things other people didn't. The good ones knew things about you that you didn't know about yourself. And they charged accordingly, sometimes to multiple clients simultaneously.

The Han dynasty records are full of advisors who served warlords during the fragmentation periods while quietly providing intelligence to the eventual winners. Some of them are celebrated in Chinese history as shrewd survivors. The people they advised first are less celebrated.

The Renaissance Made It Respectable

If the ancient world treated dual loyalty as a known hazard, the Renaissance turned it into a formal profession.

The great merchant banking families of Florence — the Medici most famously, but also the Pazzi, the Strozzi, the Bardi — employed agents who functioned simultaneously as commercial representatives, political informants, and what we might today call brand ambassadors. These men moved through courts across Europe presenting themselves as trusted advisors to local rulers while feeding intelligence back to Florence.

Machiavelli, who watched this system operate up close, didn't invent cynicism about advisors. He just wrote it down. His actual advice in The Prince about how to evaluate advisors is remarkably modern: watch whether they think more about themselves than about you, and assume that if they're smart enough to be useful, they're smart enough to be running an angle.

The thing is, the rulers who ignored this advice weren't stupid. They knew, on some level, that their advisors had competing interests. They hired them anyway because the alternative — an advisor with no independent connections, no network, no influence of their own — was an advisor who couldn't actually do anything for you.

Sound familiar?

You're Hiring the Network, Not the Person

This is the piece that gets lost in every modern conversation about influencer betrayal: you didn't follow that person because of who they are in isolation. You followed them because of who they know, what they have access to, what doors they can open. Their value is their connections. Their connections are, by definition, not exclusive to you.

The same logic applied to every court fixer, every Renaissance broker, every Gilded Age political operator. Boss Tweed's inner circle in 1870s New York was full of men who were simultaneously trusted by Tweed and on retainer to the business interests that needed access to Tweed. Everyone knew this. Everyone hired them anyway. Because a man with no other clients had no power, and a man with no power couldn't help you.

The influencer with a million followers has a million followers because a lot of people trust them. That trust is the product. And like any product, it gets sold.

The Loyalty Was Always Conditional — We Just Didn't Read the Fine Print

None of this means that every advisor, counselor, or creator is running a con. Some of them are genuinely trying to help you. But the historical record is pretty clear that the structural incentives have never, in four thousand years, been set up to guarantee your interests come first.

The medieval concept of bastard feudalism — where lords retained men with cash fees rather than land grants — produced exactly this dynamic at scale. Retainers who were paid fees rather than given land had no deep structural reason to die for their lord. They could, and frequently did, switch sides when a better offer came. The lords who understood this built systems of redundancy and verification. The ones who didn't got surprised.

Modern influencer culture has built almost none of those verification systems. The disclosure requirements that exist are routinely gamed. The audience, like the medieval lord who didn't read the contract, mostly just trusts.

The Pattern Doesn't Make You a Sucker — Ignoring It Does

Here's what five thousand years of recorded human behavior actually tells us: people in positions of trusted influence have almost always had divided loyalties, and the ones who maintained those positions the longest were usually the ones who managed the division most skillfully.

That's not cynicism. It's just the job description, read honestly.

The useful takeaway isn't to trust nobody. It's to understand what you're actually buying when you follow someone, hire an advisor, or put your faith in any person whose value comes from their connections to other people. You're buying access to a network. That network has other members. Those members have interests.

Four thousand years ago, a scribe in the court of a minor Egyptian noble was probably thinking about his options. The noble thought he had a loyal advisor. He had a man with options.

Nothing about that has changed. Only the platform is new.