The Influence Multiplier

Everyone gets what they want, relative to their influence. At least, that’s the new principle which I'm presently entertaining regarding the rules by which the “universe” operates. I’ve cycled through many beliefs about this particular question in the past—how do the mechanics of this world, if refusing randomness as a sufficient answer, allocate a participant’s wishes and justify it within the entire system? I used to carry sentimental views on this question, and was an avid enthusiast of the principle that those with “good hearts" get what they want more than others. I would later learn, having inevitably recursed up the class hierarchy to the encapsulating implementation, that good was entirely subjective, and thus not a good measure.

2017 awoke me, and probably many of you, to a much rawer side of reality. Social networks as a whole struggled to reconcile opinion on any topic. This at first strengthened my grip on the importance of facts, but later completely relinquished my grip on the mere concept of a single point of truth, and any hope for an objective reality. In this new world, it’s clear that there are no rules and that there never was. History is written by the winners, but this applies not only on a legendary scale, but on a local, daily scale. We were taught that life was cause and effect, and for every effort, an equal compensation was redistributed. In reality, those who have won on large scales played the roles of both cause and effect. The physical laws of the universe accorded their wishes, or perhaps did nothing to stop them, multiplied by the level of influence they had on neighboring matter and their ability to rearrange it into different orders.

I don’t necessarily mean influence of the social kind. I mean a sort of local, physical influence. An influence measured by the length of the radius that emanates from you as the center. A spotted leopard carries strong influence in his jungle, and his desires for blood are granted on a much grander scale than that of a feeble rodent, no matter how much more ambitious the latter. The size of an organism's ambition seems to be irrelevant if not possessing the proper influence to manifest those wishes, with at least enough emphasis for neighboring matter to take notice.

These half-baked musings unfortunately serve to benefit neither me nor you—I’m not entirely sure being aware of this "fact" does anything to strengthen your influence on matter. Instead, it helps me reconcile the past few wondrous years of new living under a weirdly connected world, and draw bridges between how I once thought the world to function, to the clear new reality that emerged as a result of the endless free-flow of information. Although, I wouldn’t be so confident as to be totally enthralled by any one pithy maxim, like you get what you want relative to your influence—I think chaos theory still comes into play, which seems to just be presently misunderstood market dynamics. But, I don’t mind observing that those with large influence on any market succeed most in acquiring the things they seek.