I thought a little more about the ‘influencer’ question, and it brought me down some interesting pathways – and I have to agree: It does take a little bit of delusion to feel that you influence people, that you completely change their ideas.

But that doesn’t mean that influence doesn’t exist.

I mean if you think about it, surely it does.

As we know, people are related to one another – we shape one another’s behavior and experiences.

Even right now, as you think about every one of the words that come off the tip of my fingers as I write it out seconds, minutes, or hours after I wrote, these words are shaping a small part of your day as you think about what’s in front of you and ask yourself:”What is he trying to get at?” amongst other things.

But you know, that’s like toy level influence – it’s trivial.

It’s kind of like how if you wanted to, you could move your right hand or your left leg upon reading this sentence (or not at all, or both at once).

You have some choice at some specific moment of what you’re going to do – I’m sure you could think of it cognitively for a moment before you actually take the action. In a moment when you choose to make the choice (maybe in a couple of seconds, in a minute or so), you could possibly plan out what you would like to do.

Not super controversial.

But could you have controlled the very first impulse, the very first thought that came to your mind? That is doubtful.

Now imagine that you are attacked by a rabid flesh eating bee (or wasp. I don’t know lol), it just attacks you and specifically attacks your right hand, then your left leg at the same time.

At that point, faced with the pain, movement for 99% of you becomes a forced choice; there is only one real choice in that scenario which is to move, to do anything to address the pain.

So yeah no, you don’t even have complete mastery of how you react to things.

So why should you say that other people are unable to influence you?

Now, I don’t think that this means that there is a silver bullet to so-called influence people, and I would maintain that if you were to believe that you can actually influence people’s actions to the point of say brainwashing them, that would be a delusion of the highest order.

If you are like David Chase Taylor, as I shared in my podcast with Tim Tiah, perhaps it plays out in your head and then because you can’t disconfirm it, and it then ends up ringing out to you as what you call reality as you end up in infinite rationalization regress.

Here is an example of this, brought to you by the keyboard of David Chase Taylor.

I may write a post dedicated to this man a little later because I think he deserves at least that much. But here’s the basic point:

There are a lot of people out there who believe that they have massive influence over events and will state their names and reputations on their beliefs; David, for one, writes these posts almost daily and has been doing so ever since I first saw him in Switzerland in 2016.

It is remarkable consistency and a shocking amount of work and time that this man has put into what he has written for no apparent reward because he believes that he shapes the course of events.

There are plenty of delusional people like that, and in fact there is a Wikipedia article dedicated to the subject of messiah claimants – people who go out saying that they are the new messiah, that they’ve come to save the world, influencing themselves more effectively than they ever could influence anyone else to travel in the general direction of oblivion.

But you know, even as you read about that, there’s a good chance that I was influencing you in the direction of feeling that David is delusional and he’s not a truth-bearer in his universe.

But if we think about it, I am just a separate human being.

Why should my opinion that he is delusional hold sway over his opinion that he is eminently rational?

You could argue that maybe I’m just speaking a little more persuasively, but if that’s the case, then implicitly, I suppose, you already admit that influence is a possibility.

Now, there are all sorts of other complicated things out there to think about and that we could also think about in the context of this blog.

Why did you find this post, for example? Was it because Google revealed something to you? Did a friend send the link to you? “Check out this guy”. Was that friend cynical, serious, a raving fan, poor, rich? Do they have buying intent or none?

Did something that was said here increase, decrease, or leave unchanged with nothing but a ‘lol’ as residue your inclination to either work with me as a student and get past the friction of emailing, or did something else happen?

All of those different things aren’t really captured in the simple whole numerical measure of daily visitor statistics.

Let’s refine our thoughts here.

At heart, I am agnostic, skeptical, yet leaning constantly on the edge of believing that influence is both real and possible.

In my mind, it would be delusional to say that we are influential over others on every level in every way – It would take an act of immense human arrogance to assert that you really are in control of things around you.

But I think it would take also an act of immense human arrogance to say that we definitively do not influence the people around us. Or for that matter, that it is not a skill that we can refine over the course of time—whether for good or for bad.