Spheres of Influence

There are some multifaceted ideas that I have been trying to sort out for a while now; ideas about power and influence in our society, and why people are so angry with one another. As I tried to work through my thinking it became clear how completely overwhelming it can all be. It makes sense that so many people stay out of the various information loops of our society; there just isn’t time to deal with all of the information, let alone the negativity and vitriol that often comes from our society’s polarized ideological extremes.

So it makes sense that when we hear words like “privilege” or “race” or any of the other hundreds of phrases that have become politically charged in this country, that we would tense up. I see all of that and how it affects power and just… it’s a lot. So as I often do with such things I decided to try to write my way through the complexity. I figured that seeing everything on paper would allow me to better examine and make sense of it all. First I wanted a framework to deal with all of it. With power comes influence – and that’s the word that stuck with me.

I have been thinking about dimensions and spheres of influence and how the dynamics between different levels of control influence human interaction a lot lately. Much of the chaos and controversies over the purchase of the site formerly known as Twitter by a certain billionaire is actually a main cause of this, leaving me to wonder about how we communicate as a society. There are people like said billionaire who say that social media sites like Twitter/X should be the modern equivalent of a town square. That idea really made me start thinking about how communication has changed over the centuries.

A hundred years ago the town square was limited to the people who were physically within proximity to the town. It was difficult to communicate quickly with more than a handful of people at once, especially if you were not a person with power or influence. If we now consider social media to be the public square, that whole idea is turned on its head. The square now stretches to almost anyone in the world with access to the internet. It is now infinitely easier for just about anyone to spread their ideas, and the people with influence become the people with the most followers, allowing for the most rapid dissemination of their words.

In many ways society is evolving faster than our minds and bodies seem capable of handling. The proximity we have to other people, both in the real and online worlds, conflicts with our evolutionary design. We are being forced to run the software of modern society on biological hardware that has not yet evolved to deal with it in an optimal manner. That conflict results in many of the societal and cultural issues we are dealing with today.

If you just google the phrase “sphere of influence” there are a lot of things that can come up. There is the geopolitical meaning when one country has influence over another, usually in a colonial fashion. The image tab will show countless charts of circles expanding outward from a middle point often containing a stick figure. The thing most of the various results have in common is mention of control, which is a loaded word for me. I have a lot of personal issues around the idea of control. While that means I’ve talked about my control issues in therapy it also means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about other kinds of control and how they influence interactions between people.      

If we consider our lives, we are each at the center. Each of us, alone in our own Core, have an extremely high degree of control and influence within the confines of our own bodies and minds, and the potential for chaos is very low. Adjacent to the Core is the Identity Layer. This layer can be multifaceted and contain several seemingly conflicting identities within it. Think of the various identities (race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, etc.) as sprinkles in a layer of cake – little bits that influence how we see ourselves, and therefore see the world. These are the parts of us that are more rigid, less changeable. We can’t change our ethnicity, and we can change our socioeconomic status, but it is not easy. These are the things that make up the Identity Layer.

If we move a little further out we find what I call our Inner Circle, made up of the people we are closest to in our lives; a small, trusted group. For many people that may be their immediate family, but that is certainly not true for everyone. Now outside of our own Core and Identity, the amount of control we have decreases while the unknown and potential for chaos increases. Each person within our Inner Circle introduces a limitless number of variables that can influence our lives in all sorts of ways through our interactions with them.

Next comes the Outer Circle. Again who exactly inhabits this will vary person to person, but it is the people that you are close to but not as close as those in the Inner Circle. Once again we have introduced more people and therefore more variables to our lives, thus further decreasing control and increasing potential for chaos.

Beyond the Outer Circle lies the Community Layer. Like the Identity Layer it is complex and multifaceted. The number and complexity of this layer can vary depending on context and each individual person at the center. While the analogy of cake with sprinkles scattered through works for the identity layer, a better one here would be the ring systems you see around planets in the outer solar system. Some people have a simple set of a few rings within the layer, while others may be like Saturn with a complex amount of them. One person could have the community layer of their church, then beyond that their town, then their country. School children could have their class, their grade, and then the school as a whole before even getting out into anything else in their lives. Another person might have the layers of work, neighborhood, city, county, state, country. Even things like favorite fantasy franchise or sports teams can be found in the Community Layer, because those are communities we can feel a deep connection to. The lines here can shift and blur for each person as they gain and lose communities through their lifetimes.

The Identity and Community Layers are the most complex and cause much of the conflict that we each come across. While they are both multifaceted there is a distinction. As mentioned those sprinkles in the Identity Layer are less malleable, some totally unchangeable, others changeable with a great amount of effort. The components of the Community Layers though are much more fluid, and can be changed with a move from one city to another, or the end of a job or schooling. The Identity Layers are much more about who the person at the center is, thus their proximity to the Core. The Community Layers are about where a person is and who they interact with, which is why they are placed outside the Inner and Outer Circles.

Conflict can appear at any of the levels. The issue is that the further from the center we go, the higher the potential for chaos and the lack of control. It really increases exponentially at each layer. There is a constant interaction with the Self at the Core and aspects of each layer; a constant exchange of energy. The trick is sorting out what energy is positive and negative. Eckhart Tolle says that Primary Reality is within and Secondary Reality is without.[i] Applying the concept to these layers can help to define and map the transition of energy between them. The Primary Reality is the individual Core and the way that we as the individual react to any energy coming in from the outside layers. These are the things we have the most control over – the things within us and how we react to any energy coming in. Our Secondary Reality is everything beyond our center, and the way these outer layers react to the energy we emanate from our individual Core. These are the things we have little to no control over. We can’t control how those people in our Inner Circle absorb the energy we send there. We have much more control over how we absorb the energy they send us.

If we consider all these factors in the context of our physical world it is complex enough, but if we introduce the internet and our increasingly more global society to it, the paradigm shifts completely. For most of our history our community consisted solely of the people we were near – now it can be people we have never even seen in person before. This increases the opportunity for connection with our Identity and Community Layers, with both positive and negative consequences. It allows us to find common good with people we wouldn’t have been able to before, and that can cause a feeling of closeness because of the immediacy of our interactions. The issue there is that the sense of closeness can be a false one. The decentralization of the physical world is not something that our ancient hardware has prepared itself for yet. Our lizard brain sees these connections on the same level as an in person one. But sometimes the person on the other side of the internet might not even be who we think they are. The anonymity the internet provides can overshadow that perception of closeness. It is also the cause of the phenomenon behind comment section attacks. The shield of a keyboard allows us to expel built up negative energy that is caused by disharmony of our different layers. It gives us an illusion that we have more control then we do, because it gives the impression of the same closeness provided by the Inner and Outer Circles, where we have more control and lower potential for chaos. With the ready availability of the internet and the decrease in so called “third places” that create real world connections outside of work or home, many of these online communities are being made to function in the place of Inner and Outer circles for a lot of people. This reinforces that the internet is like any tool – not inherently bad, but in this paradigm it has the potential, perhaps even a tendency, to be so.

With the definition of these layers in place I began to turn my attention to the interactions between them. The internet did not invent the potential friction that can occur from one layer to the next; that has happened for the entirety of civilization. There is energy exchanged in that friction, transferred between the layers, moving into and out of the Core as we move through the world, our individual spheres intersecting with those of the people around us. I thought about that energy, and how these days it is a lot of anger, but underneath that anger is pain. And that brought to mind a simple question, a powerful question that when framed in the way a Civil Rights legend has, can change things dramatically; “where does it hurt?” That question was what I dove into next.

[i] Tolle, E. (2005). A new earth: awakening to your life's purpose. New York, N.Y., Dutton/Penguin Group.