Leverage — everybody wants it. The universal fantasy is to push other people around, get what you wish, influence events, shake the world.

But the metaphor of the lever is actually far wiser than that. A real lever conserves energy: force times length is a constant. To shift something heavy you have to push across a huge distance, with a speed that's much greater than the motion of the big object. Likewise, to move minds ...

(see also ChangingSelves (20 May 1999), ... )

TopicSociety - TopicLife - TopicScience - 2004-04-07

(correlates: ThirdPlace, GoWords, LyricNotes, ...)