To Be or Not to Be Influenced

            
             What does influence mean? Influence is a process of people changing their surrounding by persuading other people to do this or not to do that, causing them to change their points of view. Influence is an unavoidable part of our life. We are being influenced beginning from birth. Parents reward us for doing good things and punish for doing bad things. In this way we get a sense of right and wrong. Current fashion determines our tastes in clothing, music and lifestyle in general. In fact, all our life consists of constant influencing each other. There is nothing wrong in it, if not allowing external influence to disturb once life.
             Why do people influence each other? Every person has a conscious or subconscious desire to control something or someone, beginning from a pet and ending with a whole country. The best way to exercise ones power is to influence other's lifestyle, thoughts, beliefs, actions. People feel themselves playing an important role in lives of others when they have the ability to change them. And of course they get a great delight in observing the effect their influence has on people.
             Just remember Lord Henry Wotton, one of the main characters in the novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray", by Oscar Wilde! There is no doubt that he had a very powerful influence on Dorian Gray. All his statements seemed to be so perfectly reasonable, that people, especially young naive man, were likely to be persuaded. It was really exciting for him to observe the effect his words had on Dorian's views on life. For Lord Henry it was just an experiment, an interesting experiment on human nature. In fact because of their close friendship young man's life changed dramatically, and far not to good. Of course Dorian was aware of what was happening to him, but he couldn't or even didn't want to change the situation. One can .
             consider Lord Henry to be responsible for that terrible influence he had on young Dorian.