People absolutely influence each other. On the rate of a couple lemmy comments its marginally tiny. But they do.

At risk of sounding cliché, we live in a society.

And heirarchy in not inevitable. The kind of social stratification we see today has only been around roughly 10’000 years. Which is nothing in the grand scheme, in evolutionary time.

For most of human history, human relationships underwent far more egalitarian structure.