Leverage is a strange beast. I'd define it as a multiplier of one's work, wealth and/or ideas.

Leverage can start with labor (other people working for you) which is the oldest form of labor. It can be enforced through law (property law) or followership (being a ruler by authority, moral or strength).

Leverage can also be financial : you put your money to work and other people will work for you.

Ultimately, you can get the physical world to work for you - steam machine and now the CPU and the Internet can do that.

Ethically, leverage, for example the labor one, is grey waters. One can argue (hello my fellow marxists friends) that one's initial destiny (wealth, access to education, grit, psychological safety given by one's upbringing) can give a definitive edge and thus end up exploiting other people who were less fortunate at start. Islamic law for example forbids most forms of capital leverage along, roughly, those lines of morality.

It is also, interestingly, the reason behind De Gaulle's failed "Participation" plan. The thinking was for everyone to get a piece of the companies they were working in. While visionnary, that approach got ditched by private interests.

Actually, what's closest to that vision is today's skilled labor choosing where and for what to work. The Internet, cryptocurrencies are all pointing in the direction of human leverage going away.

On a deeper, philosophical level, is physical leverage right ? Most of the doom preppers and "declinologues" are arguing against this and at some degree call for getting back to a leverage-less world, especially in the physical sense.

I think this makes absolutely no sense.

The universe is infinite, the power sources are infinite. The greatest threat to our specie and more broadly what life is about is starting to deflate the greatest movement towards leverage that the world has ever seen.