9 ms·

The Inner Ring (1944)

184 points by gHeadphone 3y ago

danielvf 3y ago
This article is very true. But most of the article is taken up with the dangers of trying to get in an inner circle. It's easy to miss thinking about the equally true last paragraphs. > The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. > And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
robertlagrant 3y ago
I read this, and also Letter From a Birmingham Jail[0], at least once a year. Thanks for the reminder! [0] https://letterfromjail.com https://letterfromjail.com
smithza 3y ago
I think C.S. Lewis is right in a lot of this. How much of ourselves do we give up in pursuit of being "in the circle", "in the know", "with those important folks"? He extends this philosophy in science-fiction/novel form in _That Hideous Strength_[1]. [1] https://a.co/d/4MuVdWD https://a.co/d/4MuVdWD
- johngossman 3y ago
  “That Hideous Strength” is also a good takedown of Longtermism (and its predecessors).
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    That Hideous Strength is a good book, but it's just bizarre compared to the previous two books in the trilogy (and admittedly Perelandra gets pretty bizarre in the final 20% or so of the book). But my favorite lesson is from Perelandra: Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death.
    - graemep 3y ago
      There is a discontinuity between the books because he started writing it as SF, realised it was a mistake, and then switched to pure fantasy. Like many of his books this series is misunderstood, I think deliberately. A lot of people (including Brian Aldis, and BBC continuity announcers) think the first book is anti-science because the two baddies are scientists. In fact the one who invents the new kind of spacecraft is a physicist (which is necessary) but the other (the worse one) is "something in the City" (i.e. a banker, broker, or possibly businessman depending on whether usage had shifted at the time he wrote it) and later becomes a politician. It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high opinion of sociologists - the sociologist in the That Hideous Strength is gullible because of the nature of his "glib" subject unlike people who study humanities and hard sciences! > Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death. I like that too. It gives it a lot of visceral impact.
johngossman 3y ago
Robert Sapolsky’s book “A Primate’s Memoir” is about the importance of status in baboon tribes. High status males and females are more successful at reproducing, healthier, and have lower levels of stress hormones. That said, some individuals have found alternative strategies that also work. After reading that book, I’ve never been able to take status games among humans so seriously.
- digging 3y ago
  Health and low stress levels are probably easier achieved in other ways than status, fortunately!
  - scottyah 3y ago
    But is it easy to avoid status if you are healthy and low stress?
- ta8645 3y ago
  > High status males and females are more successful at reproducing, healthier, and have lower levels of stress hormones. If those truly are the stakes, it seems like something worth taking more seriously, not less. No?
  - johngossman 3y ago
    I hope we’ve moved past that. And even some of the baboons opted out.
    - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
      Read the book Johnstone: Impro and you will see that we have not moved past that.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    If those are the stakes, are they linear with status, or do those inside the baboon inner ring enjoy them, while those baboons trying to break into the inner ring have much higher levels of stress and not appreciably better health or reproductive opportunities than mid-level baboons? (If one doesn't assume the narrator is telling the complete truth, 1984 can be read as a book in which an outer party member —who is in the outer, not inner, party based on his middling A-levels— violently attempts to buck the system. Keep in mind that when Blair went to private school, he was an "outsider", there on a nearly-free ride to keep the school's test scores up [as the rich and the thick do with boffins to this day], and boy, did the insiders ever let him know his place.)
photochemsyn 3y ago
[flagged]
- quercusa 3y ago
  As a realist, Lewis would likely agree with in real life it's just as likely that a faction of corrupt self-serving incompetents end up taking over the entire system. And that's why he'd have little interest in 'revolutions'
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    I think Lewis was less concerned about corrupt incompetents that he was about corrupt but competent people. He was even more concerned about competent zealots. Source: "A Reply To Professor Haldane" in Of Other Worlds.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Anyone have particulars to share in which they've either longed for or belonged to an Inner Ring? Observed the effects of it? Decided to leave? Decided to stay?
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  I've certainly been conscious of it for most of my life. I was moved around double-digit number of times when I was still single digits of age, so the outsider perspective is uncomfortably familiar, like a suit of armor into which I was riveted. Bryan Ferry covered "The In Crowd" particularly well: "I'm in with the In Crowd, I go where the In Crowd goes / I'm in with the In Crowd, I know what the In Crowd knows." The song covers status, respect, sexual availability, and so on. As we are not barnacles, the proper environment of Man is Man. Forget the deserts and the prairies, the jungles or tundra. We live with others of our species first and foremost, and that in turn means hierarchy and its hangups, position and its privileges. The Inner Ring gets you companionship, a stronger support network, and a greater availability of opportunity (social, romantic, professional). Outside of it and you're left scrabbling for the same things. I saw it in grade school and then high school. I went to college and I found an Inner Ring among the students who all decided to live in the A-Frames; their social graph was incredibly dense and, when I sleuth through Facebook years later, has yet to be fully teased apart. It has arisen anywhere I have worked where sufficient numbers of people existed. Once you pick up on it, it shows itself over and over. Now, I disagree with Lewis largely over his attempts at consolation via some kind of nebulous and unspoken (even unconscious) runner-up respect for not having compromised ones values or some nonsense, a bit like a Promised Land to which the faithful will eventually be granted entry. It's the usual Christian refrain of "You will have wealth ... in your heart." At worst, it's a kind of "stay in your place" classism, designed to keep the credulous recipient of this "wisdom" passive. Generally, when you hear about some virtue and notice that possession of this virtue benefits others, and you hear about this virtue from others, add a little suspicion to the mix before you swallow it whole. Being staid and unstriving is certainly convenient for some people, other people. Lewis was almost certainly of an Inner Ring himself, given what you read of his contemporaries, so in a more cynical sense, he is attempting to keep that Inner Ring small (one of the commandments of being in an Inner Ring is that one must not allow in riff-raff) by suggesting that desiring leads to some flavor of moral compromise and you've got the nice parallel that craving leads to suffering. Quite a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping you where you are. Remember that when you hear someone pooh-poohing some social or financial upward mobility. We can't all be nobility, so let's have the suckers filter themselves out.
gnfedhjmm 3y ago
[dead]
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish Perhaps he is talking about The Screwtape Letters[0]? I find that book to be awesome stuff. It is definitely Christian moralism, which I could do without, but it is mainly guidance on basic self-appraisal; regardless of the religious (or non-religious) context. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters
- johngossman 3y ago
  I have a tape of this read by John Cleese. At several points he goes full Monty Python rant and it’s hilarious.
  - infertainment 3y ago
    Yes! e.g. when he turns into a centipede about 5 minutes into letter 22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAJOstiPwiE&t=7474s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAJOstiPwiE&t=7474s
fifilura 3y ago
I am trying to figure why I have a problem relating? Maybe I am just wired in the wrong way. But maybe it is only after the "we" that you figure out what you really like doing? And the more "we" the more things you will find? Some times you just have to make a move to get somewhere - anywhere. It is difficult just finding things you love out of a vacuum.
- fifilura 3y ago
  I just don't think that it is always a good advice to a young person to (admittedly paraphrasing) "not seek friends for the sake of seeking friends, only do things you love" You might just end up lonely in a room wondering what in the world it is you could love doing. But then maybe it worked for C.S. Lewis, but maybe because he had already found his passion.
  - helloplanets 3y ago
    There's definitely a happy medium here. I guess the important point comes at the end of the article. You'll basically end up inside some kind of Ring either way, with the disctinction being that the Ring is the byproduct instead of the be-all end-all. > If in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. > But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
5cott0 3y ago
when a so-called flat-org/holacracy company says “you don’t have a boss” what they actually mean is you have an indeterminate # of bosses you just don’t who they are yet
gen220 3y ago
It's a really poignant piece, and I think having a strong grip on its ideas is the hallmark of a transition to a socially-constructive adulthood. For me, personally, it was quite depressing & disillusioning to recognize that there is no "inner ring" where the people populating it are magically "better" (more rational, of stronger character, whatever) than the people outside, and that in fact "innerness" is more often inversely correlated with those qualities. It took me a while to fully digest, value and live by the last paragraph of the essay, the call-to-action to become a crafts person invested in your "society" of like-minded friends, which, I think, is as important as the rest of the essay insofar as it provides a path forward.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > For me, personally, it was quite depressing & disillusioning to recognize that there is no "inner ring" where the people populating it are magically "better" (more rational, of stronger character, whatever) than the people outside, and that in fact "innerness" is more often inversely correlated with those qualities. Not in my experience, real decision makers do behave somewhat better, on average, then the median person, if you tally up all their virtues and vices. It's not a very steep improvement, but it is noticeable. Of course the median person will likely never meet more then a few, so even a somewhat lower fraction of bad apples can easily cause a similarly negative perception.
  - gen220 3y ago
    I think it's less the decision-maker and more the ring that's built around the decision-maker. It's also true in my experience that decision-makers are often pretty solid. Decision-making is its own craft, many CEO/VP-type people take that craft very seriously. But, unless the person in question has spent a significant amount of time and effort in forming their own "society", the "default" rings that accrete around these people are pretty awful. Agreed that the bad apples are more frequently sampled in the media, and it distorts perception of the overall population. But I do think it's the default state of human nature for great power to (eventually) attract great grift and lose its raison d'être – you see it all over history.
snikeris 3y ago
The characters Peter Keating and Howard Roark in Rand's The Fountainhead were portrayals of this theme. Although both architects, Keating is the inner ringer, while Roark is the outsider craftsman.
xpe 3y ago
Meta-question: I'm curious about why and when this piece by C.S. Lewis first got noticed in HN circles. I expect there are some interesting connections.
- dang 3y ago
  I listed the previous submissions at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701819 but one can also look at comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=lewissociety.org&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332129 (April 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353300 (Sept 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019886 (July 2013)
zem 3y ago
"the tyranny of structurelessness" is a good companion piece to this: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
dang 3y ago
Related: The Inner Ring – CS Lewis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34331775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34331775 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) The Inner Ring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894627 - Oct 2020 (1 comment) The Inner Ring (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259862 - June 2019 (2 comments) The Inner Ring (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144201 - Dec 2016 (13 comments) The Inner Ring (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930434 - Jan 2015 (6 comments)
gumby 3y ago
It’s wonderfully ironic that he began with a passage from War and Peace since Russia is full, at so many levels, of the longing of which he speaks, both the Russia contemporary to Tolstoy and today, where they invaded a country in hopes of being recognized as a nation in the “inner ring”.
- dullcrisp 3y ago
  It’s ironic that you accuse Tolstoy of invading Ukraine when the text already speaks for itself.
  - gumby 3y ago
    I re-read my comment and I think it’s clear. Russia had this kind of cultural inferiority complex back in the days of Tolstoy, which I think helped him skewer it in War And Peace (the events of which were shortly before his birth). And in the War and Peace days that quoted scene also shone a light on the macro (geopolitical) level of feeling like they weren’t really part of the “in group”. Feels like the same might have been true when he wrote the novel (invading Crimea in the 1850s is also a good example) but I am not a scholar of Russia. Also the same is true in today’s Russia, with Putin and others vainly trying to prove that Russia is still part of some inner ring, which they most definitely no longer are.
zubairq 3y ago
Inner ring was a good read and very thought provoking
Borrible 3y ago
As Marx once put it... "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

184 points by gHeadphone 3y ago

This article is very true. But most of the article is taken up with the dangers of trying to get in an inner circle. It's easy to miss thinking about the equally true last paragraphs. > The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. > And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

robertlagrant 3y ago

I read this, and also Letter From a Birmingham Jail[0], at least once a year. Thanks for the reminder! [0] https://letterfromjail.com https://letterfromjail.com

smithza 3y ago

I think C.S. Lewis is right in a lot of this. How much of ourselves do we give up in pursuit of being "in the circle", "in the know", "with those important folks"? He extends this philosophy in science-fiction/novel form in _That Hideous Strength_[1]. [1] https://a.co/d/4MuVdWD https://a.co/d/4MuVdWD

johngossman 3y ago
“That Hideous Strength” is also a good takedown of Longtermism (and its predecessors).
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  That Hideous Strength is a good book, but it's just bizarre compared to the previous two books in the trilogy (and admittedly Perelandra gets pretty bizarre in the final 20% or so of the book). But my favorite lesson is from Perelandra: Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death.
  - graemep 3y ago
    There is a discontinuity between the books because he started writing it as SF, realised it was a mistake, and then switched to pure fantasy. Like many of his books this series is misunderstood, I think deliberately. A lot of people (including Brian Aldis, and BBC continuity announcers) think the first book is anti-science because the two baddies are scientists. In fact the one who invents the new kind of spacecraft is a physicist (which is necessary) but the other (the worse one) is "something in the City" (i.e. a banker, broker, or possibly businessman depending on whether usage had shifted at the time he wrote it) and later becomes a politician. It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high opinion of sociologists - the sociologist in the That Hideous Strength is gullible because of the nature of his "glib" subject unlike people who study humanities and hard sciences! > Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death. I like that too. It gives it a lot of visceral impact.

johngossman 3y ago

Robert Sapolsky’s book “A Primate’s Memoir” is about the importance of status in baboon tribes. High status males and females are more successful at reproducing, healthier, and have lower levels of stress hormones. That said, some individuals have found alternative strategies that also work. After reading that book, I’ve never been able to take status games among humans so seriously.

digging 3y ago
Health and low stress levels are probably easier achieved in other ways than status, fortunately!
- scottyah 3y ago
  But is it easy to avoid status if you are healthy and low stress?
ta8645 3y ago
> High status males and females are more successful at reproducing, healthier, and have lower levels of stress hormones. If those truly are the stakes, it seems like something worth taking more seriously, not less. No?
- johngossman 3y ago
  I hope we’ve moved past that. And even some of the baboons opted out.
  - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
    Read the book Johnstone: Impro and you will see that we have not moved past that.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  If those are the stakes, are they linear with status, or do those inside the baboon inner ring enjoy them, while those baboons trying to break into the inner ring have much higher levels of stress and not appreciably better health or reproductive opportunities than mid-level baboons? (If one doesn't assume the narrator is telling the complete truth, 1984 can be read as a book in which an outer party member —who is in the outer, not inner, party based on his middling A-levels— violently attempts to buck the system. Keep in mind that when Blair went to private school, he was an "outsider", there on a nearly-free ride to keep the school's test scores up [as the rich and the thick do with boffins to this day], and boy, did the insiders ever let him know his place.)

photochemsyn 3y ago

[flagged]

quercusa 3y ago
As a realist, Lewis would likely agree with in real life it's just as likely that a faction of corrupt self-serving incompetents end up taking over the entire system. And that's why he'd have little interest in 'revolutions'
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  I think Lewis was less concerned about corrupt incompetents that he was about corrupt but competent people. He was even more concerned about competent zealots. Source: "A Reply To Professor Haldane" in Of Other Worlds.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

Anyone have particulars to share in which they've either longed for or belonged to an Inner Ring? Observed the effects of it? Decided to leave? Decided to stay?

at_a_remove 3y ago
I've certainly been conscious of it for most of my life. I was moved around double-digit number of times when I was still single digits of age, so the outsider perspective is uncomfortably familiar, like a suit of armor into which I was riveted. Bryan Ferry covered "The In Crowd" particularly well: "I'm in with the In Crowd, I go where the In Crowd goes / I'm in with the In Crowd, I know what the In Crowd knows." The song covers status, respect, sexual availability, and so on. As we are not barnacles, the proper environment of Man is Man. Forget the deserts and the prairies, the jungles or tundra. We live with others of our species first and foremost, and that in turn means hierarchy and its hangups, position and its privileges. The Inner Ring gets you companionship, a stronger support network, and a greater availability of opportunity (social, romantic, professional). Outside of it and you're left scrabbling for the same things. I saw it in grade school and then high school. I went to college and I found an Inner Ring among the students who all decided to live in the A-Frames; their social graph was incredibly dense and, when I sleuth through Facebook years later, has yet to be fully teased apart. It has arisen anywhere I have worked where sufficient numbers of people existed. Once you pick up on it, it shows itself over and over. Now, I disagree with Lewis largely over his attempts at consolation via some kind of nebulous and unspoken (even unconscious) runner-up respect for not having compromised ones values or some nonsense, a bit like a Promised Land to which the faithful will eventually be granted entry. It's the usual Christian refrain of "You will have wealth ... in your heart." At worst, it's a kind of "stay in your place" classism, designed to keep the credulous recipient of this "wisdom" passive. Generally, when you hear about some virtue and notice that possession of this virtue benefits others, and you hear about this virtue from others, add a little suspicion to the mix before you swallow it whole. Being staid and unstriving is certainly convenient for some people, other people. Lewis was almost certainly of an Inner Ring himself, given what you read of his contemporaries, so in a more cynical sense, he is attempting to keep that Inner Ring small (one of the commandments of being in an Inner Ring is that one must not allow in riff-raff) by suggesting that desiring leads to some flavor of moral compromise and you've got the nice parallel that craving leads to suffering. Quite a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping you where you are. Remember that when you hear someone pooh-poohing some social or financial upward mobility. We can't all be nobility, so let's have the suckers filter themselves out.

gnfedhjmm 3y ago

[dead]

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish Perhaps he is talking about The Screwtape Letters[0]? I find that book to be awesome stuff. It is definitely Christian moralism, which I could do without, but it is mainly guidance on basic self-appraisal; regardless of the religious (or non-religious) context. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters

johngossman 3y ago
I have a tape of this read by John Cleese. At several points he goes full Monty Python rant and it’s hilarious.
- infertainment 3y ago
  Yes! e.g. when he turns into a centipede about 5 minutes into letter 22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAJOstiPwiE&t=7474s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAJOstiPwiE&t=7474s

fifilura 3y ago

I am trying to figure why I have a problem relating? Maybe I am just wired in the wrong way. But maybe it is only after the "we" that you figure out what you really like doing? And the more "we" the more things you will find? Some times you just have to make a move to get somewhere - anywhere. It is difficult just finding things you love out of a vacuum.

fifilura 3y ago
I just don't think that it is always a good advice to a young person to (admittedly paraphrasing) "not seek friends for the sake of seeking friends, only do things you love" You might just end up lonely in a room wondering what in the world it is you could love doing. But then maybe it worked for C.S. Lewis, but maybe because he had already found his passion.
- helloplanets 3y ago
  There's definitely a happy medium here. I guess the important point comes at the end of the article. You'll basically end up inside some kind of Ring either way, with the disctinction being that the Ring is the byproduct instead of the be-all end-all. > If in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. > But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

5cott0 3y ago

when a so-called flat-org/holacracy company says “you don’t have a boss” what they actually mean is you have an indeterminate # of bosses you just don’t who they are yet

gen220 3y ago

It's a really poignant piece, and I think having a strong grip on its ideas is the hallmark of a transition to a socially-constructive adulthood. For me, personally, it was quite depressing & disillusioning to recognize that there is no "inner ring" where the people populating it are magically "better" (more rational, of stronger character, whatever) than the people outside, and that in fact "innerness" is more often inversely correlated with those qualities. It took me a while to fully digest, value and live by the last paragraph of the essay, the call-to-action to become a crafts person invested in your "society" of like-minded friends, which, I think, is as important as the rest of the essay insofar as it provides a path forward.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
> For me, personally, it was quite depressing & disillusioning to recognize that there is no "inner ring" where the people populating it are magically "better" (more rational, of stronger character, whatever) than the people outside, and that in fact "innerness" is more often inversely correlated with those qualities. Not in my experience, real decision makers do behave somewhat better, on average, then the median person, if you tally up all their virtues and vices. It's not a very steep improvement, but it is noticeable. Of course the median person will likely never meet more then a few, so even a somewhat lower fraction of bad apples can easily cause a similarly negative perception.
- gen220 3y ago
  I think it's less the decision-maker and more the ring that's built around the decision-maker. It's also true in my experience that decision-makers are often pretty solid. Decision-making is its own craft, many CEO/VP-type people take that craft very seriously. But, unless the person in question has spent a significant amount of time and effort in forming their own "society", the "default" rings that accrete around these people are pretty awful. Agreed that the bad apples are more frequently sampled in the media, and it distorts perception of the overall population. But I do think it's the default state of human nature for great power to (eventually) attract great grift and lose its raison d'être – you see it all over history.

snikeris 3y ago

The characters Peter Keating and Howard Roark in Rand's The Fountainhead were portrayals of this theme. Although both architects, Keating is the inner ringer, while Roark is the outsider craftsman.

xpe 3y ago

Meta-question: I'm curious about why and when this piece by C.S. Lewis first got noticed in HN circles. I expect there are some interesting connections.

dang 3y ago
I listed the previous submissions at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701819 but one can also look at comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=lewissociety.org&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332129 (April 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353300 (Sept 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019886 (July 2013)

zem 3y ago

"the tyranny of structurelessness" is a good companion piece to this: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

dang 3y ago

Related: The Inner Ring – CS Lewis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34331775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34331775 - Jan 2023 (2 comments) The Inner Ring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894627 - Oct 2020 (1 comment) The Inner Ring (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259862 - June 2019 (2 comments) The Inner Ring (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144201 - Dec 2016 (13 comments) The Inner Ring (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930434 - Jan 2015 (6 comments)

gumby 3y ago

It’s wonderfully ironic that he began with a passage from War and Peace since Russia is full, at so many levels, of the longing of which he speaks, both the Russia contemporary to Tolstoy and today, where they invaded a country in hopes of being recognized as a nation in the “inner ring”.

dullcrisp 3y ago
It’s ironic that you accuse Tolstoy of invading Ukraine when the text already speaks for itself.
- gumby 3y ago
  I re-read my comment and I think it’s clear. Russia had this kind of cultural inferiority complex back in the days of Tolstoy, which I think helped him skewer it in War And Peace (the events of which were shortly before his birth). And in the War and Peace days that quoted scene also shone a light on the macro (geopolitical) level of feeling like they weren’t really part of the “in group”. Feels like the same might have been true when he wrote the novel (invading Crimea in the 1850s is also a good example) but I am not a scholar of Russia. Also the same is true in today’s Russia, with Putin and others vainly trying to prove that Russia is still part of some inner ring, which they most definitely no longer are.

zubairq 3y ago

Inner ring was a good read and very thought provoking

Borrible 3y ago

As Marx once put it... "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."