[HN Gopher] The Inner Ring (1944)
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The Inner Ring (1944)
Author : gHeadphone
Score : 127 points
Date : 2023-12-19 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lewissociety.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lewissociety.org)
| danielvf wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I read this, and also Letter From a Birmingham Jail[0], at least
| once a year. Thanks for the reminder!
|
| [0] https://letterfromjail.com
| smithza wrote:
| 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
| johngossman wrote:
| "That Hideous Strength" is also a good takedown of Longtermism
| (and its predecessors).
| HideousKojima wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| CS Lewis wrote a letter to Arthur C Clarke in which he
| said:
|
| I don't of course think that at any moment many
| scientists are hidding Westons: but I do think (hang it
| all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not
| unlike Weston's is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star
| gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane's Rosetta
| Worlds and Waddington's Science & Ethics. I agree
| Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the
| increase of it own forces & technology with complete
| indifference to either does seem to me a cancer in the
| universe.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I suppose he actually means "Star Maker". I'm not sure
| what he means by devil worship, though. And given how
| irrational I find his Christian apologetics to be, I'm
| not sure I care to find out.
| Phiwise_ wrote:
| >It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high
| opinion of sociologists
|
| This also seems correct going by a couple of his current
| issues essays. Two spring to mind: _The Humanitarian
| Theory of Punishment_ , where he says something like
| "Only the expert Penologist, _let barbarous things have
| barbarous names_ , can tell us if a punishment is useful
| to deter", and _Vivisection_ , which ends something like
| "[So it is up to us to make the difficult distinction of
| what laboratory animal suffering is necessary and what is
| excessive to improve human life], but it is up to the
| Police to determine what is presently being done.",
| though I haven't read either of these in a while. He's
| also rather sour on the time's study of people in
| general, and the psychotherapy in particular, in both
| HumanTheory and sections of his three part _Abolition of
| Man_ , although the second gets much more abstractly
| philosophical.
| smithza wrote:
| He was an early detractor of Freud for example. Forgive
| me for not keeping my sources.
| johngossman wrote:
| I thought Perelandra was bizarre, almost hallucinogenic
| towards the end. And the bit with the devil could be read
| as "He's right, so I have to resort to physical violence to
| win." I found it funny, but a strange take for an author
| known for making intellectual arguments for Christianity.
| toyg wrote:
| Published in 1943, when the cultural milieu of Britain
| had had to process the results of appeasement and was
| forced to fight Hitler - a leader many of them actually
| not-so-secretly admired. For British intellectuals, WWII
| in many ways meant conceding an ideological point to
| Nazism (when chips are down, all that matters is actual
| raw strength, rather than the post-WWI rhetoric of peace)
| while fighting to defeat it.
| topynate wrote:
| Perelandra's devil - the Un-Man - struck me on first
| reading as an excellent early depiction of a hostile,
| alien form of intelligence, superior but purely
| instrumental. Lewis was very early in working out the
| implications of that - nowadays the Rationalists and a
| lot of others would agree that there can be entities with
| superhuman intelligence that don't intrinsically value
| their intelligence, and that such beings would have
| almost irresistible persuasive ability if given the
| opportunity. (Lewis differs in also giving the Un-Man
| genuinely supernatural abilities with which it attempts
| to overawe the protagonist.)
|
| "it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a
| weapon... Thought was for it a device necessary to
| certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it.
| It assumed reason... externally and inorganically..."
| cvoss wrote:
| Ransom doesn't concede the Un-man is right. Rather, he
| concedes that the Un-man has unlimited intellectual
| stamina, so in any debate with a human, the human
| eventually succumbs to his persuasion because humans
| reason imperfectly.
| yterdy wrote:
| I question the wisdom of belief in the existence of the
| devil - at least in a form that can be beaten to death.
| "Ultimate evil" and "susceptibility to haymakers" seem
| mutually exclusive. This sounds more like the confluence of
| blind hope that cosmically-horrifying things can be
| defeated and rationalizing murdering another person.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| In the particular case of _Perelandra_ , without too many
| spoilers, the devil possessed a man from Earth and was
| using him to try and tempt the Venutian equivalent of Eve
| into causing another Fall. How sometimes killing evil
| instead of arguing with it might apply to more practical
| religious and moral situations in real life is left as an
| exercise to the reader.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Isn't posting and commenting on HN, at least in part, a product
| of longing to be part of an Inner Circle of hackers and Silicon
| Valley elites?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| No. I mean, maybe for some people. Some of us just enjoy
| talking about tech stuff online.
| johngossman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Health and low stress levels are probably easier achieved in
| other ways than status, fortunately!
| scottyah wrote:
| But is it easy to avoid status if you are healthy and low
| stress?
| ta8645 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I hope we've moved past that. And even some of the baboons
| opted out.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| Read the book Johnstone: Impro and you will see that we
| have not moved past that.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| 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.)
| scottyah wrote:
| My interpretation isn't cause and effect but rather effect
| and cause (in the simple sense, though it is a flywheel where
| they build upon one another). High Status is a lot easier to
| achieve when you don't tire easily, don't get headaches or
| bloat easily, and lack pains that put you in a sour mood.
|
| Whether it be genes or lifestyle, social status does seem to
| reward those who find a way to live their lives better. I,
| certainly, am always ranking higher those who seem happier
| and healthier than their counterparts.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| While primate studies are useful to understand some of the
| human behavior I question their use to explain all human
| behavior.
|
| I would like to think that we have evolved new ways to live in
| complex societies.
|
| We have non-primitive languages for instance.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If you ever regard wide-audience advertising, most of it is
| devoted to status games; imx breakfast cereal ads are the
| only ones that seriously resist such low-effort
| interpretation.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fifilura wrote:
| Thank you for sharing and well written. Yeah I recognize this
| as something I believe we would call Lutheran work ethics in
| our society.
|
| Stay in place, work hard and wealth/luck/love/whatever will
| come to you.
|
| Maybe true maybe not, but it is one perspective out of many.
| Surely many people succeeded by, and for the reason of, not
| abiding to that.
| helloplanets wrote:
| C.S. Lewis didn't shun the existence of rings in the article
| - or act like he wasn't part of one - but describe the
| distinctions between healthy and unhealthy rings. He ended
| the article by writing about the upsides of being part of a
| healthy ring.
|
| In my take on the article, he wasn't advocating some sort of
| pious refrain, but rather the sort of work it takes to build
| meaningful connections with other people, instead of shallow
| connections based on a status game or optimizing for a
| maximally thick network.
|
| Of course, I'd imagine most social lives contain a bit of
| both, but a life which only has the latter is definitely a
| sad one. Not to even speak of a social life based on
| maximizing the latter.
| vintermann wrote:
| > one of the commandments of being in an Inner Ring is that
| one must not allow in riff-raff
|
| But Lewis was a professor of English literature who invited
| in the riff-raff. People like him weren't supposed to like
| pulp science fiction and fantasy stories. That was seen as
| trash, and it's not exactly hard to understand why either.
| But Lewis insisted that there was something great and
| valuable there, something fairy tales (and old epics like
| Beowulf) had but modern literature had lost sight of.
|
| Going from agnosticism and fashionable scientism of his day
| to Anglicanism was also a "debasement" of sorts. Like adoring
| pulp SF wouldn't win you the most friends in literature,
| adoring Jesus wouldn't win you the most friends with the
| rising stars in science and politics of his day. And then he
| in turn shocked a lot of his newfound Christian brethren by
| marrying a divorced woman. It's hard for me to see any place
| in Lewis' life where he tried to fit in to something
| exclusive.
| SenAnder wrote:
| It's very in line with the current zeitgeist to dismiss a
| thoughtful piece on the perils of compromising personal
| values and friendships for the sake of social climbing, as a
| mere defense of classism. Gone from public discussion are
| virtue, integrity, loyalty. There is only class struggle.
|
| Did you get the impression he meant labour organizers or
| ambitious but honest entrepreneurs when he spoke of
| scoundrels? Or, given his emphasis on friendship, did he mean
| those who would sell-out their co-workers? Do you really mean
| to defend the "financial upward mobility" that comes from,
| say, withholding the health hazards of a product?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That last bit is a tremendous stretch and you're doing your
| shoulder joint no good in reaching that far.
|
| No, there's more to it than that, but like I said, _at
| worst_ , it has a kind of "stay in your lane" feel to it.
| Not in the snotty "know your role" sense, no, rather a more
| insidious method is substituted, in which, by not striving
| to enter the Inner Ring, you're rewarded with some kind of
| nebulous peer respect. Very a much a "meek will inherit"
| sort of thing, and often untrue.
|
| Take the Tolstoy bit that was part of the piece. The
| general is ignored. But what if the general had something
| important to say, something of tactical or strategic value?
| Well, it's ignored. I'll counter with HST: "Politics is the
| art of controlling your environment." Wouldn't it be
| _prudent_ for that general, should he recognize his
| situation, to strive for entry into the Inner Ring and then
| be heard? It would be. Lewis does not address this.
| Instead, one is to take consolation that one was at least
| correct, but unheard, as the Inner Ring steers the ship off
| course. You 're even suppose to hope that other people,
| also outsiders, will recognize your track record and your
| value.
|
| Personally, I haven't found much consolation in that
| outsider position at all. Instead I have watched the
| members of the Inner Ring sail off to ever-better
| positions, failing upward. Rather than attempting to change
| my position, I am to accept it and some reward will be
| dispensed unto me. I have yet to see it.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I think this is an example of how the greatest enemy to
| virtue is cynicism.
|
| It is hard to deny the old adage: in the land of the blind
| the one eyed is king. That suggests an unscrupulous ploy, to
| blind your adversaries so that you might be king. And if you
| think in this way then you may suspect your adversaries of
| trying to blind you because you believe they desire the
| kingship for themselves. And if your adversaries are trying
| to blind you then it is best that you blind them first before
| they can do it to you. This kind of thinking is insidious.
|
| It reminds me of someone describing a culture where cheating
| was rampant. They said, only a fool wouldn't cheat when all
| of the competition is cheating. In their view it is better to
| be a cheater among cheaters than a solitary fool. Of course,
| a fool might say something foolish like: "we'd all be better
| off if we all stopped cheating each other". A cynic might
| reply: "that is exactly what _a cheater_ would want,
| obviously, since then he would then have an even greater
| advantage! The only reason someone would say something so
| foolish is if he was the biggest cheater of all! "
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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
| johngossman wrote:
| I have a tape of this read by John Cleese. At several points he
| goes full Monty Python rant and it's hilarious.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| snikeris wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I listed the previous submissions at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701819 but one can also
| look at comments:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| - e.g.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332129 (April 2015)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353300 (Sept 2014)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019886 (July 2013)
| zem wrote:
| "the tyranny of structurelessness" is a good companion piece to
| this: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Inner Ring - CS Lewis_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34331775 - Jan 2023 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Inner Ring_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894627
| - Oct 2020 (1 comment)
|
| _The Inner Ring (1944) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259862 - June 2019 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Inner Ring (1944)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144201 - Dec 2016 (13
| comments)
|
| _The Inner Ring (1944)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930434 - Jan 2015 (6
| comments)
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