The Inner Ring
// this essay includes many direct quotes but is an adapted and abbreviated version of the original piece from C.S. Lewis. I encourage you to read the original, longer piece when you have time. //
In life, there exist two different systems or hierarchies. Two rings.
One is printed in some little red book. The other is not printed anywhere.
A context might have a written organizational chart, while the social rules will tell how things really work.
In regard to these social Rings, you are never formally or explicitly admitted or expelled.
You simply discover gradually that they exist and whether you are inside or outside.
If you’re inside, a Ring might called, “we” or “You and Tony and me.”
If you’re outside, you might call a Ring, “they,” “them,” “so-and-so and her crew.”
If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call a Ring anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.
Every person encounters The Inner Ring.
Society consists of, and is simply one of, hundreds of rings.
We we want to move from outsider to insider, we give our time, energy, thoughts, and emotions to finding a way in.
To become part of the, “we.”
And when achieved, that “we” can hit like a drug. To belong. To feel needed.
“It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.”
This is not to say that all Inner Rings are evil.
Confidentiality is to be honored. Close relationships are essential. Organization Hierarchy is often necessary.
Inner Rings and the desire to belong is one of that key factors that fills our lives with struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement.
And a natural human over-desire to belong can be dangerous.
When fully embraced, “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”
The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left.
Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends.
Why should they be? You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last.
Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain."
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.
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.
It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
