
The Inner Ring (1944) - apsec112
http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php
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wyclif
"Of all the passions, 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."

This essay originated as the Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of
London. Absolutely essential reading. I discovered it as an undergrad and it's
possibly more relevant today than it was in 1944.

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beters
Thanks for sharing. This is what resonated with me the most:

> It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have
> them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.

~~~
Animats
That follows Wilde's quip that "the trouble with socialism is that it takes
too many evenings."

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thret
"The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an evil. But
an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs is not reckoned a
proper feeling, and the law frowns on even the gentlest attempts to expedite
her departure." \- No matter how much I disagree with C.S.Lewis on matters of
religion or morality, I simply adore the way he puts words together.

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kwijibob
A wonderful essay. Have read and reread many times over the years.

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nihilist11
Can you summarise that?

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Jenya_
“Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between
the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.”

―Sydney J. Harris

[http://izquotes.com/quote/343900](http://izquotes.com/quote/343900)

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dumb-saint
Would I be correct in thinking that most participation in HN is driven by the
desire to enter inner rings as the ones described in this text? (e.g. access
to VC money)

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Terr_
Perhaps, but another ring is to be a "real developer" in profession, or a
"real contributor" to some project.

Others, meanwhile, want to ever the ring of "anti-VC-establishment
enlightened", etc.

And somr just want the fleeting ring of "highly-rated commenters", but they
are a silly lot with no self-awareness. :P

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dumb-saint
Good answer, although I would argue that rings in the sense that the author
describes confer money and status. Rings that only give you monopoly money,
such as HN points, are not really going to lead you to compromise your
integrity. They are not really rings in the author's sense, they are just
silly games or pastimes.

VC money, on the other hand, is real money... And you need "introductions" to
get it. They almost outright admit that the entire thing is an inner ring.

~~~
Terr_
> I would argue that rings in the sense that the author describes confer money
> and status.

I strongly disagree!

First, while those are his early examples, he later discusses how even the
_rejection_ of money and public status is another form of wanting-to-belong:

>> People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from
snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be
devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their
desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all
the allurements of high life.

>> An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting
under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor
man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers
and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio,
the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge
that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

Secondly, he explicitly states that money and status are _not_ the desire that
tempts people over the line:

>> And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or
ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips,
you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.

TLDR: It's a cautionary speech about people idolizing a group and the
corruptive desire to belong to that group, _totally regardless of how the
group is defined_.

