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.
There definitely are organizations/people/circles that are better in some aspects (be it hardworking, or rational, or knowledgeable, or savvy) than others.
I think this is harder to see if you grew up in a nice area, with educated upper-middle class parents, and followed the traditional college->office jobs path. Or conversely, it’s hard to see if you didn’t grow up in that kind of life but were never appreciably immersed in it. We have a social contract that strongly discourages punching down so I’m trying to be delicate here… but if you spend a significant amount of time with poorer people you find that negative personality traits (to the point of being pathological and actively harmful) are much more common outside of relatively “elite” circles than within.
Any sort of institution that is “picky”, including most good jobs, naturally selects against moderate-severely negative personality traits. If someone shirks all responsibility or work they’re unlikely to have a meaningful career unless a family member swings them a sinecure. If someone is overly confrontational or aggressive they’ll get fired from their jobs. If someone is unable to take blame or accept feedback they’ll never develop appreciable skills. By all means I’m not saying well-off/famous/affluent/accomplished people are all virtuous or good people, simply that those who do so on their own merit typically as a group lack major personality flaws, which actually may resemble something of an “inner-ring” to those who grew up/live outside those circles where those traits are more common.
For context, I grew up in a "ring" that was quite inner in a global sense but quite middling or even outer in a local sense.
I've been in several inner rings since, and they were disappointing. Not in the sense of the people inside of them being hostile (maybe some were, but these were chaotic and short-lived), but more... anti-social, but not in a way that they're self-conscious of? IDK if this makes sense.
I've found picky institutions select for people who crave selection from picky institutions and getting their own. This means the people are generally hardworking and savvy, but not necessarily conscientious. I agree they lack "major personality flaws" but, I know this is trite, they tend to lack personality (goals, identity, culture, hobbies, deep & meaningful relationships) altogether. Every interaction is a transaction.
I'm open to the idea that my sample's unrepresentative. But I guess at this stage in my life/career of meeting people, I've decided it might be more long-term productive to follow the advice in the end of the essay, and build what I'm looking for instead.
I guess my conclusion is that there's diminishing returns to going inner? At a certain point, you have more to gain by building your own "inner". This is probably extra true if you were blessed to be born relatively-inner? I think this may be one interpretation of the essay, and it rhymes with my experience so far.
Trait's may be interrupted as attribute sliders, but people aren't judged that way. They are judged by the summation of their traits, and often they posses traits that counterbalance each other. I know plenty of people who shirk work, but they also have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, so they might not work very hard but they are still useful to a group. I know people who take no blame and don't accept feedback, but still manage to develop key skills that get them promoted (ability to deflect blame does seem correlated with long term corporate success).
Smaller organizations seem to expose negative traits quicker, but as long as you find your herd, you can be perfectly mediocre and still have an upper middle class life.
Now if someone has all those traits, life may really suck for them. I also know people who fall under that umbrella.
> 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.
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.
The 'ring that's built around the decision-maker' is still, on average, better than the median person.
But it generally is very unevenly distributed in any single, concrete, individual, so that it may appear to be worse depending on perspective.
e.g. A bonafide super-genius with a lot of unfortunate personality traits. Such that they can't really be considered that great, just somewhat above average.
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].
He named it, so is ever so slightly wrong - but all of us who have been around for a while and have participated semi-regularly in discussions without getting banned are in. Relative to the global online population this is still a very small group.
I don't think that's quite right. In Lewis's thesis, you only really encounter the in/out question by interacting with people who are in. By your definition, interacting on HN puts you in already. And "and have participated semi-regularly in discussions without getting banned" is a much lower bar than anything Lewis is talking about. You'd have a much better point w.r.t. lobste.rs or other invite-only forums, but the whole concept is dubious without private discussions.
Granted, but I'm not saying that just posting and commenting on HN, or passing the various gates, constitutes being 'in'. Even having high karma isn't 'in'. I don't know if I can articulate what counts as being 'in', but certainly participation in a YC round is part of it.
No, that actually kind of is what you were saying in your previous comment, about what "the forum itself enforces".
You could identify a set of people who are widely respected and listened to, but that's a different thing again from what Lewis is talking about. YC itself is arguably closer, but only tenuously connected in practice to HN social dynamics. I certainly couldn't tell you which members I pay attention to have been through YC (except for the ones who definitely haven't).
The latter quarter of the article goes into depth about how one can accidentally find oneself in an inner ring, but it is through a wholesome pursuit and no ulterior motive. The other reply to this comment gets it write: people here like interacting with the things on HN.
In other words, to comment on HN does not mean you are striving to be in the inner circle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't read the book Lewis is talking about so I have little to say about what exactly he means by devil worship, however as someone quite familiar with his work, though long since having left religion myself, I can say that he is not one use a phrase like that merely out of petty spite or to be pejorative, but rather because he thinks it's the best technical description, at least that would fit into two or three words, that reflects this is analysis of the book's themes. Lewis was a medieval and renaissance English scholar before he was a Christian, and his professional work is far the greater portion of his writing and bears at leaat as much on his thinking as did his popular apologetics.
Lewis's model devil, both by his own description and by its depiction when he uses such a character in his fiction, is a kind of well mannered bureaucrat who just happens to be made of such a nature that his sustenance must come from feasting on human souls, and the more miserable his victims are by the experience of being utterly deprived of their individuality by complete and permanent dissolution into the self of this demon, the more pleasure it derives from consuming them. It is essentially inhuman but has no connection with the conventional idea of a monstrous man-bat scampering around with pitchforks and goat themed headgear. Lewis even pointed out, in case anyone missed the allusion, that selfishness of this complete and all-encompassing sort is a territory adjacent to that of sexual desire and conquest, and shares some of its traits. Love becomes a demon when he becomes a god, etc.
The reason this is worth pointing out is that Lewis is reliably consistent with his basic criticism of the modern world as tending toward an excessive and unhealthy elevation of monumental individuality, to the point that some individuals who are in advantaged circumstances to assert their individuality at the expense of others', by outright dominating them, or depriving them of opportunity, happiness, or satisfaction, will certainly do so. and if unchecked will grow just like a cancer, for that's what they are: apex parasites grooming their hosts, suppressing their spirit(ual) energies and curiosity by anesthetizing them with banal distractions this decade, only to drive them into bloody trenches the next. All so that a few can live impossible, unsustainable existences at the pinnacle of human society, of a culture they literally cultivate to keep themselves in rareified and thoroughly selfish power. The portrait Lewis draws of Mr Savage in the Pilgrim's regress is probably the most thorough exploration of this idea, and Lewis in the voice of a character (drudge) who is given one of the more sympathetic, clear eyed and and omniscient perspectives (i.e. the authors own voice) in the book, speaks of him with admiration and even goes off to join his massing armies of Swastici and Marxomanni, "who are all alike vassals of Cruelty."
I didn't mean to imply that Lewis would speak out of "petty spite". Rather that his ability to reason appears to be clouded by his convictions about God and Christianity. For example, the "Trilemma" argument is full of holes and somewhat circular.
I'm still struggling to see how this notion of "devil" relates to the plot (specifically the ending) of Star Maker though. I googled around and did find a Reddit thread which raises the same question and describes the book's ending very well:
> The narrator comes into contact with a Creator of immense power who relates to our universe (and to several other universes that it has created) in the same way that an artist relates to a piece of art, without regard for the suffering of its inhabitants. The Creator is also depicted as pleasantly surprised that its newer universes have begun to exhibit emergent behaviours that were not intended at their conception. At the same time though the Creator is described this way...
> "Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. ... Love was not absolute; contemplation was. And though there was love, there was also hate comprised within the spirit's temper, for there was cruel delight in the contemplation of every horror, and glee in the downfall of the virtuous. All passions, it seemed, were comprised within the spirit's temper; but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation."
Perhaps Lewis interprets the idea that love is not absolute, or that the universe's creator is not a loving being, as being tantamount to "devil worship" ?
I have not read the book but from that description it sounds very like what the literal devil worshippers in That Hideous Strength worship (not a creator, but otherwise).
In one of his books (cannot recall which one) he does states that God is to be worshipped because God is good, not because he is all omniscient. He quotes of a story of a viking who says "I go to die with Odin" as sharing the underlying morality.
A dispassionate creator would precisely fit what Lewis thought of as a devil. And celebration of the concept, without any consideration of the horror implied in the subjective experience of the things that have been created, and with no favor for their happiness account as sensate beings, amounts to the creation of a plaything for one's private interests, that just so happens to incorporate the whole spectrum of pleasure along with the whole spectrum of cruelty. Lewis's position, the one that I think let him settle on Christianity as opposed to any other philosophical framework (I strongly suspect he was inches from being a nihilist, mainly had to do with the circle he grew up within) dealing with the hard problem of suffering.
So perhaps Lewis is accusing Stapledon of devil-worship for imagining a world with an uncaring creator?
I would disagree that it obviously celebrates the concept or ignores the horror therein.
I think the problem I'm having is that for me, as a well-established secular person, the concept of "devil" is inherently bound up in Christian context, i.e. on the assumption that God exists and is good etc... . The concept does not easily apply outside of that context, to speculative fiction set in hypothetical worlds. However, I suppose that Lewis interprets everything in the Christian context, whether it is intended or not.
>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.
No you're absolutely correct. His criticism of Freud anticipated Murray Gell-Mann, or rather his eponymous amnesia effect, by at least a generation.
It's been quite a few years so the exact phrasing escapes me now, but was something to the effect that Freud demonstrated a pattern of confidently talking well past his own level of understanding of certain topics even in the company of actual experts in the material, And thus although Lewis couldn't judge to what extent this was a factor in Freud's own claimed area of expertise, he observed that when Freud ventured to hold forth on something CS Lewis did know quite a lot about, namely, languages, he found him to be quite the amateur. Freud is somewhat obliquely caricatured thrpuhh the character of Sigismund, a personifcation of the more cargo cultish, callous and anti-humanist excesses of self-indulgent charlatanry marring the then-nascent psychotherapy movement as a whole.
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.
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.
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.
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…"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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!"
Is it cynicism or realism? To quote Everything2, [my] "... radical ideas about religion as a mechanism of social control have already occurred to others." It's quite difficult to separate some system of sinner and saint, sanctity and atrocity, from what might be of utility to have some portion of the populace to believe.
Our parents lied to us about many things because it was convenient that we believe them, from Santa to that dog who went to live on a farm. Obey the food pyramid (which version?) Oil companies and pharmaceutical developers say "Trust the science!" even as they pay for the studies. And certainly there's a sense of ease in swallowing what is put in front of you, without question. How untroubling! I needn't worry my pretty head about what I am told. To paraphrase: An end to struggle, at last I believed my Big Brother.
So no, a much closer enemy to virtue is those who would make cynicism a viable position. Look to those if you're in search of a dagger heading for a spine. If cynicism weren't of utility, only the most perverse would adopt it. Paul Gerhardt said it, "When a man lies, he murders some part of the world." But I can hardly go through life pretending that liars do not exist and that there are whole industries, such as advertising, predicated on getting me to believe something which isn't quite true.
Perhaps in a better world, things would be different, but first find one where the liars are not making ruin of truth.
It depends on what you are referring to when you say "it". Your insinuation that Lewis was misleading people by claiming to support avoiding chasing after some inner-ring so that he and others like him could benefit is pretty much a description of cynicism. It does not follow any definition of "realism" that I would support.
You might argue that some people sometimes misrepresent their opinions and provide advice that goes against the interests of others for their own advantage. You might suggest that is "realism", but again it wouldn't match my own definition of that term even if I were to agree it is an accurate observation about our shared experience. It does not imply to me that everyone is always misrepresenting their opinions and always providing advice that goes against the interests of others for their own advantage. It also doesn't imply that Lewis was doing so in this essay.
As in my silly example, a fool may really and truly believe that a reduction in cheating would be of a general benefit. Cynicism is to assume the fool was misrepresenting their opinion in order to gain some advantage of you. It is making a mistake to apply a general observation that happens in some cases to a specific instance where it may not apply.
You might say "I'd rather make the assumption and be wrong and thereby avoid even the chance of being cheated", which is why I argue that cynicism is the enemy of virtue. An inability to trust in others makes it very hard indeed to act with virtue.
I will admit I have been mistrustful of Lewis since I was a small child. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was my first in memory experience of feeling like the author had attempted to put one over on me, with this Aslan business. I wanted to read a fantasy book, not a lecture in a RenFaire outfit. Indeed, much later I would read from Lewis that Aslan is not an allegory for Christ but something else. That kind of hair-splitting seemed like so much sophistry, but remember, it was for my supposed benefit.
Ever since, I haven't been able to read Lewis without a feeling of what he thinks it would be better for me to believe, even when I went into The Screwtape Letters with anticipation. But I feel the sin resides with the one who does the misrepresentation, not the one who recognizes it exists and acts reasonably once it is identified.
> If cynicism weren't of utility, only the most perverse would adopt it.
Cynicism and its mirror, naivete, aren't always wrong. It's just cynicism is prone to false positives of things to avoid, and naivete to false negatives of same.
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?
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.
Throughout the piece he cautions against abandoning friends, principles, and of striving for the inner circle for its own sake, and for greed. It is a very uncharitable reading to then recast this caution and awareness as a general prohibition against entering the inner ring for any purpose. Nothing in the piece gave me the impression he is cautioning against, e.g., an upstart entrepreneur entering various inner rings to grow his sales, or a general vying for political power to help his country. It is the inverse he warns of - a general staying silent, or becoming a yes-man against his better judgement, to gain social standing at the expense of his troops.
You're right, he spends few words extolling the usefulness of the inner ring [1] - presumably he thought it obvious, especially to his audience at King's College. Probably seeing greed and sycophancy as bigger dangers than lack of ambition or too much sincerity, he naturally warned against the former. Like an old captain warning against storms instead of giving encouraging words about how many fish there are to catch. I wouldn't begrudge him that.
[1] Few, but not none: It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
The issue seems to be more subtle. Nobody is trying to explain all of human behavior with primate studies. Rather, to establish that there are still traces of our animal nature visible in human behavior.
We tend to believe we are no longer influenced by our animal nature. But without accepting that part of our construction, it not possible to understand human behavior, because that part is essential. Usually, statements like "primate studies cannot explain all human behavior" are used to de-legitimize some studies, in order to protect the taboo.
If you think that not all of human behavior is influenced by our animal nature, then certainly you can name some behavior that you believe is influenced by our animal nature. So start by asking yourself, what is such a behavior.
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'
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.
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.