I return to this essay every year or two. It's a great description of a powerful psychological force and what it does to people's character.
I've definitely met people in our circles who were very clearly motivated by the quest for the Inner Ring, sometimes a little bit and sometimes as their only apparent passion in life. Something to be aware of, in others and especially in yourself.
Very good. A lot of That Hideous Strength is about the same theme, and was also a fun read.
THS takes place at a small university where the topics being studied don't seem to be in particularly direct contact with reality. I think structuring your life so you're spending your main efforts in domains with good feedback is one way to avoid this trap, because the emergent Inner Rings will be naturally less arbitrary and more aligned with true, good things. I can imagine Lewis struggling to find his way in the humanities because the feedback is not necessarily present in e.g. the arts.
I wonder what Lewis would make of group chats. On one hand group chats naturally create rings and cliques, on the other the formalization I think probably helps people think more clearly about who they're associating with.
>>4023 I think the same concept applies to group chats. Most of my group chats are just my friends, but there are a few where a sub group chat was made excluding certain people. Usually when this happens though the splinter chat takes over the members bandwidth and the original chat slowly dies.
There was a post 6-7 years ago specifically talking about GroupMe and how every group chat has a smaller, more exclusive group chat and if you aren't in it... well...
What if the inner ring is not just a group chat, but escape from poverty and the third world? If a group forms because these people are highly productive and acquire resources, wouldn't people always latch on to it?
Thanks for this. When I started reading it, I didn't expect it to make a link with virtue ethics at the end. The trade-off between excelling in craft versus the pursuit of reputation maps very neatly onto Alasdair MacIntyre's distinction between internal and external goods.