The Quest for the Inner Ring

In CS Lewis’s essay, “The Inner Ring,” he wrote, “Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire [to be a part of the inner ring] is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.” We all have experienced being on the outside looking in, and it doesn’t feel great. To avoid that negativity, we push to be included. We don’t want to be like Dunder Mifflin’s Michael Scott, who shares, “I love inside jokes. I’d love to be a part of one someday.” We try so hard to be in the know that sometimes we do things we regret later. As Lewis contends, “Of all 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.” He shares an example of a businessman who cuts a little corner because another colleague said that is how “we” do it. We want to be the “we” rather than the “them.”

This essay came to mind as I was reading How to Rule the World by Theo Baker. Baker joins the student newspaper at Stanford upon his arrival on campus but quickly proves that he has a nose for news, finding scoop after scoop. This eventually leads him onto the trail of the University President. Baker received a tip that some of his research appeared to be falsified, and with that lead, Baker was off to the races. I’m not going to ruin the entire book for you, but he finds Stanford to be a series of inner rings. Given its location and academic prowess, it is easy to see why Stanford would be a pipeline to a life of power and wealth in Silicon Valley. That proximity also creates concentric circles of friends who received funding from the same incubator or were part of the same fellowship. From there, they ascended corporate ladders and reached the top of the pipeline, bringing in more students and creating a reinforcing cycle. If you are on the inside, you will become a tech titan. If you are on the outside, you are expected to fight to get on the inside.

Lewis notes that inner rings are not necessarily evil things in and of themselves. We all have friends we are particularly close to, and it would be wrong to reject all friendships to avoid the existence of inner rings. However, the difference between this type of inner ring based on friendship is that “its 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.” The title of Baker’s book is drawn from an exclusive meeting group of the same name he was invited to at Stanford. People were drawn to it because they were promised the secret of becoming rich and powerful. This is where the inner ring becomes dangerous.

Consider five years down the road. You were lucky enough to join the secret society and learned how to rule the world five years ago. You are a multibillionaire, running a powerful company in Silicon Valley. From the outside, you seem to be living the dream. However, your company is no longer that shiny new thing in an industry that relies on the promise of inevitable progress and constant innovation. The venture-capital investors are moving on to the next generation, and you need to do something to keep doing what you are doing. You were on the inside, but you are now drifting to the outside. The same desire that drove you to want to be on the inside in the first place didn’t leave your psyche in five years. You will do what it takes to get back inside. As Lewis said, the desire for the inner ring has led many people who might not have started badly to do many bad things.

I assume that none of you are multibillionaire investors in Silicon Valley. I am not. I invest in small multifamily residential properties in central Vermont, but it is not quite the same thing. I work at an insurance company by day and as an adjunct professor by night. On the weekends, I play power soccer and go to church. It could be really easy for me to believe that because I am not exorbitantly wealthy or uber-powerful, this lesson is not really for me. However, Lewis doesn’t limit his warning to just the elites of the world; it is specifically written to an audience of young people entering adulthood, yet broadly applies to everyone. We need to be careful that we do not care so much about the approval of others that we are willing to compromise our principles to get our foot in the door. It is a children’s Sunday School song, but the temptation for the inner ring is so real for every adult that it bears saying, “Be careful little hands what you do.”