Last week, I sent a video to paid subscribers called, “How to Fight the Corruption of Comparison”. At the end of it, I talked about C. S. Lewi’s concept of “The Inner Ring.”
Because that might not be as familiar to folks, I’m including more about it here.
In a Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the corrupting effect of comparison better than anything I’ve ever read or heard. He uses the phrase “The Inner Ring” to describes a moving target, a shifting goal, a shrinking circle of Important People or Influential Thinkers that we are prone to pursue. Membership in such company is the subconscious goal of any young person with ambition. Yet it is as devastating as it is delusional.
In the middle of his lecture, Lewis makes a haunting prediction of the students in the room:
And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”
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. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. 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.
Then comes the line that sums it all up:
…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.
No place is this clearer than in Lewis’s third installment of the “Space Trilogy”, That Hideous Strength.
The truth is, I’ve seen it in my own life, my own conversations and chatter, my own vain ambitions to belong, to matter, to be included, to be “cool”.
Lewis goes on to describe the cure:
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.
Friendship, true and easy companionship, unfettered by status or accomplishments, is the gift which the Inner Ring mimics and distorts.
And friendship is the power that breaks the spell of the allure of the Inner Ring. Friendship is the cure for the corruption of comparison.
Check out my recent post on “Friendships After Forty”:
Leader Lab
Friendships (for Pastors) After Forty
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June 30, 2025
A few weeks ago, four friends who serve as pastors in four different time zones piled into a rental car and drove up to a ranch in Wyoming for a 48-hour retreat. It was the third year in a row we’ve gathered for a small retreat together, the second year in a row of gathering in Wyoming.
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