https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

Read C.S. Lewis. He gets at in less words what I try to express below.

Preface

C.S. Lewis Inner Ring inspired what follows. As did this quote from Peter Drucker:

"There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well."

Entry Price of Exclusivity

My early life hopped from one chosen hardship to another. A modern Puritan who dispatched the religion but kept its guilt — and confused the grit for the grace. Weber would laugh at my willingness to chose my stahlhartes Gehäuse (modern reading)^1

And I’m not alone. This is at the heart of what Markovits explores in the Meritocracy Trap 🪤.

“just as toil was the antithesis of dignity in an aristocratic world that worshiped leisure, so idleness has become the antithesis of dignity today in a meritocratic world that worships industry.”

In pre-season for athletics, core political campaigns, select phases of military training, and too much of consulting, etc., pain is the point. It’s the proving ground where you pay the price for entry, which secures your place, gives your words weight, and expedites camaraderie.

The latter most wasn’t clear to me until Basic Training, which outside of the Marines, really is a spartan detox retreat for which many many civilians pay. Generally, camaraderie requires time to develop. If you don’t have the luxury of a long X-Axis (time) you can expedite with intensity.

My communities arrived between two points on the spectrum: Years of showing up, or one unforgettable stretch where we required each other to sustain. The great joy in the latter is that what I thought might be pockets have preserved. Losing a close friend forged that group forever. Suffering out in random woods and frozen on top of mountains proved the beginning not the end of most of my military mates.

Past the Point

Loftus, Kahneman, & Schacter shaped my recognition of how our memories are more reflections of what we want to remember than what happened.^2

Schacter calls it "bias" — the way memory rewrites the past to match who we've decided we are. I've decided to be suspicious of mine accordingly.

That’s my acknowledgement to say I honestly can’t remember if the following story happened or it’s a cobble of several smarller stories. So take it as a tale to make the point (hopefully):

Setting - Fort Benning circa 2014

Context - Two Privates with too much time and too little to do engaged in Politics.

Conversation:

“We wouldn’t hold a candle to the WWII soldiers”

“Are you kidding? Most were 145 pounds and subsisted off of cigarettes…”

“Yeah, but they were tougher than we are.”

Classic ‘back-in-the-day’ bias that also proves a larger point common throughout my experience: There was always some harder time that I was told to be thankful for I didn’t have to endure.

I have suffered enough and been told to be thankful I haven’t had to suffer the real suffering such that I’ve worked through my many less productive responses. All of which are really more or less educated versions of “f—k you/off”

And in doing the work, I can see shades of legitimacy. I have no desire to suffer Vietnam, and I concede that’s a terror I will never (nor should any American have had to) understand. More productively, I embrace the reality that learning only leads us so far. Then we need the searing teacher of experience. And that experience will have some unavoidable unnecessary pain. Extreme optimization would dilute crucible experiences, which I can attest are the greatest gift you can ever endure.

So it’s a classic both-and; we…

So

In the end, Drucker is mostly right: there is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well. But he assumes you know which thing is wrong — and that's the harder problem.

The Inner Ring solves it backwards. It makes the suffering legible by making it the point. The blood wings, the hazing, the 11th slide — these aren't accidents or oversights. They're the mechanism. They signal, you paid to be here. And because you paid, you belong. And because you belong, the pain was worth it. It's a closed loop, and Lewis saw it clearly: the ring exists for exclusion. Suffering-as-initiation is just exclusion with extra steps.

The crucible works differently — and the difference is everything. The 2 AM ascent nobody wanted is the story everyone still tells, not because it was hard, but because it was shared. Lewis calls it friendship or at least camaraderie. The exclusivity is accidental. The suffering was never the credential. It was just the weather we were all standing in together.

That's what Drucker misses. Some of the best outcomes in my life came from experiences that looked like the wrong thing by any efficiency measure. They weren't the wrong thing. They were the necessary thing — and the people who came out the other side of them with me are proof enough.

So the test isn't whether something was hard. It's what the hardness was for. Hazing builds rings. Crucibles build people. You can usually tell the difference — though never in the moment, and almost always in retrospect, sitting around a table years later with the people who were there.

🦶🏻 🎶

^1Damn, she got me: "from Calvinist theology to a secular version that is no longer concerned with eternal salvation but that continues to instill guilty feelings about taking time to relax." 👀

^2 Loftus: "How reliable is your memory?" / DK: "The riddle of experience vs. memory." / Schacter: Sins of Memory

Select Inner Ring Quotes

  • Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.
  • 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.”
  • It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
  • If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.
  • Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.
  • But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.
  • 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.