Inner Ring as Adversary

Inner rings, as described in CS Lewis's eponymous lecture, structurally orient around a kind of evasiveness. In this Twitter thread, Venkatesh Rao somehow evades something extremely explicit and basic in Lewis's description, but correctly criticizes Lewis for his own kind of evasion of a sort of apex inner ring.

Lewis explicitly describes the recruitment process for inner rings: being asked to transgress, implicitly in order to gain admission to the inner ring, but with no specific promises made or implied. But it turns out that's all the inner ring is made of: evasive transgression-bonding. There's no content inside it, no subject matter knowledge, only a shared unseeing of guilt, and - at most - further inner rings inside the first one.

Rao somehow has the idea that there's a game to be played in this domain, but there's no domain, there's no insider knowledge, there's no structure to the game, there's just an aggregation continually reaffirming ringhood through shared transgression.

It's notable how easy it seems to be to miss this when Lewis makes it so explicit.

Rao points out that Lewis's proposed remedy - simply not joining inner rings - effectively means declining to defend or otherwise coordinate against them, and can only work out in the long run by implying that through some nonspecific means (Jesus) things will work out in the end. Something Rao doesn't point out is that Lewis's implied advice to be an honest craftsman is inapplicable to his actual audience. The Inner Ring speech was given at an University. University students do not study to be artisans. If you occupy a white collar job in a world with inner rings, then you're in the world of Moral Mazes. Rao correctly characterizes this as recommending what he calls a Clueless strategy in The Gervais Principle.

Occupying a Bullshit (i.e. class privilege) Job while cultivating a self-image as an honest craftsman means profiting by being taken in by and thereby perpetuating the scam that your professional coverup is intellectually difficult technical expertise. Learning to distort your mind into these postures is the price students are asked to pay to join the Inner Ring of graduates. In practice Lewis is urging college students to go along with the coverup while trying to do locally valid things while posturing as experts in a technical discipline.

Ayn Rand is the only writer I've seen get both these points right jointly:

  1. There's no benefit to joining the inner ring except discovering that there insinuated benefit does not exist.
  2. Ignoring inner rings is refusing to protect oneself against a dangerous adversary

Compiled from a Twitter thread

Related: Towards Optimal Play as a Villager in a Mixed Game

7 thoughts on “Inner Ring as Adversary

  1. relating late

    Man, when I didn't know about any of this a friend told me that transgression was virtuous, and I thought that was cool and was like, hey what if we transgress on transgression itself? And they evasively acted like I was missing the point.

    Reply
  2. Pingback: Self-Criticism vs Self-Blame | Compass Rose

  3. Anonymous

    The only problem is, there are benefits to joining the inner ring. They include capital, strategically valuably information, and influence.

    Do you write anywhere about transgression bonding specifically? I’d like to learn how to avoid defacing my soul while existing in a world with inner rings.

    Reply
  4. Eli Tyre

    > In this Twitter thread, Venkatesh Rao somehow evades something extremely explicit and basic in Lewis's description

    > Lewis explicitly describes the recruitment process for inner rings: being asked to transgress, implicitly in order to gain admission to the inner ring, but with no specific promises made or implied. But it turns out that's all the inner ring is made of: evasive transgression-bonding. There's no content inside it, no subject matter knowledge, only a shared unseeing of guilt, and - at most - further inner rings inside the first one.

    > Rao somehow has the idea that there's a game to be played in this domain, but there's no domain, there's no insider knowledge, there's no structure to the game, there's just an aggregation continually reaffirming ringhood through shared transgression.

    Reading the twitter Thread.It sounds like Rao is not misunderstanding Lewis, he just _disagrees_ with him about whether there is content to the inner ring. _They have importantly different theories of how inner rings work._

    "In particular, he is sensitive to the perils of the sociopath/inner ring layer, but not to its upside — what we’d call red-pill knowledge (general matrix sense, not mra). **He thinks inner ring aspiration is entirely about simply wanting to be in the inner ring, not knowing more.**"

    Reply
    1. Eli Tyre

      Furtheremore, my case is presumably somewhat unusual, but every single inner ring or pseudo inner ring, that I've ever felt an attraction to joining is one that was attractive to me precisely because of my expectation of rare knowledge or interesting conversations.

      I'm thinking of Leverage Research in 2016 to 2018, or Constellation more recently. Insofar as I had an interest in joining them, that was because I expected to learn specific object level stuff, and I wanted that.

      Perhaps Lewis would say that those are not actually inner rings at all, by dint of their having content. Also both of these examples had/have explicit and declared boundaries and memberships, which is unlike the inner rings he describes.

      Reply
      1. Benquo Post author

        It seems to me like I was able to get *more* actual info from Leverage than from CFAR, despite being totally outside the club for Leverage but for a year or two in a pretty central clique of CFAR.

        Reply

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