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THE INNER RING 

By C.S. Lewis 

The Memorial Oration at King's College, 

the University of London, 

1944 

I read you a few lines from Tolstoi's War and Peace? 

When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening 

to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting 

something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly 

servility on his purple face. "All right. Please wait!" he said to 

the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which 

he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed 

Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted implor- 

ingly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey 

turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. 

Boris now clearly understood what he had already guessed 

that side by side with the system of discipline and subordina- 

tion which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there 

existed a different and a more real system the system which 

compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait 

respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince 

Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris 

decided at once that he would be guided not by the official 

system but by this other unwritten system. Part III, Chap. 9. 

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, 

I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion 

seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing. I 

shall do my best to gratify it. I shall in fact give you advice 

about the world in which you are going to live. I do not mean 

by this that I am going to attempt a talk on what are called current affairs. You probably know quite as much about them 

as I do. I am not going to tell you except in a form so general 

that you will hardly recognize it what part you ought to 

play in post-war reconstruction. It is not, in fact, very likely 

that any of you will be able, in the next ten years, to make any 

direct contribution to the peace or prosperity of Europe. You 

will be busy finding jobs, getting married, acquiring facts. I 

am going to do something more old-fashioned than you perhaps 

expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue warn- 

ings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial 

that no one calls them "current affairs'*. 

And of course every one knows what a middle-aged moralist 

of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against 

the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will 

be enough to deal with to-day. The Devil, I shall leave strictly 

alone. The association between him and me in the public mind 

has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it 

has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identifica- 

tion. I begin to realize the truth of the old proverb that he who 

sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. As for the 

Flesh, you must be very abnormal young people if you do not 

know quite as much about it as I do. But on the World I 

think I have something to say. 

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoi, the young 

second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist 

in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is 

printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it 

up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to 

a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed 

anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organized secret society 

with officers and rules which you would be told after you 

had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly ad- 

mitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, 

perhaps, that you are inside it. There are what correspond to 

pass words, but they too are spontaneous and informal. A par- 

ticular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive man- 

ner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not constant. It 

is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and 

who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are 

obviously out, but there are always several on the border-line. 

And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, 

or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the 

same company, after six weeks' absence, you may find this 

second hierarchy quite altered. There are no formal admissions 

or expulsions. People think they arc in it after they have in 

fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: 

this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. 

It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders 

and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may 

be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may 

be called "You and Tony and me". When it is very secure and 

comparatively stable in membership it calls itself "we". When 

it has to be suddenly expanded to meet a particular emergency 

it calls itself "All the sensible people at this place." From out- 

side, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it "That 

gang" or "They" or "So-and-so and his set" or "the Caucus" 

or "the Inner Ring". If you are a candidate for admission 

you probably don't call it anything. To discuss it with the other 

outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention 

it in talking to the man who is inside, and who may help 

you in if this present conversation goes well, would be madness. 

Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have 

recognized the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you 

have been in the Russian Army or perhaps in any army. But 

you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your kouse at school before the end of the first 

term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by 

the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within 

the Ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn 

was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house 

Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the School 

Ring was almost in touch with a Masters' Ring. You were 

beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of the onion. 

And here, too, at your university shall I be wrong in as- 

suming that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are 

several rings independent systems or concentric rings present 

in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, 

inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive 

after going down, you will find the Rings what Tolstoi calls 

the second or unwritten systems. 

All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the 

same of my next step, which is this. I believe that in all men's 

lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods 

between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant 

elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the 

terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, 

has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, 

in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters 

who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular 

Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly 

understood that "Society", in that sense of the word, is merely 

one of a hundred Rings and snobbery therefore only one form 

of the longing to be inside. People who believe themselves to 

be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires 

on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the 

desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their 

desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them 

immune from the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under 

the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communist coterie. 

Poor man it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even 

scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it 

is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the 

fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we 

we four or five all huddled beside this stove are the people 

who \now. 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 

youVe 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. 

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a 

subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe 

is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages 

of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in 

obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. 

For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are 

outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people 

know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the 

number who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar 

reason is probably very large. 

I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that 

the existence of Inner Rings is an evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not 

only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal 

friendship should grow up between those who work together. 

And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any 

organization should quite coincide with its actual workings. If 

the wisest and most energetic people invariably held the highest 

posts, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must 

be people in high positions who are really deadweights and 

people in lower positions who are more important than their 

rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. In that way the 

second, unwritten system is bound to grow up. It is necessary; 

and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which 

draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be 

morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be 

dangerous. As Byron has said, 

Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet 

The unexpected death of some old lady. 

The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is 

not an evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of 

her heirs is not reckoned a proper feeling, and the law frowns 

on even the gentlest attempt to expedite her departure. Let 

Inner Rings be an unavoidable and even an innocent feature 

of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our 

longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, 

and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in? 

I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to 

which any of you may already be compromised. I must not 

assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken 

off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted 

you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who 

appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not 

ask whether you have ever derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you yourself 

were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the 

Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the 

outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your 

days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always 

wholly admirable. I will ask only one question and it is, of 

course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the 

whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to 

be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you 

to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a 

wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction ? If so, your 

case is more fortunate than most. 

But I said I was going to give advice, and advice should deal 

with the future, not the past. I have hinted at the past only to 

awake you to what I believe to be the real nature of human 

life. I don't believe that the economic motive and the erotic 

motive account for everything that goes on in what we moralists 

call the World. Even if you add Ambition I think the picture 

is still incomplete. The lust for the esoteric, the longing to be 

inside, take many forms which are not easily recognizable as 

Ambition. We hope, no doubt, for tangible profits from every 

Inner Ring we penetrate: power, money, liberty to break rules, 

avoidance of routine duties, evasion of discipline. But all these 

would not satisfy us if we did not get in addition the delicious 

sense of secret intimacy. It is no doubt a great convenience to 

know that we need fear no official reprimands from our official 

senior because he is old Percy, a fellow-member of our Ring. 

But we don't value the intimacy only for the sake of the con- 

venience; quite equally we value the convenience as a proof 

of the intimacy. 

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you 

that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of 

action, It is orje of th$ factory which go to make up the world as we know it this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, 

and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may 

be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, 

this desire 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. That will be the 

natural thing the life that will come to you of its own accord. 

Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of 

conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, 

if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an "inner 

ringer". I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. 

But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can 

never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in 

one way or the other you will be that kind of man. 

I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for 

you not to be that kind of man. But you may have an open 

mind on the question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for 

thinking as I do. 

It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age 

reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. 

On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying 

nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least 

two or three of you before you die will have become some- 

thing very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the 

makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, 

ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you 

will not take my hard words about your possible future 

characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters. 

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 a 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 

naif or a prig the hint will come. It will be the hint of some- 

thing which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules 

of fair play: 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, con- 

fidential, 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 j oiliest, friend- 

liest 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. 

That is my first reason. Of all passions the passion for the 

Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a 

very bad man do very bad things. 

My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids 

in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves 

with water, is the symbol not of one vice but of all vices. 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. 

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If 

you want to be made free of a certain circle for some whole- 

some 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 kind- 

ness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things 

that can be really 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 

endeavour to enter the new one. 

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason 

you very well know. You yourself, once you are in, want to 

make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already 

in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group 

of people which holds together for a good purpose, the ex- 

clusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who 

are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others 

because there is work only for so many or because the others 

can't in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers 

because the rooms they meet in are only so big. 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. 

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 pro- 

fession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertise- 

ments 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 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. This is friendship. Aristotle placed 

it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness 

in the world, and no Inner Ringer can ever have it. 

We are told in Scriptures that those who ask get. That is 

true, in senses I can't now explore. But in another sense there 

is much truth in the schoolboy's principle "them as asks shan't 

have." To a young person, just entering on adult life, the 

world seems full of "insides", full of delightful intimacies and 

confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows 

that desire he will reach no "inside" that is worth reaching. 

The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the 

house in Alice Through the Looking Glass.