Investigating Social Dynamics: Power, Conformity, and Obedience 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 . . . . Of all the 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. —C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring” (1944)1
Investigating Social Dynamics: Power, Conformity, and Obedience
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 . . . . Of all the 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. —C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring” (1944)1
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It is in this sense, I believe what the English scholar C. S. Lewis proposed—that a powerful force in transforming human behavior, pushing people across the boundary between good and evil, comes from the basic desire to be “in” and not “out.” If we think of social power as arrayed in a set of concentric circles from the most powerful central or inner ring moving outward to the least socially significant outer ring, we can appreciate his focus on the centripetal pull of that central circle. Lewis’s “Inner Ring” is the elusive Camelot of acceptance into some special group, some privileged association, that confers instant status and enhanced identity. Its lure for most of us is obvious—who does not want to be a member of the “in-group”? Who does not want to know that she or he has been tried and found worthy of inclusion in, of ascendance into, a new, rarified realm of social acceptability?
