Cool Kids and Inner Rings

As of Friday I’ll be finished all my classes for this semester. I took a literature class and read a few books by C.S. Lewis. My professor recommended an essay by Lewis and I thought I’d share some of it with you.

The essay by Lewis is called The Inner Ring. We all know what an inner ring is. It’s the cool kids. Those little groups that you find everywhere you go. You’ll find them mostly at school and at work but you’ll find them other places as well. There is no formal organization and if you manage to get into one of these rings you’ll notice that it was no particular person that let you in, somehow the group consented. The rules are unwritten and understood.

Lewis says that it is one of our main desires in life to be inside the inner ring – and a terrifying thought to realize that you have been left out. These rings are not necessarily bad things in and of themselves. However, our desire to be in them might not be all that healthy. He gives a couple main reasons why we ought to get over our desire to be in these inner rings – to be in with the cool kids.

The passion to be in these inner rings can turn a person who isn’t really all that bad into a person who does very bad things. We find this at every level really. People sleep around to get in. They’ll lie and spread rumours about people. Some will even kill to get in.

Lewis also argues that in the end our desire to get in leads to nothing. The novelty of being in wears off very quickly. Once we’ve ditched our old friends to join the cool club, we find out that the cool kids aren’t so great after all. The excitement of being in does not last and next thing you know we are looking for the next ring.

Lewis suggests a couple ways to live life. You can commit yourself to your work and your studies and your hobbies and forget about the rings. It is not an easy thing to do, but even those people in the rings will know that you’ve surpassed them. You can also try real friendship.

It’s really quite a great essay and you ought to check it out. I’ve barley summed it up.

C.S. Lewis – The Inner Ring.

I’ve posted a couple songs that fit quite well with the essay. One is by Screeching Weasel and it’s called Cool Kids. The other is by Rancid and it is called Unwritten Rules.

Cool Kids is about the inner ring. Unwritten Rules seems to be somewhere in the middle. They use the language of inner rings and yet they seem to be suggesting that they aren’t really in a ring, they are just doing what they love. We need to consider that it is possible to form a ring of those who are outsiders of the other rings. But this is just a new inner ring and is no better than the first.