But this isn’t about me. It’s about what seems to be a very sad cohort of people if Lewis is reading his audience correctly, and he probably was alerted to it because he’d been tempted strongly in his life. And what was his audience? Every young person in the UK? That would be unfortunate.

I found the Lewis piece interesting but it was difficult to relate to it. When I was in high school I was unaware of any “in” ring that would have me or that I would want to be part of, so the feeling was mutual. I was not the cheerleader type, nor the student-government type. I guess if I was any type at all I was a “brain.” But that wasn’t really a “ring.” I had some acquaintances and a few good friends, and then in senior year a boyfriend. And that was it. Those were the things that mattered to me, socially speaking.

Of course, my high school wasn’t a typical one for a number of reasons. It was very large and very fragmented and there was almost zero school spirit. I simply didn’t pay attention to most of the larger goings-on there. I had my classes, which were usually the same thirty or so people who were fellow “brains.” The rest of the school was pretty opaque to me, and it was somewhat dangerous as well (although not compared to inner city schools). A lot of what other people say about their high school years are about schools that bear no resemblance to mine.

Fascinating piece from Lewis. One might think he was projecting from his own, presumably less wise earlier years. Or that he thought, correctly or not, that he was talking to a pathetic and sad cohort of younger people.

I recall class structure in high school. There was the in-group, socially at ease, probably a bit more money, parents educated so better grammar in conversation, dressed well (given the context). And the jocks and the greasers and the nerds and those not in any particular class. I don’t recall seeing any “rings”.
Same in college. Perhaps more sharply differentiated than in my high school.

I think 90% of my classmates lived in the immediate post-war subdivisions; thousand square foot house, 90 by 120 lot, single-car width driveway (garage was up to you), Pretty much everybody’s father was a WW II and there were very few kids whose parents were divorced. Almost all of us were first-born,

So, yeah, in-groups and not. Some folks desperate for getting “in” for all it signified. Status was probably not it, social opportunity was more likely the thing most envied.

But rings? Never saw one. Maybe too dumb.

But something occurs to me. In a parenting class, the instructor asked me how my folks handled peer group pressure. I said, “My parents didn’t think their kids had any peers.” I was sort of joking but in retrospect….yeah.

Didn’t need peer-group approval if you don’t have peers.

So, following; Lewis’ audience, if he’s reading them right, had been made to feel inadequate as people.

I have no idea how it goes in real life in the UK, but various dramas include dialogue in which a correction of any sort includes a hint of put-down. If this actually happens frequently, possibly that’s a factor.

https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. “The Inner Ring” was the Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, in 1944.

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, 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 organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted 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 passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so 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 borderline.
…
Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognised 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 house 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 an onion.
…
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.
…
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 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.
…
My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors 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.
…
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 something 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 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 naïf or a prig—the hint will come. 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.”

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, confidential, 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 jolliest, friendliest 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 the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
…
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.
…
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.

I read Wolf’s piece. Interesting discussion of a devastatingly dry lifestyle.

Howsomever; never having been within shouting distance of such a place, I can say such things as the Covid response exist elsewhere.

You don’t need to be the upper crust to find people begging to be made to do stupid stuff. Or to find people wild to see others made to do stupid stuff. Although four democrat governors put infected patients into nursing homes, killing thousands, the villain is Di Santis, who failed to make people do stupid stuff.

In addition, those in places of authority know they must be seen to do “Something”, as if Something is a proper noun having actual, positive effects.
A school superintendent who does not shut down the school system is guilty if a kid dies of something which, under Birx’ rules, can be coded as a Covid death. He’s a murderer from one end of the state to the other.

If he does shut the schools down and two kids die of accidents in the home because their parents cannot meet the unexpected need to make their schedules match, nobody knows or cares.

And whatever the super believes about the issue itself, he knows how it works.

Still, the screaming urge to see people made to do stupid stuff has to be experienced to be, barely, believed. Unfortunately, it’s also part of the global warming issue. Have to have global warming or you can’t make people do stupid stuff.

During Palin’s prominence, a feminist website–wish I could remember it, now they’ve folded up–was devastated at feminist attacks on Palin.

Quite a lot going on in this area and not all necessarily undiluted politics.

So I believe that the opinion writer Katie Baker is motivated by the above more than literal hate. However, the “hate is fun” factor is what makes the article promulgate.