The theme of his talk is the nature of informal groups following unwritten laws that control the formal and written:

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 outside, 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 if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.

Lewis has an interesting psychological opinion about this phenomenon:

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....

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....

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action.... 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.

-- Tom Kreitzberg

Like The Weight Of Glory, this has been in Richard Drake's top three favorites among Lewis lectures on a Christian theme for twenty five years now.

It was first mentioned here by Tom Kreitzberg at exactly the time (here) that Tom first found out about that strangely humble phenomenon of Western elitists, the Bilderberg Group. I thought that was a particularly good call, one of the best implicit links ever made on Why, which I in my normally clumsy way have now made explicit. -- Richard Drake