In “The Inner Ring”, C.S. Lewis describes a mass psychological phenomenon in which a certain social elite manipulate a much larger group of people.  They do so by employing a technique that works on the fears of nearly all people to avoid appearing stupid, uneducated, ill-informed, or naive.

Furthermore, they manipulate the desire of most people to “belong”, in some way, to whatever social membership that best embodies for them that eliteness they so admire – whether it be political, professional, academic, artistic, or whatever.

This social membership is purposefully never well defined, in order to meet needs of the elite, based on a particular existing circumstance.  Thus, says Lewis, in terms of 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 expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself ‘all the sensible people at this place.'”

This last example often comes to mind whenever I hear people demanding an immediate fix, by our government, to some pressing social problem.

One will inevitably hear calls for the passage of some kind of legislation embodying “sensible reforms” or “common-sense regulations.” How courageous are these crusaders!  However, I am certain that these are always promoted with the expectation that any population that might advocate for any non-sensible or non-common-sense variety of these things must be quite small.

Even so, we are also painfully aware that there exists a myriad of rules and regulations within the enormous body of our governments’ registries that are ultimately detrimental to our economic, physical, or mental well-being.

There are countless examples detailing the many unintended consequences that few, if any, could have predicted and fewer still saw coming at the outset of one ostensibly benevolent legislative effort or another.  ReasonTV has an entire series dedicated to these examples on their YouTube channel, and they would serve to be an education for any armchair reformer.

What can we conclude from all of this?  The only logical conclusion is that, in spite of casual observations to the contrary, there actually must exist a fair number of advocates for that non-sensible variety of reforms – indeed, a multitude – as one would expect would be required for any kind of legislation to pass.

In fact they do exist.  As we come to understand after the fact, these two groups of activists are, in fact, one and the same.  They are separated only by the passage of time.  If only there was some way to get them to see that.