"I Have Friends Everywhere"
Andor, C.S. Lewis & the loneliness of ladder climbing
“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 center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. … This is friendship.” - C.S. Lewis
Over at (through)
, Aaron Earls has a powerful piece up about the tragic lessons of Star Wars: Andor, a rare piece of perfect art within the Star Wars content mill. Like Earls will say, Andor is a Star Wars story that leaves you thinking about it. I’ve experienced this sensation after a long while of feeling little at all. Daydreaming about that galaxy far, far away, having thoughts, feelings, and opinions about the happenings of Star Wars.It’s interesting. Andor is not a very magical show. In fact, it’s quite bleak. However, its messages and virtues stand so tall in Tony Gilroy’s take on Star Wars that you inevitably find yourself adrift midday and replaying the characters’ decisions back in your mind.
I want to share some of the insights on Andor made by Earls that connect back to the work of C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia). Lewis is one of our core pillars of philosophy here at Geeky Stoics, and it’s so exciting to see that someone beat us to drawing a connection between his letters/speeches/essays and a new Star Wars tale.
In Andor, characters within the growing Rebellion use a code to identify with each other, particularly members of Luthen Rael’s faction. They say, “I have friends everywhere” in a hushed voice to let someone else know you’re safe with me. Rebels do have friends. In every Star Wars story centered on the rebellion, whether it be the films or animated TV series, Rebel stories always center on groups of friends struggling together against the impossibly large Empire. They live within a circle that expands and contracts. The circle grows with new additions into the fold, and contracts both as lives are lost or faith is broken.
The Empire, on the other hand, is a ladder, not a circle. Characters on this side of the conflict live in constant fear of one another, bound only by a shared belief in the necessity of order to hold the galaxy together.
There are often well-intentioned people who move through Imperial storylines. Syril Karn is one such person in Andor. While he is a strange and largely unlikeable young man, Karn was a street cop and brings with him a sincere conviction that lawful order is the best thing for everyone. The Empire represents this viewpoint, and rebellion against it is labeled throughout Andor as a disease or virus.
We stamp out viruses. We study, treat, vaccinate, and eradicate viruses, all while knowing they’ll mutate and take new forms. Perhaps that’s why the Imperial hierarchy looks constantly to be a ship with seamen bailing out water through fresh holes. They can’t ever plug the holes quickly enough.
“Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.” - Nemik (Andor)
Earls writes in his short essay about this thing called “The Inner Ring” by C.S. Lewis. This can be thought of as the upper rungs of the professional or career ladder, or “the room where it happens”. The people in this ring are the decision makers and movers who call the shots.
They matter. But be warned. You do not matter to the Inner Ring.
“In 1944, nearing the end of World War II, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture that outlines how normal people often become corrupted. In “The Inner Ring,” republished in The Weight of Glory, he said, “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.”
Lewis argued that these inner rings weren’t evil in themselves, but they often led people to commit evil due to their hopes of joining or remaining part of the group. “In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction?” he asked. “If so, your case is more fortunate than most.”
We see this within the Inner Ring of the Empire all the time. Dog-eat-dog. “There’s always a bigger fish”. The chain of command in the Empire is a life-or-death affair, and for some reason, these people toward the bottom always want to climb. Director Krennic calls life in the ISB a “death march” in Andor, and we see him die in that march in Rogue One. He is stomped out by Tarkin, an Imperial rival.
In the Empire, you have no friends, only rival colleagues. Every piece of human capital is reduced to its usefulness to the regime, and the goals of the regime are ever changing. You may be vital one day and redundant the next.
You know what happens to redundant people…..
Earls lays out how the Inner Ring strips people of their goodness and inevitably leaves them “a scoundrel”. It’s a classic story beat we’ve seen in culture many a time. The man or woman who claws their way up the ladder into the Inner Ring always loses their dignity along the way. It’s true in a story like Breaking Bad, and just as true in The Devil Wears Prada.
So what’s the solution? We don’t want to live at the bottom of every social ladder. What can we proactively do?
“For Lewis, the solution to the inner ring is friends. ‘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 center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. … This is friendship.’
Yes. Friends. But how do you make friends? Adults struggle with this to a particularly severe degree. If you want to continue and follow this thread, check out this breakdown of The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis, and you’ll find the answer.
I’ll give you a hint. It starts with sincerity.
