It’s referring to a talk, not just a quote, and I don’t think any short quotation would tell you everything you need to know for context.
Brief and possibly inaccurate summary (I am too lazy to dig out an actual copy, so this is from memory):
Lewis is addressing an audience of university students. He explains that he’s been invited in his capacity as a “middle-aged moralist”, presumably expected to warn them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil; says that as young men his audience already knows quite enough about the Flesh and that (on account of The Screwtape Letters) he’s already uncomfortably closely associated with the Devil, so he’ll talk about one aspect of the World. He settles on the tendency, within any organization or profession or whatever, for there to be an “inner ring” of people who see themselves as “in the know”, “on the inside”, the real movers and shakers; while the organization/profession/… presumably has some particular thing it’s about, the “inner ring” is primarily about being-in-the-inner-ring itself; the point of getting in is to have got in; it’s all about social status (and power, since inner-ring membership tends to go along with promotion and the like) as an end to itself. Lewis reckons this is morally corrosive, both because it intrinsically means focusing on the wrong things and also because in practice it often happens that the existing inner-ringers will want you to do morally problematic things to show how much you want to be one of them. He reckons the urge to belong to such groups is strong enough that if you don’t guard against it, and if you are at all the sort of person with a prospect of getting in, inner-ringing will take over (and, from some points of view, ruin) your life. As a countermeasure he proposes focusing on doing your actual job well (in a possibly-generalized sense of “job”, since inner rings arise in contexts other than specific employers) and suggests that if you do the reward will be both the satisfaction of a job well done, and a relationship with others who likewise focus on a good job well done which will amount to actual friendship which is seldom found in inner rings.
It’s referring to a talk, not just a quote, and I don’t think any short quotation would tell you everything you need to know for context.
Brief and possibly inaccurate summary (I am too lazy to dig out an actual copy, so this is from memory):
Lewis is addressing an audience of university students. He explains that he’s been invited in his capacity as a “middle-aged moralist”, presumably expected to warn them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil; says that as young men his audience already knows quite enough about the Flesh and that (on account of The Screwtape Letters) he’s already uncomfortably closely associated with the Devil, so he’ll talk about one aspect of the World. He settles on the tendency, within any organization or profession or whatever, for there to be an “inner ring” of people who see themselves as “in the know”, “on the inside”, the real movers and shakers; while the organization/profession/… presumably has some particular thing it’s about, the “inner ring” is primarily about being-in-the-inner-ring itself; the point of getting in is to have got in; it’s all about social status (and power, since inner-ring membership tends to go along with promotion and the like) as an end to itself. Lewis reckons this is morally corrosive, both because it intrinsically means focusing on the wrong things and also because in practice it often happens that the existing inner-ringers will want you to do morally problematic things to show how much you want to be one of them. He reckons the urge to belong to such groups is strong enough that if you don’t guard against it, and if you are at all the sort of person with a prospect of getting in, inner-ringing will take over (and, from some points of view, ruin) your life. As a countermeasure he proposes focusing on doing your actual job well (in a possibly-generalized sense of “job”, since inner rings arise in contexts other than specific employers) and suggests that if you do the reward will be both the satisfaction of a job well done, and a relationship with others who likewise focus on a good job well done which will amount to actual friendship which is seldom found in inner rings.