Something to reflect on regardless of our profession

This is a long quote from a WaPo Opinion piece title " The Sad Self-Importance of Journalists" and it is amazing and I think many of us, journalists or not should read this and reflect on it in our own lives.

In his classic essay, “The Inner Ring,” C.S. Lewis warned about “the delicious knowledge that we — we four or five all huddled beside this stove — are the people who know.” Lewis lectured rising British university students that “from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care,” that they would be driven by the desire to be within the Inner Ring.
 
It is, of course, a fallacy; there is no special knowledge that emanates from such bonfires. Lewis went on to describe the perilous dangers such an illusion carried, dangers to the soul if not necessarily someone’s career. “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,” he argued. “But you will be a scoundrel.”

“Of all the passions,” he added, “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.” Lewis did not worry, as we must now do, about a self-selected group of people who conclude everyone else is beneath them and don’t seem to realize that their self-regard and self-importance is often on full display on social media platforms. It is part of what gives rise to the “populist moment” we are in and the feeling among many in the United States that the left and the news media are in harness. Neither partisans nor press types benefit from that arrangement.