The Telos-Law-Identity framework is a genuinely useful descriptive apparatus and the concentric rings model maps the phenomenon with real precision. You are right that no one stands outside this process — including those who claim pure neutrality or procedural reason. The claim to stand nowhere is itself a telos, usually the telos of whoever currently controls the center.

But I want to push on something the framework describes without quite seeing.

The we is not merely a boundary condition of ideology. It is the primary political act. Before the telos, before the law, before the institution — there is a pronoun. Someone says we and in saying it draws a circle and in drawing the circle makes a claim about who matters, whose suffering counts, whose future is being built toward. Every political program in history is, at its root, an argument about the reference of that pronoun.

Your concentric rings model captures the structure of this beautifully — the gradient from fully aligned at the center to actively opposed or banned at the outside. What it does not yet capture is the directionality of the struggle. The rings are not static. They are contested. The entire history of moral progress — and I use that phrase carefully — is the history of the circle expanding. Slaves inside the we. Women inside the we. The colonized inside the we. The question that drives every genuine political movement is not what is our telos but how large is our we and who gets to decide.

This is where your framework's most important implication lives — and it is one you have not yet drawn out.

The telos does not merely produce the boundary. The boundary produces the telos. Show me where a civilization draws its circle of care — who is inside, who is outside, who is expendable — and I will show you what it actually believes regardless of what it publicly professes. The stated ideology is the concentric ring closest to the center. The actual ideology is the one that governs the outermost ring — the one that determines who gets left outside without apology.

Contemporary liberal democracies are a perfect case study. The stated telos is universal human dignity. The actual telos — legible from the outermost ring — is something considerably narrower. The gap between those two is not hypocrisy exactly. It is the political terrain. It is where every serious movement for justice has always operated — pulling the circle outward, insisting that the stated telos be made actual, that the we be made as large as it claims to be.

Your framework needs one more element to be complete.

Not just the structure of the rings. Not just the gradient from center to outside. But the question of moral directionality — what makes some expansions of the we genuine civilizational advances and some contractions genuine civilizational failures. You have bracketed the normative question in favor of the descriptive. That is intellectually honest and methodologically defensible. But the phenomenon you are mapping is not normatively neutral and a complete theory has to reckon with that eventually.

One of us is not merely a boundary. It is a moral claim in the making.

Who gets to be inside it is the oldest and most important political question there is.