It's more cynical or esoteric than that in Mark 4:

'When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that,

‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,

and ever hearing but never understanding;

otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’" '

The latter is a quote from Isaiah 6, which is Isaiah's commission in which God orders the prophet to preach doom to Judah, knowing that Judah would ignore the warnings. The assumption is that outsiders ignore or fail to understand prophecy.

Mark explicitly distinguished between insiders and outsiders.