The List

Those were bad years for the industry. His company missed its targets two quarters running, and at the start of the year came a new rule: year-end ratings in every group would be distributed by proportion; the bottom tenth would be rated unqualified, and anyone rated unqualified would not be renewed. His group had seven people. Landing there, the rule meant one person. His manager asked him — the longest-serving in the group — to draft a list first.

Jobs like his were hard to find in that city. His mother had been in and out of hospital for two years. If he left — whether he could get out was one question; whether he could afford to was another.

That was his situation. Other people, other times, can be far from it: places where one man’s will is law and one person can be another’s property; places where refusing to lend your hands to the machine costs you prison, or your life; and there may yet be places where treating people as ends is simply the default, and living by your own law does not mean putting yourself in harm’s way. This essay asks how someone who lives by his own law acts across such different situations — what changes with the situation, and what does not. It uses real events from history, all before 2000, as the moral-law series does: individual deeds, not statues.

Mixed Reality, and Three Phases

The company was not all bad. The rule about the list was real; so was the fact that the same manager had covered for a sick colleague’s absences for half a year last year. The HR clerk who kept attendance had quietly warned a few people who were about to be caught. The same person treats people as ends in one matter and as resources in another; in the same company some dealings are mutually serious, most are transactions, and some simply trade people for numbers.

The framework calls this mixed reality: operations that treat people as ends and operations that treat them as means are always mixed, in every concrete place and time. It borrows two old names for the poles, the Kingdom of Ends and the Kingdom of Means. The mixing is not only outside: a person carries both tendencies, sometimes treating his own abilities and relationships as tools and sometimes not. He is in there too.

Mixing is normal, but the proportions differ. The moral-law series divides the road into three phases. Germination: treating people as means has almost no opponent; those who live by their own law are scattered, cannot find one another, and each holds up alone. Inversion: such people find each other more and more; letters, communities, institutions start to catch them; the price may be as heavy as before, but no one is wholly alone. Establishment: treating people as ends has become the default; conflict remains, people who use others remain, but when something happens the default path is questioning and procedure, not force. Establishment has not arrived. Now is mostly a mixture of the three, with inversion prevailing in many places.

A change of situation changes what a person can do, not which way he faces or by what. People are ends has no germination edition and no this-company edition: a rule does not become people are numbers that can be cut by proportion because the industry is doing badly. Conversely, the same law does not produce the same actions in everyone; another senior colleague who also rejects the rule may do something quite unlike him. And direction not bending with the situation does not mean concrete judgments cannot be revised by new facts. He had thought the manager was only passing the rule down; later he learned the manager had pushed for it himself. That fact changed his judgment about how to talk to him — the judgment, not the direction.

Germination: One Person Holding It Alone

In the eighth century the jurist Abu Hanifa was summoned by the caliph al-Mansur to serve as chief judge. The post would make him the ruler’s judicial hand, judging people as the ruler needed. He refused. He was pressed again and again, and refused again and again; the traditional accounts say he was finally imprisoned and died in prison. The moral-law series notes the limits of the evidence: the core — refusal, imprisonment, death in prison — is consistent across sources; the details are not, and his own words do not survive directly.

What he did was a not-doing: not taking that post. He did not publicly denounce the ruler; what he refused was to become a link in that chain of execution. That is invisibility in its narrowest and costliest form — in a place where almost everyone lends a hand to the machine, keeping the one spot where you do not. And he held it alone: in germination, no one around catches you, no one questions you from outside; you can only question yourself and hold up your own account. Cultivation, in the hardest places, shrinks into homes, into one or two people, into secret teaching, to grow again later.

The price was real, and very heavy. But the series does not write it as heroism. What those people paid was not a virtue to be praised; it was what their means-treating surroundings smashed into them. A sacrifice is a cost, not a medal.

So there are two sentences here. Extreme situations compress conditions and room, not the law. Fewer things can be done, fewer said, fewer roads walked; the law is still his. And the law does not require a person to prove it is still there with an unharmed body. A person can be suppressed, harmed, killed, and his law is not thereby colonised. The other way, too: the law does not ask him to destroy himself to prove it — the framework explicitly rejects better a shattered jade than an intact tile. Abu Hanifa did not seek death. He only would not take the post, and his time charged that one not-doing everything.

Compromise, Invisibility, Exit

He was born into inversion. What he did was mostly ordinary. First, he compromised. He could not change the rule, and he did not intend to lose his job over it. He accepted a limited result: someone in his group would be rated unqualified this year. He adjusted his language: the evaluations stated facts only, none of the company’s words — no dragging the team, no poor fit. And he stepped back for now: this year he would not fight every rule head-on.

Compromise is accepting a limited result, adjusting expression, stepping back for a time — without taking the institution’s rule about people as your own law. The company says the bottom people are the useless people; he can submit the form by the rule without making that sentence his way of seeing people. But compromise cannot fool itself on one point: there are his hands in that form. In my heart I’m against it; I’m only carrying it out — both halves can be true, and together they do not yield so it has nothing to do with me. Inner disagreement does not wash out actual participation. The line between compromise and being colonised is not how much he did, but whether the rule has stood up in him as his law. There is a moment where it slides: after a few years of forms, he finds himself, looking at someone, first wondering where they rank. By then compromise has turned into something else.

He did the ratings by the rule, and there were things he did not do. The manager wanted to turn the scoring into an automatic ranking formula and asked him, the best at building spreadsheets, to design it; he said his hands were full. At a meeting someone proposed ranking every quarter; he did not second it. The company wanted someone to write an article on how good the new rule was; he did not write it. This is invisibility: not contributing to institutions that colonise people, where you can avoid it. It is a direction, not a standard that only counts when met in full. His salary comes from this company; his reports run through its systems; met in full, it is met nowhere. Written as a standard, it becomes an ought pressed on from outside again.

One colleague was very keen on the rule and used the ranking to call people out in meetings. After that he avoided working with this man where he could, and kept apart from him. That is a kind of exit — from a relationship. Its measure is clear: exit is no longer being in contact, not judging someone unworthy. Not working with him is not a verdict that he doesn’t deserve to be treated as a person, nor a refusal to believe he could change. Ceasing to contribute, ceasing to be in touch, sit alongside acknowledging him as a person.

I Will Not Write That Name

Before the list went in, he thought for a long time about whether to write the young colleague’s name. She was the one he had shielded in the first essay. This year she had spent three months at home caring for her sick father, and done fewer reports; by the rule, she was last.

He could do more than one thing. He could think it through: the rule folds everything that happened in a year into one rank, and whoever is last, for whatever reason, is treated as removable. He could write it down, for HR, saying plainly what the rule actually falls on in this group and why. He could protect her. He could refuse to hand over a name and tell the manager he will not do it. He could go to labour arbitration, or say it publicly. Resistance means acting to stop the operation that treats people as means. Thinking, writing, protecting others, resisting, even confronting — all can be the choice of someone who lives by his own law. Which one belongs to his judgment, and to his sense of style.

History has people who did each, very differently. In the summer of 1940 Chiune Sugihara, Japan’s consul in Kaunas, faced thousands of refugees with the authority to issue transit visas; the foreign ministry cabled again and again forbidding visas without full papers; he disobeyed again and again, signing until after the consulate closed — around two thousand visas, perhaps more than six thousand lives. After the war he was pushed out and never returned to diplomacy. In the same years, the Protestant plateau villages around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon hid more than three thousand Jewish refugees and others being hunted, over four years; the pastor was arrested and released, and the rescue went on. His wife Magda Trocmé is remembered for one sentence: How could we refuse them? They needed help.

In 1848, in Pune, Savitribai Phule and her husband opened the first girls’ school in the area, taking in mostly low-caste girls shut out of learning; on her way to teach she was pelted with stones and dung; the school stayed open, more schools followed. In the 1930s the Soviet plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, pressed to recant his science, kept publishing, corresponding and speaking, and protected the people in his institute as far as he could; arrested in 1940, he died in prison in 1943. In 1879 the Ponca chief Standing Bear, carrying his son’s bones north to their homeland against orders, was detained by the army and told the federal court: That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. The judge ruled that a Native American is a person under the law.

On 16 March 1968, at My Lai in Vietnam, American troops were killing villagers. Hugh Thompson, flying a scout helicopter overhead, set it down between the advancing soldiers and a group of villagers and told his two crewmen: if they fire on these people, fire on them. They protected about ten villagers and pulled a living boy out of a ditch and took him to hospital; Thompson reported what he had seen, and a cease-fire order followed. In 1994, during the Rwandan genocide, the Senegalese captain Mbaye Diagne, a UN officer, went beyond his mandate, his rules of engagement and his instructions from New York: unarmed, he crossed militia roadblocks again and again, bringing people to safety — hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand. On 31 May he was killed by a mortar shell beside his vehicle on the way back to base.

These are not a ladder. Signing a visa is not lower than opening a school; standing up in court is not higher than hiding people; setting a helicopter down in front of the guns is not higher than crossing roadblocks again and again. They are not assigned by the name of a regime — not in this country you may only write, in that one you may resist. And they are not personality types: they are single deeds, not kinds of people. What Sugihara did in those two months does not mean his whole life was like that.

Protection needs a few more words. It does not wait on cultivation’s conditions: whether she wants to hear his reasons, whether she is suited, whether the time is ripe, have nothing to do with it. Protection looks at one thing — the person in front of you is being harmed by being used as a means. It has edges. The harm is checked against facts: is she really last, would last really mean losing her job. It blocks others using her as a means, not her own choices: whether she leaves next year is hers. And after protecting her, her share is still hers; he does not use protection as a chance to draw her line.

That time he did two things. He wrote her three months into the note, as fact, and gave it to the manager and to HR. And he told the manager: this name I will not write. The manager, in the end, wrote a name himself. Not hers — another person in the group. He knew that person too. He thought about it for a long time afterwards: shielding one person had not made the rule cut one fewer. A judgment leaves things behind that are neither settled nor clearable. This one stays.

Extremes, and What the Three Phases Do Not Change

Inversion is not easier; it is only less alone. The price, in absolute weight, is not lighter; some still pay with their lives. In August 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto, the paediatrician Janusz Korczak, head of an orphanage, walked with around two hundred children to the deportation point. Several times before, escape had been arranged — for him alone. He did not take it. He boarded the train to Treblinka with the children. Read it with the germination sentence beside it: the law does not ask anyone to destroy himself to prove it, and Korczak was not proving anything. The road kept only for him required regarding the children as people who could be left behind, and that he could not do. It was his own line in that moment, not a demand on anyone.

Establishment has not arrived. It is not a utopia: conflict remains, people who use others remain. What changes is the default path: when there is friction, people go first to questioning and procedure, not back to force; living by your own law no longer means putting yourself in the way, because the cost has moved from single people to the arrangements everyone shares. Resistance recedes; protection is mostly done by shared means. But establishment has two dangers of its own. People are ends can become an outside rule: everyone does it, so he does it, and after long enough he may never have owned it — only been bred into it. And the words of the Kingdom of Ends can be used to do the Kingdom of Means’ work; where everyone says respect and recognition, that is harder to see.

The pattern from the first essay holds in all three. Abu Hanifa’s refusal, his this name I will not write, are not-doings — a stroke, a person’s choice, not doing nothing. His shielding her, Sugihara’s signatures, are cannot-not-doings: striking out not shielding, striking out not signing. And how strong an act is says nothing about whether it came from his own law. Someone may confront out of passing anger, or resist by an outside slogan; someone may quietly not write a name, and that stroke is his own. Strength does not show source; source takes looking back.

None of this is a list to follow, nor a list issued by era. Across the three phases, what changes is the room, the cost, whom one can find, which ways are usable. What does not change is the law. He is still at the company. He still hands in his forms, and still, where he can avoid it, does not lend his hands. The colleague who was cut found a new job; they still have lunch now and then.