Ranked on the Big Screen

He has been with this company for almost twenty years. This year a new general manager arrived, and in his first month put up an efficiency dashboard: every report each person turned in each week, scored on quantity, punctuality and how often it was cited, hung on the big screen in the office, ranked from top to bottom.

Most of its data came from page one of each report — who made it, when the basis changed, how many changes. That page was the rule he and the other team’s head had pushed through the whole company. Stating the basis was meant to keep readers from being led astray. Now it was material for ranking the people who make reports. He looked at the screen and thought for a long time: all these years, did any of it do any good?

This time the one who stood up was not him. The new hire from the sixth essay now leads a group. In the dashboard’s second week, the new hire said at a meeting that his group’s names would not be fed into it.

A Direction, Not a Requisition

The framework calls the whole road from the Kingdom of Means toward the Kingdom of Ends a phase transition, borrowing water turning to ice: not all at once at one temperature, but step by step across a window. The three phases are germination, inversion, establishment. Its judgment is that the road is coming closer; how fast is something people choose; and it is not a matter of each generation being better than the last — particular periods can go backwards.

He is in it. Stating the basis on his reports, not writing that young colleague’s name on the list, pushing a rule through the company with another person: all of it faced the same way as that larger movement. That is his share. And the joining has a direction that cannot be reversed.

After the dashboard went up, a colleague came to see him. She didn’t accept it either. You’re the most senior; you have to stand up. We have to make this company a place that treats people as people again. This is big. Put your personal worries aside for now. The direction she spoke of, he accepts. The second half of her sentence, he does not. The movement toward treating people as ends is something many can face together; being good does not give it the right to requisition him. A person drafted for a larger picture — whatever the picture is called — is, at that moment, being used as a means. For your good, for the collective, for history: however good the reason, imposed on a person from outside, the act is still colonization. Whether he stood up later was his judgment. The larger picture had no right to make it for him.

A Limited Share

He asked whether it had done any good, and meant it. In the years the rule held, readers were led astray far less often, and young report-makers carried other people’s errors far less often. That is true. That the same page is now used to rank people is also true. He could not decide what the rule was later used for; alone, he could not decide where the company went, still less an era. Not deciding the macroscopic outcome does not take the meaning out of what was done at the time. Every reader not misled, every error not carried in those years, did not become something that never happened because a dashboard arrived later.

In 1923 Deskaheh, speaker of the Cayuga in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, went to the League of Nations in Geneva carrying a passport issued by his own people, to ask for international recognition of his people as a self-governing polity. Canada and Britain blocked it; the League did not take it up. When he came back in 1924, the Canadian government had dissolved the traditional council at Grand River. He went into exile on a reservation in New York State and died there in 1925, never returning home. Writing of this, the moral-law series says expressly that it does not claim the international outcome was a success; what it records is the deed itself. The ruling Standing Bear won in 1879 was later partly walked back in American law; the ruling of that year still holds as an event.

The other side is blocked too: do not inflate any act into something bound to change the world. Their rule didn’t; Deskaheh’s journey didn’t. The weight of a deed is not proved by whether it changes the world. Imagining each of your acts as a link in history will crush a person, and push him toward things done only to seem weighty. So separate two things: the share he can bear, which is his and done once done; and the shared outcome he cannot control, which many people walk out together over many years, and no one carries alone.

Later the colleague said: we need to train a few more like the new hire, so we can push the dashboard back. Two things in that he does not accept. He is not fuel for this. The fifth essay said his woodwork need not prove itself useful to his job; the same holds here: how a person’s own value unfolds need not first prove itself useful to the larger movement. In 1898, after the reform failed and others fled abroad, Tan Sitong stayed, and was arrested and executed. Among the words he left: reform everywhere had come through bloodshed, no one in China had yet shed blood for it, and if someone must, let it begin with me, Tan Sitong. The moral-law series reads only the structure of that sentence: taken literally, it makes one’s own life a means to awaken others. It says expressly that this is no verdict on the man or on his weight in history. And others are not contributors in training. Savitribai Phule’s school stood beside schools opened for national strength, for political mobilisation, for developing labour; the others saw girls as future usable force; she faced these girls, shut out of school, themselves. The new hire stood up this time because his own law owned it. It is not a reserve someone trained.

The Big Picture Waits; the Person in Front of You Does Not

The framework has a sentence this essay quotes directly: Macroscopic phase transition requires waiting, but microscopic recognition is never delayed. The big picture waits. Where a company goes, an industry, an era, is the work of many people over many years; someone who lives by his own law cannot replace that waiting with force. Waiting is not doing nothing: it is self-preservation, mutual illumination, bearing witness, cultivation, keeping roads open — only not forcing anyone.

The person in front of you does not wait. In the dashboard’s third week the one ranked last was an analyst six months into the job. He went to see her that afternoon, asked how she was, told her how the ranking on that screen was calculated — what went in and what didn’t. That did not wait for the company to get better. But not waiting is not cultivation disregarding timing. He did not use the moment to give her a speech urging her to oppose the dashboard too; whether she wanted to hear, was suited to, whether the time was right, he could not answer for her. Acknowledging her as a person was there at once. Where her own law grows is hers.

The seventh essay told of Savitribai Phule, who with her husband opened a girls’ school in Pune in 1848: the caste system there was not something their generation could change, and they did not wait. Le Chambon did not wait for the war to end before hiding people. Mbaye Diagne, in Rwanda in 1994, did not wait for the rules to change, nor for the killing to end; twenty years later the UN Security Council created a medal for exceptional courage in his name. And one more sentence: present people and relationships are not transitional material for the future. That analyst is not a number to be endured until some future day the company is better; the readers not misled in those years were not test subjects for a rule. The big picture waits, and every person passed in the waiting is already an end.

What Is Being Guarded

The day the new hire said he would not feed in names, someone asked: what are you guarding? Guarding does not wait for the phase transition to finish. Any mutual recognition that has already formed may need guarding — a few people in a group dealing seriously with one another, a rule that keeps report-makers from carrying others’ errors, a village’s years-long agreement to hide strangers. In germination what can be guarded is tiny. In inversion, many can guard together, and the moral-law series gives such guarding a criterion: a group does not trade people from outside for its own safety. It imagines someone telling a village, hand over ten refugees and the whole village will be spared; a group that looks only to itself would hand them over. Le Chambon’s record meets the criterion: the pastor was arrested, and the village went on hiding people. In establishment, guarding is still needed: what has become the default can go backwards.

What is guarded is people not being reduced to means again — not the survival of an organisation or a form. After Johannes Post was executed, Nieuwlande went on hiding people; the village was not guarding a coordinator, nor a method, but the people in its houses. The new hire was guarding neither that basis rule nor the long-dissolved data group, but the people in his group, not being hung on a big screen and ranked each week as a number.

Protection at the scale of a group keeps the edges it had for one person, and adds three. Do not trade others for this group’s peace: had the new hire kept his group off the board by handing in another group’s names, it would no longer be protection. Check the facts, now for a group: he first went to HR and confirmed that the rankings would feed the year-end review, and the review would feed renewal; the harm was real, and some of it irreversible. And after protecting them, where the group goes is its own business: two people in his group wanted to see their own scores, and he didn’t stop them; what he withheld was only names for ranking on the screen.

Guarding has two faces. One faces out: the dashboard came from outside, a way of treating people as numbers. The other faces in, and is harder to see: treating people as means can grow on the guarding side too, under names like efficiency, solidarity, development, security. The seventh and eighth essays told of Hugh Thompson at My Lai, setting his helicopter down between the soldiers and the villagers: the people he blocked were his own side. That is what makes guarding inward hard — block your own, and your own will say you have gone over to the other side. In the dashboard’s second month, the people against it drew up a list of managers who had backed it at meetings, meaning to post it to the whole company’s group chat so everyone could see who they were. A dozen had already signed. They came to the new hire. He didn’t sign. The dashboard hangs people up for everyone to see, he said. So does this list. What we’re against is exactly hanging people up. The war treatise calls the shape mirror assimilation: to guard against the other side, becoming bit by bit like the other side. Here it is at personal scale.

Those who held that face have left words. André Trocmé: we will resist without fear, but also without pride and without hate — three withouts that lock resistance and keep it from turning into a political identity. The British nurse Edith Cavell, who helped Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium in the First World War and refused to buy leniency by cooperating, was executed in 1915; her last words are recorded as Patriotism is not enough and I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone. And guarding is not freezing. The form can change: the new hire and some group leads proposed that basis notes still be written, but the maker’s name come off page one, kept in the system for whoever needs to check the basis. To guard the people the rule was meant to protect, the rule itself changed. The guard’s own tools can become the thing to guard against: those against the dashboard later set up a committee demanding every group declare a position. The new hire didn’t join that either.

Back to the Person, and the Close

Guarding lands, in the end, on one person. Not handing over judgment to we decided together: a dozen names on that list did not replace the new hire’s own. Not possessing others with I contributed: someone later told him, the new hire was yours; some of this is yours. He remembered the sixth essay — how the new hire sees things was owned by the new hire’s own law; giving conditions does not make you the one who took that step. That strength is the new hire’s. Not cancelling acknowledgment of a concrete person for a shared ideal: the general manager who pushed the dashboard is also a person; opposing the dashboard is not judging him unworthy. Standing Bear owned not the concept of legal personhood but his living people and his son’s wish to be buried at home. However large an ideal, it comes down to concrete people.

Promoting and guarding are one law unfolding in two situations. Stating the basis, not writing that name, pushing a rule with another person — those years he was promoting. What the new hire did this time was guarding. Acknowledging people as ends while promoting; not letting them be reduced to means again while guarding: one thing.

And here the series ends. Looking back, one sentence runs through all nine: hold to anti-colonization inwardly; strive for cultivation outwardly. The first essay set the pattern. The second to the fifth: a person not handing himself over — not doing what others use to colonise him, seeing his own cannot-not, looking back at whether the line was his, owning what he did not manage, unfolding his own value. The sixth: not taking others as his own. The seventh to the ninth: living with many people — in mixed places, doing things together without merging, guarding recognition once formed so that no we swallows anyone. The two halves are not the front and back of the series; they are two threads all the way through. The further a person goes toward others, the less he can do without anti-colonization; the more he wants to cultivate others, the more he turns back to ask whether his own law is his. Both trace to one acknowledgment: oneself is an end, and others are ends too.

No higher subject is set up at the end. No we, no era, no history stands above these people and legislates for them. The phase transition is a direction many can walk together; the ones walking are always single people. Nor does the series close with a finished picture: establishment has not arrived, and when it does it will not be utopia; what has formed can go backwards. The stance it gives is the author’s own; the reader is his own legislator.

He retired later. The dashboard is still there; it has been revised twice. The new hire still leads that group. After retiring, he still does woodwork on the balcony. The piece in his hands isn’t finished.