One office at two temperatures. When the one who holds expects enough to go around, the decision about who is kept presents as rescue. When he expects scarcity, the same decision presents as triage.
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The savior and the one who discards are described as opposites. One is generous and the other is cruel, one funds the clinic and the other closes it, and the difference between them is taken to be a difference in character.
They sit in the same seat. Each decides, from where he sits, who will be kept. The rescuer decides who is reached. The one running triage decides who is let go. Both decisions are made by the party holding what the others need, and neither is made by the ones being decided about.
Rescue and triage are not opposite dispositions. They are one office, and what changes between them is the holder's forecast, not the holder.
[See THE SINCERE REFORMER · THE MENU OF BOOTS]
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THE HOUSEHOLD HELD BOTH
The two faces have appeared under one roof, in the same year, and the record is dated.
In May 1913 the State of New York chartered the Rockefeller Foundation, an instrument for the well-being of mankind. In April 1914 National Guardsmen and guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron, a company the same family part-owned, attacked the tent colony at Ludlow, and eleven children and two women died in a pit beneath a tent.
The rescue office was chartered first. Nobody in that household had to change character to hold both, because both were the same position, held over different people.
When the benefactor and the company that shot the strikers share an owner, the question of whether the owner is good or cruel has stopped being the useful question.
[See THE LUDLOW CHARTER · PHILANTHRO-SOVEREIGNTY]
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THE HAND THAT OPENS IS THE HAND THAT CLOSES
Generosity is a grip loosened by the one who holds, on terms he sets, and what he loosened he may close again.
That is the whole mechanism of the turn. The hand that decides to give is the hand that can decide to stop, and nothing about the hand changes when it does. A foundation that sets its payout, a company that sets its benefits, a donor who sets the conditions of the gift: each is holding an opening that it controls, and closing it requires no new power.
The power was never the giving. It was the deciding, and triage is only the deciding done with the hand closed.
[See GIVINGNESS · THE HATRED OF THE NEEDING]
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RESCUE BUILDS THE STANDING TRIAGE SPENDS
The one who sets out to save the world has claimed the office of deciding its fate.
Rescue accumulates what triage later uses. The convening, the seat at the head of the table, the public trust, the standing to say what the problem is and what counts as solving it. All of it is earned during the warm years, and all of it is real, and none of it is surrendered when the forecast darkens.
So when the holder comes to believe that not everyone will make it, he does not need a new warrant to decide who will. The warrant was issued while he was saving them. The rescuer is not the opposite of the one who discards. The rescuer is where the authority to discard was built.
[See AMPLIFICATION · THE COST TELL]
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THE RIVER
In 1975 the medical sociologist John McKinlay retold a story from his colleague Irving Zola. A doctor stands on the bank of a fast river, hears a drowning man, and pulls him out. Then another, and another, until he is so busy pulling people from the water that he never has time to see “who the hell is upstream pushing them all in.”
The story is usually told for its moral: go upstream. And the moral is right as far as it reaches.
But upstream is not a place a rescuer walks to and looks at. There is a factory there, and the factory has an owner, a permit, and a right to discharge into the river that somebody issued. The boats on the bank and the factory upstream can belong to one household. Going upstream is not a walk. It is a permit, and a permit is a jurisdiction that someone already holds the power to refuse.
[See WALLACH v. TOWN OF DRYDEN · HOME RULE FOR THE SOUL · SACRIFICE ZONES]
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WHAT THE FIXER COUNTS
The work of the rescuer is measured in the people pulled out. Lives reached, meals served, families housed, children enrolled. The numbers are true and every one of them is a person.
Now close the factory. Nobody falls in. The count of people pulled from the river drops towards zero, and every instrument built to measure the rescue records the drop as decline: fewer served, less reached, lower impact.
A measure of rescues counts a closed factory as a failure, which is why a fixer paid by that measure can do honest work for a lifetime without once being rewarded for asking about the factory.
[See GOODHART'S LAW · CESSATION]
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WHAT THIS IS NOT
The person in the river needs to be pulled out, today, by whoever is standing on the bank. Nothing here argues against the boat or against the one rowing it, who is usually sincere and often exhausted.
What is refused is the office that holds the boat and the permit in one hand. The person drowning needs the rescue. She does not need the rescue to be how the one upstream decides what she is worth.
[See THE ROMANCE PLOT · THE RELIEF IS THE POSITION]
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The savior and the fascist are not two kinds of people who take turns running the world.
They are one seat, warm while there is enough and cold when there is not, and the people in the river have been decided about in both seasons by someone who was never in the water.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
