The power of lists

From our What Makes us Human series.

Lists do.

They are everywhere, and we often hold them in low esteem. If that's not proof of their importance, what is?

Some of the very earliest examples of "civilization" are lists of goods and livestock. The ten or so commandments are a list. We make shopping lists all the time. To establish social significance, we have an A-list, a B-list, down all the way to the Z-list, the latter pronounced ze list, which is what many a German native speaker calls any list in English.

Being on some lists is desirable, being on others not so much.

There are the recently famous lists you really do not want to be on, any list that has the word "watch" in its name, for instance. Or those called "kill lists" by the US and international media. They are the Kafka-style lists: no one person seems to know how you get on one, and getting off of one alive seems near impossible.

TheEditor refused to include a cheap shot at bullet lists, insisting on the adolescent nature of such a joke and instead pointing out that even the medium of this post, a blog is really nothing but an fancy list of pieces of text.

The K-Landnews team maintains several lists of its own, the sh*tlist of companies we avoid being the most nefarious.

Santa Claus - who we can mention again in a post because it is already mid-August - allegedly keeps a list, as does the Mormon Church.

Bands, nightclubs, concert promoters have lists that get you in for free or in at all.

Every single delivery from the internet is accompanied by a list. An ever increasing amount of information is being stored in digital lists, which we decided to call databases for added commercial punch.

Philosophically and practically, the lists we do not make are just as important as the ones we make. If no one maintains a list of people killed in everyday gun violence, we can plausibly claim that we are more peaceful than we might if someone waved a long list at us.

The power of one list may be informed, amplified or nullified by another list, so separating lists or bringing them together has been one of the most crucial political games through history.

Just look at today's news and ask yourself: which of the news items is at least in part about discrediting a list?

TheEditor has its* own story about a powerful list: "We got a new Chief, best buddy of a government Secretary. The first thing the new Chief did? Make a list. Everybody above a certain status or salary level was put on the list, the very existence of which was kept confidential. There were two main criteria they looked at, one, how well you performed your job, two, how well your world view matched that embodied by the new Chief. I was rated excellent but very independent. Note the but. How I found out? Funny thing, really. I was waiting in the office of the administrative assistant for a chat the Chief wanted to have, the door to the Chief's office was not closed all the way, and I heard him and his right hand man talk about me. I have never seen a deeper purple face than that of the right hand man when he came out of the room and saw me sit there."

So, the next time you encounter a list, even if it lists only the groceries you just bought, reflect for a second before you throw it away.

* TheEditor decided to take gender neutrality to the reasonable conclusion.