A Superseding Kindness

There's a photograph from 1940 that shows papers flying from a train window—not scattered by accident, but thrown deliberately to reaching hands below. They weren't just documents; they were handwritten visas, each one a life saved. The man throwing them had written so many that his fingers had blistered and bled. When you understand the context of the image, you realize that it captures something essential about the difference between being nice and being kind. Nice was about keeping everyone comfortable. Kind was about keeping everyone alive.

Hold that thought.

We spend enormous energy teaching children to "be nice"—to share their toys, avoid conflict, say please and thank you, never make anyone uncomfortable. And mostly, this works. Politeness oils the gears of civilization. Nobody wants to raise the kid who cuts in line at the water fountain or tells Aunt Martha what they really think of her tuna casserole. But niceness, that agreeable social lubricant we prize so highly, can become its own kind of tyranny. Real kindness—the sort worth passing down through generations—sometimes requires us to be decidedly not nice at all.

George Orwell learned this lesson at the wrong end of a rifle in colonial Burma. As a young police officer stationed there in the 1920s, he was summoned to deal with an elephant that had broken free during a bout of "must"—a period of aggressive behavior—and killed a man. By the time Orwell arrived with his elephant rifle (a weapon he'd never actually used for its stated purpose), the danger had passed. The elephant stood peacefully in a field, pulling up bunches of grass and eating them with the methodical contentment of a creature whose violent moment had passed. Orwell knew immediately that killing it would be wrong—the animal was valuable, no longer dangerous, and obviously calm.

But a crowd had gathered. Two thousand Burmese faces watched him, waiting for the show. They expected their colonial officer to demonstrate British authority, to provide free entertainment on an otherwise dull morning. Orwell felt their expectations pressing down on him like tropical heat.

"I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly," he wrote. To turn away would be to appear weak, indecisive—not the done thing for a representative of the Empire. The crowd wanted him to be agreeable to their expectations. So he raised his rifle.

The elephant died slowly, horribly. Orwell fired shot after shot, watching the great beast's agony, knowing with each pull of the trigger that he was committing an act of senseless cruelty. But he was being “nice,” in a conforming sense—maintaining order, meeting expectations, keeping the peace. He was being polite to the social dynamics of colonial authority. "I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool," he reflected.

His niceness satisfied the crowd but destroyed something in himself. "When…man turns tyrant," he wrote, "it is his own freedom that he destroys." He'd become a puppet dancing to social expectations, killing an innocent creature because disappointing people felt worse than doing wrong.

Just a few years later, five thousand miles away, another government official faced a crowd with very different expectations. Chiune Sugihara, Japanese consul in Lithuania, woke on a July morning in 1940 to find hundreds of Jewish refugees gathered outside his consulate. They'd fled Nazi-occupied Poland with whatever they could carry. Lithuania had just been annexed by the Soviet Union. The world's doors were slamming shut like dominoes falling backward.

The refugees had discovered a bureaucratic loophole that sounds almost comic in its complexity: the Dutch colony of Curaçao required no entry visa, just permission from the governor to land—permission they'd never actually get, but that was beside the point. If Sugihara would grant them transit visas through Japan, they could at least escape Europe, figure out the rest later. But there was a problem. Japanese regulations were crystal clear: no transit visas without proof of final destination and sufficient funds. These desperate families had neither. They had, in many cases, the clothes on their backs and children in their arms.

Sugihara wired Tokyo for permission to help them. The response was a masterpiece of bureaucratic politeness: "CONCERNING TRANSIT VISAS REQUESTED PREVIOUSLY STOP ADVISE ABSOLUTELY NOT TO BE ISSUED ANY TRAVELER NOT HOLDING FIRM END VISA WITH GUARANTEED DEPARTURE EX JAPAN STOP NO EXCEPTIONS STOP NO FURTHER INQUIRIES EXPECTED STOP."

That last line—"NO FURTHER INQUIRIES EXPECTED"—is the diplomatic equivalent of "and don't ask again." It's the nice way to say no. The polite way to condemn thousands to death.

Sugihara wired again. And again. Three times he asked; three times he was refused, each rejection more tersely polite than the last. The message was clear: be agreeable, follow protocol, maintain order. Be nice. The crowd outside grew larger, more desperate. Unlike Orwell's crowd, they weren't expecting a show—they were begging for their lives.

Here's where niceness would have looked perfectly reasonable. A nice diplomat would have expressed deep sympathy, explained the regulations with genuine regret, perhaps even shed a tear as he closed the consulate doors. He would have maintained the polite fiction that rules exist for good reasons, that order must be preserved, that his hands were tied. He might have even slept that night.

Sugihara didn't sleep. He spent an entire night wrestling with the choice between being agreeable and being kind. He'd been raised in the strict traditions of Japanese obedience, where being agreeable to authority was not just nice but sacred. His samurai mother had taught him loyalty and duty. His entire career had been built on being professionally nice—the oil in the diplomatic machine.

"I could have refused to issue them," he wrote later. "But would that have truly been in Japan's national interest?" It's a fascinating question. He's asking whether his nation's true interest lay in maintaining polite diplomatic relations or in being kind to desperate humans. He chose kindness.

The next morning, Sugihara began writing visas. For the next month, he wrote transit visas for eighteen to twenty hours a day. His wife would massage his hands each night, working out the cramps that seized his fingers. When Jewish families lacked even basic travel documents, he invented paperwork from thin air. When September came and the Soviets ordered the consulate closed, Sugihara kept writing. As his family boarded the train for Berlin, he was still stamping documents, still signing his name. Through the train window, even as it pulled away from the platform, he threw those last precious visas to reaching hands—that photograph that captures kindness in motion.

In total, Sugihara wrote 2,139 visas. Since entire families traveled on single documents, historians estimate he saved six thousand lives. Some calculate that forty thousand people alive today owe their existence to those blistered fingers, those sleepless nights, that singular decision to stop being diplomatically nice.

The consequences came swiftly. When Sugihara returned to Japan in 1947, he was dismissed from diplomatic service. The official reason was "downsizing"—a perfectly nice way to destroy a career. For the next two decades, Japan's former rising star sold light bulbs door to door. He worked as a part-time translator. He took whatever job would feed his family. He never spoke of the visas. Nice people don't bring up the time they weren't nice.

His own son, Nobuki, didn't know what his father had done until 1968, when a phone call came from the Israeli embassy. A diplomat named Joshua Nishri was looking for Chiune Sugihara. When they met, Nishri pulled out a yellowed paper—one of those flying visas. "We have been looking for you for years," he said. "My father spoke of you until the day he died. You saved our lives."

This is the arithmetic of kindness versus niceness: Orwell's agreeable moment killed one elephant and haunted one man for the remainder of his life. Sugihara's refusal to be agreeable saved thousands and created generations.

Consider what each man faced. Orwell confronted social embarrassment, the possibility of looking foolish before people who already thought him foolish. Sugihara faced the destruction of his career, poverty for his family, disgrace in a culture where honor and obedience meant everything. Yet it was Orwell who buckled under the lighter weight. The difference? Orwell was trying to be nice—to maintain order, to be agreeable, to keep everyone comfortable. Sugihara had decided to be kind—to disrupt order, to be disagreeable, to make everyone profoundly uncomfortable in service of life itself.

The distinction matters because every generation must learn it anew. The pressure to be nice—to go along, to avoid waves, to keep everyone comfortable—never disappears. It simply changes costume. It looks like staying quiet when someone tells a cruel joke because you don't want to be "that person." It looks like avoiding the difficult conversation because it might ruin dinner. It looks like following rules that hurt people because, well, rules are rules and we should be agreeable about them.

Meanwhile, kindness often appears rude, disruptive, even hostile to the social order. The teacher who gives the failing grade that forces a student to genuinely learn isn't being nice. The friend who refuses to enable addiction isn't being polite. The doctor who delivers a harsh diagnosis isn't being agreeable. The diplomat who defies his government to save strangers is being positively disagreeable. But they are all being kind.

Here's what those flying visas tell us: kindness isn't about feelings or attitudes but about action, often costly action. It's not the comfortable virtue we package for children's books but the uncomfortable choice adults face when niceness and righteousness diverge. Sometimes being kind means being the difficult person in the room, the one who won't go along with the comfortable consensus, who makes everyone squirm by pointing out what nice people politely ignore.

Forty thousand people exist today because one man chose to be kind instead of nice. Against them, we might set all the elephants killed by agreeableness, all the cruelties committed to keep the peace, all the injustices preserved by politeness.

The choice between nice and kind faces us in small moments and grand ones, and I would argue it presents itself to us more often than we realize. Usually, thankfully, they align—we can be both nice and kind, polite and good, agreeable and righteous. But when they diverge, when maintaining comfort conflicts with doing right, those flying visas remind us which to choose.

Nice keeps the peace. Kind changes the world. The difference is written in calloused fingers and generations that exist because one man decided it was better to be difficult than agreeable, better to be kind than nice.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

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John Conrad