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     When I think about it critically, I realize
that it is ambiguous to say that I act voluntarily.
For example, it is impossible for me to "decide"to
speak French, if I am unfamiliar with the language,
or to "decide" to play a given musical instrument,
the harpsichord or the violin, for example, if I
have not previously "learned" to play them. Indeed,
when I contemplate the educational scene, it is
obvious that much "training" or "education" is 
needed to enable one to undertake many if not all
significant "voluntary" actions; and in the light
of this recognition, the notion that I, - or for
that matter anyone else, - acts by virtue of free
will, acts voluntarily, - seems implausible to the
point of being ridiculous.

     All this as a preface to a consideration of the
nature of social or political action. On first thought,
plans, statements, declarations and laws play so
prominent a role in public life, that one might argue
that communal action is fundamentally different from
individual action; that communal action corresponds to
the verbal formulas that prescribe it, while individual
action springs from the unconscious or subconscious
mind as an expression not of what one states one will
do, but rather as an expression of ones character as it
is revealed in a given situation.

     That such a formula is inadequate to explain
public or communal action is immediately apparent from
examples of theatre, dance and especially music. As the
individual cannot "will" to play an instrument unless
he has learned to play it by years of practice, so a
dance company, a theatre troupe, a symphony orchestra,
a string quartet, a musical chorus, must acquire
proficiency by practice before it is able to put on a
performance.  Arguably adaptations and accommodations
such as make possible, for example, musical
performances by the choir or the orchestra, also obtain
to one degree or another in the activities of private
or governmental organizations, and this is the case
even where the adaptation or accommodation is
inapparent and or non-verbal.

     Language in the form of laws, regulations,
directives, instructions, descriptions enters into
communal action not as the entire, and perhaps not even
as the primary incentive to action.  More specifically,
language is the pre-eminent instrument of
communication, and as such it creates the similarity or
uniformtity of thought and intuition that make the
concerted action of the group first feasible, and in
the end, inevitable.  Ultimately the actions of the
"body politic" express an otherwise undefined and
unarticulated community of thought and feeling that is
quite analogous to the unconscious or subconscious out
of which individual actions arise.

     Perhaps it is unconscious imitation and adaptation
which leads to communal action.

     With this account of the nature of public action,
one may once more consider methods and techniques, both
static and dynamic, by which the deplorably
unsatisfactory performance of public institutions may
be improved.

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Copyright 2007, Ernst Jochen Meyer
