Dear Marion,

One key to the conundrum which I defined in my "We
ought to vote in Green Cove" letter is the presumption 
that every thing that I do is my action as an individual,
is the result of my "decision" and of my "free will."
Isn't that the very essence of democracy, that each
of us is free to exercise her/his will to vote for
whom she pleases? It is a crime to lobby or to campaign
or to try to exercise any influence on the free will of
the voter within 100 feet of the polling booth. You or
I have the right to express our own "free will", free
to vote for whomever we choose. It's an individual 
decision for each one of us.  That's correct, isn't it?

But the most miniscule of introspections suggests to me
that at least what _I_ do is not a matter of my "free will".
Granted that I anticipate much of what I do, and that I am
concurrently aware of my action. But my awareness and my
anticipation are not themselves objects of awareness and
anticipation.  In other words, I "will" what I do, but I
cannot "will" what I "will", and even less can I will what
I will what I will. (I'm plagiarizing Schopenhauer.) In
other words, with respect to my supposed "free will" I can
discern no chain of causation. The action appears, it's just
there, and the thought that somehow I "willed" or "caused"
what is done by me, is merely that: a thought, an illusion,
a figment of my imagination. It's not just the vote that I
cast, it's also the words that come to mind, that I type into
the computer file, the images of my surroundings, of my houses,
of the towns and counties and cities in which I live, all 
these words and images are latent in my mind, "encoded"
somewhere, somehow in the tissues of my brain, and find their
expression when I speak, when I write, when I walk or drive
around the neighborhood, none of them selected or appointed
by me, none of them expressions or reflections of anything
that might reasonably be called free will.

I love Jello. When I've been real nice and done exactly what I'm
supposed to do, Margaret will reward me with a bowl of Jello. She
likes to put little pieces of fruit, strawberry, blueberry, apple
or peach into the Jello, because the fruit makes the Jello healthier
and it also makes it more interesting. My mind, as I understand it, 
is like the tiniest of blueberries, and a bit shrivelled at that,
buried in a huge bowl of Jello along with thousands, nay millions
of other tiny more or less shrivelled blueberries. It doesn't happen
in our house, but on Olympus in Oerlinghausen, when my grandmother
Elfriede made Jello and my grandfather Joel was meyered in a sour mood,
he would bang his fist on the table; the mass of Jello would shake and
quiver and tremble and each embedded monadic blueberry would tremble
with it, and not only tremble but would tell itself and its fellow
blueberries that it was trembling of its own free will. Now with whom
do you agree: with the blueberry that claims it trembled of its own
free will or with the Court jester Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who said
all the trembling was the expression of a preestablished harmony,
(praestabilierte Harmonie), pre-ordained by the Goddess Elfriede
when she poured the Jello and precipitated by the God Joel when he
banged with his fist. Neither Ernst nor Fritz nor Heinz were permitted
to bang their fists on the table, because as Joel liked to quote at
dinner: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.  In any event, speaking now
as a blueberry, I'm reluctant to claim that the shaking and trembling
to which I feel myself subject is consequence of my decision, of my
doing, of my free will.

Unless we can clean up this mess, and extricate the millions of shrivelled
blueberries from the sticky Jello matrix in which Elfriede and Joel have
trapped them, dry them off and turn them into free-thinking, upstanding
responsible citizens, we'll have to rethink "democracy." Maybe we should
study zoology and learn from the geese that I can see flying in formation
overhead and from the minnows that I can see swimming geometrically aligned
in a school in the pools of White Top Creek. Is it plausible that each of
them should make an autonomous conscious decision to position itself in the
exact location where it flies or swims with its fellows. And even if there
existed, invisible and inscrutable to us, some official procedure manual or
some authorized guidelines by which fish and geese positioned themselves,
is it plausible to argue that each goose, that each silvery minnow makes
a deliberate conscious decision of its own free will to adhere to such a
manual or to abide by such guidelines, each goose and each minnow being
"free" to decide whether or not to comply?

I'm not persuaded. Occam's razor mandates the assumption that geese and
minnows move in concert by virtue not of private, but of common intention.
They move in concert. "Concert" is the Schluesselwort, when one considers
the effort we make, having totally separated, isolated and individualized
ourselves and each other, then to join once more "in concert" to achieve
reintegration into an esthetic community.

6 Go to the ant, thou sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise:
7 which having no guide,
overseer, or ruler,
8 provideth her meat in the summer,
and gathereth her food in the harvest.
_                  Proverbs 6

Assuming it's true that the ant "provideth her meat in the summer,
and gathereth her food in the harvest," does she do so pursuant
to an individual act of free will, or from obedience to some formica
statute or regulation that God laid down for the ants, or that the
ants in formicratic assembly voted to impose on themselves, or does
she do it because she is compelled by some amino acid sequence
in her genes?  Just a question.

Acting or playing in concert relieves one of personal, individual
responsibility for everything except following the conductors baton.
Once communal action has been mentioned, one sees myriad examples:
in language, in politics, in science.  In each instance individual
consciousness merges with that of the community, and subsequently in
turn distinguishes itself from community consciousness. There is
continuing to and fro, hin und her between community and individuality.

On occasion, the tension between community consciousness and individual
consciousness becomes unbearable. That's where the prophet steps in.
Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus of old. Luther, Kierkegaard more recently,
all concerned with redeeming the individual blueberry from the mass of
the Jello. The modern code word is subjectivity, inwardness. When Luther
referred to "Glaube", faith, and identified "Glaube" as the key to 
"salvation", and intended the unconditional relationship to God, he
achieved also the unconditional separation of the individual from society,
a step that would have been fatal, had it not been promptly reversed in a
myriad of ways, most obviously thes unconditional subjection of the newly
"liberated" (cf. Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen) "Lutheran"
Christian to the authority of the local princely tyrant, - or tyrannical
prince, if you prefer. It's worthwhile to note, that Jesus also was not
consistent. He said first, My kingdom is not of this world. The Kingdom
of God is within you. Then he contradicted himself and said in effect,
establish that kingdom which is within you and make it outward: Go into
all the world and teach every creature. And you know where that led: to
Konnarock.

So both you and I are right. As usual, there's no disagreement. We have an
affirmative obligation to be involved, to vote for the best candidate, to
donate to the most patriotic of causes, to become a member of the party,
and of course to wear on ones lapel, the miniature American flag, that
latter-day Parteiabzeichen without which one cannot win the confidence of
the public, to join the army, the police, and even the secret police to
maintain law and order and to keep the country safe, and above all, to
have faith in the manifest destiny of the community from which we are
infact unable to escape, even if that were our wish, to shout and sing:
God Bless America, We are his Chosen People. Aren't we? You believe that,
don't you?  Inevitably and unavoidably there will come a revulsion
against such involvement, a revulsion which sends some as hermits into
the wilderness, and causes others in desperation to try to find their
identity in the works of art that they create. Happy New Year.

Jochen