Dear Nikola,

When I ended my letter to you I was on the point of pontificating about citizenship as a species of herd membership, an important, and I believe much overlooked topic. I hardly know where to begin. The trope of man being uniquely apart from and "above" the animals, derives of course from Genesis:

Genesis 1:25

“And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”

Genesis 1:26

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

The Bible stipulates that "beast(s) of the earth" were created in classes (after (their) kind), but man was made as an individual, in the image of the primary and ultimate individual: God.  (Eve, we should note, was created from Adam as an afterthought.) I haven't given the matter enough consideration to account how the descendants of Abraham came to be God's Chosen People, the People of Israel. It was as a group that they danced around the Golden Calf, and the Sodomites sinned en Masse, but most of the interactions described in the Bible were individual human beings wrestling with the divine individual or his angels (agents). I interpret the Passion of Jesus as symbolic for the conflict between the society and the god, or, if you prefer between the society and the divine in man. Elections with popular votes are not the solution. The only election described in the Bible that comes to mind was staged by Pilate: (Matthew 27)

20 But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus.

21 The governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas.

22 Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified.

23 And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified.

24 When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.

25 Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

26 Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

That was an election with a monumentally disappointing result.

It is, I think, worthy of note, that "ethical" responsibility in the New Testament is entirely that of the individual. Keep in mind in all its details, the Sermon on the Mount, while addressed to a crowd on the mountainside does not mandate a public policy, not Medicare or Medicaid, not the right to bear arms, not freedom of speech or religion.  The Sermon on the Mount mandates not social, but individual action. 

Reviewing Kant's Categorical Imperative as compliance with universal law, I note that a law is a social contract in words, binding on all members of a group, and that Kant relies on generalities, such as the requirements to act so that the maxim of ones action could become universal law, and that the other human being affected should never serve as a means to an end, but only as the end himself.  But Kant offers no other guidance as to whom I should vote for.

If I voted, I would do so not from any conviction that what I was doing was effective in promoting what is right or necessary or just or good.  I would vote only not to distance myself from members of my family, and perhaps from some friend who believed that voting was an important civic and moral duty. I myself would consider it an empty symbolic act, because a) the statistical probability of my vote having any practical consequence is accurately measurable, and it is so low as to be meaningless; and because b) I could not anticipate how, if I were the official whom my vote helped to elect, I would act in a specific instance.  Like all my actions, what I did would flow not from a prescribed formula, from apolicity or a platform, but from an intuitive apperception of the likely consequences of the action in issue. It is very unlikely that the decisions of my elected representative would coincide with what I would do.  Clearly, the behavior of one candidate would be preferable to the other. Should I then vote for the lesser of two evils? In Germany in 1936 some of my father's patients justified their vote for Hitler with the excuse: "Wir haben es nur getan um Schlimmeres zu verhueten." "We only did it to prevent something worse." Schlimmeres, the greater evil, were the Bolsheviks.

Most if not all of the political issues that I discern on the horizon seem to me to be insoluble. I have access to neither the data, nor the reasoning nor the algorithms on the basis of which climate scientists predict our demise. But for the sake of argument, and to avoid the stigma of being a climate change sceptic, I assume that those dire predictions are valid.  The United States 2020 population is estimated at 331,002,651 people at mid year according to UN data. The United States population is equivalent to 4.25% of the total world population. Therefore, assuming that atmospheric contamination is a linear function of population, the total reduction of US atmospheric contamination, would reduce world-wide contamination by only 4.25%. In order to achieve its goal of total elimination of such contamination, the US would in addition need to coerce or destroy 95.75% of the world's population, no fewer than 7,355,561,439 souls. That's beyond anything even Stephen Miller has suggested to Donald Trump, at least as of now.  Whatever the conscious intent of Greta Thunberg's disciples, the practical effect of their exhortations is the demand that the 331,002,651 US inhabitants subject themselves to an ineffectual herd project of the climate controllers' design. I have no objection to that design, other than to contemplate with equanimity, its ineffectiveness and its lack of logic.

The obvious challenge is to learn - and to teach - how to come to terms with, how to manage, insoluble problems. I have no advisory generalization. I can only contemplate individual situations. 

EJM