“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The President at the time, and through all of his life before (pause), was at heart a stern, repressed idealist of a rather conventionally religious kind. He believed in an idealized good, while believing most firmly and simultaneously that man was fatally flawed (loudly), filled with evil, more naturally given to bad rather than good intent. He believed in the absolute necessity of power, while convinced at the same time that he did not possess it; and further, he believed that in the most basic terms the individual was powerless to alter the devastating march of evil and corruption that he saw within the country, and in all the other countries of the world. No matter how much power he achieved, it seemed to him that others had more — other people, other groups, other countries — but their power he saw as evil. For while he believed in the existence of an idealized good, he felt that the wicked were powerful and the good were weak and without vigor.

It is obvious to most others that such paranoid views are not based on mass fact. (Pause.) Your President at that time, however, had at his command vast information, so that he was aware of many groups and organizations that did not agree with his policies. He used those as in other circumstances a paranoid might use the sight of a police car to convince himself that he was being pursued by the police, or the FBI or whatever. The President felt threatened — and not only personally threatened, for he felt that the good for which he stood in his own mind was in peril (intently). And again, since the idealized good seemed too remote and difficult to achieve, any means was justified. Those who followed him, in the Cabinet and so forth, possessed the same kinds of characteristics to some degree or another.

(“As you learn to trust your natural impulses, they introduce you to your individual sense of power, so that you realize that your own actions do have meaning, that you do affect events, and that you can see some definite signs that you are achieving good ends. The idealized goal isn’t as remote, then, because it is being expressed. Even if that expression is by means of steps, you can point toward it as an accomplishment. Previously we distrusted our own impulses to such an extent that they often appeared in very distorted form.”