“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Why do you have laws? You may follow it with that. Are laws made to protect life, to protect property, to establish order, to punish transgressors? Are laws made to protect man from his own cunning and chicanery? In short, are laws made to protect man from his own “basically criminal nature”?

Are laws made to protect man from the self as it is generally outlined by Freud and Darwin? Man had laws, however, far earlier. Are laws made then to protect man from his “sinful nature”? (Pause.) If you were all “perfect beings,” would you need laws at all? Do laws define what is unacceptable, or do they hint of some perhaps undifferentiated, barely sensed, more positive issues? Are laws an attempt to limit impulses? Do they represent society’s mass definitions of what behavior is acceptable and what is not?

What is the difference between a crime and a sin, as most of you think of those terms? Can the state punish you for a sin? It certainly can punish you for a crime. Is the law a reflection of something else — a reflection of man’s inherent search toward the ideal, and its actualization? When does the law act as a practical idealist? Why do you sneer so when politicians show their feet of clay?

(Pause in a forceful delivery.) You may begin to exaggerate the gulf between this generalized ideal and the specific evidences of man’s “greed and corruption” that you see so obviously about you. You may begin to concentrate upon your own lacks, and in your growing sense of dissatisfaction it may seem to you that most men are driven by a complete lack of good intent.

Most criminals act out of a sense of despair. Many have high ideals, but ideals that have never been trusted or acted upon. They feel powerless, so that many strike out in self-righteous anger or vengeance against a world that they see as cynical, greedy, perverted. They have concentrated upon the great gaps that seem to exist between their ideals of what man should be, and their ideas of what man is.