“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The detective and his criminal wear versions of the same mask. Following such ideas, you end up with segregations in which the ill, being powerless, are isolated; the criminals are kept together; and the old are held in institutions or in cultural ghettos with their own kind. Transferences of personal problems are all involved here, and clusters of beliefs.

Unknowingly, the sick often give up their power to act in a healthy manner to the physicians. The doctors accept this mandate since they share the same framework of belief, so the medical profession obviously needs patients as badly as the ill need the hospitals. Society as you know it, not understanding the nature of normal aggression, considers it violent. The prisons and law enforcement agencies need criminals in the same way that criminals need them, for they operate within the same system of belief. Each accepts violence as a method of behavior and survival. (Pause.) If you do not understand that you create your own reality, then you may assign all good results to a personified god, and need the existence of a devil to explain the undesirable reality. So churches as they now exist in Western society need a devil as well as a god.

You isolate the criminal element, therefore, in an environment in which any compensations are refused. The entire framework of a prison — with its bars — is a constant reminder to the convict of his situation, and reinforces his original difficulty.

As a society you may project it upon the criminal, as a nation upon a foreign country. As an individual you may place this power upon an employer, a labor union, or any other segment of society. In whatever area you choose, though, you will feel relatively weak in comparison with the strength that you have projected outward. You meet your own denied power, you see, whenever you find yourself in a situation where you feel weak in comparison to another person or situation that frightens you.

[...] Many — not all, now — criminals possess the same characteristics you ascribe to heroes, except that the heroes have a means toward the expression of idealism, and specific avenues for that expression. And many criminals find such avenues cut off completely.

[...] In short, are laws made to protect man from his own “basically criminal nature”?

Most criminals act out of a sense of despair. [...]

I do not want to romanticize criminals, or justify their actions. [...]

Now: Dictation: Most criminals, in or out of prison, share a sense of powerlessness and a feeling of resentment because of it. [...]

In the case of criminals and their belief systems, aggression has a positive value. [...]

It may seem that (underlined) impulsive actions run rampant in society, in cultish behavior, for example, or in the behavior of criminals, or on the part of youth, but such activities show instead the power of impulses denied their natural expression, intensified and focused on the one hand into highly ritualized patterns of behavior, and in other areas denied expression.

According to conditions, such a person could be a member of a small cult or the head of a nation, a criminal or a national hero, who claims to act with the authority of God. [...]

[...] Actually, many criminals are motivated by distorted versions of righteousness. [...]

Criminals act out those beliefs to perfection. [...]

—rather than upon any sense of justice, so that in a very basic sense man is considered a natural criminal in the eyes of the law, and more and more laws are then seemingly required, in order to protect man “from himself.” [...]

[...] At least some (underlined) criminals feel that in stealing they are simply righting society’s wrongs. [...]

[...] There were great contrasts in that period, however—deprivation, severest economic conditions, a spareness of attitude, set off by the greatest criminal activity, the wildest of parties. [...]

[...] It may seem that the retribution of law holds societies together and keeps, for example, criminal elements down, so that you have operating processes that insure more or less stable living conditions. [...]

Students go to schools, patients go to doctors, criminals go to jail. [...]