In a democratic society, the principles of democracy ideally permeate all aspects of society, including correctional and treatment systems. This is especially true in psychology, where we have no coercive power. The only real power we have is that of creating informed choice – giving people information about themselves, the dynamics of violence, and how they make choices. This knowledge can help change their behavioral choices in the future. Emotional intelligence is part of this – the ability not to be driven solely by emotional reactions.

In the United States, approximately 94.4% of all prisoners will be released at some point – back on the streets. Only about 5.6% of all prisoners (currently 1.6 million at any one time in the US) actually die in prison. For this reason, it matters how we treat people while they’re in prison, in treatment, or on probation. At some point, they’ll be free of jurisdiction, and no one will be watching them. Then they may seek revenge for how they’ve been treated by either turning their aggression and anger against themselves or others. While we have people in our grasp, we need to help them get more informed so that they make decisions differently once we release them.

Over the years, corporations like the tobacco companies have blurred the distinction between personal choice and informed choice, making them seem the same when they’re really not. Personal choice is important, but if it isn’t well-informed, it can be disastrous in the long run or even the short run. When a man commits a sex offense, he has made a personal choice, but a poor one. Treatment will hopefully make him more informed so that when he is faced with the same opportunity or decision again, he will make a more informed choice that is likely to be less harmful to himself and others. Withholding crucial information prevents others from making informed choices.

The world of advertising and politics often hooks people rather than selling useful or needed products, believing that the less the average citizen knows about their own core, the easier they are to control and influence. Remember Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs? Hannibal could tell almost immediately whether a person knew their core or not. If they didn’t, they were mincemeat as Lector had no respect for their continued existence. The less you know of your own depths, needs, and weaknesses, the more easily you are manipulated, and the less you notice it when you manipulate others.

Consider this definition of goodness I cooked up in the context of sex offender treatment:

Goodness is the ability to choose to do the right thing in the presence of the opportunity or temptation to do the wrong thing.

“Each of us is like Dorian Gray. We seek to present a beautiful, innocent face to the world; a kind, courteous demeanor; a youthful, intelligent image. And so, unknowingly but inevitably, we push away qualities that do not fit the image, those that do not enhance our self-esteem and make us stand proud but, instead, bring us shame and make us feel small. We shove into the dark cavern of the unconscious those feelings that make us uneasy – hatred, rage, jealousy, greed, competition, lust, shame – and those behaviors deemed wrong by the culture – addiction, laziness, aggression, dependency – thereby creating what could be called shadow content. Like Dorian’s painting, these qualities ultimately take on a life of their own, forming an invisible twin that lives just behind our life, or just beside it, but as distinct from the one we know as a stranger.”

Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf, Romancing the Shadow

The more we push down inside us and the more we ignore because it would make us uncomfortable, the more ignorant we are. That ignorance becomes the tail that wags the dog for the person who has the skills to manipulate it. Consider the teenage girl whose fathering was insufficient and who never got the sense of self-esteem she needs to flourish as an adult woman. She is hungry for attention and mirroring, and she needs desperately to be special. Some men will pick up on this, use her vulnerability, and then dump her. Her weakness will be exploited, and she will become more bitter and self-destructive, engaging in risky behavior for a few minutes or hours of feeling important and desired.

Informed choice is the real power that therapy and education have. The power of the courts, jails, prisons, and death chambers – these are all just back-ups for when democracy fails. The more informed each of us is about all levels and parts of ourselves, the more emotional intelligence we have, and the more effective our justice, education, and treatment systems will be. These systems will then reflect the core values of democracy, which is essential in a nation that holds itself as a beacon for the rest of the world.

I liked to ask men in my Responsivity Group in the sex offender program what they thought was the real power of therapy. They seldom guessed “democracy!” much less the crux of functional democracy: informed choice! In America, we are getting more and more used to what I would call Totalitarian Democracy – the winner takes all! If you win, you get to change the rules, punish those who don’t believe what you believe, and ignore issues that aren’t important to you. You also get to control the flow of information: ban history from being taught, ban certain books, and tell the truth about things but just not the whole truth or nothing but the truth. This is getting well beyond politics as usual.

In a functional democracy, the free flow of information and the examination of the past are crucial. The public needs to work at being informed vs. the controlling party working at disinformation. In treatment, the more information you have, the more likely you are to make informed choices and achieve a state of goodness. Letting in information, opening the barrier enough for information to get in and out of the core is crucial. Psychological x-rays such as the MMPI-3 and MCMI-IV provide crucial information. Stories that capture the essence of one’s dilemma and contain the wisdom of generations' failures, successes, and sacrifices are another vital source. Learning to decipher messages in movies rather than just being entertained is also important. Opening that third eye in the core and allowing community, conscience, and compassion to grow – the three Cs – is crucial to the survival of democracy.

In a democracy, in a free society, you are likely to encounter temptation and opportunity over and over again. True core-level change is evidenced by the ability to make informed choices and demonstrate new, healthier, and more community-based behaviors.

Democracy in Star Trek

Democracy tends to take two basic forms in our culture, embodied by two Star Trek Commanders: Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Captain Kirk is the predominant model – he’s on top, the main authority, the final opinion. It’s more top-down. Captain Picard seems to rule more from the center, the core. He is the happy ending where all connects, more like Hermes, with each extension from the core having authority, initiative, and command in their own quadrants and in relation to each other. Picard is more of a community-based way of running the ship. The two styles coincide with what Erich Neumann calls the old ethic vs. the new ethic. In the old ethic, we are what we say we are and primarily identify with what is above the barrier, the values we wear on our sleeves, with the core being a dumping ground for what is inconvenient or preferably forgotten and buried. The new ethic says that in order for society to survive and prosper in the long run, we are responsible for it all – our ego, our core, and the relationship between them. What Jung calls the shadow, the hidden self, is our responsibility as well. In the new ethic, we can’t segregate parts of ourselves for our convenience and peace of mind, nor can we segregate people in the outer world. Community means the inter-relationship of everybody, without compromise, a difficult thing to achieve but seemingly essential as our previous choices and their consequences currently make life more difficult to contend with and our survival less assured.

“The problem is not that young people haven’t learned our values; it’s that they have. They can see beneath our social and religious platitudes to what we care about most. Our great cultural message comes through loud and clear: it is an affluent lifestyle that counts for success and happiness. Yet we sometimes seem startled when the young really take our consumer values to heart and lose their hearts in the process. When there are no ethics at the top of society, it’s likely there will be none at the bottom either. Our urban children have inherited our values. The violent carnage of our inner cities is the underside of a consumer society that uses violence as entertainment. Looting is a crude shopping spree reflecting a system that loots and pollutes the rest of the world.”

Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics

So long as we haven’t unmasked the ego, it continues to hoodwink us, like a sleazy politician endlessly parading bogus promises, or a lawyer constantly inventing ingenious lies and defenses, or a talk show host going on and on talking, keeping up a stream of suave and emptily convincing chatter, which actually says nothing at all.

Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego.  Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own.  This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering.  Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become ego-less terrifies us.  To be ego-less, ego whispers to us, is to loses all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.

Sognal Rinpoche, THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING