The U.S. Declaration of Independence says, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”. It is an idea that goes back to the social contract. We live in society with other people and we establish social contracts that govern that society and, ideally, keeps things running smoothly. People will argue many nuances of the social contract. Brought forward to the language of the twenty-first century, there people may ask if it is an opt-in or opt-out contract. Do we need to read and agree with the fine print, or is simply not revolting an implicit agreement.

Yet our social contracts go much further than just our relationship with a government. In the United States, we have a Federalist system where we are in a national social contract and state social contracts and then there are contracts between the states and the Federal government.

People join together in other social contracts to create churches, corporations and other organizations, and contracts between the governments and these organizations also come into play. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments concerning the relationship between the State of Arizona, the U.S. Government, and corporations licensed to do business in Arizona. While most people are looking at this in terms of the implications for immigration, I’m especially interested in this in terms of what it means to all these different contracts.

Many of us assent to different social contracts on a regular basis as we click on the line about agreeing with the terms of service of various websites, probably most often, without ever reading those terms.

Getting closer to home, I’ve entered into an agreement with an organization. I will provide my expertise, on a full time basis, in exchange for money and benefits. It’s called getting a job. Beyond the simple agreement to be employed, there are other agreements in play.

One such agreement is about how social media and Internet Communications Technology is used. The other day, I sent out a request to friends for examples of these agreements from other corporations and received a great list. Now, I’m going over them to talk with my co-workers about how we can improve our agreements about social media.

As I thought about this, I pondered other agreements that people enter into. One agreement is a contract that patients assent to when they start group psychotherapy. The goal of this agreement is to provide a framework that will help patients work together to address issues in their lives.

This morning, I sent off an email to the group psychotherapy mailing list asking if they could share examples of some of these contracts. The question I am pondering: Can we learn from therapeutic contracts and bring some of the ideas into our other agreements? Can we do this in such a way that our actions within the broader society can also become more therapeutic? Can, or should we, assent to be civil online, or in our interactions with governments?