Superego Read Online Free

childhood: I am just completely incapable of internalizing basic morality. To me, eating, sleeping, walking, and strangling a puppy in front of a crying child are all just different activities, and none of them holds any “moral” weight for me. The first time I killed someone left no bigger impression on my psyche than the first time I tied my shoe. Most people develop some sense of right and wrong during early childhood—Freud called it the superego—but I never did. And it is very hard to interact with society when you are like that.
    It’s easy to see the direct consequences of my actions. If someone annoys me, I know punching him might be a bad idea, because he might punch me back. But what if it’s a baby? Punching the baby has no consequences, since the baby can’t hit me back, right? But most people would be shocked at the thought of striking a baby even if there was no one around to see it. They consider that “wrong.” My guess is that it’s an evolutionary adaptation. Even though striking a baby may have no ill consequences for me, there are long-term consequences to society if everyone punches babies when they get annoying. Instead of sentients having to rationally figure out things like that all the time, they just have this irrational sense that it’s “wrong.” It’s that sense that I lack.
    Lots of sentients have turned their natural feelings of right and wrong into religions. But even those who don’t believe in a supernatural moral order share those feelings. Ask an atheist whether there are repercussions to killing people you don’t know, and he will claim that there are, when I know for a fact that you can slaughter tons of people, travel galaxies away, and have nothing to worry about in terms of consequences. So really, it’s like all sentients have this irrational belief system they share—a common religion—and I am the odd man out. Not only am I a heretic, I barely understand their beliefs enough to reliably imitate them.
    Anyway, I don’t think I was the intended result of the experimental program, and it’s informative that I’ve never heard of them making another attempt. Whatever the original intentions were for me were abandoned, and I was just raised as a normal child. But there was little hope for that. I couldn’t really return affections to my “parents” because…well, I didn’t care about them beyond their utility to me. It seemed like I was destined to be a societal outcast with no real place in the world.
    I could have given up and lived all drugged up in some asylum. But here’s the inspirational part: I’ve made a normal life for myself. I’m a hitman. It’s an occupation where my lack of normal human emotions is not a disability. No one cares if the guy gunning people down seems unusually callous at times. I love being on the job and in the midst of combat. I can be myself and not worry how anyone else perceives me.
    The time between hits is much more difficult. If I don’t have a set objective, I’m out of my element. Usually, I have my next job to focus on and can think of my down time as preparation for that. But when I don’t have a next job or know when that’s coming, it’s quite a bit more stressful.
    I enjoy the challenges of combat, but there’s just something unappealing to me about starting a random fight on some anonymous planet just to entertain myself. I like to have a purpose to my actions, and besides, if I started killing people off the job I’d become a liability to the syndicate. In fact, I have a pretty strict rule that I don’t kill anyone or anything when I’m not on a job—not even insects or the planet’s equivalent. It takes too much work to figure out which creatures are acceptable to kill and what’s an acceptable way to kill them. So unless my life is in direct danger, I’m a complete