My dearest Jeffrey,
My beautiful invention deployed the feeling of guilt to discourage proscribed acts. Guilt – the mechanism of enforcing the conscience –contaminated the joy entailed within a justifiably naughty act. Whatever pleasure I anticipated from an act was perturbed by the anticipation of displeasure. My conscience discouraged otherwise pleasurable acts through the threat of guilt; in exchange, I attained the splendor of limitless vengeance against my mother. I acceded to guilt as a means of availing myself of my mother’s misery: without this additional stimulus, guilt is just simply uncomfortable!
Admittedly, however, I could not foresee that guilt, positively reinforced for years, would secretly develop into a perverted habit. The pangs of conscience, as deployed against my mommy, so thoroughly sated my indignation that my unconscious began deploying it outside the parental context, absent any prospect of revenge! My moral compass leveraged guilt – an uncomfortable feeling – to produce limitless vengeance against my mother. Though guilt is unpleasurable, I appropriated it within a scheme that ultimately sated the desire for my mother’s breast milk. My unconscious, not knowing any better, falsely applied that original scheme to contexts where vengeance is impracticable, if not downright impossible. Without the prospect of revenge, guilt is just simply irrational!
As an adolescent, for example, I deeply yearned to facilitate an illegal mining operation in an abandoned rock quarry. I serendipitously discovered a deposit of glycerol buried 40 meters below sea level while conducting a geological survey using an inductive spectrometer. I fantasized about surreptitiously trespassing the property with my syndicate of low-wage workers I recruited at Home Depot. I envisaged an air-conditioned tower erected in the center of the operation that functioned as an observation deck. I lusted over practicing skills Dale Carnegie taught me in How to Make Friends and Influence People to gently suppress labor uprisings. I never furthered this conspiracy to facilitate an illicit mining operation, however, because my conscience leveraged guilt to temper the joy I would have otherwise been entitled to! The imposition of guilt towards surreptitiously mining the earth enervated the motive to complete the act. Guilt blunted my dreams!
Applying guilt in the context of the illicit mining operation is an abuse of conscience because there is no prospect of second-order happiness. Originally, I divined the conscience in response to a prohibition against my mother’s boobies. I consciously weaponized guilt to achieve vengeance against my mother, depriving her of the sadistic joy in punishing me. This counter-strategy against repression, however, was so effective, so subliminal, so sublime, that my unconscious, not knowing any better, began generalizing it to every instance of repression. I felt guilt anytime I felt repressed because I had so thoroughly reinforced guilt as a consequent to repression, independent of the prospect of revenge. I trained myself to feel guilt like a Pavlovian mutt. In the case of the illegal mining operation, my conscience leveraged guilt despite not knowing whether the rock quarry owner—my repressor – was a sadist! If he was, then the deployment of conscience is rational, because I attain revenge by depriving him of his joy in excluding and punishing trespassers. If he wasn’t a sadist, and excluded trespassers out of a resigned necessity to do what is best for his loved ones, then guilt does not function to achieve furtive vengeance, and is therefore irrational. But I have no way of even estimating the landowner’s sadism because I have no relationship with him! The lack of a relationship with the stranger-landowner renders the function of guilt as a means of attaining counter-happiness – futile!! Guilt only functions to repress the sadists you love.
I am receiving a call from none other than Dr. Steward. Why is he calling me? Perhaps he is curious about the outcome of the deal. I will converse with him and finish my critique of the conscience thereafter.
With the noblest of intentions,
Edwin Buttered
Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, Buttered Up, Inc.