The Debugger
One of my pastimes as a six-year-old was stepping on roly-polies in the backyard. I took a great pleasure in waiting patiently for each bug to crawl out of the grass, imagining myself a giant as I assumed an exaggerated pose, jumping as high as I could, and bringing my light-up Yu-Gi-Oh! sneaker firmly down on the unsuspecting creature. They’re not quite rigid enough to crunch, nor wet enough to squish or splat; an onomatopoeia for that wonderful moment of damp crushing does not exist in our language as far as I know. All I can say is that that unnameable sensation was so sublime that I found and killed them over and over again until their population collapsed and there were none left.
You, reader, may have an instinctive disgust response to this kind of story—perhaps based on things people repeat over and over: torturing animals is psychopathic behavior, kids who take pleasure in killing insects are “messed up,” and so on. My position is different—kids like to play around. That’s all it was.
There are two points I want to make using this story.
The first is that you can choose how you interpret your experiences and actions. I know from memory that the experience detailed above was innocent and joyful; I feel no remorse. I have the power to completely absolve myself, and I do, permanently and forever. And—the secret—you can do this, forgive yourself, for anything at all. Morality isn’t an inherent aspect of material reality; it’s a system that co-evolved with complex civilizations to maintain stability. In practice, your morality is a piece of your mind that stubbornly adjudicates your actions according to inherited values. You can just turn it off.
“But then, if I ignore morality, won’t I hurt people and cause harm?” I don’t know—is that what you really want to do? Don’t you trust yourself at all?
Second—you’re never obligated to conceal your nature. I’ve just told all of you that I have no empathy for insects, but let me make it worse: actually, I hate dogs too. I wish they didn’t exist. Whenever a dog approaches me I feel a combination of revulsion and irritation. Once while waiting to cross the street a dog started enthusiastically licking my shoes and I had to work to suppress the urge to kick it. This is simply how I feel, and I’m not interested in apologizing. The wonderful thing is—I don’t have to apologize. I can tell the truth when people ask and ignore the way they respond. Nobody can force me to hide or change the way I feel.
And so it is for everything. Your mind is your sovereign domain, and your preferences and emotions are yours alone. You may face consequences (the dog thing probably makes me unmarriageable in San Francisco), but so what? Show some courage. We have no idea how free we are.