It is a major piece of work to teach our consciences to know with us rather than against us.
Those who have been taken prisoner within themselves by their consciences are inexorably attracted to the ruthless, often falling in love with them, as if a merger might produce a form of conscience-averaging which would be tantamount to liberation, but without the work and the risk, the awful vulnerability of a realistic and therefore confusing set of limits.
For all too many, conscience is the most difficult science of all.
Our consciences may easily be corrupted to become the secret police of what secretly pleases us.
A mean conscience can make a mean person, sneaky, spoiling and ruthless, all in the service of gaining access to pleasures that should never have been declared off-limits in the first place.