As Freud noted, the more we obey the superego commandment, the guiltier we feel. The paradox also holds in the Lacanian reading of the superego as an injunction to enjoy: Enjoyment is an impossible-real, we can’t ever fully attain it, and this failure makes us feel guilty.
A series of situations that characterize today’s society exemplify perfectly this type of superego pressure, like the endless PC self-examination: Was my glance at the flight attendant too intrusive and sexually offensive? Did I use any words with a possible sexist undertone while addressing her? And so on and so on. The pleasure, thrill even, provided by such self-probing is evident.
What scares me about our present superego culture is that it has no interest in actual goodness. It really is about just destroying and ruining and controlling pleasure, injecting itself into the ego and id, inhibiting their productivity, their functioning.
The superego has grown in an uninhibited way—a carceral way. It's a tumor pressing on the other parts of the psyche. For someone born and raised in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s—the culture of the 2010s and 20s is really a total mindfuck, a total inversion of the permissive liberalism and carefree ideology of earlier eras. Constant self-surveillance technologically tricks us, after awhile, into believing the superego is all there is.
Personally, for instance, I find myself constantly constructing rationales for the things that I enjoy or the pleasures I pursue—constantly simulating defensive conversations in my head, constantly responding to possible criticisms and social attacks… constantly undermining my own enjoyment of things.