Reader sits on toilet and fantasises about murdering landlady

A READER WRITES: “I like to move my bowels with the roar of a lion first thing every morning. My grandfather taught me that this was the secret to health and happiness and I must say that once new flatmates get used to the twin fulminations of my morning ritual I am usually left alone to enjoy a cleansing half hour. Before the roaring phase I like to read a little Friedrich Nietzsche as I find his work most conducive to getting the peristaltic waves going in my lower colon. So conditioned am I, after all these years, that I can hardly have a successful evacuation without a little Zarathustra to inspire my viscera into action.

After all this reading I have become enamoured with the idea of the Übermensch, a superior man who is beyond the bounds of conventional morality. I believe I fit that mould very well and believe that laws and conventions, which have been created to keep uncultured men in order, should not apply to me. This philosophy has led me to consider murdering a certain individual - an old landlady of mine. A spiteful miserable wretch of a woman, who has never entertained a kind thought in her whole life. This usurious and mean-spirited person holds a number of vulnerable people in her thrall and I believe it would be a service to Irish people if I were to end her life.

I have considered the various laws and religious injunctions against murder but I believe, and Nietzsche would appear to support me, that these should have no hold over me. I should be free to exercise my will to achieve a higher purpose. I am not without a certain cunning and I am pretty sure I could do the deed and not be caught - I find the idea of this challenge utterly irresistible.

So that's my story and I mean every word of it. I'd like to hear your perspective - do you support my position or not? If a man was going to shoot people and you had a choice to shoot him first to stop him - would you do it? I feel my situation is very similar to this question.

BB SAYS: : There is no simple answer to your predicament. I recommend you read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. The anti-hero of that novel was in a strangely similar situation to you. He wanted to murder his landlady. He said to himself “What would Napoleon do in my situation? He would not hesitate to do the deed. It is only cowardice that is stopping me”. Then he went ahead and did the deed. I won’t ruin the story by going into what happens next. Suffice to say, things did not work out at all like he expected. Counter-balance your reading of Nietzsche by reading Dostoyevsky. Then you will be able to make an informed and balanced decision concerning whether or not to kill your landlady.