part 1
Lets have a closer look at the phenomenon of "You" or "I"
What ARE "You"; what is "I"?
In my mind, if you really take those concepts apart, You'll arrive at
it being nothing more than an accumulation of imprints - full external (parents say stealing is bad; so = stealing = bad);
internalized external (society has punishments in place for people who steal - ergo stealing must be bad)
and full internal - stealing makes ME feel bad, so stealing = bad)
I am fully aware of the ambiguity and the overlap of these; in my mind this arises from the inescapable fact of relating everything to the first person "I" as "he who experiences"; the differences, however, lie in the way it is imprinted in the functional schema/workings of ourselves.
one can apply the same formula for positive pole t.i. "good" instead of "bad"
and from these fundamental - and largely external influences we grow our egos' as one would a plant from a certain type of soil.
The issue then becomes, if we, for example, choose the 3rd option of internal imprinting - who is the "me" that feels bad/good about something if the premise is "you/I are/is a collection of imprints"? what are these things imprinted ON?

to me then the next logical step is to examine the entity know as ego - which is fundamentally an autopilot born out of the basic biological drive of survival - some experiences lead to greater and some to lesser chances to reproduce- effectively reducing the chance of creating more life - the primary function of any living (whatever the running definition of "living" may be) organism.
so it makes sense that in a world where humans are far from the ultimate predator there needs to be an "autopilot" that instinctively "knows" and can react to stimuli such as "rustling in the dark" = danger, because someone who would stop and consider all the possible causes of leaves rustling in the dark would get eaten by a bear were it actually a bear, whereas someone who bails the fuck out risks considerably less.
so we arrive at the instinctive reflex know as "fear of the unkown".
apply same logic for other dominant auto-pilot reactions to stimuli.
The ego then is nothing less than an automatic schema consisting primarily of instincts and instinct-inspired, passed-down-through-generations-and-then-imprinted auto-reactions of maximizing the potential of passing on your genetic material and spawning more life.

Laws or rules then, societal or individual are nothing more than condensed, verbalized, and institutionalized rules for survival. e.g. - anger is bad, because anger leads to violence, violence is bad, because is leads to murder, murder is bad because if there are individuals around who are prone to violence it might affect/kill me which in turn decreases my/the groups chances of procreating which in turn decreases the chance of creating more life/surviving. - SO, we arrive at the rule of "do no harm"
the EGO is in essence then a geographically (thus culturally as we know these are eerily similar according to geographical specifics) flavored amalgamation of basic survival instincts.

part 2 some other time cuz im fuccken tired.