The Moral Center of our Brains

In the novel I’m working on, a poison added to a country’s sausage supply turns testosterone into a neurotoxin such that men who wish to retain their ability to think must take feminizing hormones. In the ensuing chaos, both houses of congress are populated by women, transgender people, and a minority of straight men who have reluctantly taken high doses of estrogen.

On the homefront, many marriages are destroyed and an army of men who are enraged to have been forced to become women forms.

Although the leader of this army genuinely wants to be a woman because he is greedy for all forms of power, he doesn’t let his troops know this. He exploits his army’s rage, enflaming them with speeches about how furious he feels about his feminization.

He is quite a monster.

• He funds his army by producing and procuring orphan children for expensive, island spas that use blood transfusions to give the wealthy patrons a temporary, youthful glow (but absurdly swollen hands and feet).
• He derives a lot of pleasure from watching gruesome inquisition executions and enjoys spending time with dead bodies.
• He sexually harrasses his non-poisoned, male employees. My protagonist’s love interest, Mr. Randall, remains masculine because he has not been poisoned, but this makes him a target of his feminized boss’s romantic advances. He has to tell his boss that he is beautiful.

The plans this monster has for his army are nothing short of genocidal and he knows that regular people are not capable of such psychopathic violence without careful conditioning of their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It is possible to engineer the destruction of this part of the brain through childhood abuse, early exposure to violent entertainment, or severely traumatic experiences, but he decides to use a shortcut method – a form of lobotomy that is carried out by sticking a swab up into the nose of the soldier, so that it punctures the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This procedure is very painful for about ten seconds and many of the soldiers pass out, but they are told that it is a necessary diagnostic test for disease, so they all line up and willingly consent.

A soldier would say, “It felt like I was being cleaned from behind my eyeball and then I had a headache and a nosebleed for a few hours. Some of the guys passed out. It was like an initiation ritual to prove how tough we were.”

Stabbing the ventromedial prefrontal cortex by sticking a swab four inches up into the nose and swishing it around would make people more susceptible to advertising and less able to detect deception and sarcasm. It would also reduce their response to frightening things, reducing their survival instinct and their sense of moral outrage over horrible things happening to others. It makes the army more merciless and driven by immediate gratification. They maintain their intelligence, but lose the moral center of their brains. They lose their connection to their memories of shame.

That wooden stick looks rather sharp and inflexible.

They also lose their ability to be inspired by beauty and symbolism.

Most of the shoppers just kept walking.

The protagonist knows something about neuroanatomy and when the government starts collecting young people for this ‘necessary diagnostic test’, she doesn’t want her children to consent, but her husband is a very obedient, socially minded man. He yells at her that she is insane when she tells her children to avoid the testing station at their school and hide in the bathroom when it is their turn.

lobotomy kit

Because of this disagreement, her husband threatens to have her committed to a mental hospital. He is unaware that he has been poisoned and lost his ability to think. His stupidity is terrifying for the protagonist because she can see and understand things that he can’t.

The protagonist’s career has placed her in the public eye and she recklessly used her position to say some things that were critical of a dangerous inquisition. They have already begun building a smear campaign to make her look like a crazy pervert. Because of this, she knows that her husband would have little trouble with getting her locked away. Her only hope to escape this fate and save her children from lobotomization is Mr. Randall – a secret agent ex-gigolo who runs a prostitution network as a front for intelligence gathering.

He is a man with some serious issues.

He isn’t all bad, though. He has a romantic side and is rather noble. He is just very sensitive and tends to become acquisitive and shut down to protect himself when he is frightened.

He seems to have an excess of everything a man could want, but he is trapped by all of it.

I’m still trying to figure out the point of view used to tell this story. I started with a historian investigating the history of Mrs. Randall, but I’m not sure if that will get close enough to each character. I wonder how I could show all of the characters’ mommy issues.

The protagonist suffers from her memories until they are removed. Perhaps “It only gets much worse” will be the message she leaves behind for herself when her memory is erased. Her new self reads these words and thinks, “What an awful perspective. I’m glad that I’m not her anymore.” Her son reads the words and cries.

I think she gets her memory erased after she fell in love with Mr. Randall but then learned far too much about his history. She was freaking out, he hit her, and she left him.

He keeps his memories and accepts his flaws.

They get back together under a blood moon after her memory is erased.