I’m working on a comedy (hooray! finally) with the working title The Engine of Our Destruction. I became fascinated by the psychological condition scrupulosity, and the main character suffers from this fascinating variant of OCD. Scrupulosity is akin to OCD but for ethical and moral matters. People with scrupulosity fixate on moral actions and experience extreme stress and anxiety if they feel they are going to commit an unethical act.
Marisol is a freelance digital forensic investigator who lands a gig investigating a CIO’s transgressive post on Twitter. Her scruples indicate she cannot tell a lie, but she is placed in a seemingly impossible-to-navigate moral position. Meanwhile, her daughter has been harassed out of the Naval Academy for informing on a group of cheaters.
The play is in nascent form and likely will veer at least slightly from this initial premise.
Questions raised: Is honesty always the best policy? If our ethics are driven by neurotic compulsion, are we really ethical? What price must we be willing to pay for taking moral action?