Synthesis:

A Clockwork Orange
Jasmin Pearl D. Andaya
Bachelor of Science in Nursing
1st year, Section F

Alex DeLarge, Alex, as the members of the story call him, is a troubled and rebellious
teen who do terrible and immoral things such as drugs, rapes, tortures, and robbery. He does
these acts together with his gang, which he calls them his droogs, namely George, Pit, and
Dim. They live freely at a level of psychopathic individuals, who needs a strong and effective
treatment to change their perspectives in life. Together, they rob houses, torturing people,
gang raped the wife of a writer in front of him and killed a rich lady in her own house. After
killing the old lady, the police were fast approaching and as he tries to flee away, little did he
know, his gang betrayed him and set him up to be caught by the police. The amoral freedom
that Alex had, had been stripped off him as he was caught and sentenced for 14 years in
prison. The free-living Alex in the past has turned into an obedient prisoner to the wardens. He
patiently and obediently abides everything on the wardens’ demands. Even though he is
already seeing the grasp of living a moral life, he still often dreams about psychopathic acts
and desires to do it again once he gets out of jail.
His desire to get out of the prison so bad, made the government on choose him in their
new program called Ludovico’s Technique, a brutal form of aversion therapy that includes
Alex watching films of Nazi atrocities. Ludovico’s technique sounds a little ironic to me. The
treatment’s aim is to wash away brutality and violence but it’s effective only if people would
undergo the same violence through mental torture. How could that be possible? The
Ludovico’s Technique is indeed, have the best intentions and that is to have peaceful world
however it bears the violations on the human rights. It would be beneficial to the world, but it
would be a silent torture to the people that would undergo the treatment. This I think, is
unethical to the government body.
Slowly, the treatment made him lose his psychopathic desires, but his freedom was
also taken by the treatment. This is when I thought that there is wrong about the treatment.
As what Dr. Brodsky have said, “We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics.
We are only concerned with cutting down crime”, which shows that utilitarian standpoint
where any methods is justifiable if its result is in the best interest of humanity. As I watch
Alex lose himself by force, I find it very wrong and thought that it’s against the human rights.
Yes, Alex is a troubled and brutal teenager, but something might have caused it. It is a
serious mental health illness that needs to be treated with patience, understanding, and
interest.
Free will is the focal point of a human being. The treatment deprived him of both freedom
and humanity. If it is taken forcefully, then that human is nothing but an empty vessel, a
puppet. It turned him into “a clockwork orange,” that means natural-looking on the outside,
but mechanical and inhuman on the inside, making him incapable of moral choice. He then
gets the karma of being the victim as what he does in the past. He was shamed, attacked,
and violated, receiving it with no other choice than being good.
The revocation of free will can never be in the best interest of humanity because it is
inherently antihuman, which is unethical. Freedom, freedom to choose is all that matter. A
world with without ethics, morality, and empathy to humans? I see death. It would cause an
internal wound that would make people lose their minds and choose to free themselves in
the darkness of death.