When I was sixteen, I sneaked ( or is it snuck?) into a theatre to watch a film that would stay with me for life. I was only 16 but I pretended to be 18. My older brother took me. He was good like that. He knew I would see it and felt it was better to do so under his watchful eye.
Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange wasn’t just a film - it was a visceral, unforgettable encounter. What struck me wasn’t just the graphic violence. It was the contrast: the lilting beauty of Beethoven soaring over acts of sheer horror. The delight of Alex and his gang in depravity, paired with the elegance of music, made it more disturbing, not less. It showed me something then that I would come to understand only more fully with age: evil often wears the mask of culture, refinement, even charm. I was quite upset when we left the theatre. My brother said: " Don't watch things because they sound exciting unless you are ready. " And he was right. I was too young, But in many ways, I am glad I went to see that film when I did. It opened my eyes.
That thought returned to me recently, talking with Redhead, who turned 93 yesterday. Our conversation turned to today’s moral blindness, especially around the events of October 7 and the current violence in cities like Paris, Los Angeles, Melbourne, the list goes on. So many now shout "Free Palestine" with passion, but refuse to watch, even acknowledge, the brutality Hamas unleashed that day. Murder, rape, beheadings, the deliberate targeting of civilians. It was not resistance - it was terror. And yet, some people actively look away.
Like young Greta Thunberg.who refused to look. To watch. Thank goodness I opened my eyes when I did......
For those unfamiliar with it, A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian film (and novel by Anthony Burgess) set in a near-future Britain, where a teenage delinquent named Alex revels in ultra-violence, classical music, and domination. After being caught and imprisoned, Alex is subjected to the Ludovico Technique - a state-run behaviour modification experiment designed to eliminate his capacity for violence by conditioning him to feel intense physical illness at the very thought of it. The procedure strips him of free will, rendering him incapable of making moral choices, and thus raising the disturbing question: is a person truly good if they can no longer choose evil?
For myself, for someone to choose to follow evil is beyond my comprehension. Yet so many do, don't they?
And this is the moment we find ourselves in. Why are people choosing evil over good? Cruelty over compassion? Ignorance over enlightenment?
Why have people gone bat shit crazy in recent years? And the question is urgent: what happens to a society that refuses to look? That chooses a comfortable lie over an ugly truth? Can such a society still call itself moral?
Kubrick gave us two paths in A Clockwork Orange. On one hand, we see the terror of the Ludovico Technique - a forced awakening, stripping a person of choice, of free will. A mechanical morality. And on the other hand, there's the possibility, barely hinted at, of true moral reckoning: of seeing, feeling, choosing differently - not because someone made you, but because you understood.
This same fork stood before the world after World War II. The Holocaust was too vast, too monstrous to be believed - until the Allies showed it. At Nuremberg, the truth was laid bare: film reels, testimonies, documents. The evidence wasn't just for punishment - it was for posterity. For conscience. The world was asked to look. And the world, mostly, did.
We need that spirit again now. We need a media that chooses Nuremberg over Ludovico. That dares to present the full, searing, horrifying reality - not to shock, not to manipulate, but to inform the soul. To say: this is what happened. This is who did it. This is what it means.
But there’s another creeping danger. Our moral crisis today is not only about those who do evil: it’s about how we treat those who seek to do good. The quiet protester who prays outside an abortion clinic is vilified. A parent who questions ideological curriculums is branded extreme. Ordinary citizens asking questions about borders, safety, or even biological reality are dismissed as dangerous.
We’ve reached a point where it is easier, socially and politically, to burn a flag than to defend one.
Has the term “extreme right” become a weaponised phrase to shut down traditional conservative thought? Has the “extreme left” become a euphemism for violent socialist militancy? Are we truly still debating coal vs renewables, or have these become proxies in a war of values and narratives - climate change versus the grand solar minimum, abortion versus the sanctity of life, science versus scientism?
And what of the language itself? The age of clarity has given way to what some now call “word salad” - empty slogans, echo-chamber chants, virtue-signalling mantras. It’s not just the gaffes of an ex Vice President. It’s a contagion of incoherence. Shouted louder, it becomes extremism dressed as justice, confusion mistaken for progress.
If we fail to do this - if we continue down the road of manufactured outrage and selective blindness - then governments will eventually step in. Not with justice, but with control. Truth will no longer be something we seek - it will be something we’re fed. And when that happens, we all become like Alex: eyes pried open, forced to watch, stripped of choice and humanity. What worries me is what we will be made to watch.
It doesn't have to come to that. We still have time. Time to demand honesty from our media.
Time to face hard truths, even when they challenge our politics or piss us off. Time to choose the dignity of free moral awareness over the cold efficiency of ideological programming. The question isn’t just whether we can handle the truth. The question is: do we still have the courage to look?
I feel we each have the capacity for both violence and beauty. I am the first to admit it. I sometimes feel intense anger and a desire to punish. But I do not act on that impulse. I choose restraint.
I found myself in that situation nearly 40 years ago when confronting a couple who raped and murdered a young girl who was one of my daughters friends ... all it would have taken was one person to yell and we would have charged. But, outside a courthouse, where hundreds of us gathered, we stood in silent horror and said... nothing.
Were we right? I have long pondered that very question. Essentially it came down to the fact that none of us were murderers. None of us were evil.
It was our decency that saved us and condemned them to a life behind bars.
Unlike Alex, we still have the chance to choose.... to face the truth, and grow from it. That, more than anything, is what keeps us human. Let us never trade that away - not even for comfort, not even for peace.
Let us choose to see, before someone chooses for us.
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