In Alex’s opinion, Deltoid, the newspapers, and the State
are fundamentally mistaken in their belief that wickedness represents
a perversion of goodness, as opposed to an equally valid, alternate
state of being. Goodness, these institutions believe, is a naturally
occurring phenomenon, yet they argue that evil, the opposite of
goodness, somehow requires a rationally explicable cause. When Deltoid leaves,
Alex scoffs that “[t]his biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of
badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick [boy]. They
don’t go into what is the cause of goodness, so
why of the other shop? . . . More, badness is of the self . . .
and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and
radosty [joy].” If God created man’s potential for goodness, Alex
argues, then God must have also created man’s potential for evil.
Virtue and wickedness are both natural elements of humanity, and,
in Alex’s eyes, a government that attempts to eradicate one is a
government that rejects the human self, which is God’s most beloved
creation.
The problem with Deltoid’s government, as A Clockwork Orange presents
it, is that it operates on the assumption that humans are morally
perfectible. P.R. Deltoid promotes the State ideology that, through
education and reform, humans can always become virtuous and good.
Because he firmly believes this theory of human nature, Deltoid
finds Alex puzzling. Alex has the right environment yet continues
to be incorrigible in his violent, criminal behavior. Deltoid can’t
understand how Alex could sanely and soberly choose his actions
and derive pleasure from them. And though it is dangerous to wholly
attribute Alex’s violence to a carefully considered ideology, his
criminal actions do have political ramifications. Since good behavior
reinforces the social order—an order that Alex believes to be fundamentally
flawed—Alex resists the State and affirms his individual will most
clearly when he misbehaves. In Alex’s eyes, his commitment to evil
becomes the only legitimate choice available to him, as well as
a potentially authentic way to live under a repressive, totalitarian
regime.
