Moral Pill
It was summer of 2009 when I had got the
chance to read Anthony Burgess’s novel (and Stanley Kubrick’s film) A
Clockwork Orange which in turn narrates Alex, an unrepentant psychopath, who has
his eyes pried wide open(in the pic above) and is forced to watch violent
images. Like Pavlov’s dog, Alex is being programmed to respond with nausea to
violence and sex. This scene remains shocking to me till date, but, like most
science fiction, it has aged. The behaviorist psychology it was drew upon has
long expired, and the fear that science will be used to make, or even force,
people to be morally better now sounds old-fashioned.
