n, humans find it attractive. However, having said this, some would hold the thought that ‘A Clockwork Orange is not about violence’ as theorized by the author Steven M. Chan; whilst on the one hand many would say that the novel is glorifying violence (hence its cause for the infamous copycat murders), while others on the other hand would disagree and say it is condemning it, Cahn would disagree with both opinions, and concludes that the novel is in fact ‘a dramatization of the view that no human being is right when he calls himself “free”’. Burgess utilizes this set-up to expose the defining characteristic of a dystopia: the forceful revocation of free will from the people. It is the underlying characteristic of all aspects of a dystopia, from oppression, to censorship, to lack of individual rights, to surveillance; the inherent evil that lingers underneath all of these qualities is that moral choice is not an option. Burgess states in the introduction: “…by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is A Clockwork Orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.” It is therefore widely suggested that A Clockwork Orange is the story of what happens when a person has his or her free will taken away. Alex is a dangerous and ruthless criminal, and the idea of treating him so that he is no longer able to commit crime seems like a reasonable one. At the time of Burgess’s writing, operant conditioning was an exciting new idea, presented as a “technology of behaviour” that could be used to solve many societal problems, including warfare, crime, and overpopulation. Burgess’s novel warns against the use of such technology. In his view, a person who has been conditioned to behave a certain way loses the God-given right to free will and becomes something like a machine, something as unnatural as A Clockwork Orange. It is true that after his treatment, the formerly monstrous Alex appears ‘good’ to the outward eye. However, since he is not capable of moral choice, his ‘goodness’ is hollow and insincere. “Goodness is something chosen – when a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man” perfectly indicates main moral to the story employed by Burgess in which one is stripped of their label as a ‘>