You Love the Sickness

The more suffering, the better you like it

Apr 17, 2025

I will inform you as to the nature of your desires, their causes and the possibilities of their fulfillment. Do you suppose if you were capable of figuring these things out for yourself that you would be here now? You are surrendered, you are in protective custody. You have forfeited your rights as an individual. From now on I will do your thinking for you. You will listen. You will observe. You will obey. Let’s begin.

— The Doctor

I Love Culture

“Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don’t want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.”
“Oh. And what’s stinking about it?”
He cried out: “It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like you done, and there’s no law nor order no more … It’s no world for any old man any longer, and that means that I’m not one bit scared of you, my boyos, because I’m too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I’ll be glad to be dead … So your worst you may do, you filthy cowardly hooligans.” and then he started singing again: “Oh dear dear land, I fought for thee And brought thee peace and victory”– So we cracked into him lovely … Then we tripped him so he laid down flat and heavy and a bucketload of beer-vomit came whooshing out. That was disgusting so we gave him the boot, one go each, and then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy old rot.
— A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

Duet

“You mean,” I said, “it will be just like going to the pictures?”
“They’ll be special films,” said Dr. Branom. “Very special films.”
One veshch I did not like, though, was when they put like clips on the skin of my forehead, so that my top glazz-lids were pulled up and up and up and I could not shut my glazzies no matter how I tried.
“This must be a real horrorshow film if you’re so keen on my viddying it.”
And one of the white-coat vecks said, smecking: “Horrorshow is right, friend. A real show of horrors.”

… there was the close-up gulliver of this beaten-up starry veck, and the krovvy flowed beautiful red. It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen. Now all the time I was watching this I was beginning to get very aware of a like not feeling all that well … I was sweating a malenky bit with the pain in my guts and a horrible thirst and my gulliver going throb throb throb, and it seemed to me that if I could not viddy this bit of film I would perhaps be not so sick. But I could not shut my glazzies, and even if I tried to move my glaz-balls about I still could not get like out of the line of fire of this picture. So I had to go on viddying what was being done.

I was heaving away but could not sick … while red krovvy shot on to the camera lens. Then all the teeth were like wrenched out with a pair of pliers, and the creeching and the blood were terrific.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it … Turn it off you grahzny bastards, for I can stand no more.”
So this time I knew I had to sick up, so I creeched: “I want to be sick. Please let me be sick. Please bring something for me to be sick into.”
“It was horrible.”
“Of course it was horrible,” smiled Dr. Branom. “Violence is a very horrible thing. That’s what you’re learning now. Your body is learning it.”
— A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

Welcome to the Club

Throughout the centuries your culture has celebrated destruction and oppression, and the murder and the burning and the horror. It’s always been that way. That’s the way you operate. Now, when I make a few simple observations on the show, a couple of remarks, the next thing you know, with the phone calls and the letters, “It’s inappropriate, it won’t do, we really don’t want to hear it.” Well, my friends, how would you like to be crushed under my boot! That’s what’s coming to you — complainers and bellyachers. You’ll all be crushed!