clockwork orange

plural clockwork oranges

1. A person or organism with a mechanistic morality or lack of free will.

   This one took reality to be a large machine, a ‘clockwork orange', an automaton.

   1999, Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, Ernest Mathijs, Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection: The White Book of "Einstein Meets Magritte

   3 more examples

   Contrarily, he may be saying, “Look what your computerized, commodified society has made of me—a clockwork orange, for all appearances organic but mechanical."

   1996, Mark Dery, Escape Velocity

   The telos of the pathologization of crime is the perfected robot or “clockwork orange” of present-day behaviorism and sociobiology, descendants of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century associationists like Jeremy Bentham.

   1998, Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

   Under the archbishop's ceiling, the self is not a clockwork orange programmed by the state but something more unnerving: Peer Gynt's onion, layers of performance without a core.

   2004, Enoch Brater, Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change

alternative Clockwork Oranje

1. datedball gamesNickname for Netherlands national football team

   Lifelong fans, Riverside residents and a whole lot of new Netherlands supporters got the chance to see “Clockwork Orange” in action during the approximately 75-minute session.

   2026 June 10, Dave D’Marko, “Community practice gives fans chance to see Dutch soccer superstars up close”, in Fox4, Riverside, archived from the original on 16 Jun 2026

   Synonyms: The Flying Dutchmen