I think Stanley Kubrick is one of the most lucid, acute and critical Anglo-American filmmakers. It's a pity that new generations don't know him; perhaps he fails in the education he offers. Kubrick could not be absent from my chairs in Audiovisual Semiotics, and whenever I could in other courses I made reference to him (I don't know how this is assumed in other countries, especially in Europe, and in the USA). He should be an author to cultivate (verbal game).
Kubrick's criticism, based on Burgess, is devastating. A controlling and repressive society is obviously questioned, albeit strangely permissive, and hence the manifestation of its hypocrisy. Also to a falsely rebellious youth, which is only capable of reacting irrationally (the other side of the "rationality" of the system), completely assimilable, because it does not really possess solid criteria about life.
That is why the end of the film, escaping from the novel that inspires it, seems to me very certain: what is proposed as a "solution" is not such, it is just another expression of the rational irrationality of society and its morality.
I think The Mechanical Orange is a film, in its theme and vision, hardly surmountable. Thank you for your good post, @ladyrebecca.