“Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being one of these malenky machines.
When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not, or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round… like old Bog Himself turning and turning and turning a vonny grazhny orange in his gigantic rookers.” - Alex
The natural mentality of youth is always rebelliousness. Young people usually do not have the maturity to think about the deeper reasons or consequences of their actions. They just do what they do because they want to experiment with ideas, or discover what it is like to behave as they are not expected to. Alex seems to say that this is perfectly natural for a young person, and that they cannot really help what they are doing. Reasoning with them, or trying to figure out the causes, will not work because their actions are not guided by reason, but by impulse alone. Even when they get into trouble because of their actions, or they get punished, it cannot really stop them because they do not understand why they must stop. According to Alex, people finally let go of their irrational antisocial behaviour only when they grow up and become mature enough to understand that they are being foolish and it does not get them anywhere. According to this view, the conditioning will not work either because it does not address the root impulse of teenagers. They will eventually grow up and let go of the violence in any case. Alex himself seems to have grown up in this passage. He wants to stop his son from making the same mistakes that he made, but he feels that his son, too, would not listen to him and end up taking the same antisocial path. Young people need to understand the effects of their behaviour on their own if they are to truly let go of it. Alex thinks that this is a pattern that will repeat itself for every successive generation, as long as they have a way to rebel, and there is really no adequate method to stop that. It is rather frightening to think that we cannot really do anything about all the violence in the world. For example, the terrorists who blew up Mumbai recently were all young men aged around 20 or 21. There has been a lot of talk about what could have motivated them to do such a horrendous deed. What if it was just the reckless heady impulse of youth, combined with some cause that they strongly believed in? Does that mean that we cannot stop terrorism and violence? I cannot decide which is the more negative view: either people are evil enough to carry out such violence on the basis of reasoned justification, or they are doing it on impulse and there is no way to prevent that.
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