J.G. BALLARD, UN VIZIONAR

„Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly.
The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
A nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom and a cancerlike consumerism had replaced everything at the center of humans' psyches”. - J.G.Ballard


„Ballard’s metaphors are consistently mystical, atavistic: consumer goods are portrayed as psychic “totems” evoking “collective rituals” and expressing “tribal values,” dark, orgiastic impulses waiting to explode the surface calm of this “new gulag … where the forced labour was shopping and spending.” - Rob Latham


„No contemporary writer captures our malaise better than does J. G. Ballard. In a writing career dating back half a century now, he has explored with acuity, from the aerie of his respectable suburban home outside London, the anxieties of modern existence—of what he calls the marriage of reason and nightmare.
The reason is our technological advance, the nightmare the uses to which we have put it.” - Theodore Dalrymple


„People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be.
All we've got left is our own psychopathology.
It's the only freedom we have – that's a dangerous state of affairs.
That's where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.” - J.G.Ballard


„A visionary reductio ad absurdum of what Ballard sees as the lack of meaning in modern material abundance, in which erotic and violent sensationalism replace transcendent purpose.
Boredom and a lack of common purpose provoke aggression, and self-destruction follows. Prosperity is not enough.” - Theodore Dalrymple


„For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it.
I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.
Sooner or later, everything turns into television.” - J.G.Ballard


„I discovered to my surprise that the middle classes behaved in crowds with the same menacing disinhibition as their supposed social and educational inferiors.
They swore and screamed abuse and made fascistic gestures and urinated in the street with the same abandon that they attributed to the proletarians.” - Theodore Dalrymple


„It was Ballard who first spotted that the bourgeoisie wanted to proletarianize itself without losing its economic privileges or political power.
We have become bored with what we have inherited, to which, for lack of talent, we have contributed so humiliatingly little. Ballard understands why educated people, haunted by the pointlessness of their lives, feel the need to loot, and he satirizes it in Millennium People.
This mind-set can result in the violence from which, as Ballard discovered early in life, we are always but a hairbreadth away, however solidly founded our comfort may seem.” - Theodore Dalrymple


În stînga, Laura Johnson, fiică de multimilionari („o elevă eminentă dintr-o familie deosebit de înstărită și onorabilă”) care a făcut parte dintr-o bandă ce a jefuit magazinele Curry’s, Comet, Halfords, PC World și o benzinărie BP din sud-estul Londrei, a fost arestată de poliție care i-a găsit în mașină marfă furată în valoare de 5.000 de lire sterline (două plasme, un cuptor cu microunde, un player Blu-ray, telefoane mobile, țigări și alcool).
Poliția a identificat între jefuitori, studenți, absolvenți de facultate, muzicieni, o balerină, un pastor baptist, un bucătar, un consultant de asigurări, toți provenind din clasa mijlocie.


„There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that make up our national consciousness.
I've tried to nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called psychopathology.” - J.G.Ballard


„People within the Science Fiction world never regarded me as one of them in the first place.
They saw me as the enemy.
I was the one who wanted to subvert everything they believed…. I’m some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the virtue of Science Fiction and began to subvert its DNA.” - J.G.Ballard