1743) Human beings today [...] are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City [London's Wall Street], the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that.

J.G. Ballard
"Kafka in the Present Day"
[London] Sunday Times (c.1993)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)

1744) The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates - the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.

J.G. Ballard
"The Consumer Consumed"
Ink (c.1971)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)

1745) Perhaps our own fin-de-siecle decadance takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists.

J.G. Ballard
"Back to the Heady Future"
[London] Daily Telegraph (c.1993)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)
[review of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993)
John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds.]

1746) Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.

J.G. Ballard
"Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century"
Zone (c.1992)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)

1747) [P]sychiatrists - the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War [...]

J.G. Ballard
"The Lure of the Madding Crowd"
Independent on Sunday (c.1991)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)
[review of The Faber Book of Madness (1991)
Roy Porter ed.]

1748) The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.

J.G. Ballard
"Magnetic Sleep"
[London] Daily Telegraph (c.1994)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)
[review of From Mesmer to Freud (1993)
by Adam Crabtree]

1749) I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.

J.G. Ballard
"The End of My War"
[London] Sunday Times (c.1995)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)

1750) Time does not exist for those who are absolutely without anxiety.

Soren Kierkegaard (attributed)
quoted by J.G. Ballard in
"The Thousand Wounds and Flowers"
New Worlds (c.1969)
republished in
A User's Guide to the Millenium (1996)
[review of The Voices of Time (1981)
J.T. Frazier, ed.]