Kingdom Come

by J.G. Ballard

THE SUBURBS DREAM of violence.

This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was an end state of consumerism.

I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger. The decision by the estate-dwellers to reject the imam was an exercise of consumer choice.

JOURNEYS SELDOM END when I think they do.

I walked across the sitting room and drew the curtains. The bright garden light flooded through the scent of stale tobacco and staler memories. In front of me, looming across the houses and office buildings, was the silver dome of the Metro-Centre, dominating the landscape to the west of London. For the first time I realized that its presence was almost reassuring.

The calming, comforting embrace of commerce and capitalism.

The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only about the corporate logos on its shroud.

confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.

I seemed more aggressive, not in the bully-boy way of the street thugs who had driven the imam from his suburban mosque, but in the more cerebral style of the lawyers, doctors and architects who had enlisted in Hitler’s elite corps. For them, the black uniforms and death’s-head emblems represented a violence of the mind, where aggression and cruelty were part of a radical code that denied good and evil in favour of an embraced pathology. Morality gave way to will, and will deferred to madness.

‘It’s more than a shop, Mr Pearson. It’s an incubator. People go in there and they wake up, they see their lives are empty. So they look for a new dream . . .’

‘Doctors, lawyers, police officers, bank managers . . . they get funny ideas in their heads. Some of them start thinking logically.’ ‘Is that bad?’ ‘Thinking logically? Out here it’s dangerous. Very dangerous. It can lead intelligent people to do things they shouldn’t, like acting rationally and for the public good.

Wherever sport plays a big part in people’s lives you can be sure they’re bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture.’

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.

When the teachers had driven away I left the car and walked down the drive littered with sweet wrappers, cigarette papers and cola cans, the debris of an amiable plague.

‘The only real things are the mirages.

The shadow of Freud’s statue lies across the land, the Agent Orange of the soul.

‘What’s the point of free speech if you have nothing to say? Let’s face it, most people haven’t anything to say, and they know it. What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison? Consumerism is a collective enterprise. People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation.’

‘So . . . liberalism, liberty, reason?’ ‘They failed! People don’t want to be appealed to by reason any more.’ Sangster bent down and rolled his sherry glass across the desk, as if waiting for it to stand up on its own. ‘Liberalism and humanism are a huge brake on society. They trade on guilt and fear. Societies are happier when people spend, not save. What we need now is a kind of delirious consumerism, the sort you see at motor shows. People long for authority, and only consumerism can provide it.’

We like dual carriageways and parking lots. We like control-tower architecture and friendships that last an afternoon. There’s no civil authority telling us what to do. This isn’t Islington or South Ken. There are no town halls or assembly rooms. We like prosperity filtered through car and appliance sales. We like roads that lead past airports, we like air-freight offices and rent-a-van forecourts, we like impulse-buy holidays to anywhere that takes our fancy. We’re the citizens of the shopping mall and the marina, the internet and cable TV. We like it here, and we’re in no hurry for you to join us.’

‘You have to think about England as a whole, not just Brooklands and the Thames Valley. The churches are empty, and the monarchy shipwrecked itself on its own vanity. Politics is a racket, and democracy is just another utility, like gas and electricity. Almost no one has any civic feeling. Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode. The great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph, led directly to today’s consumerism.’

‘But if reason and light have triumphed?’ ‘They haven’t. Because we’re not reasonable and rational creatures. Far from it. We resort to reason when it suits us. For most people life is comfortable today, and we have the spare time to be unreasonable if we choose to be. We’re like bored children. We’ve been on holiday for too long, and we’ve been given too many presents. Anyone who’s had children knows that the greatest danger is boredom. Boredom, and a secret pleasure in one’s own malice. Together they can spur a remarkable ingenuity.’

Decadence demands a certain degree of innocence.’

People still think the Nazi leaders led the German people into the horrors of race war. Not true. The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party. That’s why they stayed together till the end. They needed a psychopathic god to worship, so they recruited a nobody and stood him on the high altar. The great religions have been at it for millennia.’

Look at the most religious areas of the world at present—the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they’re going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe in except God.’

state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.

Messiahs always emerge from the desert.

The riot had ended with the frustrated mob glaring at itself in the mirror and breaking its bloodied forehead against the glass.

If enough people believe in you, it’s a sure sign you’ll end up nailed to a cross.

People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure. They don’t want a jackbooted fanatic ranting on a balcony. They want a TV host sitting with a studio panel, talking quietly about what matters in their lives. It’s a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box. Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason, they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics.

‘No. It’s too authoritarian, too nanny state. It’s not new politics.’ ‘And what is that?’ ‘The unpredictable. Be nice most of the time, but now and then be nasty, when they least expect it. Like a bored husband, affectionate but with a cruel streak. People will gasp, but the audience figures will soar. Now and then slip in a hint of madness, a little raw psychopathology. Remember, sensation and psychopathy are the only way people make contact with each other today. It won’t take your viewers long to get a taste for real madness, whether it’s a product or a political movement. Encourage people to go a little mad—it makes shopping and love affairs more interesting. Every so often people want to be disciplined by someone. They want to be ordered about.’

People need a little bit of abuse in their lives. Masochism is the new black, and always has been. It’s the mood music of the future. People want discipline, and they want violence.

Show an authoritarian edge, be openly critical of them. Make a sudden emotional appeal. Show your flaws, then demand loyalty. Insist on faith and emotional commitment, without exactly telling them what they’re supposed to believe in. That’s new politics.

At the same time, everyone knew who the real enemy was—subversive elements in local government offices, the county establishment, the church and the old middle classes, with their jodhpurs and dinner parties, their private schools and anal-retentive snobberies.

Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen.

‘I feel for you, Richard. Sitting for years behind a big desk in Berkeley Square, you still believe in the human race. People like violence. It stirs the blood, speeds the pulse. Violence is the best way of controlling them, making sure that things don’t get really out of hand.’

Crime-scene tapes surrounded a small Fiat, which sat on flattened tyres, retardant foam deliquescing on the gravel like crab spawn on a beach.

I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and sometime actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement, while the cable presenter had expanded a hundredfold and was ready to burst out of his bottle.

The reign of the bully had begun.

They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as a credible alternative to the truth. Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised.

Consumer capitalism had never thrived by believing the truth. Lies were preferred by the people of the shopping malls because they could be complicit with them.

‘People are bored. Deeply, deeply bored. When people are that bored anything is possible. A new religion, a fourth reich. They’ll worship a mathematical symbol or a hole in the ground. We’re to blame.

I keep warning Tom that violence is the true poetry of governments.

People are capable of the most wonderful madness. The kind of madness that gives you hope for the human race.’

Within a few days you’ll see a congregation worshipping its washing machines. The baptismal font that immerses the Monday-morning housewife in the benediction of the wool-wash cycle . . .’

But this was a new kind of fascism, and it needed a new kind of leader—a smiley, ingratiating, afternoon TV kind of führer.

David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy, a shrink-proof shaman of the multi-storey car parks, Kafka in a tired trenchcoat, a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.’

We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. Our gurus tell us that coveting our neighbours’ wives is good for us, and even conceivably our neighbours’ asses. Don’t honour your father and mother, and break free from the whole Oedipal trap. We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt.

He lived out a fantasy, as quietly deranged as any psychiatrist I had met, the only real inmate in the asylum he ruled.

The motorway towns were built on the frontier between a tired past and a future without illusions and snobberies, where the only reality was to be found in the certainties of the washing machine and the ceramic hob, as precious as the iron stove in a pioneer’s shack.

In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.