The Elementary Particles

by Michel Houellebecq

these self-professed Satanists didn’t believe in God or Satan or any supernatural power. Blasphemy was simply something they used to spice up their rituals, and most of them quickly lost the taste for it. In fact, like their master the Marquis de Sade, they were pure materialists—libertines forever in search of new and more violent sensations. According to Macmillan, the progressive destruction of moral values in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties was a logical, inevitable process. Having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals, liberated from the constraints of ordinary morality, should turn their attentions to the wider pleasures of cruelty. Two hundred years earlier, de Sade had done precisely the same thing. In a sense, the serial killers of the 1990s were the spiritual children of the hippies of the sixties, and their common ancestors would be the Viennese Actionists of the fifties.