J G Ballard and Millennium People

Protests in London come and go as designer fashion shows these days.

Last year some of the G20 protesters in 2009 were very silly but some are more akin to the bored characters in JG Ballard's recent novels e.g Millennium People who want to trash and subvert the over-mediated consumer landscape and find meaning in a meaningless word.

The decline of the left, socialism, conservatism and, increasingly, of political liberalism means that we have left as an ideology is consumerism. History has reached a dead end of banality and narcissistic consumption where values are redundant.

As Ballard writes,

"People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be," he says witheringly. "All we've got left is our own psychopathology. It's the only freedom we have – that's a dangerous state of affairs.

"The sheer meaninglessness of a society based on the hallucinatory substitute for reality that the vast masses of consumers have bought into has defined the New Labour period.

Now that the illusions have crashed with the finance system, the result is going to be a rejection of the boredom and conformity that comes from reducing nearly every aspect of everyday life to nothing more than a series of money transactions.

Ballard believes that this can 'only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.".

Just as the Vietnam War was to the 1968 media conscious rebels, so too the Iraq War and the frustration that the cloistered 'Metropolitan elites', all on first name terms and who play at politics to give the illusion of brand distinction, is going to mobilise people to reject the system.

Unfortunately, it will not be peaceful: there is the potential for massive and gratuitous acts of psychopathological violence, just anything that will force the masses to question the 'inauthentic' nature of their existence.

'Consumers Suck' read some of the banners: if they fail to respond, it is quite possible that extreme radicals might take to selecting less obviously 'political' targets such as shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, airports and theme parks.

The victims of terror were aiding global capitalism by consuming: their deaths will be a small price to pay if it helps to destroy the fake consumer confidence that keeps the system going and directly causes Third World immiseration and global warming.

The novel starts off with a bomb explosion at Heathrow that turns out to be the work of a demented paediatrician, Dr Richard Gould who later tell the main character David Markham that the sheer meaninglessness of such an outrage forced people to ask 'why'.

Ballard's Millennium People tended to just laugh at the middle class protesters 'the Kropotkins with Pink Gin' and that the "the middle-classes are the new proletariat", and that's the main weakness of the book. Ballard does not know the radicals: just the Guardian reading middle classes.

For Millennium People could have included the deracinated Islamists and Class War nihilists, as well as the anti-road protesters and the increasingly psychopathological journalist hacks who rationalise in metaphysical terms every terror threat or terrorist action to push a revolutionary agenda.

A lot of the street carnival protesters at G 20 were like those, as in Ballard's Chelsea Marina who desire to escape the "self-imposed burdens" of civic responsibility and consumer culture.

By only focusing on the trashing of the RSB, people are missing the point about much of the 'global justice movement'.

It is not merely the 'Good' anger of wanting to right wrongs and injustice: a look at the G20 Meltdown groups shows the usual 'hard left' sects whose leaders are motivated by 'Bad' anger, a craving for destruction more than any real policy of a constructive alternative.

Just as the 1968 insurrections fomented a climate of opinion in which the Angry Brigades and the Baader Meinhof were created, so too will 2009 lead to radical psychopathological terror groups.

In 2009 , however,there are the added ethnic and sectarian tensions bred by wars in 'the Muslim World' and the growth of Islamism and religious faith based apocalyptic politics.

As Ballard writes,

"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."

That hunger for apocalyptic violence is innate in human beings and the more people's lives are confined to a mind numbing routine of frenetic work and regulated consumer fun, the more people will turn to violence and nastiness

Not least when the cosmetic 'niceness' of the system conceals iniquities and inequalities that are screened from perception by the mainstream media and by happening in poorer countries.
The result could be something like the Baader-Meinhof-in Islamism that already evident.