Reflections on New Emerging Psychopatholgies.

Some of recent protests such as that against G20 in 2008 and the recent Student Demonstrations had violent elements that made them akin to the bored characters in J G Ballard's recent novels such as 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. Only a form of Lifestyle Anarchism seemed to underpin the students demos, the myth of counterculture.

As J G Ballard wrote,

"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."

The sheer meaninglessness of a society based on the hallucinatory substitute for reality that the vast masses of consumers were prepared to buy into defined the New Labour period of PM's Blair and Brown until the great economic crash of 2008.

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

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

On the fringes of a deracinated society there are those who harbour a deep frustration that the cloistered 'Metropolitan elites', all on first name terms in the "Westminster Village" just play at politics to give the illusion of brand distinction

That along with greater numbers of semi-educated people who cannot get the status from the jobs they believe their degrees entitle them too are likely in future to reject 'the system' and turn to ideologies that offer a total explanation for the way the world is.

In recent years, universities were becoming recruitment grounds for jihadist-salafi organisations and 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.

At the G20 demonstrations some of the banners read 'Consumers Suck' : 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.

Ballard's Millennium People 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 was mostly designed to force people to ask 'why' and create meaning again.

The novel, though, 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 did not know the radicals: just the Guardian reading middle classes.

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 such as Seumas Milne who rationalise in metaphysical terms every terror threat or terrorist action to push a revolutionary agenda of the hard left and Islamists.

The growth of Islamism in the West and the connections with the New Great Game and energy geopolitics still awaits its novelist.

Nevertheless, a lot of the street carnival protesters are those, as in Ballard's Chelsea Marina who desire to escape the "self-imposed burdens" of civic responsibility and consumer culture by having choreographed street protests and violence as a way of

By only focusing on the trashing of the Royal Bank of Scotland, people are missing the point about the degree to which much of the 'global justice movement' has been hijacked by fanatics craving destruction and to rationalise their resentment as being the "losers" in their own society.

The good anger of wanting to right wrongs and injustice always seems to be eclipsed by the organisational dominance of those motivated by hatred dressed up in humanitarian concern: a look at the G20 Meltdown groups shows the usual 'hard left' sects such as the SWP with a craving for revolutionary destruction more than having any real 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 the growing radicalism given impetus by the crash of 2008 potentially lead to the spawning of radical psychopathological terror groups: only

Unlike the 1970s, a decade of terrorism, however, there are in the second decade of the twenty-first century the added ethnic and sectarian tensions bred by wars in 'the Muslim World' and the growth of Islamism. Apocalyptic politics based on an interpretation of Islam is spreading into the cities of Europe.

As Ballard claimed,

"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 a recurrent feature of history 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, where whole sections of society feel cut of, separated and full of hatred towards a decadent society

Not least when the cosmetic 'niceness' of Britain as portrayed as a fair and decent society is believed to conceal the global iniquities and inequalities that make meaningless consumer decadence possible and that are screened from perception by the mainstream media that fails to question Western projects to invade Afghanistan or Iraq.

Shaping Up for Things To Come

‘… could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.’

J G Ballard The Guardian, 14 June 2008.

Though this picture of shop workers limbering up in perfect unison along the aisles of a store in the Beijing Shopping Centre is something that does not happen at the moment, this appalling sight in today's free "newspaper" Metro had me thinking that something like this could come to Britain in the near future.

The novelist J G Ballard mused increasingly on the theme of whether consumerism could lead to a sterile world of perfection not least in his last novel Kingdom Come. This a theme I've become obsessed with not least because Ballard's writing was unknown to me when I first started to ponder this when Blair came to power in 1997.

Since 1997 and Blair's carefully choreographed entry into Downing Street, which was slightly hysterical and had something totalitarian about it and the re-presentation of the British PM Blair as a saviour who could act as a megaphone for "the people's aspirations" through soundbites, real political choice and debate has been continually constricted.

With the lies that lead to the Iraq War, the curtailment of civil liberties in anti-terrorism legislation, the acceleration of social trends that are eroding civil society and reducing politics largely to the aesthetics and images that buttress the power of a new moneyed oligarchy with little time for Britain as anything other than a "market", questions need to be asked.

Consumerism, a society of the mass spectacle, the depth psychology of the advertising industry in tapping inner most insecurities and needs and the elevation of image and brand symbolism over the substance of words could lead to a combination of greater consumer freedom and greater authoritarianism.

There is no reason why China, instead of being a nation that somehow will learn to adapt towards Western liberalism in politics will not instead combine "liberalism" in economics with an ever more effective security state that will crush freedom even better precisely because people prefer consumer security and a fantasy world of perfection than freedom.

In that sense, China could be a new model to decaying Western states such as Britain. Blair had authoritarian tendencies and lauded Singapore in 1997 as a great beacon of modernity. One commentator called this trend "happy face fascism", something that has surreal possibilities that few thinkers have looked at-apart from Ballard.