J. G. Ballard Sees the Future

From his introduction to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí.

“The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational.”

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.” -Interview in Metaphors No. 7, (1983).

“The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.” -As quoted in J. G. Ballard Quotes : Does The Future Have A Future? (2004) edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan.”

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