“ Consumerism itself is a vast desert. A desert without a single oasis as far as I can see…This a sort of soft fascism, almost a fascism lite - horrible phrase, but you know what I mean. But the underlying motivation is probably the same. I mean, one sees what people are looking for is their own psychopathology. They’re looking for madness as a way out. They’re bored, and they want to start breaking the furniture. They are, you know, the tribe of chimpanzees who are tired of chewing twigs and decide to go on a hunting party. And to do so they first work themselves up into a bloodcurdling state of rage, and then they go and tear a lot of monkeys limb from limb. And I’m suggesting a similar sort of mechanism may have been at work in the fascist Germany of the 1930s. No explanations I’ve seen are ever convincing of why cultivated and intelligent people like the Germans and Italians should plunge into this insane world-view. And that’s the sort of comparable thing, in a lower note, the other end of the piano, that might take place [here]. ”
ballardinterview (via Joanne McNeil at the Tomorrow Museum and jomc)
