As suggested in the preceding chapters, one way of appraising J. G. Ballard's unique position in the history of contemporary literature is to say that his fiction seeks to challenge nothing less than the psychic and material parameters by which we attempt to regulate our everyday lives and understand the nature of reality and of our own aspirations and fantasies. Rejecting traditional notions concerning the necessary ascendancy of the rational mind, Ballard's view of modern life emphasizes the process by which society enters the individual and establishes a fundamental separation between reason and impulse, thereby negating the all-pervading force of unconscious desire which, as we have seen, stands as both the possibility of self-fulfilment and the danger of self-annihilation. This particular feature of his fiction ties in with his vision of contemporary society as based on a set of values that entail the loss of instinctual freedom in the name of a ‘reality principle’ that has taken the form of delayed satisfaction, safer planning and greater efficiency in all fields of modern life.

That Ballard's catastrophe scenarios almost invariably take place within societies which have reached a high level of social welfare and technological sophistication is indicative of his concern with how violence and brutality can be unleashed by a freedom- and progress-oriented society. Another useful parallel can be drawn here between Ballard's social critique and the opening proposition of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’. What Adorno and Horkheimer are warning against is that the concept of reason upheld by Enlightenment thinking (as well as by its practical extension into the Industrial Revolution and modern technologies) as the supreme agent of freedom and progress for all mankind bears the seeds of a totalizing, and potentially totalitarian, view of the common good that may lead to the psychological confinement of the individual.