Ballard on Ballard

In a way it shows the lengths that human beings will go to survive, the instinct for survival is intensely strong, no doubt about that, people will give up everything: every shred of dignity, every dream, every illusion, they will give up their most cherished fantasies, just to live for another half-an-hour. It’s a terrible thing to have to face but it’s true — war is a corrupting experience, it’s corrupting in the sense that violence is quite seductive, it has an appeal, In that, you can understand a world entirely given over to brutality and violence, whereas, sort of, peace — civilised life in the everyday sense of the term — is much more ambiguous, in fact, because we keep discovering there are things about ourselves that don’t quite accord with this notion that we are — civilised inheritors of the whole enlightenment tradition, and that we live in welfare societies and, you know, care for each other, but then something happens that reminds us that maybe it’s not quite that straightforward — war is very corrupting because it is so clear cut — people have a ruthlessness about the need to survive that is unmistakable really.