J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'People at Eden-Olympia don't mix. It's a problem we're working on. By the time they get home they want to be alone, fix a martini, swim a few lengths. Their true social life is the office.'

'That sounds like a design error. Jane and I go into Cannes just to talk to the tourists at the next table.'

'I've tried that – odd, isn't it?' Penrose muffled his voice. 'Don't they seem a little strange?'

'Tourists in Cannes?'

'People outside Eden-Olympia. In some way a dimension is missing. There's a lack of self-corroboration. They stroll along the Croisette, talk about their flights to Düsseldorf and Cleveland, but it's all unreal. If you stand back for a moment, tourists are a very odd phenomenon. Millions of people crossing the world to wander around unfamiliar cities. Tourism must be the last surviving relic of the great Bronze Age migrations.'

'So they should stay at home?'

'Yes, but that won't help them. Go into Cannes and look around – the checkout girls at the Monoprix, the chauffeur walking a poodle, the dentist and his receptionist having their cinq à sept in a backstreet hotel. They're like actors improvising their roles, unaware that the production has moved on.'

'To Eden-Olympia? I haven't seen a copy of the script.'

'It's still being written. We'll all take part – the Delages, you and Jane and Mrs Yasuda. It's the only script that matters.'

'Let me guess.' I finished my wine and placed the empty glass in front of Penrose, wondering how long it would take him to knock it over. 'The characters never meet, except in the office. There's no drama and no conflict. There are no clubs or evening classes…'

'We don't need them. They serve no role.'

'No charities or church fêtes. No fund-raising galas.'

'Everyone is rich. Or at least, very well off.'

'No police or legal system.'

'There's no crime, and no social problems.'

'No democratic accountability. No one votes. So who runs things?'

'We do. We run things.' Penrose spoke soothingly, exposing his badly bitten nails as if trying to present himself as vulnerable but sincere. 'Years ago people took for granted that the future meant more leisure. That's true for the less skilled and less able, those who aren't net contributors to society.'

'Such as?'

'Poets, traffic wardens, ecologists…' Penrose gestured dismissively, and struck my wine glass with his hand. He settled it on the table, embarrassed by his clumsiness, and continued: 'I'm being unfair, but I know you agree with me. For the talented and ambitious the future means work, not play.'

'Depressing. No recreation at all?'

'Only of a special kind. Talk to senior people at Eden-Olympia. They've gone beyond leisure. Playing around with balls of various shapes and sizes…' Penrose tripped over his tongue, and paused to flex his lips. 'That's something they left behind in childhood. Work is where they find their real fulfilment – running an investment bank, designing an airport, bringing on stream a new family of antibiotics. If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.'

'There's one thing missing. All I see are a lot of office buildings and car parks in a faked-up landscape. What happens to the law and the church? Where are the moral compass bearings that hold everything together?'

'They fall away. We shed them, like that brace you got rid of once you could stand on your own legs.'

'So Eden-Olympia has gone beyond morality?'

'In a sense, yes.' Controlling his clumsy hands, Penrose moved my wine glass to the next table. 'Remember, Paul, the old morality belonged to a cruder stage of human development. It had to cope with packs of hunter-scavengers who'd only just left the Serengeti plain. The first religions were forced to deal with barely socialized primates who'd tear each other's arms off given half a chance. Since they couldn't rely on self-control they needed ethical taboos to do it for them.'

'So, goodbye to the old morality. What then?'

'Freedom. A giant multinational like Fuji or General Motors sets its own morality. The company defines the rules that govern how you treat your spouse, where you educate your children, the sensible limits to stock-market investment. The bank decides how big a mortgage you can handle, the right amount of health insurance to buy. There are no more moral decisions than there are on a new superhighway. Unless you own a Ferrari, pressing the accelerator is not a moral decision. Ford and Fiat and Toyota have engineered in a sensible response curve. We can rely on their judgement, and that leaves us free to get on with the rest of our lives. We've achieved real freedom, the freedom from morality.'

Penrose sat back, hands raised to the air, part conjuror and part revivalist preacher. He was watching me to see how I reacted, less interested in converting me than in extracting a grudging concession that he might be right. At some point in his life, at his medical school or during his psychiatric training, someone had failed to take him seriously.

Unconvinced by his case, I said: 'It sounds like a ticket to 1984, this time by the scenic route. I thought organization man died out in the 1960s.'

'He did, our worried friend in the grey-flannel suit. He was an early office-dwelling hominid, a corporate version of Dawn Man who assumed a sedentary posture in order to survive. He was locked into a low-tech bureaucratic cave, little more than a human punch-card. Today's professional men and women are self-motivated. The corporate pyramid is a virtual hierarchy that endlessly reassembles itself around them. They enjoy enormous mobility. While you're mooning around here, Paul, they're patenting another gene, or designing the next generation of drugs that will cure cancer and double your life-span.'

'I'm impressed. Eden-Olympia is the new paradise. You should put up a sign.'

'We might, one day, but we don't want to boast.' Penrose beamed at me, broad smile lighting up his dead eyes. 'At long last, people are free to enjoy themselves, though most of them haven't realized it yet. In many ways I'm a kind of leisure coordinator. I run the adventure playground inside their heads. It's open to everyone here. You can explore your hidden dreams, the secret places of your heart. You can follow your imagination, wherever it leads.'

'Ennui, adultery and cocaine?'

'If you want to, but they're rather old-fashioned. You're a pilot, Paul, you've flown above the clouds. You owe it to yourself to be more inventive.'

'That sounds like a head-on collision with the law. Or a new kind of psychopathology.'

'Paul…' Pretending to be exasperated, Penrose leaned back with a deep sigh. 'The rich know how to cope with the psychopathic. The squirearchy have always enjoyed freedoms denied to the tenant farmers and peasantry. De Sade's behaviour was typical of his class. Aristocracies keep alive those endangered pleasures that repel the bourgeoisie. They may seem perverse, but they add to the possibilities of life.'

'That's a curious thing for a psychiatrist to say.'

'Not at all. Perverse behaviours were once potentially dangerous. Societies weren't strong enough to allow them to flourish.'

'But Eden-Olympia is strong enough?'

'Of course.' Penrose spoke soothingly, as if to a favourite patient. 'You're free here, Paul. Perhaps for the first time in your life.'

Penrose was watching me, curious to see my reactions, a forgotten smile lingering on his lips like a tide-mark. I wondered why he was making this evangelical play for me, and whether he had talked to Jane. Then I thought of another, more impressionable doctor.

'Free? It's hard to know how loose the handcuffs really are. Did you discuss this with David Greenwood?'