In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

The line crystallizes a recurring Ballardian paradox: when a society becomes perfectly regulated—"completely sane" in the sense of normalized, rationalized, and behaviorally policed—individual agency can be squeezed out. In that condition, what gets labeled "madness" (irrationality, deviance, refusal of consensus reality) may be the only remaining space for genuine autonomy. The quote also critiques how institutions define sanity as conformity: if sanity is equated with compliance, then freedom requires stepping outside sanctioned reason. Ballard’s work often explores this boundary where psychological extremity becomes a form of resistance to technocratic or consumerist control.