Systemic fear of personal losses seals the postmodern system without bribes

Evidence

A new kind of fear — rather than Lenin’s famous bribes — now seals this system in, since you have a personal stake in its smooth and unobstructed reproduction, something beginning to happen so fast it is no longer visible. Nor is your fear, now systemic, visible, either, having been experientially repressed; the need to avoid evaluations of the system as a whole is now an integral part of its own internal organization as well as its various ideologies. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 752

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the specific mechanism of postmodern hegemony: fear of systemic breakdown rather than overt payment or coercion.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s own argument about postmodernism as cultural dominant and to theories of ideology from Althusser/Marx that the reader may hold.