The system’s core necessity is keeping the customer from ever suspecting resistance

Evidence

In contrast to the liberal era, industrialized as well as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamental. It outlasts the organized acceptance of the uniformed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of women’s organizations, but the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the innermost causal drive of the culture industry — domination via constant presence rather than puritan repression.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from puritanism to system-inherent presence is a genuine paradigm shift in how domination works — worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Against a system demanding meaning-production, the masses’ passive conformity is the superior resistance. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 291