From the postmodern culture of fun to the grim realities of postcommunism

The collapse of communism at the present fin de siècle coincided with widespread interest among intellectuals in a phenomenon known as postmodernism, itself a confluence of apocalyptic themes found in the previous fin de siècle (Meštrović 1991) and the fun-culture uncovered by David Riesman in his Lonely Crowd (1950). The confluence of these two phenomena, postcommunism with postmodernism (as a fun version of the apocalypse), produced the giddy, optimistic belief that democracy and tolerance would emerge from the ruins of communism, a widespread belief that only a fun-culture could produce. This nexus of sometimes contradictory cultural forces, and their consequences, will be the theme of the rest of this book, yet it requires some immediate clarification.