Kurginyan defines social regress

14.08.2022, Aleksandrovskoye.

The process of simplification, the society’s loss of its capability for creating anything complex, for accumulating and developing knowledge is a regress, said philosopher, political scientist and the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan on August 8 in a new issue of his original program Destiny published on the movement’s YouTube channel.

A a metaphor for regress, the political scientist used the image of a weed-grown field where flax used to grow. He noted that this “post-cultural” weed is much more rough and dangerous than the wild grass that grows on virgin soil. This “secondary barbarization” is what Kurginyan calls regress in contrast to progress.

A regress, according to Kurginyan, would be e.g. losing the skill to build houses or to create complex machines. If the capability for creating complex things is good, then the loss of this skill is unquestionably bad, it is regress, the expert believes.

The philosopher stressed that for certain part of the society, progress is not something good, as it is “fixated on great primordial traditions” and thus it believes that any movement towards the future is unacceptable and must be discredited.

The philosopher suggests that the supporters of the primordial traditions should answer the question that he believes to be most important, “Does history bears any progressive, enriching, developing origin that promotes human ascension? Or does it lack such an origin and only exists of an absolute evil?”

Certainly, there is much evil in history, but can history be reduced to such evil, Kurginyan wonders. For example, the Christians and other “people of the Bible” wait for a redemption, for the Messiah in the end of history. And to them, history cannot be an evil only.

The political scientist proposes the following concept of progress: “as long as a society conveys certain knowledge, creates this knowledge, accumulates, cultivates, arranges, and develops it… we have a progress, a non-linear, ambiguous, complicated, painful, but still progress.”

A loss of such a capability for conveying, accumulating, and developing knowledge is what Kurginyan calls a regress. It is very easy to lose this capability, but it is much more difficult to regain it after it was lost than to gain it from scratch, he stressed.

“Something complex is created. Complex means fragile. A blow was made on this fragile complexity, and it is gone. Then we discover that we need it. We began to shuffle the fragments exclaiming ah and oh. But these exclamations will not restore the complexity. And we cannot mend what was broken,” the leader of the Essence of Time movement explained.

Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency

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