24.08.2026, Moscow.
In the modern world, no one addresses the issue of where humanity is heading; all hopes for the future are tied to the development of computers and digital technologies, political scientist, philosopher, and the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan stated on August 7 during the Conversation with a Sage program on the Zvezda radio.
The philosopher recalled what the Russian poet Aleksandr Blok wrote in his poem “Retribution” regarding human development and the relationship between humanity and technological progress:
But what of Man? In roaring steel
In fire, in black gunpowder smoke
What kind of fiery expanses
Have manifested to your eyes?
And earlier in the same poem, discussing the 19th century, Blok wrote:
And man? He lost his liberty:
Machines and cities matter more…
“In other words, the point is that if we fail to address the issue of what is happening to Man, things will go badly. Yet, there is an effort to avoid dealing with this issue,” the political scientist emphasized.
Kurginyan stated that as long as Russia follows the West, this tendency will dominate Russian politics with absolutely disastrous consequences.
The philosopher recounted how his mother, a prominent Soviet philologist, once told him that after the prominent Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov gave a speech at a Party congress, a saying emerged among literary scholars, “Man is a fish to man” (similar to “Man is a wolf to man”).
Kurginyan explained that when he asked in bewilderment what this meant, his mother replied that throughout his speech, Sholokhov had spoken only about the fish in the Don River, without saying a word about the Man.
After that, she noted, that this “Man is a fish to man” is a third way of trying to interpret the human destiny. Two others were “Man is a wolf to man” and “Man is a friend, comrade, and brother to man”.
“So, what’s happening now: man is cryptocurrency to man? Man is a digit to man,” the philosopher said, shifting the conversation to the present condition. He recalled that Russia had not supported the UN’s “Our Common Agenda” (vision for the future of global cooperation), which made no mention of the Man.
In its place, another concept was proposed at a forum in the city of Kazan, Russia, yet it, too, says nothing about the Man, focusing instead on cryptocurrency and digital technologies. “What does it mean when there is such an aversion to talking about the Man? Is it a case of not mentioning rope in the home of a hanged man?” the political analyst asked.
Kurginyan noted that the first time he heard arguments about the Man having reached a dead end in his development was not from “illiterate Silicon Valley representatives.” The philosopher recounted that “since the late 1980s, I had heard from academicians, advisors to Gorbachev, that the Homo sapiens, as a species, was a dead branch on the tree of evolution, the tree of life, and that this branch needed to be chopped off.”
The political analyst recalled that in the 1980s, Soviet and Western thinkers met at the Esalen Institute in California, “where they hashed things out, yet it never really became clear what kind of convergence that was, or how it was linked to anything else.”
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
