Limits of Decay

However, since ancient times, the processes have accelerated, and now the question is important for us: at what stage of the process are we? Have we already passed the peak of the “crumbling” of the old world order or not? Has the collection and construction of the new one begun?

Unlike in past times, humanity is much more ready for trials. The power of people has increased many times over, new technologies allow us to communicate very effectively and fight diseases, and engineering skills allow us to solve many problems that were previously impossible to approach. In general, if we ignore the most terrible natural upheavals, people manage many processes on the planet quite skilfully. This gives us great hope that in our case we will be able to cope with the creation of a new world order relatively quickly and successfully.

At the beginning of the article, I mentioned that the limits of disintegration in the social sense are limited, in fact, by a single person. That is, people can turn into a crowd of individuals. But this has almost never happened, except for periods lasting hours or, in the worst case, days. As has been rightly noted, individual survival is dear to each of us, but the salvation of loved ones, family, is generally more important. There are a huge number of illustrations of this. It can even be found in the destruction of Pompeii, which gave us evidence of the touching affection that people feel for each other. So the limit of disintegration, it seems, is in the formation of a group of coexisting clans, families. Of course, anything can happen at the individual level, the behavior of a specific person is difficult to predict, unlike the behavior of a statistically significant number of people. 

A more important question is: how does a society assemble from disparate elements? In our case, how and with what will the new world order develop? At the beginning of the text, I also mentioned the Higgs boson. It is called the God particle because – as they write in popular articles – it is these particles that interact with other particles, they are, if you will, the glue, the substance (may physicists forgive me), which actually allows for the creation of the world in which we live, including us ourselves.

So, I would like to understand what the Higgs boson is in politics and history. What or who connects the diverse array of human institutions into a single whole, and allows us to create complex human communities on a planetary scale.

The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.