The All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center general director: "The global crisis will be long-running and painful..."

The well-known Russian sociologist, General Director of VTsIOM (The All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center), Valery Fyodorov, spoke on May 24 in Moscow at the conference “New Meanings of New Reality” with a very curious and rather pessimistic forecast, the abstracts of which are published by Novye Izvestia:

1. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been repeatedly seen to be with us again. Plague, War, Famine and Death. The world is insecure! Sociologists note that the paradigm of world perception that has been characteristic of the past few decades - progress, enrichment, development, confidence in the future - today has changed to another, in many respects the opposite: uncertainty, fragility, danger, unpredictability. The young people feel the change of paradigm most sharply and painfully. This is typical for the world as a whole, Russia is no exception.
2. The paradigm shift is the result of the dramatic finale of the epic process of globalization. The final started around 2016 (Trump, BREXIT), continued with a pandemic and a special operation. At first it looked like "global turbulence", today it looks like full-fledged de-globalization. The United States and Great Britain are the leaders of this process, they have been building a new world for several years already - a world divided and unequal. The “world order based on rules” has long ceased to exist and has remained only in Western phraseology. But in reality - "Comrade Volk knows who to eat, and eats, and does not listen to anyone".
3. The NWO is a new, more intensive and broader phase of the overall process, it again transfers the struggle from the sphere of economics, diplomacy and intelligence to the military sphere. It gave a powerful impetus to the erection of walls instead of bridges, the expansion and strengthening of military blocs, the rearmament of armies, and the militarization of previously quite peaceful alliances. It forced many to choose a side, to decide who they are with, even despite the long tradition of neutrality and mediation. It revealed a lot that had previously been hidden, and intensified all the contradictions and conflicts to the extreme. But it has not yet created anything fundamentally new, but only strengthened the previously manifested trends.
4. The global crisis is deepening and will probably take not years, but decades. We are living in a big transition process that will be long-running and painful. Just as the First World War was not a tragic accident, so the wars of the 21st century are organic and inevitable within the framework of the crisis of an outdated and agonizing world system. We need to understand and accept the fact that peaceful times are over, and this is for a long time - regardless of the good / evil will of the parties and the course of hostilities in Ukraine.
5. There will be more and more conflicts, they will move from hot to frozen phases and back. Everything will become a weapon: resources, institutions, capital, connections, people, ideas. It is the ideological front that acquires the main importance, because wars are still waged by people, and not "humanoid combat robots." The eternal question arises again: how is a "just war" possible? What values are worth dying for? Where is the line between the good that a just war brings and the evil that it creates? Answers to these questions must be given, they are needed not only by Russians, but also by people all over the world.
6. In order to survive this war, to come out of it stronger than we were before - and this is precisely the goal of any strategy - we must create a firm ideological position. The existing position is accepted by the majority of Russians, but not by the majority of Ukrainians, let alone the West. Our only thesis, which more or less finds understanding abroad, concerns opposition to US hegemonism. Other theses - about denazification, about refusing to annex Ukrainian territories, etc. - do not receive support. Probably because they are of a narrow nature and do not concern the main problems of our time, and therefore are not close and uninteresting to our potential allies in the big world.
7. To get out of the ghetto into which the West is driving us, our thought must be not conservative, but progressive. It must be directed to the future, not to the past. Our understanding must be global, not national. Our position must have not only a rational, but also a moral dimension. If this does not happen, does it mean that we have nothing special to say to the world? A dangerous moment, and it needs to be changed as soon as possible. We must speak on behalf of the future, on behalf of morality and on behalf of the world - otherwise no one will simply hear us.
8. Our message to the world must respond to the main challenges and concerns of today's crisis. We have to talk about inequality; about insecurity; about injustice. In other words, it should be a left-wing discourse, but not a degenerate left-liberal one (the rights of LGBT people, women, etc.) and not a barren left-conservative one (let's restore the collapsed USSR, bring back Stalin, etc.). The demand for such a discourse is enormous, the supply so far is negligible. And we have a chance to make our application right here and now.

P.S. In this regard, the most important and difficult post at present is not the post of defense minister, but the post of director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.