Alexey Murashov, author of mentology

In my opinion, the changing world, the external reality in which a person lives and is immersed, cannot help but have a comprehensive and transformative impact on the person. In this sense, I think that external reality sets the boundaries and vectors for all changes in the so-called inner world of a person, in their beliefs, values, principles, rules, the phrases they think and speak, and the mindsets from which they generate all their desires, decisions, and actions. This is precisely how we see it in mentology, considering mindsets, which express the ideas and meanings that a person lives by, as the foundations from which they produce all their conscious activity and behavior.

The question is, how does changing reality affect a person? Not just routine changes, as always happens, but changes that are rapid, fundamental, explosive, and avalanche-like, requiring one to almost instantaneously, by the standards of a human lifespan, change the foundations of their life and the life paradigms in which it is placed to be effective, stay afloat, and sometimes simply survive? How does the influence of such a rapidly and deeply changing reality differ from the everyday usual influence of the external world, which, of course, always serves as a source for projecting the inner world? I believe that such processes are a severe test for the average person, a test of breaking, a "mind-blowing" experience, and I think that not all of these average people are able to cope with this challenge adequately.

However, in a multi-directionally changing world, it is very difficult to determine the mainstreams and trends of changes that must now be followed to continue living, and even more so, to live not worse than before or better than before, not worse or better than others. The trends that people manage to track do not provide them with unconditional choices of the "right direction" for their changes. Even if these are trends of the majority, they can always turn out to be a mistaken whim of the "herd mentality of the crowd." If these are marginal aspirations of the minority, even a bright and clearly thinking minority, the fact of their marginality against the backdrop of more widespread views scares the choosing person, and they cannot follow them.

You all know how this happens in another simple example when, with the rising cost of currency, everyone rushes to buy it en masse when it is already too late (translator's note: this example is well known and easily understood in Russia but can be confusing for Americans; use examples of stock market panics instead), but none of these people were ready to do it when the marginal minority did it, in conditions when the majority believed that everything was still almost okay. In this context, mentality either gets conserved or becomes increasingly fragmented, non-integral, and torn, trying to meet all the multi-directional demands of external reality simultaneously. Of course, this does not succeed. What happens to a person then? Most often, they become lost, increasingly alienated, withdrawn, apathetic, and antisocial, socially autistic, living more and more in their deep and carefully guarded inner world rather than in the frightening, incomprehensible, unpredictable, and oppressive external reality.

Only a very small number of people break through in these conditions to a new quality of representations, "overthrowing old gods," creating new ones, defining new ideas and meanings, rethinking and redefining everything or much. The best of them create new rules of life for themselves and everyone else; the worst take advantage of the turmoil of changes for their own benefit only. But can we, at least in the broadest terms, define what the contours of this "new mentality" are, and where it is heading? Perhaps, we can. It is necessary only to clarify whose mentality we are talking about, and whether there are common features in the changes of mentality of people living in Africa, Europe, Asia, or Russia. What does it depend on? Does it depend on the economic and political situation in the country, and cultural and social processes? Certainly, yes.

If we talk about the general features of such changes, I will name, on the one hand, the intensification of the autonomy and separation of each mentality from the "worldwide process," and on the other hand, the search for new supports for group mentalities, formed both in traditional social groups by gender, age, profession, religion, nationality, and so on, and in new communities formed on other ideological and meanings-based grounds.

Thus, if we provide the most general answer to the question of where and how mentality is moving, the answer would be: towards the discretization and opposition of mentalities, based on any traditions and foundations, and mentalities of a completely new type, various marginals, producing new ideas and meanings and creating communities based on these foundations, just as communities of well-known world religions were once created. I introduce a new concept to denote these new people and their new communities — I will call them neoses. I believe that the prospect of opposition between old and new mentalities, including rigid, even to the point of physical extermination of the bearers, is a long-term prospect for the new world. Who will emerge victorious in the next round — traditions or neoses — is still unknown.

This article was written by Alexey Murashov in Russian in 2014 and published on the Association of Mental Approach (Mentology) website in 2018.

Translated from Russian by Andrey Kazantsev in 2024.

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