«People do not think»: Heraclitus and the cognitive problems of culture
The subject of this article is the social and cultural preconditions of cognitive deficits (limitations) in today’s public perceptions. Obvious deviations from rational knowledge and logic in contemporary mass consciousness often make it necessary to polemically assert that "people do not think". A similar judgment, attributed to Heraclitus, is taken in the article as a starting point in the search for the causes of this phenomenon. Among the social and cultural prerequisites of the phenomenon "people do not think", the article presents dysfunctions of social development of the personality, splits in personal identity, stress of self-preservation and the dominance of the paradigm "folk holism" – a worldview in which the key principle of building judgments is an idealized whole (common, unified) , which is higher, more valuable and more important than the singular and individual. The holistic way of thinking forms and maintains the social attitudes of the absolute power, communal collectivism, and a single and indivisible paternalistic state. By the method and result, such thinking techniques generate the effects of inakoNEmyslie (Engl. lack ofdissent, the Russian term coined by Merab Mamardashvili), as inability to think something differently, which create obstacles for understanding of the world’s diversity, but it is convenient for manipulating the mass consciousness. The holistic mentality seems to be derived from the archetypes of the tribal consciousness of the clan. Modern information policy, enlightenment, education do not seek to modernize the perception of society in this regard. On the contrary, they support certain stereotypes of thinking, strengthen the stereotyped means of their production. In terms of theoretical approaches, the work adjoins research into embodied forms of cognition. It uses methods of case analysis and text analysis – authentic discourses and narratives.
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