Modern existential crisis and new final values

ABSTRACT

Why does the ruling class in all countries of the world today act so weirdly and sometimes irresponsibly? Maybe because they are all bored. They don’t know what to do with themselves, or even what to do with their power. The deepest cause of the modern crisis is the lack of new ideas. First of all, ideas that justify your life and death. These ideas are called meanings of life, final values, final goals, final goods, human life's ends, reasons to live, etc. Philosophers and psychologists pick out from five to twenty known final values that cannot be reduced to one another. The existing final values are not but the final values system itself is outdated and has not been updated for a long time. To get out of the existential crisis, we need to look for new final values. New final values mean new ethical standards, new philosophies, new religions, new ideologies, new social institutions, etc. The more final values we know, the richer our culture is, the freer we are and the more expanded (more flexible, sophisticated, etc.) our consciousness is.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Yury Tikhonravov

Yury Tikhonravov, a PhD in philosophy, writes on final values, their connections to cultural-historical traditions, and on the search for new final values. Among his recent books are Ideological Warfare (Moscow 2022) and Ivan the Fool's Quest for Meaning (Moscow 2020).