As is well known, physicists are still looking for the smallest particle, that is, the limits of what our world is divided into. Molecules and atoms have already turned out to be giants in the physical world. Neutrinos? Mesons? The Higgs boson, also known as the God particle? Physicists still debate the details. Something similar is happening in the world of politics. To what degree of fragmentation can the world disintegrate? Theoretically, we can be “atomized” to the point where everyone is for himself. But still, this is unlikely. What is the smallest human gathering necessary to spark the formation of a new world order? Is there a “God particle” in the political world, without which human community is impossible?
The discussion of the Valdai Club on the eve of SPIEF 2025 is titled “Homo Perplexus: How to Stop Fearing and Learn to Love Change”.
It’s well known that people usually say that they don’t like changes. At the same time, they have nowhere to go, all life is change and the end of each life is predetermined and known. Nevertheless, while a person is alive, he always tries to somehow improve his situation: for example, to earn more or start a family with a loved one. That is, some changes are desirable. The same is true of fear. It is impossible not to be afraid. Existential fear is always inherent in man – fear of death, illness, the loss of loved ones, for example, that is, fear of bad, unwanted changes. In general, people have learned to manage everyday changes and fears, and have come up with a host of ways to live with them. In essence, all human culture is exactly about this.
But sometimes the situation worsens. New dimensions of fear and anxiety appear in response to the possibility of catastrophic changes for everyone. The simplest example is natural disasters. They hit everyone at once.
But let's return to political and social processes. There is a feeling – and this has been repeatedly discussed at meetings of the Valdai Club – that the old world order is crumbling: connections are falling apart, old conflicts are intensifying, and new ones are emerging. It is becoming increasingly difficult to plan our actions or to predict the development of events. In fact, the world, if we understand it as a system or a complex multidimensional matrix, is falling apart; the mutual connections between certain entities are breaking or becoming entangled. Elements of the system are becoming isolated. Incidentally, many historians believe that certain cycles of growth and decline exist in the human system. They say, for example, that about 4,000 years ago, the world was extremely interconnected, tin from Britain reached Mesopotamia and wool from the Caucasus reached the Mediterranean. Then the “Sea Peoples” came, and the entire world-system of that time collapsed. Similar tragedies have happened more than once. One that is quite close to us is the fall of the Western Roman Empire. By the way, the description of the fears of Roman citizens on the eve of collapse is one of the most popular themes in fiction.
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.
Of course, each individual person is, to varying degrees, a kind of social Higgs boson. There are people who prefer to rely on someone, and there are still others on whom many prefer to rely. On whom they place their hopes. It is clear that from those who rely and who are relied upon, a kind of hierarchy of hope and trust gradually emerges. Once upon a time, the first social formations arose from such hierarchies, from which, later, states developed.
Today, of course, we live in unusually complex social systems. But some points are still important. The only way to overcome fears and begin to respond with reasonable confidence to inevitable changes is to live in a society whose institutions can be relied upon. That is, to live among people, most of whom can be trusted, and some of whom can never be relied upon. And the formation of a new world order can only occur through close-knit groups of people. Groups within which there are rules of the game, a system of observing justice. In today's world, I believe that only states can act as such groups. Alas, not all of them, but only those in which there is agreement between different social groups and mechanisms to support this agreement. Of course, the question remains: are there any other international entities besides states? And – if there are – how can they interact with states? But these questions are for a separate and rather complex conversation.
