Contemporary social science in Russia needs to catch up in understanding the changes occurring in the country and in forming a sovereign worldview, and it needs to be accelerated, philosopher Alexander Dugin told journalists at the 5th Congress of the Russian Society of Political Scientists in Svetlogorsk (Kaliningrad region).
He believes it is necessary to ‘develop our Russian, sovereign, civilisational worldview on the fly, and implement it into education and science on the go.’ ‘This ideology is necessary because we are fighting an ideological opponent. It’s not just a war of armies or states; it’s a war of ideas and civilisations. Accordingly, we need to quickly define the Russian worldview, the basis of which is laid out in the documents of the President of Russia, in his speeches, visions, and our doctrines’, Dugin said.
However, he noted that current social science is significantly behind what is happening in the country. ‘It is essential to philosophically and metaphysically change the most basic notions. The President has shown us the way, but it’s up to our entire social science community to engage, which it frankly hesitates to do. That’s the problem: it needs to be hurried along’, the philosopher remarked.
According to him, over the last thirty to forty years in Russia, several worldview models have changed until the ideology of liberalism finally took hold. ‘Our approach was such — everything in the West is correct; we need to align all standards to the Western ones, and then everything will be correct. We followed this direction until a certain point. This came to a dead end; we are now simply at war with this West. It turns out that now we need to justify this war, understand our own historical path, and find criteria for measuring whether we are heading in the right direction’, Dugin explained.
