A leader of public opinion: social portrait in the conditions of hyperreality of modernity

The article analyzes the social characteristics of leadership in the public consciousness of modernity. The authors evaluate the dynamics of leadership culture in public perceptions of the newly constructed social reality. The position of influence and social pressure of the quasi-social on the trajectories of social behavior and the nature of public contacts is justified. The riskiness of the dynamics of the essential characteristics of leadership is seen in the decomposition of the value narrative, the ambivalence of postmodernity's morality. Informational terror based on "overturned values" possesses massive virulence directed, according to the author's assessments, towards the younger generation. The justification of these risks is seen in the "social traces" of Westernization, which received prolongation due to the liberal policies of recent decades and the contagious content of mass media, in the spread of classical addiction crises and new forms, including doomscrolling. The authors see the vector of transformations in the revitalization of traditional Russian imperatives and the principles of new humanism.