On ideologies and their bearers: revisiting the issue

With the advent of the era of information and knowledge, ideologies are becoming increasingly important in the life of societies and determine their history. The role of ideologies has especially increased during the period of aggravation of the civilizational confrontation between the Collective West and those non-Western countries that are friendly toward Russia and China. The article defines the concept of ideology and provides a brief description of modern ideologies of the West and Russia. We prove that even a scientifically developed theory is very limited in its ability to identify the main patterns of societal development (due to the incomparable complexity of the knowable and the knower), and even more so to purposefully influence this development. There is a well-known Leninist formula: “An idea becomes a power when it takes hold of the masses”. But it is the elite, the ruling stratum, that develops an ideology, protects it from hostile influences, and communicates it to society. Based on the works of Russian and Western historians and sociologists, the paper describes the development of ideas about the ruling stratum, the elite as the bearer of ideologies and the dangers associated with its split. In Western countries, the function of selecting personnel for the elite is largely performed by the market mechanism of capital accumulation. In Russia and China, in the “ruling stratum - government” tier, the leading role is more often played by the government, which largely forms both the ideology and the ruling stratum. In modern Russia, one of the crucial tasks is to create mechanisms for the selection of personnel and creation of privileged conditions for the ruling stratum in a situation of existing unjustified socio-economic inequality. The article discusses methods for practical solution of this problem. The presented material can be used to determine the priority of the tasks facing Russia and to form institutional mechanisms for their solution.