This is a fairly old text; it was written in 1986. It would seem that it has no direct relation to the problems of modernization of Russia .. It is a pure philosophy[edit] But what is new in society most often arises as knowledge, as an invention, as an idea. Namely, philosophy has been trying for thousands of years to understand what an “idea” is, how it relates to matter and material (real) things, how knowledge arises, where people get ideas from, how an idea is embodied in objects of the real world. And what is "knowledge" and "thinking" in general . Man has no power to create new matter or to destroy "all" that is; it exists forever and only changes its forms as a result of the activities of nature and people. What is available to man is the creation of new ideas and the embodiment of them with the matter that is at hand. At the same time, a person is able to destroy a trace (as opposed to matter) of previously created ideas - as they burned the Alexandrian library . But both new knowledge and new ideas are created, as it turns out on closer inspection, not by individual genius inventors, but by large intellectual communities of people. The inventor combines ideas developed by other people in the mental history of mankind, adds something-tone - and gets the invention, the idea of a previously non-existent thing, process or organization. You can't invent a plane unless someone else has invented a wheel, a wing, a propeller, an engine... a bolt and a lever, after all. If we better understand how people invent new things, we can probably better organize the processes in which human activity is organized to create new things in our country.