The Ability to Think: The Emergence of a Subject Capable of Producing a New Reality

Abstract

The article presents a philosophical and historiosophical study of the production and reproduction of subjectivity. Its central concern is the distinction between the ability to act within an existing construction and the ability to produce a new construction and determine the direction of its movement.

To describe this distinction, the article proposes a three-level model: Level I — the production of conceptions, meaning, and direction; Level II — the production of specialized knowledge and decisions for their implementation; Level III — the functioning and reproduction of the created system. These are not social hierarchies or levels of intellectual superiority, but different functions of thinking in relation to a construction.

The central problem is the reproduction of Level I. Knowledge, education, professional competence, and technological complexity do not in themselves create the capacity to move beyond an existing construction. This capacity presupposes the discovery of the construction itself and of one’s own participation in producing the determination of the world that is taken for reality. The concept of self-metaphysicality is introduced to designate this relation.

The central thesis of the article is that the complexity of a system is not identical with its subjectivity. A society may expand its knowledge, technologies, and institutions while simultaneously losing the capacity to determine its own direction independently. Subjectivity is determined by the capacity to reproduce forms of thinking and environments that preserve the possibility of questioning an existing construction and producing the next one.

Keywords: thinking, independent thinking, strategic thinking, production of the future, self-metaphysicality, social complexity, reproduction of subjectivity, construction, Level I, political subjectivity.

1. “Technical” Knowledge and Independent Thinking

In this study, “technical knowledge” refers to conceptual knowledge already produced by someone else, which a person adopts in place of their own thinking. Mastery of such a “technique” makes it possible to understand an issue within a given system of concepts and relations and to act within an already existing construction.

For example, by applying a risk-management framework, one can construct a “risk map”: identify known types of risk, classify them into categories, assess their probability and consequences, and reduce the results to a formal procedure. However, the ability to perform this procedure does not in itself imply the ability to see what is happening as movement toward a goal in which unexpected problems may arise. Analysis as thinking begins where the ability emerges to detect what has not yet become a problem but may become one.

A thinking technique can be applied within a given construction. Kuhn demonstrates this using scientific knowledge: normal science solves problems within an accepted paradigm, while the accumulation of anomalies that cannot be accounted for by its means may lead to a crisis and a change in the paradigm itself (Kuhn, 1962). The new conception, however, is not a simple inference from the anomalies: it proposes a different construction within which they acquire a new place.

Therefore, the fundamental distinction is not between someone who possesses a technique and someone who does not know it, but between the ability to apply an existing scheme and the ability to independently change the system of categories, produce a new thought, and through it change what is happening.

1.1. Living Inside Constructions

For those who do not assume that thinking prior to constructions determines what happens, any form of “non-technical” knowledge appears useless: it merely gets in the way of those who are “embedded” in living and improving their own existence in a world where, as it seems to them, everything is already clear.

There are already familiar schemas of existence: how one should get up in the morning, why one should get up, and where one should go next. Yet those who are firmly situated inside a world constructed by someone else never ask where, all of a sudden, the new noise arises in their minds—a noise that is always perceptible to another social estate, one capable of recognizing a sharp change in the behaviour of those being led.

This “embeddedness” may be not only everyday but also professional or “political,” when the “fully embedded” person fails to notice that their system of life is not something self-evident, but merely a construction.

In his study of Buddhist philosophy, Alexander Piatigorsky examines various forms of interruption of the ordinary state of life and consciousness. He describes entering dhyāna as a departure from the natural flow of life: each act of contemplation becomes, in this sense, an interruption of the ordinary state. Within contemplative practice, the ordinary flow of thought may also be interrupted—for example, when a particular thought-object arises. As one moves into other states of contemplation, the mode of thinking and perception changes. In transcendental states, the relation of consciousness to time also changes: Piatigorsky describes dhyāna as a transition from “when” to “where,” that is, as a departure from the ordinary experience of time (Piatigorsky, 2007).

It is important to note that “breaking embeddedness” is my own conceptualization, not a term used by Piatigorsky. His analysis, however, makes it possible to see a related structure: the issue is not simply the acquisition of new knowledge, but an interruption of the ordinary continuum of existence and a change in the position of embeddedness. At the same time, such an interruption can itself become a normal state. Sometimes the “state of interruption” becomes the norm. For the “fully embedded,” by contrast, continuous embeddedness in the existing order is itself the norm, while “breaking” becomes something deeply uncomfortable. Such a break may occur through the procedure of “de-signification” that we propose was characteristic of Socrates’ circle.

And here a fundamental asymmetry emerges: some live inside constructions and take them for reality, while others are capable of recognizing changes within constructions—or are themselves capable of producing them.

Yet the person whose behaviour suddenly changes may not notice that the change has arisen not through a state of interruption, but through a change of scenery—that is, a change of constructions.

2. The Ability to Think

It may be suggested that in England’s elite educational institutions, oriented toward preparing future members of the political and intellectual elite, the task of education consisted not only in transmitting specialized knowledge but also in developing the capacity for independent thinking. Eton College is particularly illustrative in this respect: among the aims of its education, it explicitly identifies the development of an enquiring mind and a long-term interest in independent thinking and learning. Its contemporary educational practice likewise emphasizes students’ independence, curiosity, ability to ask questions, and willingness to critically engage with the ideas presented to them (Eton College, n.d.-a).

This also makes the very significance of studying seemingly useless classical subjects somewhat clearer: Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Roman history, and antiquity as such. The point of a classical school, in this case, is not simply to acquire knowledge of how the world is organized according to some “technical construction” that confines consciousness in advance to a particular picture of the world. It may instead be argued that a humanities education creates a space for developing imagination, independent judgment, the ability to engage with the ideas of others, and the capacity to subject the foundations of one’s own thinking to critical examination (Nussbaum, 2010).

In this context, a study devoted to the use of classical literature for the development of critical thinking is particularly relevant. The authors show that working with classical texts can take education beyond mechanical memorization: the student must analyze, interpret, and evaluate the content, identify biases, and question different views. The classical text thus becomes not merely an object of knowledge acquisition, but also a means of developing analytical ability and intellectual independence (Hassan et al., 2025).

This does not, however, automatically mean that the historical purpose of Eton was precisely to liberate consciousness from constructions. That is already an authorial interpretation. But the character of such an education allows another question to be asked: might one of its functions, among others, have been not to implant a single ready-made picture of the world in a person, but rather to expose them to diverse material—including material that was contradictory and practically useless from the standpoint of an immediate profession—different worlds, different epochs, different ways of thinking, and different ways of expressing them?

In that case, classical education can be understood not as the transmission of a final answer to the question “how is the world organized?”, but as the creation of an ability to engage with a plurality of already produced answers without becoming permanently attached to any one of them.

This is where a hypothesis emerges: perhaps the task of such an education was not so much the accumulation of pictures of the world as the production of a subject capable of accepting none of them as final and, using technical knowledge merely as an instrument, independently producing their own thinking-reality.

A person who knows how to think does not need to know “how the world is organized”—they must be able to invent it themselves.

At first glance, however, the opposite should be the case: from childhood, a person should be taught the technical, introduced into a profession as quickly as possible, trained in management and economics, made to choose a direction, and turned into a human instrument. Yet the classical school, in its most radical logic, does something else: it seeks to produce a person who cannot be reduced to a predetermined function.

Such a freely thinking person may later become anything—a politician, a military officer, an entrepreneur, a scholar, a statesman—but their education precedes that specialization. It should produce not a ready-made function, but a subject capable of determining for themselves which function to assume, which construction to use, and when to abandon it.

2.1. The Jesuit School

Jesuit colleges represent another historical line in which a similar logic of education can be observed. Their purpose was not limited to transmitting a body of practically applicable information: the intellectual formation of the person was pursued through classical education, rhetoric, philosophy, and engagement with classical authors.

In the Ratio studiorum—the principal document of the Jesuit educational system, systematized in 1599—classical humanities occupied a central place. Contemporary research on the history of Jesuit education shows that the humanities constituted one of its essential components, while education was connected with preparing young people for the role of adult leaders capable of making wise decisions for the common good. The curriculum relied particularly heavily on classical authors, above all Cicero and Virgil (Grendler, 2024).

At the same time, Jesuit pedagogy was indeed oriented toward more than the accumulation of information. Within the tradition of the Ratio studiorum, rhetoric, composition, declamation, and close engagement with texts occupied a substantial place. Research on the tradition of eloquentia perfecta shows that Jesuit pedagogy combined classical rhetoric with the formation of character, moral responsibility, and the capacity for judgment (Mailloux, 2015). Classical education can therefore historically be associated not only with the transmission of specific useful skills, but also with the formation of speech, argumentation, judgment, character, and the capacity to act (Mailloux, 2015; Nussbaum, 2010).

But the argument advanced here goes beyond a straightforward account of the historical sources: in its most radical form, the purpose of such an education may have been the production of a person who knows how to think—an independent subject capable of thinking for themselves.

Such a subject should become someone capable of acting independently in any part of the world and under any conditions, without looking for a “white master”—an external bearer of a ready-made order who would think for them, determine their place, and answer in their stead.

This is why independent thinking here is not merely an intellectual posture or the ability to object to an already existing idea. It is an emerging capacity to step outside a given position of thought, produce an alternative position, and act from it.

Such a person is capable not only of using existing constructions, but also of transforming the environment in accordance with an alternative mode of thinking as it emerges.

2.2. Entering a Tradition

Two components become important in such a process of formation.

First, entering a tradition requires seeing a demonstration of how thinking itself takes place. This may seem strange, but this is precisely how entry into a tradition occurs. It may seem that reading a book is enough to become part of a tradition of mathematical, strategic, philosophical, fundamental, or other forms of thinking. In reality, this is an illusion. Such entry requires a demonstration of thinking as it unfolds. Those who are embedded in a tradition are qualitatively different from those who have merely heard about it or read about it in a textbook.

Here an essential point arises: a substantial part of knowledge does not exist in the form of ready-made rules that can simply be transmitted to another person. It is acquired through participation, observation, and reproduction of the practice itself. In this sense, learning is not merely the transmission of content, but the incorporation of a person into a mode of action that cannot be fully reduced to an instruction (Polanyi, 1966; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

The primary function of specialized schools and old universities, therefore, is not simply to transmit knowledge, but precisely to bring a person into a living tradition. Paradoxically, the principal task of “centres of thought” is to demonstrate, through a living example, how thinking takes place within a particular tradition—a tradition into which the person now demonstrating this mode of independent thinking to newcomers was themselves previously incorporated, and which in a particular field has developed over many centuries, and sometimes millennia.

This understanding is particularly visible in the case of scientific knowledge. Kuhn shows that scientific training is not reducible to the acquisition of abstract rules: normal scientific work is learned through solving problems and mastering exemplars of how problems are posed and solved within a given paradigm. Belonging to a scientific tradition therefore presupposes not merely knowledge of its propositions, but the ability to act within a particular mode of thinking (Kuhn, 1962).

Second, once embedded in a tradition, the participant must demonstrate—or, more precisely, enact—the ability to produce the thinking of that tradition. Student presentations, seminar papers, debates, independent assignments, and a final thesis, whose value in themselves may be close to zero, are needed not only to assess the result. They create a situation in which the student is compelled to produce at least rudimentary examples of such thinking and, through a deliberate push, to learn how to think independently within the terms of a particular tradition.

This is precisely where the boundary lies between knowledge about a tradition and participation in a tradition. One may know the history of philosophy, read a great many philosophical texts, and still remain an external observer of the philosophical tradition. Entry begins where a person acquires the ability to independently produce at least elementary acts of thinking characteristic of that tradition. In this sense, learning represents a gradual movement from peripheral participation toward full participation in a practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

This entry into a tradition, followed by the ability to produce thinking, becomes a fundamental factor in forming not an object or a repository of static encyclopedic knowledge, but a person capable of thinking independently across different domains of life.

At the same time, a tradition is not simply an archive of accumulated knowledge. It exists as an ongoing practice in which new participants acquire already existing ways of thinking while simultaneously gaining the possibility of continuing and developing them. In this sense, a tradition exists only as long as it is capable of producing new participants who can not only reproduce its content, but also act independently within it (MacIntyre, 1981).

3. Subject, Not Instrument

Let us suppose that such a person—having discovered the capacity for independent thinking, not reducible to various forms of conceptual and technical knowledge, and capable of drawing a distinction between “technical knowledge” and the very capacity to think—is no longer an instrument, but a subject.

Such a subject may, for example, serve as a member of the board of directors of a transnational corporation and possess various forms of technical knowledge. At the same time, their classical education at Eton College, involving the study of philosophy, history, and poetry, may appear almost useless—or even “stupid”—from the standpoint of immediate practical utility. Yet this is precisely where the fundamental distinction emerges: unlike other “technical” participants, they are someone who knows how to think, and therefore everything that happens becomes for them not merely a collection of facts or tasks, but material and an instrument for their own thinking.

After several years, such an executive will become familiar with the field and learn the intricacies of the particular industry. Yet their value to the organization is measured not only by their technical knowledge—which in the contemporary world is itself becoming increasingly accessible—but also by their ability to produce thinking independently. According to Alexander Piatigorsky, what matters is not simply the possession of knowledge, but the possibility of observing one’s own thinking as an object and thereby moving beyond the immediate content of thought (Piatigorsky, 2002).

This is why an education that does not provide an immediate practical instrument may have a different function: it allows a person to move beyond individual tasks and see the very grounds on which those tasks arise. Philosophy, history, and poetry do not replace specialized knowledge, but they can cultivate the ability to treat any knowledge as material for thinking rather than merely as a ready-made set of ways to act.

It is worth noting that contemporary research on strategic leadership does indeed distinguish domain-specific expertise from broader cognitive capacities associated with problem definition, analysis of goals and constraints, forecasting, creative thinking, evaluation of ideas, and the formation of vision (Mumford et al., 2017; Rousseau & Stouten, 2025). Research describes expertise as a domain-specific structure of knowledge, whereas leadership-related cognitive skills include problem definition, cause/goal analysis, constraint analysis, planning, forecasting, creative thinking, idea evaluation, wisdom, and sensemaking/visioning (Rousseau & Stouten, 2025).

But we propose that an increase in the volume of expert knowledge by itself does not allow a person to move to another level of thinking. Such a transition requires not further accumulation of technical knowledge, but a particular meta-level transition. In this sense, expert thinking by itself is not necessarily capable of bringing what is happening into a coherent whole.

Let us suppose that it is precisely the strong thinking of a person who knows how to think independently—thinking capable of breaking existing constructions—that can synthesize heterogeneous forms of knowledge into something genuinely strategic: discovering not merely a solution to an individual problem, but a solution for the enterprise as a whole.

In other words, technical knowledge gives the subject material, but it does not produce the thinking itself that determines what should be done with that material. An instrument knows how to carry out an assigned task; a subject is capable of questioning the task itself, changing its construction, and producing a new direction of action.

3.1. An Instrument of One’s Own Will

Such a person, capable of thinking independently, can no longer be merely an instrument of another’s will. This is indeed the only true aristocracy: an independent subject who is, of course, constrained by the environment in which they were formed, but whose mind can no longer be completely reduced to these constraints and to ready-made pictures of what is happening.

In this sense, Isaiah Berlin’s discussion of positive liberty is particularly relevant. At the centre of his analysis is a person who seeks to be the source of their own decisions and ends, to be a subject rather than an object, and to act according to their own will rather than serve as an instrument of another’s will (Berlin, 1969).

Moreover, such a mind is itself capable of producing thinking: not merely choosing among already existing thoughts, but changing them according to its own intention and will. At the same time, becoming a subject, according to the preceding argument, requires more than the acquisition of expert knowledge. It requires a particular practice—the ability to take a position toward one’s own thinking, move beyond ready-made constructions, and, when necessary, break them.

We call this a particular form of meta-awakening.

In this sense, a subject is not simply someone who possesses a will of their own. A subject is someone capable of independently producing the thinking from which that will becomes genuinely their own.

3.2. The Collective of the Free as the Cause of Its Own Destiny and Place in the World

Let us suppose that when a people lacks a collective body of participants capable of independent, untabooed, and strong thinking, that people is condemned to remain something secondary. It may possess an enormous number of specialists, vast amounts of technical knowledge, and highly developed systems of production, but without the ability to independently produce conceptions and determine its own direction, it becomes incorporated into someone else’s construction. In this sense, the collective capacity for independent thinking becomes a condition of political subjectivity and of the ability to determine one’s own place in the world.

The sum of such free subjects is capable of producing its own independent world, which subsequently becomes something consumed at the periphery of this thinking—thinking capable of producing primary reality. This raises an important question: how can the capacity to think freely itself be produced?

Such free thinking is by no means something extravagant, radical, or simply a particular type of thinking. If it is indeed a condition for producing one’s own reality, then the problem becomes one of creating a mechanism for reproducing people capable of thinking independently.

To anticipate what comes later: how, in this context, can one not recall the attempt to create an instrument for producing people who know how to think through the creation of a technique of thinking—Shchedrovitsky’s school of methodology?

Organizational-Activity Games, which emerged from the work of the Moscow Methodological Circle, were conceived as a specific practice for organizing and developing collective thinking-activity, as well as a means of working with complex problematic situations. What is particularly important for us here is that the methodology itself represented an attempt not to transmit ready-made knowledge or a set of tools to a person, but to create conditions in which thinking would have to develop through the person’s entry into a new field of thinking-activity (Shchedrovitsky, 2019).

And here the problem that interests us emerges. If the attempt to create a “technique for producing people who know how to think” itself becomes a new construction, then the question arises:

• does it actually produce an independent subject —
• or merely a more sophisticated bearer of a particular technique of thinking?

At the same time, we should assume that there are limits to the possibility of transforming the subject at a metaphysical level through such a technique. Perhaps there is a point beyond which a technique for producing thinking is no longer capable of producing the very meta-awakening of which we spoke above: it can organize activity, teach particular procedures, and force a person to work with a problem differently, but it cannot necessarily produce the subject who begins to independently produce their own constructions.

This is precisely where the paradox emerges: if free thinking can be produced by means of a technique created in advance, then it has already been produced by that technique and, consequently, is not entirely free from it.

In this context, it is particularly interesting to observe Shchedrovitsky himself in his surviving speeches and presentations. In some of them, one can indeed see a sharp distinction between those capable of working with a methodological construction and those who remain within specialized knowledge. This may be perceived as a particular kind of arrogance toward the “technicians”: before him stand highly educated, cultured, and professionally capable people possessing enormous amounts of knowledge, yet, within his own position, incapable of moving beyond their professional constructions.

For our model, however, what matters here is neither Shchedrovitsky’s psychological characterization nor the question of whether he was actually arrogant. What matters is something else: he himself confronts the very problem that we are trying to formulate.

One can organize collective activity, create a methodology, teach a person to problematize, construct schemes, take a position, and reflect. But can one, by such means, produce someone who will one day be capable of breaking even this methodological construction itself?

If not, then a technique for producing thinking produces not a free subject, but a person equipped with a more sophisticated technique of thinking.

This is precisely why the problem of collectively producing free subjects is fundamentally more difficult than the problem of creating a good educational system. Producing someone capable of applying a particular constructed mode of thinking does not yet mean producing someone capable of being the cause of their own thinking.

And so the original question returns in a more radical form: can a people reproduce a sufficient number of subjects who not only know how the existing world is constructed according to some theory, but are capable of independently producing conceptions of a new world?

3.3. The Collective as a Source of Progressive, Competing Thinking — and Therefore of New Reality

When a created model-as-thinking is unable to detect a point from which another mode of thinking can emerge, intellectual destruction begins. At some point, there is no longer any need to investigate the model itself; what begins instead is the reworking of conclusions already formulated within it. Thinking starts moving in circles, producing ever new explanations within an already accepted construction.

Therefore, every strong mode of thinking requires another point—a point from which one can attempt not to prove a beautiful hypothesis, but to break it. If it survives, its foundation becomes stronger. If it does not, the possibility of producing another mode of thinking emerges.

In this sense, criticism is not an external obstacle to thinking but a mechanism of its development. This is precisely how the Popperian logic of conjectures and refutations operates: a conjecture must be exposed to criticism and attempts at refutation, because the discovery of errors makes further movement possible (Popper, 1963).

At the same time, self-criticism within a single model is not a complete test of the model itself. What is needed is an external position within the dispute—a subject that has no interest in preserving the original construction and operates from another mode of thinking, another methodology, or even rejects the original formulation of the problem altogether.

In this sense, what is at stake is not simply the need to “tolerate another opinion.” For John Stuart Mill, the confrontation of opposing opinions is a condition for discovering the part of truth that may be absent from the prevailing position; even a true opinion, if it is not subjected to vigorous challenge, risks becoming a mechanically accepted prejudice (Mill, 1859/1978).

The contemporary practice of adversarial collaboration effectively institutionalizes this principle: researchers committed to opposing models jointly design studies capable of comparing competing explanations. The confrontation of independent positions thus becomes not an accidental conflict but an organized means of testing competing explanations (Isch et al., 2025).

If there is no external position, an epistemic deadlock emerges. A thought may be entirely correct, yet within itself it has no way of determining which part of its stability is grounded in reality and which part results from the fact that the construction itself has already defined the permissible ways of seeing that reality.

It is here that we propose our own hypothesis: the absence of an independent circuit of thinking capable of generating another, opposing mode of thought can lead to intellectual self-reproduction. The system begins to produce ever more thoughts that are, in fact, reworkings of the same initial construction.

This is how empty circular thinking emerges: the quantity of reasoning produced increases, but the space of possible thinking does not expand.

This, in turn, creates the need for the freedom of opposing thinking. Liberalism, in this sense, matters not only as a moral requirement of tolerance toward another opinion. It can be understood as an institutional mechanism for preserving independent circuits of thinking, without which a complex system loses the ability to detect its own errors and produce alternative constructions.

Despotism, by suppressing the possibility of collective contradiction, destroys not merely political opposition. It thereby deprives the system of one of the mechanisms of its own intellectual correction. If no one is able to question the construction itself, the system begins to explain itself ever better—and to see what lies beyond its own thinking ever less clearly.

And this makes clear why a collective needs free subjects: not only so that each person can think independently, but also so that their modes of thinking can confront one another.

It is precisely this confrontation that creates the possibility of the progressive movement of thinking: one construction reveals the limit of another, a new position emerges, and then a new construction, which itself becomes the object of the next confrontation.

Thus, a collective of free subjects is not merely an aggregate of independent individuals. It becomes a mechanism for producing competing thinking, and through it—a mechanism for producing new constructions, new conceptions, and, ultimately, a new reality.

4. The Cognitive Pyramid

If we take as a working hypothesis that 0.01% represents a very narrow thinking class, 1–3% a higher intellectual and technical stratum, and everything beyond that the remaining body of thinking and knowledge that sustains the existing economic system and the instruments already produced, a peculiar cognitive pyramid emerges.

It is important to state at the outset that 0.01%, 1–3%, and the remaining levels are not established statistical proportions, but a conceptual model we propose for the distribution of the capacity to produce and apply thinking. The distinction between the levels is determined not by the amount of education or the quantity of knowledge possessed, but by the function of thinking.

Data on the British elite can be used as an external empirical reference point. However, they do not directly confirm the pyramid described here; they merely make it possible to compare its hypothetical scale with an empirically observable structure of contemporary society.

A recent study by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, based on an analysis of more than 125,000 members of the British elite from the late nineteenth century to the present, distinguishes two levels: a broader positional elite, comprising approximately 33,000 people in 2022, and a much narrower wealth elite of approximately 6,000 people drawn from this group. The positional elite includes heads of major organizations, companies and institutions, members of Parliament, judges, and others holding substantial influence within their respective fields. The wealth elite consists of members of Who’s Who who simultaneously belong to the top 1% of the wealth distribution. The approximately 6,000 people in this group amount to roughly 0.01% of the population of the United Kingdom (Reeves & Friedman, 2024).

It is important to stress that the 0.01% identified by Reeves and Friedman is not evidence for the existence of the first level proposed here. It is an empirically identified, very narrow wealth elite combining positional influence with exceptional wealth. The broader positional elite is considerably larger, at approximately 33,000 people (Reeves & Friedman, 2024). The British data are therefore used here solely as an external reference for scale, not as confirmation of the proposed cognitive model.

At the same time, the study of the British elite reveals not only the existence of such a narrow stratum but also the persistence of its reproduction over time. Having examined more than 125,000 elite individuals over a period of approximately 125 years, Reeves and Friedman found that people born into the top 1% of society today have roughly the same probability of entering the elite as people from comparable social backgrounds did around 125 years ago. Family origin and education continue to exert substantial influence on access to positions of power and influence (Reeves & Friedman, 2024).

Reeves and Friedman study the social reproduction of the British elite, not the capacity of an individual to independently produce a conception, a strategy, or a new reality. Their research therefore confirms not the existence of the “first level” as defined here, but only that a narrow elite exists as an empirically observable social stratum and possesses a substantial capacity for reproducing itself.

This is precisely why the British material can serve as an external empirical reference without replacing the conceptual construction proposed here.

But this raises the fundamental question: does a socially reproduced elite coincide with a cognitive elite—with the stratum capable not merely of occupying positions within the existing system, but of producing conceptions that determine its subsequent direction?

The data cited above do not answer this question. Yet it is precisely this question that is necessary for testing the proposed model.

4.1. The Pyramid of Thinking and Knowledge

The pyramid here is constructed not as a hierarchy of people, but as a distinction between the functions of thinking and knowledge. The same person may occupy different positions within this structure: they may be a narrow specialist at Level II while simultaneously possessing the capacity of Level I—to move beyond their specialization and independently produce a new construction.

Level I — The Production of Conception

This is the level of the subject capable of independently producing a construction and determining its direction, rather than merely acting within one that already exists.

It may encompass different fields of knowledge and practice—insofar as they are used to produce a construction rather than merely apply an existing one:

• metaphysical knowledge;
• the general art of governing people;
• the art of politics;
• the art of thinking, playing, and waging war;
• knowledge of the structure of higher assemblies;
• knowledge of the game, intrigues, and secrets.

These are not defining bodies of knowledge, but domains that may become material for Level I thinking when they are used to produce a construction.

The issue here is not a sum of specialized knowledge as such, but the capacity to assemble heterogeneous forms of knowledge into a construction, define a problem, produce a conception, and perceive the possibility of another configuration of what is happening.

Research on leadership cognition, for example, identifies problem definition, cause/goal analysis, constraint analysis, planning, forecasting, creative thinking, idea evaluation, wisdom, and sensemaking/visioning. This is not identical to the Level I proposed here, but it does indicate that the capacity to act at the level of complex leadership decisions cannot be reduced to the volume of domain-specific knowledge (Mumford et al., 2017).

The “view” of Level I, let us suppose, moves from the top downward, all the way to the bottom: existing specialized knowledge and instruments are regarded as material for its own thinking and for the realization of its conception.

Level II — Specialized Knowledge and Realization

This is not simply an aggregate of qualified specialists. It is specialized knowledge through which a conception can be specified and realized.

It may include:

• geopolitical art and world diplomacy;
• the management of regional and global financial flows;
• the structure of world trade;
• the structure of the world economy;
• specialized medical craft and poisons;
• specialized priestly knowledge;
• specialized military knowledge;
• fundamental scientific and engineering knowledge;
• and so on.

Here, grey zones emerge—zones of transmission and overlap between Level II and the level below. The boundary between them is therefore not rigid.

At the same time, a participant in Level I is very often a narrow specialist at Level II. What distinguishes such a person from an ordinary Level II specialist is not the volume of specialized knowledge, but the capacity to move beyond that knowledge, change the formulation of the problem, and independently produce a new construction.

This is precisely where expertise must not be confused with Level I thinking. A specialist may possess an enormous body of specialized knowledge and be exceptionally effective within their field, yet this does not in itself imply the capacity to independently change the very construction within which that field exists.

Level III — Reproduction of the System

This is the sphere of activity that sustains the functioning and reproduction of an already created material and social system and provides the foundation through which Level I can implement its strategy.

This level includes numerous forms of specialized, applied, and productive knowledge necessary for maintaining the existing construction.

At the same time, scientific knowledge as such should not be conflated with Level III. Scientific knowledge may occupy different positions within the pyramid depending on the function it performs. A high scientific or engineering status in itself does not imply belonging to Level I: a specialist may possess an enormous volume of knowledge while remaining within a given formulation of the problem.

This is where the distinction emerges between knowledge and the capacity to think through knowledge. Polanyi shows that knowledge cannot be reduced to formalized and articulable propositions: professional and scientific activity also involves tacit, personal knowledge through which a person is able to recognize, connect, and integrate elements that cannot be reduced to a set of formal rules (Polanyi, 1966).

Thus, an outstanding scientist, academic, or engineer may possess a colossal body of knowledge and nevertheless remain a specialist within an existing construction. This does not diminish their significance; the point is different: specialized knowledge in itself does not imply the capacity to move beyond a construction and produce another one.

At the same time, Level III provides for the immediate reproduction of the system by involving people in different forms of activity: from management and engineering to skilled and unskilled labor.

Remark

Social position and the capacity to be an “objective idiot” may occur at any of these levels. Here, the concept is used in a sense close to Pyatigorsky’s: not as a designation of low intelligence or insufficient education, but of a person who does not make their own thinking an object of observation and remains within the immediately given construction of reality.

In this sense, what is essential in Pyatigorsky is not the amount of knowledge a person possesses, but the possibility of observing one’s own thinking and discovering it as an independent object (Pyatigorsky, 2002).

This is precisely why an increase in the volume of knowledge does not in itself turn a person into a Level I subject: knowledge may expand the instruments of thinking, but it does not guarantee the emergence of the capacity to independently produce a new construction. As Tubali shows in the context of Hannah Arendt’s engagement with the problem of thinking, the capacity to think cannot be reduced to the accumulation of knowledge and requires a departure from the automatic adherence to already given representations (Tubali, 2018).

The transition from living within a given construction to occupying the position of a subject presupposes the possibility of making an object of observation not only the surrounding reality, but also one’s own way of producing it. In its most radical sense, this becomes a distinct philosophical act—the discovery of oneself as a metaphysical subject.

4.2. The Pyramid Not as a Social Hierarchy, but as a Site of the Production of Thinking

The pyramid is not constructed according to the principle of “who is above governs those below,” but according to a distinction of functions: who produces the conception → who possesses the specialized knowledge required for its realization → who ensures the functioning of the system already created.

Therefore:

• Level I — production of the conception. A subject capable of independently producing a construction, a solution, a strategy, and a project of the future.
• Level II — specialized knowledge for the realization of the conception. People possessing the specialized knowledge required to work within particular domains in which the conception can be specified and realized.
• Level III — functioning of the created system. Economic activity and production that ensure the functioning and reproduction of an already existing material and social construction.

The relationship between the levels should therefore not be understood as a simple vertical I → II → III, in which each successive level is merely subordinate to the preceding one. It is more accurate to speak of the movement of a construction: Level I produces the conception; Level II produces and applies the specialized knowledge through which it can be realized; Level III ensures the functioning and reproduction of the system that emerges.

At the same time, movement can also proceed in the opposite direction. Specialized knowledge at Level II may reveal the limitations of an existing conception, propose its own solution, or alter the formulation of the problem itself. Practice at Level III may likewise reveal contradictions within an already created construction and become a source of new knowledge. The boundaries between the levels are therefore not impermeable.

A participant at Level I may simultaneously be a narrow specialist at Levels II and III. Their difference from an ordinary specialist lies not in the volume of specialized knowledge, but in the capacity to move beyond it, alter the formulation of the problem, and independently produce a new construction.

This is precisely why Level II is not simply a collection of engineers or highly qualified specialists. It is defined by the function of specialized knowledge in relation to a more general construction. Likewise, Level III is not a “lower” level of thinking in any evaluative sense: it is the set of knowledge and practices that ensures the reproduction of an already created system.

Thus, the pyramid describes not the social position of its participants, but the distinction between functions in relation to a construction—from its independent production through its subsequent specification, realization, and reproduction.

5. The Necessity of Discovering Self-Metaphysicality

The fundamental distinction of Level I lies in the fact that its representative understands that knowledge is not identical to what is actually happening. Knowledge is a particular construction produced by human beings, through which what is happening becomes determinate and meaningful to them.

The distinctive feature of a person operating at Level III is that they may think indefinitely within schematic thinking and still never arrive at Level I. The issue is not the amount of knowledge or material studied. The problem lies in the capacity to discover the very construction within which thinking takes place. In this sense, we are already dealing with philosophical thinking—with the capacity to call into question what is immediately accepted as reality. Even Eton College, in its educational model, explicitly speaks of developing enquiring minds, independent thinking, curiosity, and the ability of students to challenge presented ideas and ask questions (Eton College, n.d.).

“To understand this” is an insurmountable problem for ordinary consciousness, because it requires a rupture in the normal world that it always experiences precisely as the world.

The normality of the ordinary person is the certainty that their everydayness is itself actual normality, rather than the result of the operation of yet another conception. In this context, Alfred Schutz’s description of everyday consciousness is revealing: a person exists within the “natural attitude,” in which the surrounding world is experienced as self-evident and simply given (Schutz, 1962, 1967). For Schutz, what matters is precisely the unquestioned character of the everyday world: until it is called into question, a person accepts it as it appears to them. Berger and Luckmann, developing a related line of analysis, show how social orders produced by human beings, through institutionalization and socialization, come to be experienced as objective reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

Those living within such configurations may spend their entire lives moving in a direction given to them by someone else, without ever noticing that the direction itself has already been produced. If now is the time to push others aside, they will push others aside. If now is the time to become someone else, they will become someone else. But who determines the “time”?

This is precisely where the distinction appears: one person lives within what is happening; another is capable of seeing the very construction through which what is happening takes place.

When observed from the outside, a person may display complete certainty that everything is normal and that their life is entirely adequate. From the standpoint of Level I, this can be astonishing: the participant does not notice the construction of the “world” within which they live.

Thus, when a Level I participant finds themselves inside any construction, they possess the capacity to look for the possibility of “breaking” it when they discover within it a contradiction that cannot be eliminated by the means of the construction itself. In their “search for truth,” however, they establish the boundaries of what can actually be “broken” through encounters with other thinking: genuinely independent thinking makes it possible not to become trapped in the vicious circle of one’s own thinking.

Nietzsche is revealing here. For him, the opponent is not merely an obstacle, but a necessary condition of one’s own development: in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a friend must be capable of becoming a “better enemy,” while the scholarly literature specifically notes that Nietzsche repeatedly connected the development of his own ideas and abilities with the choice of worthy opponents (Nietzsche, 2006/1883–1885; Conway, 2013). Nietzsche himself also repeatedly wrote about the painful experience of isolation and the absence of close intellectual companionship; in an 1888 letter, he speaks directly of his extreme intellectual loneliness and the absence of a friendly voice (Nietzsche, 1969/1888).

By contrast, a participant incorporated through the logic of Level III does not necessarily possess this capacity. They may learn that a construction exists, read about it, and acquire the corresponding knowledge—but merely learning about a “strong mode of thinking” does not enable them to discover the “capacity to break.” For this, existential acts of new thinking are required. And if there is no new thinking, knowledge that “constructions exist” remains merely another closed spiritual act within the same construction, which continues to remain unnoticed.

This is precisely why the metaphysical discovery of oneself cannot be reduced to acquiring new knowledge. It is a change in the position of thinking itself: a person discovers not only the world as an object of thought, but also the very way through which this world has been produced for them as a world.

In this sense, self-metaphysicality is not simply the capacity to reflect upon one’s own thoughts. It is the capacity to discover oneself as a participant in the production of that determination of the world which, until then, one had taken for the world itself.

This is why Level I begins not with a person knowing more than others, but with the discovery of oneself within the production of one’s own picture of reality and with the emergence of the possibility of calling into question the very construction through which this reality exists for them.

6. The Limits of Reproducing Subjectivity

6.1. Arrogance or Independence?

Everything presented above can easily be understood as a form of arrogance: as an attempt to divide people into those who “know how to think” and everyone else. This objection must be taken seriously.

However, it is important here to distinguish arrogance as a psychological disposition from the independence of thought that consists in not accepting an existing construction as normality. Outwardly, the two may indeed look similar: a person who refuses to regard the obvious as self-evident, challenges accepted premises, and does not accept a ready-made meaning can easily be perceived by others as arrogant or condescending. Research on teachers’ perceptions of creative students shows that independence, individualism, willingness to break rules, defend one’s own opinion, and act according to one’s own judgment can indeed be associated with the image of a creative person (Gralewski, 2019).

However, this does not mean that arrogance is evidence of the presence of Level I capacity. An arrogant person may remain completely embedded in someone else’s construction. They may reject the opinions of others not because they have discovered the limitations of the existing system of meanings, but because their own position rests on an unexamined sense of superiority.

In this respect, it is important to distinguish an outward posture of superiority from an intellectual position of independence. As Sergey Datsyuk notes, an intellectual position is not determined by social status, recognition, or membership in a particular group; it is connected with the ability to produce one’s own thinking and to take responsibility for the foundations upon which that thinking is constructed (Datsyuk, 2013). A person may therefore occupy a high social position while remaining completely inside a ready-made construction, whereas a subject of independent thought may be situated outside recognized centers of influence.

What matters is not the display of superiority, but the capacity for the particular form of independence described above—the capacity, when necessary, to “break” an existing construction, including the construction within which the subject themselves is situated.

For this reason, Level I cannot be defined by manner of behavior, social position, or a sense of superiority. Within the proposed model, its criterion is the ability to “move beyond”—to detect the boundaries of the immediately given construction, question its foundations, and independently produce another.

Moreover, a person who genuinely knows how to think does not necessarily have to appear arrogant. The ability to recognize the limitations of one’s own construction may require precisely the opposite quality: the willingness to acknowledge the limitations of one’s own thinking, to subject one’s own foundations to doubt, and to admit the possibility that one’s own construction is precisely what needs to be reconsidered.

6.2. A Strong First Layer

If we examine the history of Poland, we can observe numerous partitions and a prolonged period without a state, yet the reproduction of Polish political and intellectual subjectivity did not cease.

Before the partitions, the Polish szlachta constituted the Polish “nation” in the political sense. According to Kulczycki, it comprised approximately 9–10% of the population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and around 25% of the Polish-speaking population. Within the estate, political rights were formally equal regardless of wealth: a nobleman could be a magnate or completely landless. In the nineteenth century, members of the szlachta carried the consciousness of belonging to a political nation into new social classes, even after the Polish state itself had disappeared (Kulczycki, 1976).

For the model proposed here, precisely this point is important: Level I does not necessarily coincide with a narrow elite of wealth or formal status. On the contrary, a broad estate, including a numerous petty nobility, could serve as a social environment for reproducing political consciousness and subjectivity.

However, it is necessary to preserve the distinction between the historical fact and the interpretation proposed here. Kulczycki does not speak of a “first level” in the sense proposed here, nor does he demonstrate that the szlachta possessed the capacity to produce a new reality. He demonstrates something else: the existence of a broad political estate capable of carrying the consciousness of belonging to a political nation across different social structures, even under conditions in which the Polish state itself no longer existed.

This is precisely why the Polish example is interesting for us—not as proof of the existence of Level I, but as historical material through which to test the hypothesis concerning the reproduction of a layer of political subjectivity.

For the model proposed here, what matters is not the mere preservation of identity, but the preservation of the capacity to produce a political project after the destruction of the previous form of existence. The disappearance of the state does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the subject capable of thinking in terms of a future political order.

In this sense, the Polish example reveals an important distinction between the preservation of a social group and the preservation of the capacity to produce a new construction: subjectivity can survive the disappearance of the institution within which it originally existed.

Subjectivity can persist as a possibility of future political action even when the political form within which it originally existed has already disappeared.

6.3. A Break in the Reproduction of the First Layer

The historical material associated with the state system of the second half of the twentieth century is particularly interesting here, but it must be approached with caution. The argument that follows involves a certain degree of speculation and is used only as an illustration of the problem under consideration.

…

If this hypothesis is extended to broader historical material—for example, to the revolutionary processes in seventeenth-century England, France in 1789, and other major political ruptures—it becomes possible to ask whether a similar contradiction can be found there: between an existing system of power and administration that has lost the capacity to produce a new direction for the development of the system, and an emerging subject capable of proposing a different construction of the future.

However, this should remain precisely a hypothesis for further research, rather than a ready-made explanation of revolutions or particular historical processes.

Within the proposed model, the question can be formulated more precisely: what happens to a society when it retains the capacity to reproduce complex economic, scientific, and technical systems, but loses the capacity to reproduce people capable of independently producing the direction of its movement?

In such a case, the problem is not the complete absence of people possessing high intelligence, knowledge, or specialized competencies. The issue is different: a possible disruption in the mechanism for reproducing the first layer—the capacity to produce new constructions, determine strategic direction, and create a conception of the future that extends beyond the existing order.

This is precisely where the distinction between the complexity of a system and its capacity for self-renewal emerges. A society may possess enormous economic, scientific, and technical potential and nevertheless become dependent—not because it lacks specialists or knowledge, but because it has lost an autonomous source for producing its own direction.

The central danger lies not in the system ceasing to know how to function, but in the capacity to sustain the existing construction becoming separated from the capacity to continually produce new meaning.

6.4. Reshuffling

A significant reshuffling occurs when representatives of the middle or lower levels gain access to positions associated with decision-making, system management, and the distribution of power. In Pareto, this is expressed through the concept of the circulation of elites: political change is associated not only with the disappearance of particular rulers, but also with the replacement of one elite by another. In this sense, a crisis may change the personal composition of the upper layer without eliminating the phenomenon of the elite itself (Pareto, 1968).

But here the proposed model takes an additional step. The circulation of elites does not necessarily mean the circulation of the capacity to produce new constructions. A person may rise socially, acquire power, resources, education, and access to higher institutions without becoming a subject of Level I.

For example, the simple replacement of an organization's leadership, the composition of an administration, or the ruling elite does not by itself create a new strategy. If the new holder of the position acts within the previous construction, they merely reproduce an already given trajectory. In this case, a change in personnel may preserve the existing inertia or, if the construction itself has already lost its capacity for development, accelerate its decline.

In this sense, reshuffling can create the appearance of renewal while in fact changing only the composition of the participants, rather than the very mode through which a new reality is produced.

Therefore, social mobility in itself is not the principal condition for the renewal of a system, although its absence may also become a factor in degradation. With or without mobility, a system can lose its capacity to reproduce new subjects. Mobility is only a condition for possible circulation; it is not a guarantee that the capacity to produce a new conception will emerge.

This is precisely why social mobility and the production of Level I belong to different dimensions. The former changes the distribution of positions within the system, whereas the latter changes the capacity of the system itself to produce new constructions and new directions of movement.

6.5. The Problem with Level III

The problem with Level III arises when modernization itself begins to produce large numbers of people whose cognitive complexity has already exceeded what is required merely to reproduce the existing system.

Advanced education, technical training, and access to modern knowledge produce not merely specialists performing particular functions, but people with heightened expectations regarding their own place in the world. They begin to perceive themselves not only as executors of given tasks, but also as potential participants in Level I.

And here a structural contradiction emerges: the mass development of Level III can produce people who seek to move beyond their assigned function, while the system itself does not always possess a mechanism for transforming this potential into Level I subjectivity.

At the same time, the desire to leave Level III does not automatically mean a transition to Level I. A person may seek not to produce a new construction, but to gain access to higher circuits of management, decision-making, and resource distribution. In this case, what occurs is not a transition to Level I, but a movement within Level II: a transition from engineering into management, finance, consulting, administration, or other fields concerned with governing already existing constructions.

A peculiar illusion of ascent then emerges: a person leaves direct production and gains access to more complex domains of the system, but this does not yet mean that they have become a subject capable of producing a new construction.

They may simply have changed their position within the existing construction.

Contemporary China provides an interesting example of this contradiction. On the one hand, the scale of engineering education has created an enormous body of technically trained specialists. According to Zhang (2025), China has approximately 20 million engineers and the world's largest engineering education system. At the same time, the researcher identifies structural problems, including a shortage of high-level engineering personnel, insufficient links between engineering education and practice, and the need to move from a quantitative “engineering dividend” toward the capacity to produce technological innovation (Zhang, 2025).

This problem cannot be reduced merely to the number of specialists. The Chinese engineering system faces a more fundamental question: how can mass technical education be transformed into the capacity to create complex solutions requiring independent design, interdisciplinary thinking, and innovative activity? A similar gap between the number of trained specialists and the availability of high-level personnel is also identified in studies of Chinese engineering education (McKinsey Global Institute, 2005; Zhang, Xu, & Lin, 2025).

At the same time, there is a problem concerning the attractiveness of particular engineering trajectories. Research on Chinese engineering policy indicates that some engineering professions face insufficient social recognition, limited career prospects, and a need to strengthen the professional identity of engineers (Zhang, 2025). This does not mean that young people are abandoning engineering education on a mass scale: strategic technological fields, on the contrary, remain attractive. The problem lies elsewhere—in the capacity of the system to reproduce engineers not merely as executors of technical functions, but as subjects of complex technological development.

Within the proposed model, the question is therefore not simply where engineers move or which professions become more attractive. The more fundamental question is this: what happens to a system when it produces large numbers of people who no longer want to be merely executors of an existing construction, but does not possess a mechanism for transforming these people into subjects capable of producing direction?

A particular form of tension then emerges: Level III becomes intellectually more complex while retaining its previous function. It produces people capable of seeing the limitations of the existing system, but does not necessarily acquire a mechanism for transforming this capacity for analysis into the capacity to create a new construction.

This is precisely where the distinction between modernization and the development of subjectivity lies. A system may successfully increase the number of specialists, complicate its technologies, and expand education, while nevertheless confronting a fundamental problem: it produces more and more people capable of asking questions, but does not produce mechanisms that allow them to become the source of new answers.

6.6. Competition between Centers of Construction Production

If Level I is understood not as a social class or a closed group of people, but as the capacity of a society to reproduce independent thinking, the following question arises: what happens when different systems confront one another, each possessing its own source of the production of meaning?

For an external actor, the problem is not simply that another society possesses specialists, resources, or complex institutions. All of these elements can be incorporated into a new system and used as resources. The more difficult situation arises when there exists another autonomous center capable of independently determining the direction of movement and producing an alternative meaning.

In other words, competition between systems is not only a struggle over territories, resources, and technologies. These are secondary to the question of what provides the answers that determine the meaning of what is happening.

The history of the Mongol Empire provides interesting material here. However, it cannot simply be described as the destruction of existing intellectual or administrative elites. Studies of Mongol imperial organization reveal a more complex picture: Mongol rulers destroyed or subordinated previous centers of political autonomy while simultaneously making extensive use of specialists, administrators, scholars, craftsmen, and representatives of different administrative traditions within the new imperial system (Allsen, 2001; Morgan, 2007).

Therefore, within the proposed model, it is more precise to speak of the neutralization of an autonomous center of meaning production—political, existential, and so on. This does not necessarily mean the physical destruction of its bearers. It may instead mean their incorporation into a different system of coordinates, within which the ultimate direction is determined by another center. This should not be understood as a universal description of Mongol policy, or as evidence that such an objective was consciously pursued in every case. It is an analytical scheme that allows us to examine one possible outcome of imperial integration.

This distinction is fundamental. An engineer, administrator, military specialist, scholar, or financier may possess a high level of competence and nevertheless remain part of another actor's construction if their decisions are produced within an already defined horizon of goals. The existence of a complex Level II or Level III does not in itself imply the existence of an autonomous Level I.

This is precisely why an external system may be interested not in destroying another system's human capital, but in incorporating it. Knowledge remains; specialists remain; technologies remain. What changes is the question: who determines the direction within which all of this is used?

In a broader theoretical sense, this problem is connected with the distinction between reproducing already existing social forms and creating new ones. Castoriadis emphasized that society not only reproduces established institutions and meanings, but also possesses the capacity to create new social forms and new meanings (Castoriadis, 1987). Within the model proposed here, precisely this capacity constitutes one of the substantive characteristics of Level I: it is not limited to producing decisions within an existing construction, but is capable of participating in the creation of the very framework of strategic thinking.

In this sense, the Polish example discussed earlier represents the opposite situation. After the disappearance of the state, a part of political subjectivity could survive precisely because a social mechanism existed for reproducing a conception of its own political will. The significance of the szlachta lay not merely in origin or status, but in its capacity to preserve the possibility of a future political project even after the destruction of the previous state form (Kulczycki, 1976).

The opposite situation arises when a society preserves knowledge, specialists, and complex institutions, but loses its autonomous source of producing its own direction. The system may then remain technologically advanced and organizationally complex, while its movement increasingly becomes determined by an external or already given configuration of goals.

Thus, the deeper level of competition between systems concerns not only control over resources, territories, or human capital. It concerns a society's capacity to reproduce an autonomous source of its own conception.

Let us suppose that one mechanism for dealing with potential competitors may be the cultivation of a negative attitude toward thinking itself, and even more so toward a holistic approach capable of giving rise to Level I. Such a strategy can reasonably be hypothesized: its advantage is that it does not require the physical elimination of bearers of knowledge or educational institutions. It is enough to make thinking itself socially unattractive—to ridicule intellectualism as useless, detached from reality, or impractical. Primary thinking then disappears, while the upper levels become filled with something else, which may ultimately become a cause of the degradation of institutional capacity itself.

In the end, conditions are created for the endless reproduction of such assemblies in a state of secondariness.

Here a different relationship to competition emerges. An external system does not necessarily have to continually suppress an already existing autonomous center of construction production. If the conditions under which such a center reproduces itself can be altered, its subsequent absence may become self-reproducing within the system itself. The society then continues to produce knowledge, specialists, institutions, and complex technologies, while producing fewer and fewer subjects capable of questioning the very construction within which they operate.

The central question, therefore, is not how many specialists or institutions a system possesses, but whether it retains the capacity to determine the horizon of its own future independently—to produce new constructions, choose among possible directions, and organize action around them.

This is precisely where the boundary lies between a society capable of using complexity and a society capable of independently producing the direction of that complexity.

7. “Unnecessary People”

7.1. The Expansion of Primary Thinking

The meaning of the strategic movement taking place is that, as long as primary thinking exists, everything on the second and third levels continues to expand.

The pyramid of productive thinking itself, together with the reality that emerges from it, grows outward, encompassing ever new areas of life and involving an increasing part of the surrounding environment in its process.

This is how cities emerge, new spaces are developed, economic sectors expand, populations grow, and new professions and social functions come into being.

It is precisely at this point that the mechanisms of social mobility begin to operate: the expansion of the construction creates new positions and, together with them, the possibility of movement between levels.

7.2. Emptiness on the Upper Level

But if something else begins to accumulate on the upper level instead of primary thinking, the reverse process emerges—the contraction of the entire pyramid, first of thinking and then of the rest of reality.

At the same time, the participants produced by the second and third levels—managers, administrators, engineers, skilled workers, doctors, teachers, and other specialists—suddenly become unnecessary and find no place for themselves in the new reality.

And this is where statements may emerge from the absent upper level claiming that the uselessness of those on the second and third levels is their own fault, rather than a consequence of the disappearance of meaning and the hollowing-out of the upper level. This is a defensive mechanism that makes it possible to avoid the question: then what is the first level needed for if it no longer produces what makes the existence of the others necessary?

The participants of the second and third echelons become unnecessary not because they work worse or are insufficiently educated. They become unnecessary because the construction for which they were produced disappears, and the cause of this is the emptiness where meaning should be generated.

7.3. The Denial of Thinking

At a certain point, when emptiness emerges on the upper level, there is always a temptation to say: enough with these impractical conversations about the morality of Cicero, about Alexander the Great, about all these aphorisms of Virgil and the rest of this ancient darkness. Why not do something practical instead—applied economics, management, technology, something genuinely useful?

Yet this objection cannot simply be dismissed. Sometimes those who present themselves as this mysterious first level are merely an appearance of it. The mere existence of conversations about supposedly “higher” matters proves nothing in itself. Such conversations may be nothing more than another layer of historiosophical slag produced by party functionaries—chatter that itself signals that the upper levels have long since become empty.

Either everyone has been pushed aside, or something—some kind of plague—has caused the mass extinction of primary thinking first, followed by the emergence of that very phenomenon of “unnecessary people” on the remaining levels.

7.4. The Radical Contraction of Reality as the Death of Meaning

Thus, first, the person who speaks about meaning becomes unnecessary. Then the person who produces complex solutions becomes redundant. After that, there is no longer any use for the engineer, the doctor, the skilled worker, or the teacher.

But this does not happen because the profession itself has lost its value—the integrated meaning of what is happening disappears.

And yes, space can become a resource for those who produce meaning, and the history of humanity is full of such episodes.

It is precisely here that historical cases become intelligible in which entire social strata suddenly become “unnecessary.” The petty nobility at certain periods, the lower nobility in France, and other similar groups can be considered not merely as social ballast, but also as a consequence of the contraction of the construction that had previously made their existence possible—and of the emptiness that had emerged on the first level.

7.5. The Layer as a Chance after Crisis

However, an even more important point emerges here.

Such a broad layer, formed in the context of yesterday's powerful development of meaning and rendered unnecessary within a fading construction, may become a potential source for the emergence of that strange primary thinking and for the renewal of the construction, as happened with the Polish state, the French kingdom, and in other historical cases.

Therefore, under certain historical conditions, a layer can become a second chance.

And how can we not recall the unexpected and rapid expansion of the educational and cultural environment that formed Pilsudski?

Of course, the issue is not simply the szlachta, nor professional qualification as such. What matters is precisely the type of education and cultural environment that initially formed a broad layer of participants in Level I and subsequently became a way of thinking across an entire social space, transmitted from generation to generation.

The hypothesis proposed here is that Pilsudski's formation as a political and strategic subject, and ultimately his ability to resist the Red Army, cannot be understood solely through his individual qualities or professional preparation. It may also have depended on the existence of a broader social and cultural layer capable of reproducing the forms of thinking from which such subjectivity could emerge.

And then this layer is no longer merely the remnant of a disappearing construction, but a reservoir from which a new life can emerge.

8. Conclusions

The proposed model begins with a distinction between knowledge, the complexity of a system, and the capacity of a system to produce its own direction of movement. A society may possess an enormous volume of knowledge, developed infrastructure, and a multitude of highly qualified specialists, while nevertheless lacking the capacity to produce a new conception.

Level I is understood not as a social elite, but as a function of thinking: the capacity to discover the existing construction, identify its limitations, combine heterogeneous forms of knowledge into a new construction, and formulate a direction of movement toward a future that does not yet exist. The capacity to discover one's own involvement in producing the particular determination of the world is designated by the concept of self-metaphysicality.

It follows that increasing complexity is not identical to increasing subjectivity. Education, professional competence, social mobility, and the circulation of elites may increase the complexity of a system, but they do not in themselves ensure the reproduction of the capacity to produce new constructions. The circulation of people is not the same as the circulation of the capacity to think.

A system may preserve knowledge, technologies, and institutions and effectively reproduce itself, while simultaneously losing the capacity to determine what future all of this is supposed to exist for. Conversely, subjectivity may survive the destruction of a previous institutional form if the capacity to produce an independent conception is preserved.

The reproduction of Level I requires an environment in which it is possible to subject one's own construction to independent criticism, compare it with another, and thereby move beyond one's own thinking. Subjectivity presupposes not only the production of a construction, but also the possibility of its confrontation with another mode of thinking.

Finally, the capacity to produce a direction of movement becomes a matter of competition between systems. Knowledge, specialists, technologies, and institutions can be preserved and incorporated into a different order of goals. Therefore, the question concerns not only the resources possessed by a system, but also who produces the direction within which those resources are used.

A human being becomes a subject not when they acquire more knowledge about the world, but when they discover the way in which that world becomes given to them. A society becomes a subject not when it possesses greater power, but when it retains the capacity to produce people capable of asking: why should this particular world exist—and what might the next one be?

Alternative Version

Read the alternative version of the article on Telegraph: The Ability to Think: The Emergence of a Subject Capable of Producing a New Reality.

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Useful Links

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• The Great Mirror.
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• Weir, P. (Director). (1989). Dead Poets Society [Film]. Touchstone Pictures.