Mental Blindness (The Roots of Unreceptivity to New Ideas)

There is a lot of evidences of total resistance to radical innovations – both in science and in day-to-day life. The author traces the wide-spread explanations given to this phenomenon since the end of XIX to the beginning of XXI century and reveals the inner “pivot” of their evolution. It is shown that all they remains within the bounds of the matrix with two orthogonal axes – the character of the knowing subject and the locus of motives determining the propensity to the opposition to novelties (individual subject – cognitive motives, individual subject – extracognitive motives, collective subject – extracognitive motives, collective subject – cognitive motives), – while it increasingly exhausts its heuristic potential. To solve the problem it is necessary to take the source of influences out of the scope of individual minds but, at that, not reduce it to external (social or cultural) forces. The established knowledge of every epoch being learnt by people as applied to the tasks they perform ensures a kind of uniformity in the tune of thought which is commonly named mentality. This transpersonal reality conditions the conceptual structure of the subject’s inner world, on which his aspirations, projections, and expectations as regards the object he deals with depend. Just in the realm of mentality, the immediate roots of irreceptivity to the new are to be sought for.

Keywords: dislik for the new, opposition to novelties, unreceptivity to new ideas, human mentality