The principal characteristic of evolution

The principal characteristic of evolution is the stability of changes. The society acquires intensively new social features and attributes which lead its historical development to a qualitatively higher level. Being in the given epochal period, the society is open for its signs unlike the involutionary society.
The emancipation of individuals occurs, and the cognitive component of the psychological person’s structure becomes stronger, which gives rational signs to the society.

In the political sphere, the freedom of choice and the principle of consensus prevail and become the conditions for existence and efficient functioning of the democratic order. Society and individuals recognize that “a state is strong due to strong citizens”. Stability of a new social order is ensured by the supporting of conditions for the enhanced innovative and communicative activity of citizens (“free individuals”) in the society. The innovative social dynamics developing like a nuclear chain reaction in the society reaches eventually the critical limit and generates a real threat to the stability of a further social development.

Thus, the typology of a socio-historical subject in the context of the universal epochal cycle can be given in the following ideal model: revolutionary period which is characterized by the activization of activity of the subject “I”, when remarkable historical persons lead the people to the winning of joint fruits of the historical creation; involutionary period to which the priority of collective forms of the historical development is intrinsic and when the activity of the subject “We” is of primary importance; during the co-evolutionary period, the dominant influence of the collective socio-historical subject is still kept; finally, the evolutionary period of the epochal cycle is characterized by the activization of the subject “I”.

It is worth to underline that, by a conditional scale of values, the subjects “We” and “I” are characterized, respectively, by moral-ethic values and rationalpragmatic or, one can even say, egoistic values. Moreover, for a subject-collective, the category “I” is, in fact, the emanation of “individual manifestations of nationality”, whereas for a subject-individual, “We” is a personification of the social.
From the viewpoint of social psychology, the “I-concept” has the following structure for individual and collective subjects:

 Thus, the subject “I” prefers personal aims over the aims of a certain social group. Self-identification is realized on the basis of personal attributions, but not through the identification of oneself with a group. The subject “We”, on the contrary, prefers the aims of a social group (“We”, the Soviet people, are
building communism”) rather than personal tasks. Namely the social ties define a man’s behaviour and determine his/her social status. Independence of the subject “We” does not mean “to act in one’s own way”, but “to be responsible”.

Now we define the peculiarities of the present social development in the countries of the West advance-guard from the viewpoint of the universal epochal cycle.