THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONCEPTS OF "PEOPLE", "CROWD", "MASS" AND MEDIOCRITY AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL PHENOMENON
Authors:   Kharkiv State Academy of Culture, Petrenko V. 
Published: September 2023

The article explores the meaning, content and historiography of the concepts: people, crowd, mass. It was found that the development of these concepts is uneven, and the historiographical dynamics is variable. Emphasis is placed on mediocrity as a socio-cultural phenomenon that is defined as the historical development of the given concepts. The study demonstrates that the undulating historical progress of these concepts found its critical point of bifurcation at the end of the 20th century, when the change took place in the most radical way and the transition to a new technocratic reality occured. Having established this relationship, it can be seen that a wide scope emerges for researching the ontology and phenomenology of mediocrity as a social phenomenon. The purpose of the article is to reveal and analyze the base of sources associated with the concepts of the people, the crowd, and the mass, as well as to rethink it in the context of the study of the concept of mediocrity and to determine their relationship in the historical perspective. The methodological foundations of the research are: linguistics, cultural comparative studies, philosophy of culture, ontology, phenomenology, socio-political philosophy. The research methods are: historical-genetic, hermeneutic, contextual and comparative methods, the cultural approach. The scientific novelty lies in the coverage of the genesis of mediocrity, which begins in ancient historiography, philosophy and literature, and is combined with the source base of the Old and New Testaments. The combination of these ideas makes it possible to take a fresh look at the formation of civil society in the united Europe, the fundamental principle of which is the idea of citizenship, revealing itself not only in the Age of Enlightenment, but also at earlier stages. At the same time, the next stage, which was proposed by the history of philosophical and cultural thought, was the idea of mass and mass culture, which is also contained in these texts. Reaching this level of understanding mediocrity, as an effect of evolution, of ancient Greek and Christian texts is the novelty of this article. That is, the culture of mediocrity is a logical continuation of the evolution of the phenomena "people", "crowd", "mass" which are recorded in the sources as concepts (implicitly or actually). For the cultural scientific discourse, such a deployment gives an idea of the relationship between the phenomenon and the concept, through the analysis and interpretation of the sources, and also opens up the possibility of a systematic study of mediocrity, in a historiographical perspective, as a sociocultural phenomenon. In the conclusions, the author emphasizes that the concept of mediocrity does not try to devalue the meanings of the concepts of the people or the mass, but points to a new strategy for understanding the problems of the development of a plurality of people, which implements the political will in the conditions of the latest scientific and technological revolution. Key words: people, mass, crowd, mediocrity, ochlocracy, democracy, citizenship.