Crisis of institutional trust in society under transformation of social memory values

Abstract

The paper attempts to identify the connection between the crisis of institutional trust in society, which is formed amidst severe political and social censorship, on the one hand, and the transformation of social memory value in the public mind, on the other hand. Social memory serves as an important construct that incorporates social, cultural, religious, and political norms of the sociocultural past. We suppose that the relationship between social memory and a decrease in the level of institutional trust of society in the legal, social, and political systems is the most important problem and requires empirical and theoretical analysis. At the same time, a number of studies show that social memory serves as an adaptive and balancing factor in the public mind maintaining relative stability in society amidst declining trust in formal government institutions. According to our observations, the ongoing marginalization of public consciousness under these conditions requires additional experimental research, which became the basis of this article. Regarding the social sensitivity of young people to fluctuations in the socio-political system, which is projected in the minds of social memory, we made a survey on the most basic axiological attitudes of the individual. We tried to identify the significance of such constructs as national traditions and customs in everyday life, religion, family, homeland, historical memory, attitude to the past mistakes and merits of the nation. The purpose of our study was to analyze the level of the adaptive resource of social memory, the significance of its meanings in the minds of young people amidst a stable distrust of formal government institutions. The authors have come to the conclusion that the crisis of institutional trust forms a multi-vector process in the mind of the individual: on the one hand, it is subject to such psychological factors as anxiety, short social planning, expectations orientation mainly concerning the inner social circle of people. On the other hand, social memory continues to be a vital resource for maintaining spiritual security in a society that is experiencing the challenges of rewriting familiar meanings in a changing reality.