From the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, debates about its origin became substantially ideologised. The main ideological competition comprises the opposition of the two poles, the West understood in the collective sense, and China. Despite the WHO Commission regarded the version of artificial SARS-CoV-2 origin that escaped from the laboratory in Wuhan, the least probable, some Western politicians continued to use speculations about “Chinese biological weapon” in 2021. The Chinese authorities have countered these speculations with impressive successes in the fight against the epidemic and a willingness to engage with other countries through the new Health Road initiative. Confucian values are cited as one of the foundations of Chinese achievements, which, however, are of universal human significance. The article provides an overview of the current situation.

In my book review of Vaclav Smil’s recently published book Growth, I focus on perspectives of technocratic ideology with respect to human evolution. Can we measure future evolution of homo sapiens quantitatively or in some other way? I study Smil’s approach to the problem and show its key strengths and deficiencies.

The techniques for material and, more importantly, informational exchange across virtually all borders that have emerged and spread worldwide in recent decades, have led to a phenomenon known as globalisation. Not only certain pesticides or exhaust gases such as CO2 as substances introduced by humans into the environment, are spreading globally and changing the ecology of the planet. There is a close parallel to ideas spreading globally, be they dreams of a happy and peaceful world community (“One Humanity” ideology) that begins to dissolve existing nation states and cultures or, alternatively, Malthusian nightmares as results of an anticipated climate catastrophe, or a sequence of pandemics that, like the plague or leprosy in the past, paralysed entire societies and plunged them into an existential chaos. SARS-CoV-2-related mental crisis is an instructive example. In the paper I analyse positive and negative implications of One Humanity project with respect to the COVID-19-related global shift of mental stereotypes.

How a population/group feels about its future, its so-called “social mood”, and how that mood biases collective events of all types is the focus of this article. Through a variety of “sociometers” running from fashion styles to financial markets behaviour, the paper argues that the social mood dramatically influences the types of events we can expect to see on all time scales. The financial market price movement serve as possibly the best sociometer for measuring the social mood on all time scales. Additionally, I present arguments showing that there is virtually no feedback from events to mood; that is, the social mood is endogeneous to the population and is not determined by any sort of “outside forces”. I hypothesize that it may be mainly determined by “internal ideology” of a group that may be unobvious to its members. Finally, the paper concludes with a research program for turning the hypotheses advanced here into a full-fledged scientific theory of collective human behaviour.

Rice played different roles throughout Filipino history. A magical item in ancient times up to Middle Ages, rice transformed to a consumer product whose consumption reflects the stratification of the Filipino society. From a central cultural element in the Philippines islands rice was gradually downgraded to a side cultural detail due to its commodisation, urbanisation, industrialisation and the Green Revolution. However, in our times rice started to play a new role of cultural artefact referring to invented traditions having little in common with ancient culture of the islanders. Besides, it became a tangible sign of ideological movement against the Green Revolution.

The concept of interpretive activism and interpretive activists, is introduced as a media between cultural objects (Verdi’s operas) and political meanings. The multitude of political and ideological interpretations of Verdi’s operas written in the 1840s, that resulted from the differentiation between socio-political interests of interpretive activists, goes definitely beyond the traditional understanding of Verdi’s music as a convenient ideological tool used for creating pre-designed Italian nationalist sentiments of Risorgimento.

In the 2017 Constitution of Kingdom of Thailand there was a call to create a National Strategy of the country’s development. The 20-year National Strategy was adopted in October 2018 by the National Council for Peace and Order. A major part of this strategy deals with the problem of Thai provinces’ separatist movements and increasing Bangkok’s political and social control. To achieve these goals, a new ideology of “commercial nation” was created that contrasts with the more traditional “community democracy” approach. While the ideology of commercial state may be a useful vehicle for urbanising Thai provinces in the future, conquering separatist trends and articulating new priorities for the Thai population, it is still pure ideology and it cannot be applied practically in the form in which it was formulated. However, the “commercial state” ideology may be an instructive example of new techniques for social unifying people in developing countries.

COVID-19 pandemic is possibly the most serious challenge to the humanity since the end of World War II. Surprisingly, this threat did not unite countries of different ideological blocks. The ideological division of the world only exaggerated in the COVID-19 times. Not even common programmes of mutual healthcare assistance were elaborated. Instead, Russia, the East (mainly China) and the West deepened their discrepancies in international relations and strengthened their hostile rhetoric against each other (with exception of Russo-Chinese relations). The paper studies possibilities of overcoming ideological barriers that prevent the world now to create effectual administrative, political, social and legal techniques of counteracting such outstanding a threat as the Great Pandemic.