“One current theory holds that modern world religions, such as Christianity and Islam, were able to spread precisely because they effectively enculturated norms of prosocial behavior which galvanized large-scale cooperation among relatively anonymous strangers (Atran and Henrich, 2010). According to this view, followers of modern world religions, such as Christianity and Islam, will be more likely to have internalized these norms of prosocial behavior and will thus treat anonymous others with greater fairness and generosity” (Hruschka and Henrich 2013, p. 5).

Trust is based on common norms: legal, religious, ethical, etc. It is common morality that ensures the unconstrained and unconditional unity of human beings, which results from belonging to a common culture, that is, to a single universe of norms and identities. Morality as a practice that takes shape in the space between instincts and reason is part of what Hayek called “extended order,” a spontaneous result of human action but not of human design:

“I prefer to confine the term ‘morality’ to those non-instinctive rules that enabled mankind to expand into an extended order since the concept of morals makes sense only by contrast to impulsive and unreflective conduct on one hand, and to rational concern with specific results on the other” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 12).

The community is a unity of individuals and humanity; society creates a gap between them. This gap is filled by social categories that develop on the basis of common identities of people and their common social actions. Social classes are only one kind of social categories. The development of culture-society is not driven by the struggle of classes, but by the gap between society as a whole and individuals; and social categories are the necessary mediator that holds society and individuals together, connects individuals with each other. The pursuit of the ideal, of the unity of individuals and humanity, is the driving force of all socio-cultural development:

“Man is characterized by a free, i.e. consciously performed action in accordance with the universal, general goal of humanity. The ideal is this idea of the ultimate perfection of humanity. It thus includes the awareness that man is the end of his own activity in itself and in no way a means for someone or for something, be it God or a thing in itself. According to Kant, the ideal as a state of achieved perfection of the humanity, which we imagine today, is characterized by the complete overcoming of the contradictions between the individual and society, i.e. between the individuals who make up society (humanity)” (Ilyenkov 2019-, vol. 6, pp. 56-7).

Each moment in the evolution of culture-society is characterized by its own ideal, its own norms and its own choices that people make. By social necessity we understand a counterfactual result of social choice, of the activities and actions of people carried out within the framework of an imagined ideal socio-cultural order. By individual necessity we understand the case when a person (or a small group) makes a choice not only for himself but also for others. Justice is the degree of correspondence between social and individual choice, between social and individual necessity. Trust, justice and reciprocity are key elements of sociality that allow culture-society to reproduce itself. As Karl Polanyi noted, reciprocity and reputation, centralization and redistribution of goods were the basis of the socio-cultural order of early traditional communities: “Reciprocity and redistribution are able to ensure the working of an economic system without the help of written records and elaborate administration” (Polanyi 2001, p. 51).

The socio-cultural order is not a totality or a whole in relation to which individuals act as its parts. However, there are domains of order—for example, the state and other types of political and economic organization—that tend to become a totality. By combining economic and political power, the state becomes a self-sufficient meaning. By separating individuals from humanity and standing between them, states and social categories make justice and trust dependent on their functioning.

There are generally two approaches to the application of the term “culture.” In the first case, culture is defined as everything that is opposed to “nature,” and it is precisely in this sense that we have used this term so far. In the second case, culture is defined as that which goes beyond the boundaries of economics and politics. We will call the first, broader meaning “culture” and the second, narrower meaning “culture*.” The division of culture into politics, economics and culture* is itself the result of the evolution of meanings, their division, addition and multiplication.

Our broader understanding of culture differs from the approach that is characteristic of many representatives of the social sciences. For example, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson reduce culture to culture*, that is, ideas, beliefs, values, morals:

“The culture hypothesis, just like the geography hypothesis, has a distinguished lineage, going back at least to the great German sociologist Max Weber, who argued that the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant ethic it spurred played a key role in facilitating the rise of modern industrial society in Western Europe. The culture hypothesis no longer relies solely on religion, but stresses other types of beliefs, values, and ethics as well” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 56-57).

Reducing culture to culture* might make sense if we assume that culture* is in some way a minimal description of culture as a whole. By culture* we mean relationships between people with respect to thinking. Thinking is not limited to working with symbols and concepts; at its core, thinking is a deeply emotional and thus psychophysical process; this is evident, for example, in religion, art and play. Nor is thinking limited to the processes of the brain; it is the activity of the entire human body, insofar as this activity is aimed at human psychology, at the mental world. Culture* is, if you will, a choice of thinking.

Here we need to clarify a difference between an individual and a personality. Personality is not the same as an individual: individuals form the population, personalities form the culture-society. Personality is “a special quality that an individual acquires in society” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 1, p. 385).

“Personality is not a genotypically determined integrity: one is not born a person, one becomes a person. Therefore, we do not speak of the personality of a newborn or the personality of an infant, although personality traits appear no less clearly in the early stages of ontogenesis than in later age stages” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 2, p. 196).

We wrote above that meaning as an activity creates culture-society. The part of the aggregate activity that is performed by an individual shapes his personality. The reproduction of culture-society in the population becomes the reproduction of personality in the individual:

“…The real basis of an individual’s personality lies not in the genetic programs inherent in him, not in the depths of his natural makings and inclinations, and not even in the skills, knowledge and abilities he has acquired, including professional ones, but in the system of activities implemented through his knowledge and skills” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 2, p. 202).

We could probably say that personality is active knowledge. “Knowledge is action, because the correction of knowledge entails the renovation of ourselves” (Frisina 2002, p. 76). From this point of view, the increase of the subject—both of a culture-society and of a personality—consists in the increasing complexity of knowledge, its division, addition and multiplication. When Hayek introduced the concept of the “division of knowledge,” he wanted to go beyond the “division of labor” as a collection of existing activities. The division of knowledge, according to Hayek, is the set of all possible activities in a given state of the culture-society, that is, a set of counterfacts: