Form and Essence

It often feels as if we know the world already, as if everything in it is recognizable at first glance. The shapes are familiar, the outlines habitual. A sense of something already lived through emerges. And it is precisely here that an error begins to accumulate.

Similarity of form is increasingly mistaken for similarity of essence. And this is where the error becomes systemic.

A shark and a dolphin look almost identical. From a distance — especially so. Both are fast, both are predators, both are perfectly adapted to the ocean. For a fish, there is no difference. Yet this resemblance is the result of environment, not kinship. A dolphin is a mammal, closer to land animals than to fish. A shark is a cartilaginous creature, related to rays. They arrived at the same form by different paths. The form converged through adaptation. The essence did not.

The same happens with systems. In the modern era, different civilizations found themselves in a similar external environment — global, technological, dense. They began to produce similar forms: parties, parliaments, elections, popular sovereignty, constitutions, digital platforms — a familiar silhouette. Yet the internal logic of these systems can be fundamentally different. Different anthropologies. Different sources of legitimacy. Different understandings of meaning, freedom, power, and time.

Expecting identical behavior from them is like expecting a dolphin to live as a shark does.

But these differences are not limited to individual societies or political regimes. They point to larger formations — stable, historical, slow-moving. To levels where form is no longer merely institutional, but cultural and civilizational.

Let us take a vessel. First, we place the large stones inside. Then the smaller ones. Then sand. And only after that — water. If we start with water, there will be no room left for stones. If we ignore the sand, the structure will be unstable.

Civilizations are the large stones. Cultures, ethnicities, traditions are smaller ones. Individual lives are sand. Water fills the space between them and binds everything more tightly — communication, information space, the connective tissue between people and cultures.

Cultural belonging does not coincide with state borders. It flows, seeps through, layers itself, clashes, and mixes. Stability here does not arise from unification, but from a proper proportion of elements.

Most global conflicts do not begin with malicious intent — that is where they reach their peak, when they become irreversible. Their beginning is almost always rooted in a misreading of the other’s nature. When form is confused with essence, conclusions become distorted, worldviews skewed, and actions follow from that distortion.

Our shark and our dolphin can coexist in the same ocean. But if a dolphin is forced to be a shark, it will die. And the reverse is equally true.

It was precisely this error that underpinned the idea of the “end of history.” A form that emerged within a specific civilizational context was taken for a universal essence — as if a familiar silhouette meant the completion of evolution.

But history does not end where forms temporarily coincide. It continues through divergence of foundations, meanings, anthropologies, and visions of the future.

The future world is not an ocean of a single species, not a world of triumphant modernity, and not a homogeneous postmodern space. It is a complex ecosystem of distinct civilizational worlds, arriving at similar forms by different paths. And perhaps the key skill of the coming era is to stop judging by silhouette and relearn how to discern essence.