The author’s starting point in this article is the hypothesis that one of the conditions enabling the communist totalitarian regime of the past decades to keep the major part of the population in subjection were passivity, conformism and mediocrity. The elementary sources, reasons and consequences of these phenomena are being revealed in a prisma of different branches of science.
In the view of philosophy the author comprehends the passivity as negation of an active attitude manifesting itself through the vanity of rational getting to know and a lack of conclusive evidence of the sensual perceiving on the gnoseological level, through refusing any active activity concerning natural and social realities on the practical level, through scepticism concerning any activity when dveloping oneself on the onthological level. As for axiology the system of values forced upon an individual by the party ideologists by the help of the narrowed optics of the marxist philosophy gives a statement about the individual’s passive attitude. Thus a citizan as manipulated into an, in advance postulated and directed, hierarchy of the life values. As for the psychological position the supressed individual’s desire to be unique, the permanently induced fear of being exceptional and the lack of any inner stimulation are indentified as the very sources of the rise of passivity and mediocrity.
From the point of view of sociology, individual passivity and that evoked and regulated by the social pressure are being distinguished here, the rise of the latter being caused pardy through conforming pressures in a social group and the associating of individuality and originality with the élite and élitism as well as the missing mechanism of social justice, and the mediocricity normalization. As for the economic field, the originating of passivity and mediocricity here was assisted by the ditransparency and non-intelligibility of the working conditions, the inpossibility of influencing the organization and results of work, and the niveliuzation and dehumanization of the content of work. Educational reasons for the rise of passivity and mediocricity are above all seen in a non-differenciated attitude to education, in the uniformity of outer conditions, goals, contents, methods and means of education, in non-respecting hereditary differencies, in the absence of any meaningfulness of the study-efforts and in disgust concerning learning.
The article leads into a reflection about the problem how to stop those mechanisms producing passivity and mediocricity and how to deliver the contemporary society of those remnants in the people's thinking, consciousness and conduct.