The Soviet Union, drained of blood by the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War, still managed to create the second most powerful industry and science in the world. Nowadays in Russia all attempts not only to create an “innovative economy”, but also to design a passenger car are failing. Is it really more difficult to create a car than the best tanks in the world? Was the Soviet management system really better? If it’s about people, then how are today’s educated, world-experienced specialists at their service inferior to our fathers and grandfathers? Such questions can be multiplied further, receiving in return unintelligible answers. But the problem can be transferred to a different plane if we assume that our country is faced with such a phenomenon as systemic degradation. Degradation is the loss of previously acquired positive qualities, and we observe this trend in almost all spheres of economic, cultural and scientific life. The sources of this disease have been little studied, which is why it is so difficult to explain the degradation processes, and even more so to find the correct methods of treatment. This book is devoted to the problem of analyzing the essence of degradation and its manifestations.