The article attempts to identify and analyze the complex of those large-scale and profound changes that have occurred in the most important spheres of public life on a worldwide scale in the last decades. The analysis of nature, key factors and main vectors of these shifts is given. Particular importance is given to the processes of globalization, the information and telecommunications revolution, the trends of accelerating social time, a kind of "contraction" of the world space, etc., which together contribute to the erosion of traditional national and state borders, and the unprecedented rapprochement of peoples. The phenomenon of the new great migration of peoples, the ever-increasing flows of migration of the masses of people that lead to a radical transformation of the demographic map of the modern world, to the gradual westernization of the East and the orientalization of the West are given due place. The analysis of still new trends in world development is given as a large-scale redistribution of wealth, technology, knowledge, science, information, relative geopolitical power, in-version of the vector and functions of globalization, etc. Based on the analysis of these and other related trends and processes, the conclusion is made about the entry of the modern world into a qualitatively new stage of its development, its radical transformation. The thesis about the need to reassess the values of democracy, the ideas of human rights and freedoms, their system characteristics, place and role in today's rapidly changing world is substantiated.