Do you think many of our contemporaries will be able to answer the question of what is passionarity? It seems that no. Meanwhile, this is a very interesting phenomenon, the essence of which we will discuss in a short article.
What does this term mean?
This term, created by L. N. Gumilev, meant that in the history of mankind there are people who stand out from the general mass with their irrepressible thirst for activity and the active transformation of the outside world. It’s like a circle of chosen people who change their life.
Among passionaries there are many great conquerors and political figures, there are poets, writers, musicians, and artists. These people consciously go against the traditions and norms of behavior in society. They bring new knowledge, a new faith, a new ideology that can destroy the old ideology.
What are the signs of a person can be called a passionary?
A person of this type is always distinguished by the courage of his views and the ability to serve for the good of society. He, as it were, creates energy for social development, and does not waste it, as ordinary consumers do.
Thus, considering the term “passionarity”, the meaning of which comes from the theory of ethnogenesis, we can conclude that people of this type, as a rule, come into conflict with society.
They consciously go to this conflict, end it, gather like-minded people around them and create either a new religious teaching (as the Prophet Muhammad did) or a new ethnos (there are a lot of examples of this in the history of mankind).
The scientific concept of passionarity
In fact, passionarity can be considered as a property of the psyche of a person who is set up to create completely new social relations. Why such people are born, the author of the theory of ethnogenesis explains in his many scientific works. Many books devoted to his discovery L.N. Gumilyov. Passionarity is a kind of key to understanding his scientific concept.
So, a scientist, based on a methodological analysis of various sources, using the methods of retrospective analysis, logic and synthesis, comes to the conclusion that any ethnic group is not only a social, but also a biological phenomenon. Ethnicity is born, lives and dies under the influence of internal and external circumstances. Moreover, each ethnos establishes its relationship with its environment. Let us briefly consider these relationships, which we will call the characterological features of his life.
Characterological signs of ethnos life: landscape
The concept of passionarity suggests that it is important to study the relationship of the ethnic group and the surrounding landscape. It can be steppe, plain, forest, mountain, coastal. Depending on its natural features, the national features of one or another people and the characteristics of their mentality are formed.
The highlanders are warlike and strong, they are used to relying on themselves and do not form superethnos because social ties in this type of nature are difficult.
Primorsky people are open to contacts from the outside, they are successful conquerors and conquerors of new lands (by the way, Primorsky people can form superethnos).
Representatives of the steppe also seek to conquer peoples, but they, as a rule, lead a nomadic way of life, have little knowledge of technology, so their historical age is short.
All these ethnic groups are created by passionaries who are ready to get away from the existing lifestyle and already understandable landscape in order to establish a new ethnic group of a mixed landscape type.
In order to answer the question of what is passionarity, it is important to study the problem of the time of the existence of ethnic groups.
The life time of an ethnos according to L. N. Gumilyov
The scientist believed that each ethnic group has its own historical time. He described this phase for a period of 1200 to 1500 years. He also suggested that any ethnic group could successively experience several periods: rise, the formation phase, possibly the breakdown phase, the period of stagnation and the face of decline and death.
By the way, the period of stagnation does not have to end with a death phase. If an ethnos can find the strength in itself to give birth to a certain number of people of a passionate type, then the ethnos can again return to the times of stability or mutate.
What is passionarity: signs of the birth of an ethnos in the history of mankind
The followers of Gumilyov single out in their works eight signs of creating a new ethnic group. Briefly consider these signs:
- The first sign is the presence of people in a passionate warehouse. This is the most important sign. It is the passionaries who lay the foundations of a new ideology, which leads community members to create a solid foundation for a new ethnic group.
- The second sign is a new type of behavior. In this case, we are talking about the fact that the ethnos is developing technologically: nomads adopt a sedentary lifestyle, residents of coastal regions master trade and agriculture.
- The third sign is migration. This phenomenon allows the ethnos to bring its values to other peoples and people, which they can gradually make their own in spirit.
- The fourth sign is the demographic rise. All of the above allows the ethnos to increase in quantity quickly enough, which leads to the fact that the passionarity of the ethnos itself increases.
- The fifth sign is the creation of a system of public relations. This is also an important step towards the formation of a new ethnic group. A clear system of public relations regulates social interactions and strengthens the power of passionaries in this ethnic community.
- The sixth sign is active state building. It is statehood that allows an ethnic group to exist safely for centuries and even millennia.
- The seventh sign is the passionarity of culture. Along with statehood, culture begins to actively develop, supporting the existing state model of governance.
- Sign eighth - the presence of all of the above in dynamics.
Thus, we can give a clear answer to the question of what is passionarity. This is the psychological quality of the elected members of the ethnos who are able to turn their people into a great ethnos, create a powerful power and leave their mark in the history of mankind forever.