What is passionarity? Meaning of the word

Do you think that many of our contemporaries will be able to answer the question about what passionarity is? It seems that no. And yet this is a very curious phenomenon, the essence of which we will talk in a short article.

What does this term mean?

This term, created by LN Gumilev, meant that in the history of mankind there are people who stand out from the general mass of their inordinate thirst for activity and active transformation of the external world. It's like a circle of elected people who change the life around them.

Among the passionaries there are many great conquerors and political figures, there are poets, writers, musicians, artists. These people consciously go against the traditions and norms of behavior in society. They carry new knowledge, new faith, a new ideology that can destroy the ideology of the former.

On what grounds can a person 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 benefit of society. It seems to create energy for social development, and does not waste it, as ordinary consumers do.

Thus, having considered the term "passionarity", the significance of which proceeds from the theory of ethnogenesis, it can be concluded that people of this type, as a rule, come into conflict with society.

They deliberately go to this conflict, complete it, gather around themselves like-minded people and create either a new religious teaching (as the Prophet Muhammad did) or a new ethnos (examples of this huge number in the history of mankind).

The scientific concept of passionarity

In fact, passionarity can be regarded as a property of the psyche of a person who is inclined to create entirely new social relations. Why such people are born, the author of the theory of ethnogenesis explains in his numerous scientific works. LN Gumilyov devoted many books to his discovery. Passionarity is a kind of key to understanding its scientific concept.

So, the scientist on the basis of the methodological analysis of various sources, using methods of retrospective analysis, logic and synthesis, comes to the conclusion that any ethnos is not only a social, but also a biological phenomenon. The ethnos is born, lives and dies under the influence of internal and external circumstances. At the same time, each ethnos establishes its relations with its environment. Let us briefly consider these relations, which we call the characterological signs of his life.

Characterological signs of life of the ethnos: landscape

The concept of passionarity suggests that it is important to study the relationship of the ethnos and the surrounding landscape. It can be steppe, plain, forest, mountain, seaside. Depending on its natural features, the national features of a particular people and the peculiarities of their mentality are formed.

Highlanders are belligerent and strong, they are used to count on themselves and do not form superethnoses because social ties in this type of nature are difficult.

Primorses are open to contacts from outside, they are successful conquerors and conquerors of new lands (by the way, Primorye can form super-ethnoses).

Representatives of the steppe also aspire to conquer peoples, but they tend to lead a nomadic way of life, know little about technology, so their historical age is short.

All these ethnoses are created by passionarians who are ready to escape from the established way of life and already understandable landscape in order to establish a new ethnos of a mixed landscape type.

In order to answer the question of what passionarity is, it is important to study the problem of the time of existence of ethnoses.

The time of life of an ethnos according to LN Gumilev

The scientist believed that each ethnos has its own historical time. He described this phase for a period of 1200 to 1500 years. He also assumed that any ethnos can consistently experience several periods: the rise, the phase of formation, possibly the phase of the breakdown, the period of stagnation and the phase of decline and death.

By the way, the period of stagnation need not necessarily end in a phase of death. If the ethnos can find the strength to give birth to a certain number of people of a passionary type, then the ethnos can return to the times of stability or change.

What is passionarity: signs of the birth of an ethnos in the history of mankind

Followers of Gumilyov sing out in their works eight signs of the creation of a new ethnos. Let us briefly consider these features:

• The first sign is the presence of people of a passionate warehouse. This is the most important sign. It is the passionaries that lay the foundations of a new ideology that leads members of the community to create a solid foundation for a new ethnos.
• The second sign is a new type of behavior. In this case we are talking about the fact that the ethnos develops in technological terms: the nomads assimilate a settled way of life, the inhabitants of the coastal areas master the 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.
• Symptom four is the demographic rise. All of the above allows the ethnos to increase rapidly enough in numbers, which leads to the fact that the very passionarity of the ethnic group is increasing.
• The fifth sign is the creation of a system of public relations. This is also an important step towards the formation of a new ethnos. A clear system of social relations regulates social interrelations and strengthens the power of passionaries in this ethnic community.
• The sixth sign is active state building. It is statehood that allows the ethnos to survive safely for centuries and even millennia.
• The seventh sign is the passionarity of culture. Along with the statehood, culture is also actively developing, supporting the existing state model of governance.
• The eighth sign is the presence of all of the above in the dynamics.

Thus, we can give a clear answer to the question of what passionarity is. 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 forever leave their mark on the history of mankind.