10: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version

When Darkness Comes, The Change of Phase Imperatives

Chapter Ten

In characterizing the inertial phase, we have devoted much space to an analysis of the unfavorable changes that occur in this phase in the relationship between the ethnos and the landscape that feeds it. But perhaps even scarier are the changes that take place within the ethnic system itself during the inertial phase. After all, we should not forget about sub-passionaries. And there have always been sub-passionaries. In the ascendant phase, they were completely unnecessary and not valued at all. Then, during the Acmatic phase, they were used as cannon fodder and valued very little. But in the inertial, silent time theories began to emerge that "man sounds proud"; that everyone should be given the chance to live; that man cannot be left behind; that man needs help, needs food, needs water; and that if he is not able to work, then he must be taught; and that if he does not want to learn, then we teach him badly. In general, the most important thing - the man, - everything for the man. Therefore, in the "soft" time of civilization with the general material abundance for everyone there is an extra piece of bread and a woman.

Imagine how people of a certain sub-passionate disposition use such teaching, which becomes an ethical imperative. They say: "All right, we agree to everything, but you feed us and give us some vodka”. If you don't give us enough, we'll "chip in for three," that's okay. There are more and more of them, but they find a place for them, and they multiply, because there is nothing else for them to do. They don't write dissertations.

At the end of the inertial phase of ethnogenesis, they are no longer a modest little layer within the ethnos, but a significant majority. And then they say their word: "Be like us!", that is, do not strive for anything that cannot be eaten or drank. All growth becomes an odious phenomenon, industriousness is subjected to ridicule, intellectual pleasures provoke rage.

In art there is a decline of style, in science original works are replaced by compilations, in public life corruption is legalized, in the army soldiers hold officers and generals in obedience, threatening them with revolt. Everything is corrupt, nobody can be trusted or relied upon, and in order to rule, the ruler has to employ the tactics of an outlaw: to suspect, hunt down and kill his collaborators.

The order established in this phase, which we call the phase of obscuration - obscuration or attenuation - cannot be considered democratic. Here, as in the phases that preceded it, consortia reigns, only the principle of selection is different, negative. What is valued is not ability, but lack of it; not education, but ignorance; not firmness of opinion, but impartiality. Not every average citizen can meet these requirements, and so the majority of the people are inferior and therefore unequal in the eyes of this new imperative.

Now we will try to characterize this last phase of the ethnos's existence, the phase of obscuration. Here we encounter difficulties in choosing examples. The fact is that not every ethnos survives to the phase of obscuration. There are cases where it dies before, and this happens so often that the phase of obscuration can only be traced on a small number of examples.

Examples from modern history, from the history of Europe, which has not yet reached this last phase of its ethnogenesis, are irrelevant here. To describe the phase of obscuration we must take ancient periods of history, where this phase can be seen with sufficient clarity and completeness. The Late Han and Three Kingdoms eras in China (3rd century), including the Five Barbarians and Northern Wei (4th - 6th centuries) are very typical for this.

But we will not take China as an example, because it is a very exotic subject. More accessible and understandable (just closer to us and our erudition) is the era of the Roman Empire, which was so grandiose that it failed to rot before its neighbors destroyed it. The Ancient Chinese Han Empire followed the same path.

As we can see from the above, obscuration is characterized by the predominance of sub-passionarians, who gradually displace the harmonious, balanced individuals, the individuals of the "golden mean," proclaimed as an ideal during the inertial phase by Octavian Augustus at the end of the first century B.C. In this phase, sub-passionarians and passionaries are displaced, although they both coexist with them.  

And then you have to ask yourself: "How is it that sub-passionarians who are unable to concentrate, unable to set themselves goals, unable to behave in an organized way in any kind of long operations, who ruin everything, find themselves on the crest of a wave and begin to dictate not even their will (because they have no will) but their whims? After all, it is extremely unprofitable, extremely unpleasant for the sub-passionarians themselves, and, of course, for everyone around them, and yet it happens!

Let us try to grasp the mechanism of this phenomenon. To do this, let us take a quick look at all the phases of Roman ethnogenesis and try to understand how the role of sub-passionarians in the ethnic system of Rome changed from phase to phase.

Carriers of obscuration in Rome

We have mentioned before that Rome at the beginning of its existence was a city inhabited by warlike people. Every Roman was a warrior, who served in the cavalry if he had plenty of money, or in the infantry as a hard-armed warrior if he had little. Thus, the Romans won the war against Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, by capturing Tarentus, against Carthage, the three Punic wars by capturing Sicily, Spain and Carthage itself, against Macedonia, against the Syrian king Antiochus, against Mithridates - against all who opposed. These successes and the abundance connected with them meant that the sub-passionarians, coming back from the campaigns, no longer returned to the dull peasant labor of their plots, but instead drank them up and went to the city, and demanded to be provided for there. They did not want to live in the villages. This phenomenon is quite understandable, but nevertheless unnatural.

The Gracchus brothers' attempt to turn back history and sell these impoverished peasants on parcels was not successful because they had to take land from the rich, but the rich protested - they had bought the land, but the poor did not support their defenders, their tribunes, they left them to be completely destroyed. And then the administrative genius of the leader of the Democrat party, Caius Maria, intervened.

The democrats in Rome differed from the aristocrats only in that the democratic party was the party of the rich - moneybags, the so-called "horsemen" who had the means to buy a horse, and not even one, while the aristocratic party was based on the not yet ruined peasants and part of the Senate. Both parties were, of course, slaveholding.

Marius saw that drunken legionnaires, unwilling to work their plots and demanding free bread, could be used as a military force. He suggested that they be recruited with rations and a small salary. Thus, the militia would become an army of mercenary soldiers. Since the law was passed by the Senate and there was nowhere else to go, the sub-passionarians were eager to do it, since they had no money for their own armament and were used to fighting. Thanks to this reform the army very quickly became permanent and even hereditary.

Why hereditary? The point is that a legionary was hired for twenty years, and often he stayed for the rest of his life, if he was not killed. These legionnaires were trained in the art of war for days - it was a sporting exercise from morning till night. But since such a man was condemned to a lifetime of service and warfare, he naturally demanded some of the comforts of life. The mercantile service in Rome was very poorly organized, and it was rather quickly converted, as we would say now, to a social basis: there were female auxiliary women who sold soldiers everything they needed for a proportionate share of their spoils. Naturally, the marching women became pregnant. Sometimes the Marquitan women did not know who the father of the child was, and sometimes they did, in which case they were called hetaerae, that is, combat girlfriends. These friends gave birth to children, the children were considered children of the regiment and were brought up in the military tradition from infancy, from the cradle, and were enrolled in the corresponding cohorts of the respective legions. Over the course of 200 years, from the second century B.C. to the end of the first century A.D., a special stratum within the Roman population was created: the legionaries.

How to determine their class identity? Difficult! Of course, they belonged to the state class because they maintained the existing order, but it is difficult to call them slave-owners because they did not have slaves. They served all their lives, and sometimes, if they managed to survive, they retired with minimum security. If they managed to save some money from their spoils, they lived relatively normal lives, but most of them died because there were wars all the time. In this way soldiers formed an independent sub-ethnos, whose importance grew with each passing year, and whose stereotype of behavior changed in accordance with the conditions of lifelong military service.

Sub-ethnos vs. super-ethnos

The result of the emergence of a new sub-ethnos was that Rome won a number of new victories. Syria was conquered, Mesopotamia by Pompey, Gaul by Caesar. Roman armies went to Germany, Egypt and Illyria were subdued by Octavian after Antony's death. The empire became vast, encompassing half of modern Western Europe and a large part of the Middle East. The frontiers were long and difficult to defend, so legions were needed, and they were constantly replenished by willing volunteers who found bread and nourishment, glory and a place in life in the natural way already described.

So, separated from the general population of the vast Roman imperium, which included both Italy proper (the metropolis, so to speak) and the conquered countries called provinces, the legionaries were at first very disciplined and conscientious in their duties. They obeyed their commanders, appointed by the Senate, fought heroically in civil wars, defending their commanders, defeating those militias of supporters of the republic and the old orders which were displeasing to them, because legionaries preferred to obey not a foreign civilian Senate, but their commander, who became a comrade in the campaigns and dangers they endured.

So, they brought Caesar to the throne first, then Augustus and Antony, then they supported all the men who commanded them. And the commander of the army was called emperor, that is, lord. He was not a king, not a head of government, he was a commander of an army, an emperor. And all this continued quite happily until '68, when the first attempt at a transition to obscuration appeared, albeit unsuccessfully. The fact is that the next emperor, Nero, behaved so badly that he caused general resentment in all the western regions of the empire. In the eastern regions he was somehow tolerated, because he was far away and favored the eastern people - the Greeks and especially the Syrians and the Minor Asians - but also, generally speaking, no one was going to stand up for him when the revolt that ruined him happened. This is where we will focus our attention.

The first uprising against the tyrant was led by an Aquitanian legion commander, one Julius Vindex. He was supported by the Spanish legions, commanded by Galba, and not defended by the Rhenish legions, commanded by the drunkard Vitellius. That is, the whole west of the Rhine border (the Aquitanian legions, the Spanish legions) all broke away from the empire. And here were the most combat-ready troops that no one could match. Vindex and Vitellius quickly came to an agreement with each other, and Galba was a friend of Vindex's.

But it turned out that the Lower Rhine legions (they consisted not of Germans, but of the same Romans) decided to clash with the Aquitanian legions, and it was impossible to keep them from clashing, although the leaders had already reached an agreement. Vindex fell in this bloody battle. Galba seized the initiative and subjugated Rome.

Rome had a corps of praetorians, guardsmen who guarded order, the Senate, and the emperor's person. These Praetorians, seeing that Galba was bringing order and discipline among them, killed him and chose as their leader one of Nero's drinking companions, named Othon. He was a very decent man. He drank and debauched with Nero, but did not kill anyone, which was already a great credit to him. He led the Praetorians, but the Lower Rhine legions went to war against them.

I say "legions", meaning soldiers and officers, but not generals, because Vitellius, a former drunken comrade of Othon's, wanted more than anything to submit to him and remain simply the commander of his frontier line. But neither the officers nor the common legionnaires gave him such an opportunity. He was presented with the alternative of either being killed or raising an army advancing on his comrades-in-arms, only from a different military unit. In the first skirmish, Othon suffered a small defeat which did nothing, but apparently, he - a man of conscience - was so disgusted that he gave up the fight and committed suicide. Vitellius was brought to Rome and forced to declare himself imperator.

He was opposed by the Eastern legions under the command of Vespasian Flavius, who, generally speaking, did not want to rebel either, for he had his hands full in the East: he was subduing and pacifying rebellious Judea. But the legionaries said, "No, not at all, some Vitellius, some lower-ranking guys over there in Rome, let's go save Rome.

The war took an ugly turn. The Eastern legions, hardened in constant combat, were not made up of Oriental men, but of the same Romans. They passed through the Balkan Peninsula, took Cremona, which did not want to resist.   However, they took it by storm and killed all the inhabitants of that Roman city on the grounds that they were Roman citizens and as such they could not be subjected to slavery, so they were not taken prisoner. After the capture of Cremona, they entered Rome.

Vitellius demanded to be released from the throne, for he wanted to go into private life. He absolutely did not want to sit on the throne. His soldiers forbade him to do so and made him lead the resistance, sitting in the palace and waiting for them to kill each other. But they fought not against the enemies of the fatherland, but against their comrades-in-arms, who had come from Syria. The latter won, slaughtered all their fellows from the Rhine, and killed Vitellius himself. He was executed, though he cried out that he was not guilty of anything. Indeed, he was not to blame. The Flavian dynasty was established.

I dwell on this episode in such detail to show where it began. There was a similar case after the third Flavius, Domitian, who was a terrible tyrant. He was killed at the instigation of his unfaithful wife. Nerva and Trajan installed their Antoninian dynasty in '96. It lasted until the end of the second century.

The decisive turning point in the fate of the Roman ethnos occurred in 193. The last Antoninus, son of the philosopher Marcus Aurelius, Commodus (a nickname corresponding to his psyche) turned out to be a degenerate, a monster, a murderer, an autocrat. He killed people mainly out of cowardice, because he was afraid of being killed. He ended up dropping a plaque with the names of those condemned to death in the bed of his mistress. She picked it up, read it, and saw that her name was also on it. She gave it to the men who had been sentenced to death. They invited a gladiator named Narcissus who had killed Commodus.

A new emperor was needed. The Senate nominated the venerable old man Pertinax, who immediately set things in order, but the Praetorians went to his house and killed him. They auctioned the throne to the highest bidder. They found a buyer: Didius Julian, a rich swindler who had stolen a lot of money in Gaul. The Praetorians received the money as "gifts" and Julian became emperor.

Empire vs. eternal city

Here the provincial legions rose up against the Roman legions: in Syria, Clodius Albinus in Britain, and Septimius Severus in Pannonia, about whom a Roman senator said very wittily: "He could not be born or could not die". He was a violent man, from a horsemen's family. He no longer commanded the Romans, but the Thracians and Illyrians (the Illyrians are the people nowadays called Albanians) recruited from the provinces. They were desperate people (as well as Thracians) because the East was already experiencing the same passionate push that caused the Great Migration of Peoples.

The North, close to Rome, entered the Eternal City without a fight. Didius Julian, abandoned and betrayed by the Praetorians, was killed in his palace after 63 days of reign. That was how long it took for the Praetorians to drink away the money they had received.

The Praetorians, however, who came out to meet the usurper with laurel branches, miscalculated. Septimius Severus destroyed the Roman corps of praetorians: the praetorians were cordoned off, the Illyrian legionnaires pointed their spears at them, disarmed them, expelled them from Rome and sent them out to the provinces - two men per cohort. The entire praetorian corps (the basis of Roman power in the social sense) was replaced. As a social institution it remained, but the people who were assigned there were no longer from the Romans, but from Illyrians, Thracians, Moors, Gauls, Germans, Sarmatians, Arabs, who came to serve - anyone at all.

Thus, the once subjugated Illyria and Thrace were defeated by Rome. After the defeat of Illyria and Albinus, Septimius Severus relieved his soldiers and enlarged the army, like the Praetorian corps, with citizens from the eastern provinces: Illyrians, Thracians, Galatians, Moors, Gentiles, Arabs, etc. As a result, by the early 3rd century nearly the entire Roman army was manned by foreigners. This means that the Roman ethnos, which ceased to supply voluntary defenders of the homeland, lost its passiveness. The structure, language, and culture of the empire still held by inertia, at a time when authentic Romans numbered in separate families, even in Italy, which was populated by natives of Syria and the descendants of prisoner-of-war slaves, the Colons.

The demise of the Roman super-ethnos and the passionate push of the first century A.D.

This was how the Roman Empire was during the reign of Septimius Severus, who did not believe in senators, did not believe in horsemen, hated Rome, although he himself was a Roman, relied on provincial, very reliable troops.   This had nothing to do with Rome: Rome remained simply the capital of a vast system that was no longer an expression or fulfillment of the Roman ethnos. The Roman ethnos found itself in its own country as one of many, as yet an equal ethnos.

The next act of tragedy was the edict of Caracalla, the successor of Septimius Severus. He was a murderer, a monster, a corrupter. Most frightening of all, he was a sadist and a liar. He issued a law declaring as Roman citizens all free subjects of the Roman Empire, all except slaves, and by the way, the Egyptians were not enrolled there because they showed no interest in public life. Illyrians, Thracians, Germans, Gauls, Greeks, Spaniards, Moors, they were all considered equally Roman because they were free subjects of the empire.

Thus, the concept of "Roman" changed its content. Where once they were the descendants of the patricians and plebeians who founded the city of Rome and conquered the Mediterranean, now they turned out to be inhabitants of that very conquered Mediterranean, who were added to the legions and, through the legions, to the command. The worst thing in the Roman Empire was not the situation of the poor peasantry, which was exploited in every way, but that of the Senate, who were rich enough to issue decrees that were supposed to be valid throughout the empire. Senators were killed whenever they wanted and as many times as they wanted. The Senate had to crawl on its stomach before the Emperor, because every attempt at autonomy was punished. Fortunately, Caracalla was stabbed to death in the Persian campaign.

Thus, the military dictatorship of Severus prolonged the Roman system for only 40 years, and then it began... In 235, soldiers killed Alexander Severus and his clever mother, Mammea, handing the throne to the Thracian Maximinus. Proconsul of Africa, the native Roman.

lanian Gordian opposed him along with his son. Both perished. In 238 the soldiers killed Maximinus and the Praetorians killed the two consuls, Pupien and Balbinus. Gordian III was killed by Philip the Arabus, prefect of the Praetorians, in 244, and by Decius himself in 249. After Decius' death in a battle with the Goths, soldiers killed Gallus, then Aemilianus. The empire fell apart: the usurper Postumus in the west, the Palmyra king Odenatus in the east, who repulsed the Persians.

The emperor Postumus was in Gaul for quite a long time. Then, when he was killed by his soldiers, Gaul was again subjected to Rome. But how? Here, too, we must make one very important point. Postumus inherited Gaul from a certain Tetrick, a very good and disciplined man who wanted nothing more than to rebel against the lawful Roman government. But the soldiers gave him, like Vitellius, the alternative - either you lead us or we kill you and appoint someone else. Tetrick agreed not to be killed, proclaimed this army, and then before the decisive battle, he ran to his opponent Aurelian and reported that so-and-so. But, of course, no one harmed him, no one touched him, and then he was appointed to a very great position - the corer (co-ruler) of Italy. And the legionaries? - They fought until they were slaughtered.

At every rebellion, which was very numerous in the 3rd century, about every month and a half or two months, the soldiers massacred their worst enemies. And who is a soldier's worst enemy? - A petty officer and a platoon leader! Legionnaires killed those junior commanders who maintained discipline among them. And since vacancies had to be filled all the time, the quality of the noncommissioned officers, the skeleton of the army, gradually deteriorated. The legions were transformed from the best-trained army in the world into a gang or several gangs that competed with each other, and the commanders were subject to their own discretion.  It was by their hands that the emperors Gallienus, Aureolus, Claudius II, and Quintilian, who reigned for 17 days, were consecutively assassinated.

The death of Emperor Valerian in 260 was again the fault of his own hardened legions. Before the battle, they demanded that Emperor Valerian go to the Shah of Persia and negotiate a free retreat. They, you see, did not want to fight. He had to go there under threat of death and the Persians took him prisoner, mutilated him, put him in the "tower of silence", a prison, and mocked him so that he died. Unfortunately for him, it lasted nine or ten years. And the legionaries, deprived of their command, were slaughtered by the Persians. The Persians then invaded Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, and Aurelian had to drive out the Persians and take Palmyra, which also possessed much of Asia and became an independent Arab state.

Aurelian was a very strong man, and it was he who fought Tetricus and pardoned him.   He pardoned Queen Zenobia of Palmyra as well, but he was utterly ruthless in his treatment of the senators, and the senators considered him, not without reason, an executioner. Besides, he, an Illyrian peasant, a warrior by vocation, disliked disorder and dishonesty very much.

When it was discovered that one of his finance ministers was defacing coin and profiting from it terribly, he had the minister executed and had the defective coin removed from circulation. This caused a financial crisis, and Rome revolted. There were seven days of fighting in the streets of Rome, which had to be settled by legionaries, not Romans. Aurelian put things in order and was about to go to war against the Persians, when he discovered that one of his closest collaborators, freedman Mestius, was a swindler. When he discovered this, he, knowing the character of the emperor, decided that he would not live long. So, he forged the Emperor's signature on the death warrant of his closest collaborators. They assassinated the Emperor. But when the deception was discovered, Mestius was thrown to the beasts of prey.

After Aurelian, the old consulor Tacitus, his brother Florian, the Pan-Nonian officer Probus, Carr, Numerian, Apros were murdered one after the other. It was not until September 284 that Dioux was proclaimed a king.  The Republic came to an end in September 284, when he took advantage of the fact that his rival Carinus (son of Carus) had been murdered by his associates and then he became king. The republic was over.

This long enumeration of the murders of kings allows us to understand the course of ethnic development, if we take into account that many more (they say “orders of magnitude”) of ordinary people were murdered.

In such an environment, any passionate system crumbles. Passionarians are strong where they are surrounded by either weak passionate people, or people who are stronger passionately, but carried away by some ideal - a distant prediction, or harmonious, balanced individuals, who, willingly trusting their leader, support him and do not even try to replace him - this is the most reliable.

But when passionate people are surrounded on all sides by "life-lovers", the situation becomes extremely difficult. The subpassionarians have instinctive reactions (to drink - now, to eat, to find a hetaera, to beat up someone they don't like) that have no counterbalance in the form of restraining passionarity, so "life-lovers" are at the mercy of their uncontrollable emotions. When there are a lot of fun-loving people, and they have guns in their hands, it becomes difficult to maintain the system. Not that Rome was without a strong-willed general or a clever diplomat (it was a vast country!), but there were few faithful executors.

Diocletian realized that only a backward province could save him. So, he divided the cares of defending the borders with his three companions, set up his residence in the Asian town of Nicomedia, far from Rome, and surrounded himself with armies of Illyrian, Thracian and Mesian highlanders who were still in good physical condition. He created a bureaucracy because he did not trust, with good reason, the corrupted society. He erected a persecution against the Christians and Manicheans, because these communities lived according to their own laws and not according to his. In short, he used the inertia not of the ethnos, for that had dried up, but of the culture created by previous generations. But he, too, capitulated to the force of things, for he became not head of the republic (princeps), but king of the state (dominus).

Still, despite the tragic situation, the Roman army held the frontier along the Rhine, the rampart along the Tidus, and did well against the Numidians and Moors. It was harder in the East.

The Decline of Iran

Rome's main adversary here was Persia. After Valerian was defeated and taken prisoner by the Persian Shah Shapur I in 260, Persia, with 50 times fewer resources, waged a successful and uninterrupted war in Mesopotamia.

What was it that balanced such a great difference in strength? To answer this question, let us analyze the history of the Parthian-Persian ethno-social system and its phases.

Ancient Persia, which had conquered Babylon, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt in the west and Sogdiana and part of India in the east, regarded itself as a world empire - Iran, pro-Turan. Iran and Turan were inhabited by closely related Aryan tribes. What separated them was not race or language but religion. The Persian kings patronized the teachings of Zarathushtra, a dualism that divided the world into worshippers of Ormuzd, the deity of light, and worshippers of Ahriman, the lord of darkness. The dogma of this doctrine is complex, but fortunately we do not need it here. What matters is the antithesis of Iran to Turan, understood to mean Central Asia and present-day Afghanistan. Iran was not worshipped by Ormuzdes but by the Devas, ancient tribal gods which were analogous to the Hellenic Olympians.

Alexander the Great's victory over the Persians was unexpectedly easy, but the Turanians - the Parthians, led by Saka (Scythian) Arshakos - forced the Macedonians out of Iran in the 3rd century BC, took Babylonia in the 2nd century BC (141 BC), defeated the Romans in the 1st century BC (53 BC) and then held the western border up to the fall of the dynasty.

Parthia was a feudal and liberal country. At the head of it were the four royal families of the Pahlavs, below them seven princely families, 240 noble families, and the dehkans, a poor nobility obliged to serve in the army. Still lower were merchants, urban artisans and peasants; still lower were slaves. There were also Christian and Jewish colonies in the cities, and in the mountains and steppes - different tribes with their own faiths, habits and customs. All lived together without interfering with one another. It was a united multi-ethnic system.

The first 200 years (250-53 B.C.) was a phase of ethnic upheaval, succinctly described by the poet Behar:  On the west the Romans, the Saks from the east, Two battled the stronghold of Iran's stream. But the Parthian army stood between them. Here are the Saks fleeing, Here is confusion in Rome. The fighters of Khorasan, Gurgan, and Rhea have repulsed their foes with their breasts.

The poet correctly noted the areas that were the poorest, most sparsely populated, but most heroic. These areas were located on the outskirts of the ancient Eastern area, so the decay of the crumbling Assyro-Babylonian culture poisoned them minimally.

The second period, the Acme phase (50 BC-224 AD), was characterized by the diversity of cultural influences, dynastic wars, and the abandonment of Hellenism for Zoroastrianism. But the change of events did not save the Arshakid dynasty. For the Persians, they remained Turanians, strangers and invaders.

In 224 one of the seven princes, Artashir of Pars, a descendant of the Sassanids, with the support of the Zoroastrian clergy and local dehkans, defeated the Parthian king Artaban V and was crowned Shahan Shah of Iran in 226. From this time the "alliance of the throne and altar." "Pure religion" was declared the state religion, and "idolatry" (i.e., tribal cults) were persecuted. Sabeanism, Gnosticism, Greek polytheism, Chaldean mysticism, Christianity, Buddhism and Mithraism had to bow to the religion of Avesta. The Gnostic Mani, permitted under Shapur I in 241-242, was executed under Bahram I in 276-77.

Only Judaism was not persecuted because the Jews were the true enemies of Rome, with whom Iran was in constant warfare. In short, it was difficult, but possible to live in Iran in the III-V centuries. It was hard for everyone, although in different ways, as always happens in the inertial phase. Herein lies the clue to Persia's successes in the war with Rome: Persia was younger. When Rome was already in the era of soldierly emperors, Persia was still in a time equivalent to the empire of Augustus. The presence of "golden mediocrity," though it reduced the creative potential, it offered enormous opportunities to coordinate a harmonious population.  In short, 3rd century Persia had all the qualities and disadvantages we have mentioned about the phase of civilization (inertia).

However, the inexorable course of ethnogenesis brought Persia, as well as Rome, to the last phase of ethnos development - obscuration. Although it happened later and differently than in Rome, the logic of events was the same.  Shah Kawad (488-531) inherited a complex ethno-social system, which his ancestors had carefully maintained. Three noble Parthian families, the Karens in Armenia, the Surens in Khorasan, and the Mihrans in Arran, were the pillars of the throne. Mobeds (priests) and dabirs (scribes) made up the intellectual stratum; azads (free men) served in the cavalry.   The fourth estate paid taxes by tilling the land and raising livestock.

But to maintain this system, complicated by the presence of small ethnic groups: Deylemites, Arabs, Saks, Jews, Armenians, Nestorian and Monophysite Christians, Mithraists and Gnostics, required a constant expenditure of passion; and one day it was no longer sufficient.  (The energy ran out). The phase of ethnic obscuration - a reduction in the number of elements that make up the ethno-social system - began.

What happened was this. Natural disasters - drought, famine, locusts - caused turmoil in 491 and then the Shah's favorite, Wazir Mazdak, proposed his program, which consisted of two parts: philosophical and economic. Mazdak believed that the realm of light and good is the realm of will and reason, and evil is spontaneity and irrationality. Therefore, we must build the world intelligently: confiscate the property of the rich and distribute it to the needy. Since the "needy" were chosen by Mazdak himself, it is clear that in a short time the existing population groups (sub-ethnoses) were joined by another group - the Mazdakites, who wished to live at the expense of the treasury, replenishing it with confiscations.

This program was resisted (especially the removal of women from harems), and the lack of will led to executions, killing the nobles who were the cavalry, the main force of the Persian army.  In 529, the king Khosroi carried out a new coup, executed Mazdak, removed his father Kavad from the throne and hanged at the feet of the Mazdakites. But it was impossible to make up for the losses. There was even nothing to reward the coup plotters who had lost their property embezzled by Mazdak and his adherents. The Shah could offer them service in the army for a daily wage... and they had to agree, so as not to be poor. Thus, a standing army was formed in Persia, and the Shah became the "soldier's emperor”.

The last 120 years have been tragic. The regular army scored victories over Greeks, Ethiopians, and Turkuts, but it also proved a temptation with disastrous consequences. The twelve mounted regiments were the only real force in Iran, and Khosroi's son Hormizd (579-590), leaning on his army, finished Mazdak's work: in ten years he executed 13,000 nobles and mobs. The Arabs of Dworech fell away, the Delemites refused to submit, the insulted spahbeid (governor) Bahram Chubin rebelled, and the nobles Bindoi and Bistam, in order to avoid execution, murdered Hormizd.

Bahram became shah but Byzantine intervention returned the throne to Khosroes II who repaid the Greeks for their help with a war of extermination (604-628). But the collision was repeated. The Shah wished to kill the victorious commander Shakhrvaraz but was killed by his own people with the support of the Nestorians. After this there was a sharp juggernaut of shahs until Hezdigerd III came to the throne of Iran. This one quickly lost the war with the Arabs, fled to Merv, was not allowed into the city and was stabbed to death by a miller, at whose house he thought to spend the night (651).

That was the end of it. The Caliph Omar, having conquered Persia, did not seek to convert the Persians to Islam, but to collect from them the Haraj, a tax on non-Persians. To discourage excessive conversion, he forbade Muslims from owning land in conquered territory. So, the rich landowners kept both land and religion by paying high taxes. On the other hand, the poor and the dekhkan, who did not value their scraps of land, willingly converted to Islam and obtained high-paying positions, such as tax collector. Thus, most of the Persians voluntarily became Muslims, while wealthy intellectuals emigrated to India. Thus, Iran became Muslim, and sincerely so, for by this time the Persians had neither the strength nor the will to defend Zoroastrianism against the vigorous bearers of Islam.

Indestructible Life

Now, having grasped the essence of the Roman-Iranian collision, we will go back to Rome and see what was the outcome of the last phase of ethnogenesis there. The result was as follows: different parts of the country began to detach from it. In 274, the Romans abandoned Trajan's conquest of Dacia. In Dacia formed the ethnos that we call "Romanians. The fact is that from the time of Trajan until Aurelianus, Dacia was needed by the Romans. There was gold in the mines there, the Romans drained it and used that country as a place of exile for criminals. The criminals came from all over the Middle East - Macedonians, Greeks, Phrygians, Galatians, Isaurians, anybody. Each had its own language, but to understand each other they spoke a common language - the language of the superiors, that is, Latin (of course, non-literal). So, when the Romans left Dacia, they naturally left the criminals and their descendants there: why take them with them? Why would they need criminals inside the country? They have plenty of their own! And they lived and lived in the Carpathian Mountains, in the steppes, in the forests, in a fertile climate.

They were discovered completely by chance at the end of the IX century or at the beginning of the X century. At that time the Bulgarians were constantly at war with Byzantium, raiding, taking their loot and crossing the Balkans.   They were inaccessible in the mountains. And so, after such a raid, when the Byzantine armies were pursuing the retreating Bulgarians, while they were leaving with their laden booty, donkeys and horses in the mountains along the paths, a donkey began to rumble, that is, to kick the pack, to shout, to behave in an undisciplined manner. And the frightened herdsman shouted, "Torbo, torbo, fratre!" ("Calm down, calm down, brother!"). And the Byzantium officer who knew Latin, - the educated man - has written down, that, as it turns out, these savages have Romeys, that is descendants of Romans. Thus revealed the existence of Romanians who had served in the Bulgarian armies.

The loss of Transylvania was a small loss for the Romans. Much worse was the situation in those parts of the empire which continued to be part of it. At the end of the third century Gaul was boiling, where peasants revolted and destroyed all unfortified settlements and manor houses. This was the famous rebellion of the Bagauds.

At the same time the Bukolos, that is, shepherds, rebelled in the Nile delta of Egypt. It was impossible to catch them because they were as at home among the many channels. They did not recognize Roman authority, nor did they pay taxes, but killed all those who came from the cities, especially from Alexandria. The war with them was very hard. The Gadramantes, a tribe of Tibbo, Negroes, who lived in Tripolitania, revolted. They had to be driven away. The whole of provincial Africa was uprising.

Obviously, a system which had survived a century of such continual abuse, hardship and depredation would not have been resistant; it is therefore no wonder that rather small armies of Goths, Vandals, Sveves (actually one of the Svea tribes), Franks, Lombards and other Germanic and Slavic tribes penetrated as far and wide as the Interior.

Now let us pose the question: Could it be that the fall of the Roman Empire was a crisis of the slave-owning formation? It would be very simple. Of course, there was a crisis of the slave-owning formation, and of course the slave-owning economy was completely unprofitable under these new conditions, but for some reason only the western half of the empire died. And the eastern half survived with the same laws, with all social institutions, with the same orders, with the same code of Roman law, which was codified in Constantinople and not in Rome, and even for a long time - 1000 years - had the same name - the Eastern Roman Empire, which we now call Byzantium.

The social moment probably shows us one side of the phenomenon, but when we want to cover the phenomenon as a whole, we must also take other moments, including the peculiarities of ethnogenesis. In the West, where there were the main descendants of the Romans and Roman settlements, we see a complete destruction - the replacement of the original Roman ethnic composition of the inhabited areas by a completely new ethnic composition. The German historian T. Mommsen shows that already at the beginning of the inertial phase, i.e. the "golden age" of general prosperity, neither men nor women in Rome wanted to have children. Unnatural vices were a daily occurrence. Women especially did not want to have children so as not to spoil their figure, men because they had many other occupations.

The instinct of fatherhood had weakened among the Romans. What does the instinct of fatherhood have to do with anything? It is a constant for all people, always striving to "give birth and raise". But this is in a normal relationship with passionarity. And if passionarity is noticeably greater than the instinct of self-preservation, then of course one can sacrifice his children, as Roman heroes of the legendary period did. One of them sent his son and then his grandson to the enemy. They were killed! But they managed to inspire the Romans to victory; and the Romans won.  The result was depopulation in Rome: the population loss in the third century alone was very great. By how much? - It is impossible to say, of course, because no one kept statistics in such turbulent times, of course, and research does not provide reliable data. But Spain lost half of its population, how much Gaul - is unknown, Italy lost a lot.

The economy in such conditions, of course, collapsed, and there was nothing to feed the slaves anymore. They began to put them on the land and make colonists out of them. Italy began to be populated with captured prisoners of war, planted on the land, who, of course, being of different tribes, as in Dacia, learned Latin in order to communicate with their neighbors and superiors. In addition to prisoners of war, immigrants also populated Italy. In Syria, for example, there were large numbers of peasants who had already so disfigured their country's nature by rapacious, uncalculated farming that the most vigorous of them went to Northern Italy and settled there. And since these Syrians were mostly Christians, they had monogamous marriages and thus large families.   They fairly quickly inhabited the Po valley, which used to be called Cisalpine Gaul, but by then there was no trace of the Gauls and Romans who had conquered them. A different population emerged there - Italians, different from those around Rome, close to the Syrian Semites, Christian in religion and Latinized in language. This is how new ethnoses are formed from the wreckage of the old ones.

The Return of the Lost Paradise

Thus, one can see that the loss of ethnos' passionarity is an irreversible but gradual process. The children of heroes, though not all at the same time, turn into capricious boys and stupid egoists, unable to distinguish between what is pleasant and what is necessary. What remains of the period of obscuration? What remains are relicts - individual remnants. Such a relic was, for example, the ancestors of the Romanians. Such a relic were the Basques, who survived the pre-Roman period in their mountains, where they were simply not deemed worthy of conquest. Basconia was considered subordinate to Rome, but no one established any order there.

After the Illyrian legions had spoken, their less passional descendants remained. They survived in Albania and lived there for quite a long time, without producing any great perturbations in the surrounding world. When a passionate youth appeared in Albania or Basonia, he had nothing to do at home, and the Basque went to be employed by the French or Spanish king, and the Albanian went to the Republic of Venice, or to Constantinople, no matter who was sitting there, a Christian or a Muslim monarch, all the same. He went to enlist in the army, he went to engage in trade, he organized a bandit gang. And those who stayed, constituted the relic ethnic groups, ethnic groups, which went into a state of homeostasis.

So, let us now pose the question: what is ethnic homeostasis? At one time, it was generally accepted that homeostatic ethnoses were simply backward tribes. They were considered primitive, inferior. I think this point of view is totally unacceptable to us, because it reflects outdated concepts of racism that have been discarded all over the world. And why should they be inferior, why should they be inferior to us? They are not worse than us, they adapted to their conditions just as we adapted to ours. Are we all so energetic, so passionate, so creative? Thank God no. Because if everyone was involved in art, science and politics, who would need to write books, paint pictures, or build houses? There has to be a consumer who will do something else, too.

Among so-called civilized nations (English, French, Russians, Chinese, whatever) there are enough people of the type we consider characteristic of homeostasis. The trick is that in homeostasis, this type of harmonious human being is predominant, that passionate individuals do not coexist in such ethnoses, which sometimes form very primitive social forms, sometimes inherit from past history complex ones. In other words, all these relic peoples are not the initial but the final phases of ethnogenesis, ethnoses that have lost their passionate fund and therefore exist in a relatively benign state.

Does the imperative of behavior change during the transition to homeostasis? Yes, it does. In the terrible age of obscuration, as we said, the imperative of behavior was the slogan: "Be like us simple legionaries. Don't show off! We'll make you emperor because you're a good guy, not because of your merits, and we'll keep you as long as we want to. And if you want to do any feats, we don't want you to do, we'll kill you. And if you want to study some sciences that we can't do, we'll kill you. And if you want to make riches and decorate the city, which we cannot do, so we will kill you.

Note that by killing their leaders, the carriers of this phase doom themselves, because they fall prey to any, even relatively weak neighbors. They are swept away by the flow of natural ethnogenesis, and the quiet people who remain, who were invisible to no one, erect a new, and final, imperative of the collective to the individual: "Be yourself be content”. Live and do not disturb others, obey all laws, and we will not touch you at all. It is possible to live in a homeostatic society, it is easy to live. You could say that this is the return of a lost paradise that never existed. But who among us would ever want to exchange a life of creativity and worry for the tranquility of such a homeostatic society? You'd die of boredom!

This is beautifully described by a writer of everyday life such as Alexander N. Ostrovsky. He describes how the actor Lucky has fallen into homeostasis.   "It's all right," he says, "I have an aunt who always feeds me, saying, 'Eat, you murderer of your soul,' and gives me vodka, 'Drink, you murderer of your soul,' and 'Take a walk, you murderer of your soul. "I," he says, "will take a walk in the garden, drink some vodka, have a snack, and lie down in the candle room upstairs. The apple trees are blooming, the spirit is light, the birds are singing, and the thought is knock-knock-knock, will I hang myself?"

And so that poor Lucky, as we all know, went back to being a strolling actor. In the expanses of the Oikumene, we know of many relict ethnic groups that have lost their capacity for self-development, whose process of ethnogenesis has ended. There are a lot of them in tropical America, in South India, in Africa, in Indonesia, in Malacca, and they are not very active or just living quietly. They regulate the population growth not to exceed a certain number for they know that an increase in population leads to an impoverishment of the area. They maintain a balance in their tribe's relationship with nature, something every civilized nation in the world dreams of.

The Papuans, for instance, had a custom whereby every young man who wished to have a child had to kill a man of a neighboring tribe, bring his head, but learn his name because the number of names was strictly limited, and only then was he allowed to have a child. Otherwise, he was not allowed.

The Indians in North America fought fierce tribal wars, which from a European point of view did not make any sense: there was plenty of land, lots of buffalo, so why did the Sioux kill the Blackfeet, for example, who killed the Dakotas, the Chains killed the Comanches, the Comanches killed the Chains. Why? Because the Indians of North America knew perfectly well that nature's gifts are not limitless, they can only feed a certain number of people without affecting reproduction (normal, natural). If you want to have a child, go kill your neighbor and, when space is available, have a child. Otherwise, it was not allowed.

True, there were no such restrictions in America as there were in New Guinea with the Papuans. They did not need it because they had these wars all the time and it was possible to bring the scalp of a man from a neighboring tribe or kill a gray grizzly bear - it was considered equivalent, after which a young man could become the father of the family. Thus, the Indians managed to keep the nature of America in a balanced state until the whites came and deformed it, because they did not seek harmony with nature, but profit.

The loss of the dream

Homeostasis is not the end. People in this phase are like the vast majority of workers in the inertial phase, and not only peasants and artisans, but also executive officials, hard-working engineers, conscientious doctors and educators. After all, passionarians are distinguished not by their skill, honesty and adaptability to the work they do, but by their ambition, greed, envy, vanity, jealousy, which push them into illusory enterprises, which can sometimes be useful, but rarely.

A man of the ethnic homeostasis phase is most often a good person, with a harmonious warehouse of the psyche. He is usually honest, because he is not tormented by passions or seduced by vices. He is benevolent, because he does not need to take from his neighbor what would be for him not a necessity but a surplus. He is disciplined, because he was brought up in respect for his elders and their traditions, but all this makes him a natural conservative, irreconcilable to any violation of the customary order. In short, harmonious individuals are the foundation of the ethnos, but at critical moments, towers are needed, and they cannot be built with the loss of passionarity.

And the harmonious man is not stupid. He knows how to appreciate the exploits and creative takeoffs of which he himself is incapable. He especially likes the heroes and geniuses of times past, because the dead cannot bring any trouble. And he remembers them with sincere felicity, which gives him the right to call the described phase "memorial". Serviceable memory omits all episodes that upset the individual, and indeed the ethnic collective. It is not that hard and shameful events are completely forgotten, but people try to remember events that are pleasing to their self-esteem. History gradually becomes one-sided, and then turns from a science to a myth.

But this is not the limit of the simplification of the ethnic system. Memory is a heavy burden, and the selection of memories requires some, albeit small, expenditure of passionate energy. And if the ethnos-isolate reaches the next phase - deep old age, its members do not want to remember, love and regret anything. Their horizons in time are reduced to relations with their parents, less often their grandfathers, and in space to the landscapes that flit before their eyes. They do not care whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa.   And in general, they are more comfortable living on a flat Earth, because sphericity tires their imagination.

Sub-passionarians of this kind exist in all phases of ethnogenesis, but they are usually overlooked because they are so uninteresting. But when they are left alone, they are called "primitive" and "backward," when they are simply old and defenseless. But they have remnants of myths and legends, and this shows that we are describing not the initial, but the final state of the ethnos, which it is somehow uncomfortable to call a "phase”. But the foregone conclusion of ethnogenesis is only a probability. There are no hopeless positions, for regeneration is always possible.

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