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

The Irresistible force; examples of how to understand this very "something"- even anti-instinct - the quality that pushes people to follow illusory rather than real goals.

Chapter Two Passionarity.

It was shown above that humans as individuals of the species Homo sapiens are influenced by physical forces, as all organisms of the biosphere. But while thermal or electromagnetic fluctuations are perceptible at the level of organisms, the biochemical factors of interest to us can only be described at the population level, that is, at the level of ethnic groups. Although they manifest themselves in the behavior of individuals, only the empirical generalization of a wide range of observations allows us to give the definitions necessary for understanding the processes of ethnogenesis as well as the connection of ethnic phenomena with biospheric ones.

To begin with, let us note an undeniable fact. The uneven distribution of biochemical energy of living matter in the biosphere over historical time must have been reflected in the behavior of ethnic groups at different epochs and in different regions. The effect produced by variations in this energy is described by us as a special characteristic of people and is called passionarity (from the Latin word passio - passion).  Passionarity is a characteristic dominant; it is an irresistible internal desire (conscious or, more often, unconscious) for activity aimed at achieving a goal (often an illusory one). This goal is considered by the passionate individual to be more valuable than even his own life, let alone the life and happiness of his contemporaries and fellow tribesmen.

The passionarity of an individual can be paired with any abilities: high, medium, small; it does not depend on external influences, being a feature of the mental constitution of a given person; it has nothing to do with ethics, equally easily generating exploits or crimes, creativity or destruction, good and evil, excluding only indifference; and it does not make a person a "hero" leading the "crowd", because most passionaries are in the "crowd", determining its potency in this or that era of ethnos development.

The modules of passionarity are varied. These include pride, which stimulates the thirst for power and glory through the ages; vanity, which pushes demagogy and creativity; greed, which generates avarice, avarice and scholars who hoard knowledge instead of money; jealousy, which entails cruelty and guarding the hearth, and, when applied to an idea, which creates fanatics and martyrs. Since it is a question of energy, moral judgments are inapplicable. Good or evil can also be conscious decisions, not impulses.

Although we can detect the phenomenon of passionarity in individuals, bright and dim, it is more convincingly seen in ethnic history, when other factors are mutually compensated and the statistical patterns that distinguish ethnogenesis from sociogenesis and culturogenesis are revealed. The pattern of passionarity in ethnogenesis is the same for all the different eras and countries. Let us trace it using different examples of Eastern and Western ethnic history.

Two biographies

Most illustrative examples! But I am not going to set out the history of the problem now, that would take us too far away - but I’ll simply set out the concept that I have based my ethnic history on. I noticed the following: people, as Gorky wrote, need a piece of bread, a roof over their heads and a woman. A normal person doesn't need anything more than that. This is what Gorky wrote in "My Universities" and "The Watchman," and it really seems right.

If you have, say, three cutlets daily, of which you eat two and a half or even one and leave half a cutlet for the birds, why do you need 48 cutlets? There's nowhere to put them! If you have a cozy house with three or four rooms, why do you need a palace of fifty-six rooms for one person? Well, halls, offices, but why such a mass, - but they do build it.  If you have enough money to satisfy all your needs - to feed your wife, your children, yourself, to drink on holidays and in the evening, as and when you like, - and you have enough money for all that, why do you need huge deposits in the bank? What do they give you? Nothing.

And indeed, the normal course of life of an organism as a member of the species Homo sapiens implies nothing but this. And yet, let's look at how well-known historical figures behaved. I am not referring to "great men," but to those from whom biographies remain. They don't have to have been in high places, but their biography has to be clear and distinct.

Alexander Philip of Macedonia lived in Pella, Macedonia, and he was ex-officio king. This position was not very richly paid, because Macedonia was not a very large country, but he still had a palace. He had the best horse, Bucephalus. He had two fine dogs, Gero and Allo; they were released on a bear, and the dog alone took the bear.  Mighty dogs.

He had many friends, and good friends, and those close to the king were called "comrades" - hetaerae; for example, Comrade Parmenion or Comrade Philotahetae. This was a very high position - "comrade" - and there were not many of them, but again for hunting and for all kinds of amusing pastimes. The king also had plenty of amusement, because there was no shortage of Macedonian, Greek, and Libyan women.

For intellect he had an interlocutor like no one else in the world - Aristotle. He was hired to be the king's teacher, something even Queen Victoria of England could not afford for her son George.

The question is: And for what reason did Alexander Philipovich go first to Greece, then to Persia, then to Central Asia, and then to India? What did he lack? It is commonly said that Alexander the Great was influenced by Greek trading capital. Although there was no capital then, there were indeed Greek trading circles that were eager to capture Persian markets. There were quite a number of people in Greece who knew how to trade. (The Greeks are still quite good traders.) They lived in Athens and Corinth, but Athens and Corinth were against Alexander the Great, or not for him. He had to take Thebes, to make Athens capitulate, in order to secure his march; that is, these supposedly interested circles of merchant capital were against the war with Persia. Why, indeed, would they go to war with Persia when they could trade with it in peace. There was no need to conquer it.

Could it be that the Macedonians wanted to get incredibly rich? But just all sources, all reports about Alexander's personality say that it was only his personal charm that made the Macedonian peasants rise from their villages and go on a campaign against the Persians, who, by the way, to the Macedonians they had done nothing wrong, and there was no hard feelings against the Persians.

Since there were not enough Macedonians for the campaign, Alexander had to bring in the Greeks, but in order to be able to recruit soldiers there, Greece had to be conquered. Here was the workaround. Alexander took Thebes, at the time the most fortified, most resilient of the cities. They massacred almost the entire population of Thebes, the men at any rate, sold the women and children into slavery, and preserved only one house of the poet Pindar, because Alexander was a cultured, intelligent man, and left the house as a monument, while all the others were razed to the ground. What for? To attack the unsuspecting Persians who had done nothing to him.

But even when the Macedonians conquered Asia Minor and ravaged cities such as Ephesus and Halicarnassus, which had resisted to the last arrow, they did not destroy the Persian garrisons, but the Greek mercenaries who were fighting for the Persian king, against the Macedonian invader.

Quite a strange war, it would seem. Most importantly, it made no sense for Macedonia, nor for Greece. Nevertheless, after capturing the coast of Asia Minor, which could be explained, for example, by strategic purposes, the desire to expand a little, to create places for colonization, Alexander went to Syria.

At Issus he defeated the army of Darius, who fled and his wife and daughter were taken prisoner. Alexander treated these ladies with chivalry. He married his daughter (although he already had a wife, he took another) and went on to conquer Palestine and Egypt.

And then he had to take Tyre, which agreed to submit, but refused to let the Macedonian garrison in. It would seem that an isolated city on an island, posing no danger, legally subdued, could be overlooked by an army that set itself entirely different goals. "No," said Alexander, "take Tyre! Tyre fell for the first time in its history, not a single living Tyrian Phoenician was left. Masses of Macedonians perished, and reinforcements from Macedonia and Greece were needed. Recruitment after recruitment pulled men from there.

Egypt was occupied. Well, it would seem, well, what more? They've taken Alexandria - beautiful! Darius offers peace and cedes all the land west of the Euphrates. Parmenion says, "If I were Alexander, I would accept it." Alexander replies: "And I would agree to it if I were Parmenion. Let's go east!"

Everyone is horrified and surprised. Unsure why they go east, defeat the Persian army on the wide plain of Gaugamel between the Tigris and Euphrates, invade Persia through the passages, losing men because the Persians fought back desperately, but there were just not enough of them. They took the city of Persepolis, called Istahr in Persian, held a grand banquet on this occasion and drunkenly set fire to the magnificent palace of the Persian king - a marvelous work of art. That is the whole point of the campaign. Alexander explains it by saying that once upon a time, during the Greco-Persian wars, the Persians burned down the Acropolis in Athens; so, he repaid them.

But the Athenians also managed to rebuild the Acropolis during this time - the wooden Acropolis was made marble, and the Persians had already forgotten about the campaign in which they were defeated and forced to retreat. What was the purpose of all this?

Alexander was asked about it many times by his contemporaries. He said, "No, no, Persia must be done away with. "All right," they think, "maybe the tsar is really so clever that he wants to do away with his enemies, or else they will attack us. And an offensive goes on through the eastern deserts of Iran. The heat, the thirst is tormenting, the stuffiness, the dust, the horsemen jump up suddenly, shoot from long bows, and the Macedonians cannot keep up with them, fall down, fight back.

Anyway, Darius III was killed by his own people, the Macedonians caught the murderer and crucified him on the cross. Well settle down on that. "No," he says, "beyond the Oxus River lies Sogdiana (that is, Central Asia). We must take all these cities."

They say to him, "Alexander, fear God." - "And how can I fear God? - He says. - When I was in Egypt, it was explained to me that my father is the god Zeus." "Come," they say, "king, for I myself stood on the watch when your father Philip went to your mother. What kind of father is Zeus to you? Why do you slander your mother?" - "Ah," he says, "you don't admit it! Well, I'll show you. Let's go!"

One by one, the Central Asian cities fell. They fought back fiercely, in a way that the West could not, in a way that the Persians could not. Samarkand, for example, celebrated its anniversary, the anniversary of what do you think? - The destruction of it by Macedonian troops?!  And the Macedonians moved on, ruthlessly massacring the local population.

They reach the Syr Darya. The indomitable retreating Persians and Sogdians go beyond the Syr Darya and start guerrilla warfare. The Macedonians could not cope with the steppe guerrilla warfare and decided to capture the mountainous regions of modern Afghanistan - Bactria, where the mountains are high, steep, steep, at the height there are castles, to which the paths cut down in the rock lead, so that only one person can pass. No matter how many people are let in by this path, one, standing at the gate, will kill them all. So, the castles are virtually impregnable. Food is prepared, it rains a lot, and water is collected in the big pools and cisterns. The besiegers have nothing to eat in the gorges.

Alexander ordered to take the castles, but how? They found a way out. They caught the beautiful Raushanak - translated as "Brilliant", but everybody knows her as Roksana, so Alexander married her and surrounded the castles, not allowing the people to get out of there; they did not want to be besieged either. They said, "Ah, he married our princess, and the first wives aside. If so, then he is our kinsman, then we will agree to obey him, only that he does not go to our castles. Well, here he agreed, because he was offered to conquer India.

There was internecine war, he helped the weakest, defeated the strongest, defeated his infantry and fighting elephants. The losses were great, but the Macedonians managed to disarm the elephants in the following way: a dozen of the bravest young men with heavy knives run at the elephant and run between its legs; the elephant crushes them and catches them with its trunk, but one of ten manages to run to the hind legs and cut his hamstrings. That's it! The elephant is finished. Quite an unprofitable way of warfare, but nevertheless the victory was won and Alexander went on to Bengal.

In Bengal the Hindus raised a clamor that some terrible conqueror was coming, destroying everything. The Brahmins declared holy war, drums beat in the jungle, and the Macedonian camp was surrounded. Then the soldiers shouted, "King! Where are you leading us? What have these Hindus done to us? What have they done to us? We don't want anything from them, we can't even mail the booty we take from these remote countries home, because the packages are stolen by the intendants on the way. We don't need this war at all, lead us back. Tsar, we love you, but enough!"

Alexander persuaded them for a long time, but then was forced to resign himself to the will of the whole army, with not a single man to support his fervently beloved tsar. The gaiters - his comrades - were by no means sycophants. They slashed the truth in his face and said, "There is no reason to go, there will be destruction," pointing to the superior forces of the enemy and, most importantly, the pointlessness of the war. With great losses on the retreat along the Indus, when every town had to be taken, the Macedonian army made its way to the mouth of the Indus, putting the wounded and sick on ships and sending them across the Persian Gulf. On the way they died of heat and waterlessness. The healthy ones went through the Kerman Desert; some reached Mesopotamia.

The king had to be driven because in one city, the name of which is not preserved, he performed the following experiment (I will tell you because it is important to us). The city refused to open its gates to the Macedonians and surrender. Then ladders were pulled up and placed against the walls to storm the city.  But the ladders were short; only one was long. The king was the first to climb this long ladder, jumping up on the wall. The soldiers followed him. They followed him.

The king had four more men to jump up, but the ladder broke, and all the soldiers fell down. It was no big deal - the height was not so high, but the king was alone on the wall of the enemy city, and they were shooting at him. He looked and saw a courtyard below and jumped down into it, followed by one centurion and his two hetaerae - Ptolemy and Seleucus - and a fourth, but the fourth was killed at once.

Then the soldiers suddenly saw that the very king who had brought them to India, who had put them through terrible hardships, who had exposed them to deadly dangers without benefit, was himself in danger. An impulse arose! The Macedonians ripped out some trees, some sticks tied up. They climbed the wall. They get in and look - the king has already been hit with throwing stones. He is lying almost without feeling, Seleucus and Ptolemy hold shields over him and beat off the Hindus with their short swords, and the fourth, the centurion, is lying face down already killed. "Ah so, the king is in danger-guys, beat it!" Not even a name was left of the city! But Alexander could not recover from this wound; it tormented him for the rest of his days. For some reason he returned to Babylon, which was already an abandoned city, but one with a historical tradition, uncomfortable as a capital, but posh. Alexander declared it the capital of his empire and soon died.

Now let's try to figure out what he, Alexander, wanted. This is the question I myself began my research with. Alexander said and Arrian wrote that he wanted the glory, that he wanted to be so famous and to glorify his people that he would be talked about for centuries and all over the world. And he achieved this goal.

But here's the question: what is fame? "Neither to eat, nor to drink, nor to kiss." What is it for? She provides nothing, no life of her own, no wealth, no offspring. For her, Alexander died at 33 from exhaustion, perhaps even from poison, leaving offspring doomed to perish because his children were finished off by his generals, who shared the inheritance they had received. And his unfortunate wives were murdered. Why did he do all this?

After the death of Alexander, his diadochian commanders fought among themselves - it was a terrible war. And the empire fell apart. It would seem that he achieved nothing. But we know his name, his biography has survived. And that's what he wanted. What? Illusion! Wealth, perhaps? Alexander was lavishing riches. No, he didn't want wealth for himself.

What did the people he gave the looted gold to, when they returned home, do with it? They drank it up! After all they were soldiers, tired after campaigns, they had no reason to save - tomorrow they will be called again to fight, what for to collect the property? So, they threw the undrinkable gold, gave it to their friends and went to war again. This time they fought against one another, some for Antigonus, some for Seleucus, some for Ptolemy, some for Perdiccas, etc. No slogans were thrown at them but simply said: "Dear brothers, they beat us". And that was enough.

So, Alexander was striving for an illusion. But maybe this is an exceptional case? Let's take a closer look, maybe we are talking about some fantastic, crazy tsar, who used his official position for the evil of his people and everyone around him? Take someone else, whose biography is also well known (better known, by the way, are the biographies of people from antiquity than from the Middle Ages).

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Here is Rome, which had just won the terrible Punic War, defeated Carthage, conquered all of Italy. A rich city that was growing, with palaces, with playful squares where mimes played jokes, where amusing tricks were performed, with theaters, where brilliant actors donned masks and actresses danced on the circus's ropes ... Lucius Cornelius Sulla, an aristocrat, lived in this city. He had it all - he was a jolly man, witty, brave and handsome. He had friends, and more women friends, but he did not enjoy life, because Rome was at war with the Numidian king Jugurtha, somewhere in Africa, and the people's tribune, Caius Marius, was victorious.

Marius was a stocky man, red-haired, with a broad face, rude, not at all sharp-witted, but very intelligent, an excellent organizer, a great leader; he was connected with the horsemen, that is, with the rich men of Rome, who gave him money for these military operations, and he returned them with interest, robbing the defeated, and left enough for himself. Marius was considered the first general and the smartest man in Rome.

And Sulla became obsessed - why Marius and not me? So that's what he did: he asked Marius for an officer. Well, that could be arranged, and it was arranged for him (he had great connections in the Senate), they sent him. Marius says to him, "Please stay on the staff, Lucius Cornelius. And he says, "No, I would like to go to the front." -  "It's strange, but if you want to go, go.

He went and did wonders of courage: he overturned the Numidian cavalry in an attack with his Roman cavalry. And where he got the Romans, who could ride so well, I do not know, no one explains. But he somehow managed to inspire his cavalry so much that it broke the fierce Berbers - the ancestors of the current Algerians. Jugurtha fled to Morocco to the Moorish king Bocchus. Sulla went there as a truce-bearer, and demanded that he extradite Yugurtha; he threatened and so badgered him that he had to hand over his guest in chains, which was considered most terrible and dishonorable in the East. He brought the unfortunate Jugurtha to Rome. They put him in an underground dungeon and rolled a stone in his mouth and there to this day he remains.

What profit was there to Sulla from this? Money? No. Marius got the money. For the whole campaign he collected contributions from the people, robbed everybody, and all the money went to him, and he distributed it. Sulla got nothing, just some awards, pennies, which in his budget meant nothing. But he got a chance to walk around the Forum in the crowd and say, "No, but Marius is a fool, and I am the hero." And nothing else!

Well, some people chimed in, "Yes, Sulla is our hero!" And some said, "What about him, he's a braggart. That's Marius." And that pissed Sulla off even more. So, when the Cimvrians and Teutons (Cimvrians are Gauls, Celts, and Teutons are Germans) crossed the passages in Al-pah, stormed into Northern Italy to destroy Rome, and all Roman troops were thrown against them, Sulla asked again. They said to him, "Well, all right, since you are so brave, go ahead!" He went, challenged the leader of the Cimvrians to a duel, and stabbed him in front of the army. A desperate gesture! After that, the Romans were victorious. Sulla appeared and said, "Well, did you see? What about your Marius? He's a sack on legs, but I am!!!" And had no other benefit from it.

After that, misfortune happened for the Romans. I must say that they behaved in conquered countries in a boorish way, they robbed the population as much as they could, so they were not popular. When Mithridates, king of Pontus, turned against Rome, as a liberator of the East, he managed to kill huge numbers of Romans, scattered in Asia Minor and Greece.

This war was, from our point of view, a strange one. The Pontic kingdom included the eastern part of the southern coast of Crimea, roughly from Theodosia to Kerch, the Taman Peninsula, and a narrow strip of the southern coast of the Black Sea, where Trapezund and Sinop are, between the mountains and the sea. And so, this kingdom went to war against the entire Roman Republic, which already included, in addition to Italy, Greece and North Africa, Spain and part of Gaul - Southern France. The war seemed unequal, but nevertheless Mithridates had great successes.

Sulla demanded to be sent to this war, and he was appointed commander, but then the Senate said: "Enough is enough, let others do the work." So, they appointed someone else - Stalinist Maria. Sulla took offense, returned to his camp to the soldiers he wished to lead and turned to his legion, declaring: "Soldiers! We have been sent away from the march." They replied, "How? What? Ah, how unfortunate! Here we were thinking of going to war." (There was a very different attitude to war then than there is now, back then people wanted to go to war, not run from it.) Sulla says, "What? And this is how you talk, Quirites (that is, citizens - with this he terribly insulted, he should have called them 'militas' - warriors)". Those: "Why do you dare to call us so?" "Because you are shit," Sulla said to them, "sitting there, old idiots in the Senate, making decisions to the tune of Marius, and are we going to stand for it?" They said, "No, we won't stand for it. Drive!" And Sulla commanded them, "March! "Into the ranks! Forward march to Rome."

Rome was quite far away. They heard Sulla was marching with his legion. Rome had fenced off the barricades. They approached the barricades in the evening. Sulla ordered torches to be lit and removed his helmet so that he could be seen going ahead to storm his hometown. Broke down the barricades, fearing nothing, entered the Senate, demanded that the senators meet and change their decision and he, Sulla, would be sent to the East to fight against Mithridates and his army.

The Senate sent Sulla, and indeed he defeated Mithridates, destroyed Corinth, took Athens, and destroyed a mass of cultural treasures; but in the meantime, Marius has made a revolution, seized power and begun to exterminate all the friends of Sulla. Since he was short of men, he armed his own slaves, gave them weapons and told them to beat their opponents, the free slave-owners. The slaves were glad! When they caught one, they whipped him to death - both the senators and all those who voted for Sulla.

And Sulla was bound - he was at war - he could not return. But when Sulla won, he went back to Italy, sailed across the Adriatic Sea and began a war against the Marians with his legionnaires, his veterans, his comrades in arms. He defeated Marius, Marius escaped and died somewhere in Africa, beyond the ruins of Carthage. And then Sulla said: "No! I will not allow such an outrage as Marius. I know who must be killed. Here are the lists of people to kill-the proscriptions; these you can, and all the others you cannot." But there were so many people on the proskripts that it was enough for a long time. They were outnumbered. Sulla was declared dictator of Rome for life. He was for a while, and I wonder how he ended up? He said: "Now that order has been restored, I'm tired of ruling you, I'm going home. I'm giving power back to the Senate, restoring the Republic." He gave up his power and went home on foot. Some young lout started scolding him. Sulla just looked at him and said, "You know, because of people like you, the next dictator will no longer relinquish power. And he went home, where he died rather quickly.

The same question: what was he doing all this for? What did he want? He explained it himself, and Plutarch wrote it down: he was jealous first of Marius and then, during the Eastern campaign, of Alexander of Macedon. He wanted to surpass Alexander the Great. Of course, it was impossible, but anyway, it was his wish and he would have sacrificed Athens, Pergamos, the lives of many Greeks, his friends, his legionaries, and anything in the world to do so.

And then, when he had satisfied his desire and decided that he would not be forgotten (and indeed he was not, we remember), he went home. And there he quietly and quietly entertained himself like any rich Roman: he drank wine, hosted guests, who visited himself. And soon he died, because he got very bad infectious disease in the East. He even sacrificed his life to satisfy... what? His whim? But because of this, what events took place - grandiose!

I have skimmed over two biographies of people of high standing, so to speak. This does not mean that men of this type and this temperament must necessarily be of a high position; it is merely that the record of them has been preserved in history. Forgotten are the masses of others who supported Alexander or hindered him, who supported Sulla or Marius. And who also did this against their own interests, because it was always easy to step away from politics, to do nothing at all, but sit at home, chase pigs in the oak woods, cultivate the fields, watch the sunset with his own lovely wife, and babysit the children. No one would touch such a man. But for some reason, there were people who demanded something more for themselves. And that is what made the noise in history.

The impulse is one - the goals are different

And if we turn to later times, we see the same thing. Here, for example, is the conquest of America by Spain. Who went as conquistadors, who went after Columbus across the sea with Cortez, Pizarro, Quesada, Carvajal, Valdivia to the terrible American jungle of the Yucatan, to blessed Chile, where the Araucans defeated the Spanish and kept their independence until the liberation of America and the creation of the Chilean Republic. The most dangerous place was in Chile. Indian women are very beautiful, and so the Spaniards who fought against the Araucans, the inhabitants of Southern Chile, married local women.

But why did they go there? I looked at the statistics. The statistics, however, do not refer to the Americas, but to the Philippines, another Spanish colony. So: 85% of Spaniards who came there died in the first year - from disease, from malnutrition, some were killed in clashes with natives, some - in scandals with the authorities, because in these remote places the arbitrariness of the authorities was incredible and anyone unwanted man could be convicted for anything and executed.  All in all, 85% of them were going to die, and of those 15% that came back, probably 14% were hopelessly ill, because they were so overworked that any flu could kill a man and cause a chronic illness.

Yes, they brought gold, but they had nothing to spend it on, because there was so much gold in Spain, that prices for wine, olives, bread and fabrics skyrocketed ... So, there was no profit in the campaigns. But there was greed. Greed drove them to it - to get gold, which is not necessary, but important as a sign of your exploits, as a sign of achievement.

There were also other times. At one time, for example, I was very surprised by the descriptions of the voyages of Orellana, the Spanish captain who discovered the Amazon. They were fighting Indians there in the area of present-day Ecuador, on the slopes of the Andes. Orellana went down to the east, saw great rivers flowing, and, determined to find out where these rivers flowed, led his party with him. There was almost no food, the supplies there were very poor, and the crossings were long.   The Indians, of whom they made porters, were dying of overwork in large numbers. Nevertheless, Orellana carried his entire troop, which included intellectuals who left notes, such as the chaplain of the troop, Gaspar de Carvajal. He kept a diary, and that was his main occupation. This diary is now published.

They traveled down the Amazon, encountering all kinds of Indian villages. According to Carvajal's accounts, they were large settlements, not as large as they are now, but much larger, and inhabited by the most primitive Indians, who had no gold. Where in the Amazon did gold come from! So, we," the padre wrote, "weren't really looking for gold”, we were looking for something to eat; hungry, we were floating on boats and on rafts on the biggest, most watery river in the world. Finally, we swam out, sick, tired, tired, frightened by the alligators, huge anacondas that swallow large alligators, but a human being can be swallowed by a large anaconda. So, we swam out to sea, reached the Spanish colonies on the island of Cubagua, to the settlement of New Cadiz and rested.

Orellana was given the title of Marquis for the discovery of this great river, given a reward because he had no wealth of his own. What did Orellana do after this? He used the money to launch a new expedition to the Amazon. But he never returned. Why?

Let's look at how these types of people behave, depending on the goals they pursue. After all, not all of them want to lead and be leaders. Here's Newton. He spent his life solving two cardinal scientific problems, the creation of mechanics and the interpretation of the Apocalypse, and that was all he was interested in. He didn't have a wife, he was rich.

He did not accumulate any wealth, was not interested in anything except his ideas, lived at home with his housekeeper and worked. And when King Charles II of England made him a peer, he went to Parliament as a conscientious man and sat there all the sessions (I would not do that if I were him), but all the time he said there only two words: "Close the window”. Everything else was of no interest to him.

Here is an example of a man who did not aspire to leadership, but at the same time, he debated, argued, and proved his point. He was a sincere Protestant and an enemy of the Catholics; in other words, he had all the human qualities, but the aim of his life was his thirst for knowledge, which we might call the modus vivendi. The miserly knight gathered money, and Newton gathered knowledge: both were greedy, but not vain.

Conversely, we can find any number of actors who are insanely vain, or poets who are willing to sacrifice anything for the sake of their popularity. To change my chronological principle a little, I will give you a very famous example: Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. At first, he wrote comic strips, which were very successful in the '40s and early '50s, but when people got carried away by social themes, he felt that interest in his strips waned. So, he decided to capture the imagination of young people and he pounded out "Rudin," "On the Eve," "Fathers and Children" and off he went. The novels were so-so, but that's not the point, the point is that the mode of his passion was vanity, and he sacrificed, generally speaking, all his human abilities in order to achieve the ultimate and unquestionable success with the youth who were the trendsetters of tastes and fashions. It ended sadly for him.

After Pushkin's jubilee in 1880, when all of a sudden Turgenev's idol of the reading public in Russia was taken over by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, in a letter to V. N. Botkin he wrote that he was a great admirer of Russian culture. In a letter to Botkin he writes that he is unlucky, not getting enough money from the estate, that Viardot is unfaithful to him, that the public does not understand him and does not accept him (and they really did not after Bazarov), and so he goes to the estate to abandon his dream-most importantly "of happiness, by which I mean a state of mind which flows from a satisfactory state of affairs”. Typical psychology of a vain man. He needs to be praised.

History has also recorded very extreme cases of human behavior, when people fall in love with their ideal to such an extent that they sacrifice their lives for it, which is quite inappropriate from a normal point of view. Joan of Arc was a very impressionable and very patriotic girl. Even though she did not speak French well, she was determined to save France, and as you know, she did. Still, after she freed Orleans and crowned Charles in Reims, turning him from dauphin to rightful king, she asked to be let go. She did not seek a place at court. She was not let go and her fate was sad.

I have tried to show that there are people who strive more or less for ideal illusory goals. The view that all human beings seek only personal gain and that if they risk their lives, it is only for money or enduring material gain is not Marx and Engels, but Baron Holbach, the 18th century French materialist, who is considered a vulgar materialist and has nothing to do with Marxism. This is the materialism that Marx and Engels overcame.

And if so, we can quite safely pose the question of how to understand this very "something"-the quality that pushes people to follow illusory rather than real goals. What is this passion that sometimes proves to be stronger than the very instinct of self-preservation? From the word "passion" (Latin "passio") I call this quality, and its bearers - passionarii.

Degrees of Passionarity

There is no doubt that an overwhelming number of human actions are dictated by the instinct of self-preservation, either personal or species-specific. The latter is manifested in the desire to reproduce and raise offspring. Passionarity, however, has the opposite vector, for it forces people to sacrifice themselves and their offspring, who are either not born or are completely neglected for the sake of illusory desires: ambition, vanity, pride, greed, jealousy and other passions. Consequently, we can view passionarity as an anti-instinct, or an instinct with the opposite sign.

Both instinctive and passionary impulses are regulated in the emotional sphere. But mental activity also encompasses consciousness. So, we should find a division of impulses in the field of consciousness that could be compared to the ones described above. In other words, all impulses must be divided into two classes: a) impulses aimed at preserving life, and b) impulses aimed at sacrificing life to an ideal - a distant forecast, often illusory.

For ease of reference, we denote "life-affirming" impulses with plus sign, and "sacrificial" impulses, naturally, with minus sign. Note that "positive" does not mean "good" or "useful", and "negative" does not mean "bad". In physics, cations and anions, and in chemistry, acids and alkalis do not have qualitative marks.

In general, it should be noted that only in the social form of movement of matter does it make sense to contrast progress with stagnation and regression. The search for a meaningful purpose in the discrete processes of nature is misplaced teleology. Just as mountain building in geology is no "better" than denudation, or conception and birth are as much acts of organismal life as death, so there is no criterion for "better" in ethnic processes. However, this does not mean that there is no system of movement or even development in ethnogenesis; it only means that there is no "front" and "back”. In any oscillatory movement, there is only rhythm and more or less tension. So, let's talk about terms.

The positive impulse of consciousness will only be unrestrained egoism, which requires reason and will, to realize itself as a goal. By reason we will understand the ability to choose a reaction under the conditions that allow it, and by will we will understand the ability to act according to the choice made. Hence, all tactile and reflexive actions of individuals are excluded from this category, as well as actions performed under compulsion of other people or sufficiently weighty circumstances. But internal pressure, an imperative of either instinct or passionarity, also determines behavior. So, it should be excluded along with the pressure of the ethnic field and traditions. For "free" or "selfish" impulses there remains a small but strictly delineated area, the one where a person is morally and legally responsible for his actions.

Psychological classification on the level of organisms

Here again we encounter the impossibility of giving a definition that is practically unnecessary. The collective experience of mankind clearly distinguishes involuntary acts from crimes. Murder in self-defense differs from robbery or revenge, seduction differs from rape, etc. In the middle of the last century, attempts were made to identify such acts, but this was groundless resonance. Nowadays, it is clear that no matter how reasonable a person's concern for himself, it does not give him reason to deliberately violate the rights of his neighbors or the collective.

"Reasonable selfishness" is opposed by a group of impulses with an opposite vector. It is well known to everyone, as is passionarity, but it has never been singled out in a single category.   All people have a sincere attraction to truth (the desire to make an adequate representation of the subject), to beauty (what they like without prejudice), and to justice (conformity with morals and ethics). This urge varies greatly in the strength of the impulse and is always limited to a constantly acting "rational egoism," but in some cases it proves to be more powerful and leads to death no less steadily than passionarity. In the sphere of consciousness, it is analogous to passionarity and therefore has the same sign. Let us call it attractionality (from the Latin "attractio" - attraction).

The nature of attractionality is unclear, but its correlation with instinctive impulses of self-preservation and with passionarity is the same as in a boat the relationship between the engine (motor) and the rudder. Equally related to them is "rational egoism," which is the antipode of attractionality. Therefore, we can place our selected impulse discharges on the coordinate axis: subconsciousness on abscissa, consciousness on ordinate (see Fig.). We would then have a psychological classification suitable for our task.  But is such a complicated structure necessary, and for what purpose?

Correlation of discharges of impulses

The biological nature of instinctive impulses is beyond doubt. Both the desire to live long lives and the urge to reproduce oneself through progeny are biological traits peculiar to humans as a species. But if so, its magnitude (in the sense of influencing the actions of individuals) must be stable. This means that the human urge to live is the same for all people who have lived, lived and have had to live, in every single case. At first glance, this seems to contradict observable reality.

Indeed, there are plenty of people who do not value life enough, they volunteer for war; there are cases of suicide; parents abandon their children to their fate all too often, and sometimes even kill them. And this is along with deserters who evade war; with those who for the sake of their lives endure all kinds of insults, humiliation, and even slavery; with parents who give their lives for their children, often unworthy and unprofitable. A tremendous range of data!

Isn't this reminiscent of the view of the ancients that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones? Only Galileo's experience proved that gravity acts equally on a lump and a cast-iron ball, and the difference in speed of fall depends on an extraneous phenomenon - the resistance of the air environment. The same is true of the problem that occupies our attention.

In the figure on the same line lies the inverse momentum of passionarity. When added algebraically, it cancels out some or other part of the positive abscissa, and sometimes even all of it. The value of the "P" impulse (passionaric voltage) can be less than the instinct impulse (a value that is conveniently taken as a unit), equal to it, or greater than it. Only in the latter case we call a person a passionarius.

When the values are equal, it is a perfectly harmonious person, something like Andrei Bolkonsky. I take as an example of such a literary hero, who does everything very well. He is a fine colonel, a caring landowner, the guardian of his noble honor, the faithful husband of his first wife, the faithful groom of his new bride. He is an absolutely harmonious person, and he works well - not for fear but for conscience, but he will not do anything extra; this is not Napoleon, who, like Alexander the Great, conquered country after country and even countries, which he obviously could not hold, such as Spain or Russia, for some unknown reason.

Napoleon threw people to death for the sake of an illusion, for the glory of France, as he said, but essentially for his own ambition. Andrei Bolkonsky will do nothing of the sort. He is a good man, he has everything in order, he does only what needs to be done, and he does it well; a respectable man.

But there are also sub-passionarians, whose passionarity is less than the impulse of instinct. To illustrate this, I will again cite literary characters that are well known to all - these are Chekhov's heroes. Everything seems to be fine, but they still lack something: a decent, educated man, a teacher, but... "A good doctor, working very hard, but... An "Ionich". He is bored, Chekhov's hero, and everyone around him is bored. All Chekhov's characters, or almost all of them that I remember, are sub-passionary. They, too, have some passionate intentions. And such characters dream... to beat their neighbor at chess, for example, to satisfy their vanity.

Subpassionaries are just as important to an ethnos as passionaries, because they are a certain part of the ethnic system. If there are too many of them, they begin to dramatically inhibit their spiritual and political leaders, telling them: "What are you doing, what are you doing, whatever happens". With such people it is absolutely impossible to undertake some kind of major action. There is nothing to talk about an action of an aggressive nature here, nor is there anything of a defensive nature; these people cannot even defend themselves.

However, the subpassionaries are different. The dose of passionarity can be so small that it does not extinguish even the simplest instincts and reflexes: here, the person wants to drink, but he has only one ruble, he runs and contributes "for three" just to drink, and this ruble at him last, and will give him something to drink a little, and, in general, it does not satisfy him, but since the habitual conditioned reflex is formed, he is drawn to drink, and he forgets about everything. Such are the bogeymen of A. M. Gorky's early stories. Even lower are the cretins and degenerates.

And if the passionate tension is higher than the instinctive tension? Then the point representing the psychological status of the individual would shift to the negative branch of the abscissa. There will be conquistadors and explorers, poets and heresiarchs and, finally, initiative figures like Caesar and Napoleon. They are usually very few in number, but their energy allows them to develop a frenzied activity that is documented everywhere there is historical literature - written or oral. A comparative study of the heap of events provides a first approximation of the magnitude of the passionate strain.

We observe the same consistency in conscious impulses deposited on the ordinate. "Reasonable egoism," that is, the "everything for me" principle, has a stable value in the limit. But it is tempered by an attraction that is either less than unity (which we take the impulse of self-love to be), or equal to it, or greater than it. In the latter case we observe sacrificial scientists, artists who give up their careers for art, truth-seekers who risk their lives to defend justice: in short, the Don Quixote type in different concentrations. So, the real behavior of the individual we have the opportunity to observe is composed of two constant positive variables (instinctivity and "rational ego-ism") and two negative variables (passionarity and attractiveness). Consequently, only the latter determine the variety of behavioral categories observed in reality (see table on p. 491).

The contagiousness of passionarity

In addition, passionarity has another quality that is extremely important. It is contagious! Passionarity behaves like electricity in the induction of a neighboring body. Tolstoy noted in War and Peace that when a chain of soldiers shouts, "Hurrah!" the chain rushes forward, but when they shout, "Cut off!" everyone runs back. I have fought and I can tell you that no shouting can be heard during combat. And yet Tolstoy's observation is absolutely correct. What is the matter?

Let me give a simple example. We know there are commanders who are very experienced, very strategically trained, but they don't know how to get their troops into a fight. I take military history because it is the clearest illustration. Where a man risks his life, all the processes are highly aggravated, and we have to understand extremes in order to go back to everyday situations. We had General Barclay de Tolly-Weimar, a very bold, very brave man, very clever, who drew up a plan to defeat Napoleon. He could do everything. The only thing he could not do was to make the soldiers and officers love themselves, follow themselves and obey themselves.

So, I had to replace him with Kutuzov, and Kutuzov, taking Barclay de Tolly's plan and executing it exactly, was able to make the soldiers go and beat the French. So, it's quite right - we have monuments to these two commanders standing next to each other in front of the Kazan Cathedral. They both contributed equally much to saving Russia in 1812, but Barclay de Tolly invested his intellect, while Kutuzov - his passion, which he undoubtedly had. He managed to electrify the soldiers, he managed to inspire in them the very spirit of implacability to the enemy, the spirit of fortitude that any army needs.

This quality possessed A. V. Suvorov to a great extent. When Paul I threw the Russian army in Italy against stubborn French armies, commanded by the best French generals (MacDonald, Moreau, Joubert), Suvorov won three brilliant victories with the help of a small Russian corps and auxiliary Austrian divisions. Although no one could accuse Austrians of cowardice or poor fighting ability, they were the same Slavs: Croats, Slovaks, Czechs, and they were able to fight. But the decisive strikes, which overturned the French grenadiers, were led by Suvorov, and they were made by the Russians. He breathed into his soldiers the will to win, as they usually say, and in our language, the passionarity that he himself had.

You might say, maybe it wasn't about Suvorov, maybe the Russian soldiers were just so good? All right. And Austerlitz? And Friedland? What about Zurich, where we got kicked in the teeth? Suvorov had 30,000 and Rimsky-Korsakov had 60,000. It should be said that Korsakov was also a smart commander, but the whole army capitulated near Zurich, surrounded by the French. So, it's obviously not a question of numbers. But why did the Austrians fight worse? Obviously, because the Russians understood Suvorov and he was understandable to them, while the Austrians did not understand him. This is a hypothesis, but let's apply it further...

The Austrians demanded that Suvorov, instead of invading France and causing an uprising of Royalists and Girondists there, went to war in Switzerland. The cause was unreliable, and there he found himself surrounded by the French. Suvorov protested against this campaign, but could not influence the Austrian officials of the Hofkriegsrat. Having lost all his cannons in Switzerland, retaining only his banners and having lost a quarter of his men, Suvorov led the rest of his army out of the encirclement and was honored in Vienna with imperial honors, for it was the first real success in the war against the French, albeit with retreating army tactics.

But after all Suvorov could not carry out any of his undertakings among the Austrians and Germans. And it should be said that the Germans, too, had difficulty in carrying out, as we saw in the example of Barclay de Tolly, their very clever undertakings among the Russians. So, what is the induction of passionarity connected with? Obviously, some kind of attitude, which is the binding force that binds an ethnos together. What is this spirit?

Here remember what we said before. Every living organism has an energy field, now we can compare it to the description of ethnicity and therefore we can call it an ethnic field created by the biochemical energy of living matter.  So, there you go. If we take this energy model, the force-field model, and apply it to the problem of ethnicity, we can think of ethnicity as a system of vibrations of a certain ethnic field. And if this is true, then we can say what the difference between the ethnos and each other is. Obviously, it’s in the frequency of the field, that is, in the specific nature of the rhythms of different ethnic groups.   And when we feel one's own, it means that the rhythms fall in unison or are built in harmony; when the rhythms do not fall in unison, we feel that this is a stranger, not our own person.

This hypothesis, at the present level of our knowledge, satisfactorily explains all observed ethnic collisions. Even if it is replaced by some other hypothesis, the matter will not change. Our task is to describe the phenomenon, and the interpretation of its causes may vary in the future, which will not affect our results.

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