Rise. Which actually means the beginning of the movement by inertia. Establishing a balance with the surrounding hostile world, securing the necessary flow of energy from the outside. Sometimes a painful transition (breakdown) from capture to stability and protection of what has been achieved. From the era of «warriors» to the era of «administrators». From «knights» to «traders».
Recession. The transition to protection from external challenges, the use of extracted resources to strengthen one’s own structure within oneself. Digestion of what has been achieved by the members of the system. The economy of managing – including, as a consequence, the streamlining of behavior and structure, and for this, the development of knowledge and culture is necessary. In the end, crystallization is the fixation of form, the concreting of order, patterns.
The potential, in turn, can be considered as a certain rate of entropy reduction in a particular self-organization (upper graph of Fig. 10). The system spends energy both on expansion and on the development of order, which is reflected in the form of an increase in negentropy – information, including coded in the form of scientific achievements, works of art, etc.
«Negentropy is a philosophical and physical term, formed by adding a negative prefix neg- to the concept of entropy, and denoting its opposite. In the most general sense, it is opposite in meaning to entropy and means a measure of orderliness and organization of the system or the quality of the energy available in the system.»
Initially – a minimum of order, at the peak – active ordering, including in the form of administration through a large number of laws, instructions, regulations, descriptions, etc. On the decline – necrosis, when a lot of information has been accumulated, order is cast in granite, but energy, the ability to act is no longer in the system.
Fig. 10. Thermodynamic metaphor of Gumilev’s theory
The derivative of the potential function (bottom graph of Fig. 10) reflects just the nature of people’s behavior that at this stage of the life cycle most of all reflects the system’s imperative – an informal collective aspiration. The vertical scale can be called the axis of passionarity, with the most active progressive/knightly activity at the top, and the most active conservative/philistine activity at the bottom.
We emphasize that, unlike Lev Nikolaevich, passionarity for us is a derivative (in the literal and figurative sense) of the systemic charge. Like electric current or temperature. As a system indicator of the internal movement of particles – people. And not vice versa – not an internal force that drives every person and thereby changes the system. And in this understanding, we consider passionarity as a systemic dominant, the result of the action of internal, so-called, feedbacks in the system – positive and negative. These feedbacks close on any members of the system – on groups and on individuals and encourage, or vice versa, suppress certain actions and ideas. Exactly how these feedbacks work is a complex question and not very important in our context. We will look at these connections in more detail below.
Now it is important to understand that the total effect of feedback on our actions in the system changes with its age! And this pressure within the system at each stage of its life stimulates different types of our behavior and our thinking.
Man, however, is not a one-dimensional, binary being: active/passive. Our actions are largely determined by our psychotypes, various character traits and abilities.
It can be assumed that the very activity of the individual is an impulse, a vector, unchanged in magnitude, but the direction of the application of our forces changes according to the social dominant.
Passionarity, like a psychotype or character, can be a complex characteristic. The derivative of the potential can determine the projection of various personality traits that is most in demand by the current state of the system: let’s put aside upwards on the vertical axis – the desire for creative activity, downwards – towards consumerism, horizontally to the left – the predominance of instinctive reactions, to the right – mental activity. Then the points on the passionarity curve will be located on approximately the following trajectory – see Fig.11.
Fig. 11. Passionarity as a systemic dominant of selection
And this is already a result that can be used for self-diagnosis for the compliance of individual actions with the «age characteristics» of your company, for example.
So, each organization overcomes successively several stages of development. We – working in companies, managing companies, business owners – should first of all keep in mind that different stages of the life of our businesses are different dominant behaviors. Which means significantly different types of behavior, thinking and action that are adequate at different points in the life cycle. That is, at different times – different recipes for the success of business projects and the success of our careers, as a result.
«There’s a time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones together» [Ecclesiastes 3:5]. And these times are dictated inside, to its elements, by the system surrounding them. The next step is to take a closer look at how we feel different times, being in the thick of things.
Reporting from a particle
Our object is with us inside
So, nothing lasts forever – any product or company will someday exhaust its potential. They even leave the stage. And we? We want to live on, and most likely, we want to live well. Then the main interest for us is the miracle of the emergence, the birth of new systems, products, projects. To be at the origins, to be the initiator of a new business, a new project – this is the sought-for secret of entrepreneurial immortality. Unlike the barbaric times in history, when the losers lost everything forever, in business, the same people who have experience in failed projects or experience in decrepit companies can start again. Experience is always useful, and negative experience even more so.