Passionarity as an Excitable Medium: A Falsifiable Demographic Core

This paper by Boris Kriger evaluates Lev Gumilev’s theory of passionarity by translating its historical narrative into a falsifiable mathematical model of an excitable medium. The author extracts a scientific core from the original prose, defining collective drive as a system with a stable rest state, a threshold for ignition, and a predictable burnout phase. Crucially, Kriger rejects the idea of a single global energy, instead proposing that activity occurs along orthogonal axes like political power and spiritual production. When backtested against the Seshat Global History Databank, the model performs poorly on the social-complexity axis, as most historical regions show a ratcheting growth rather than the predicted rise-and-fall cycle. The work ultimately performs a demarcation, separating testable scientific mechanisms from the unsupported ideological claims and nationalist myths often associated with Gumilev's work.