The Life-Giving Vitality of Ukrainians in Defiance of and Despite Russian Genocide

Abstract

The article presents the historical methodological principle and theoretical achievements of Ukrainian philosophical-psychological thought, whose knowledge resource has a life-giving purpose for the preservation of our centuries-old Indo-European nation. A correlation of this demiurgic thought is drawn with the modern American methodology of positive psychology. In this analytical context, the following key questions are examined: determining what is included in the subject of positive psychology and what remains outside it; the question of the ratio of the volume of what is covered by the subject field of positive psychology compared to what is adjacent to it. The main focus is on determining how functionally self-sufficient for the preservation of life the formation of the life-giving purpose of psychology is in the conditions of the Russian genocide of Ukrainians in Ukraine: what are the sources of hope for preserving human life in the conditions of constant nightly Russian bombing of homes of families with children, daytime artillery shelling, rapes, hangings, drownings, burnings, injuries, shootings of the Ukrainian population in their own homes and during attempts to evacuate from the territories occupied by the Russians. Based on the search for answers to these pressing social questions, the article substantiates the ideas and positions of one of the founders of positive psychology in the USA, Martin Seligman. The article poses the dilemma of coexistence: «Can one species-ethnos have well-being and happiness against the background of or at the expense of the life of another on our planet?» It is noted that, unlike the European cultural process, psychological thought in Ukraine over the past millennium has developed in a wave-like manner, being directly dependent on the degree of protection or aggressiveness of the geocultural environment structured by various state formations that tried to conquer Ukraine by military means combined with other means of genocide and assimilation. The prototype of the theory of positive psychology is the theory of emotions, created in 1706-1710 by Feofan Prokopovich, which was set out in the fifth book of the textbook «On the Art of Rhetoric» under the title «On the Interpretation of the Affects of the Soul.» Answers to the question of human happiness were developed by Heorhiy Konysky, Hryhoriy Skovoroda’s teacher at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in his theory of happiness, and Hryhoriy Skovoroda himself. The article argues that the inevitable conflict between acquisition and creation, plunder and preservation of the results of one’s labor, killing people and protecting their lives determines the current war between the Mongoloid race, which is concentrated in Russia, and the Europoids, to which Ukrainians and their state Ukraine belong, which has always taken the first blow from the time of the Golden Horde to the present day. At each of these stages of the development of human civilization, which was accompanied by wars, murders and plunder, the preservation of life was determined by faith in one’s own strength and hope for a better future, and therefore – for security, well-being and happiness. All this determines the ground on which the life-giving purpose of psychological knowledge is revealed, with its ability to realize a person’s creative abilities to improve existing relationships, living conditions, and happiness.