In some way, passions can be seen as a tree whose stem is uniteism, dividing itself into 3 branches, luxurism, groupism, and seriism.
Uniteism tends towards social unity.
Luxurism subdivides itself into the 5 senses, and it tends towards luxury, that is the combination of internal luxury, that is health, and external luxury, that is wealth.
Groupism subdivides itself into the 4 cardinal or affective passions, and it tends towards the formation of affectuous groups.
Seriism subdivides itself into the 3 distributive or mechanizing passions, and it tends towards the organization of groups into series.
The 4 cardinal and 3 distributive passions make the 7 animic passions, in contrast to the 5 senses which form material passions.
According to Fourier, every person has either a unique dominant passion, which can be anyone among the 12, or several dominant animic passions (between 2 and 7). People of the first category are called solitone (and in some sense they are monotonous), and those of the second category are polytone. Highest in the hierarchy of characters are the omnitone, who have all the 7 animic passions dominant. Fourier claimed to be one of them. A few persons have a mixed character, with several rallying passions instead of dominant ones.
As Civilization is not organized in the serial model, the 3 distributive passions do not find their proper place in it, and so they lead to immorality and anti-social behaviour. Persons living in Civilization, whose dominant passions number as many or more distributive ones than cardinal ones, tend to become dangerous. Examples include Nero, Sade, etc.