The driving force and source of development of the person and his communities - стр. 6

The critical consciousness of the intelligentsia under certain conditions can lead not to development, but to the regress of the community, to the decline of the whole state.

A significant compromise between the power elite and the informal opposition in the person of intellectuals is impossible, inasmuch the imperious elite never voluntarily will make serious concessions and never voluntarily will concede the power. However, if on average the level of the highest consciousness at her representatives is not too low, and the criticism from oppositional intellectuals is effective, implicating involving the broad masses of the population in the protest movement, then the imperious elite can be inclined to reforms as it, for example, was being occurred the last hundred years in Europe.

Otherwise, instead of smooth reforms the case may end with the complete replacement of the imperious elite, the overthrow of the state system, and even to the changing economic relations, as it has been happened in Russia in 1917.

But Lavrov was wrong about the mandatory progress at such replacement of formations. This is confirmed by the same experience of Russia, which after 1917 received the era of wars, genocide of own population, brutal dictatorship, and in the end – the collapse of the state.

Nevertheless, Peter Lavrov has guessed the external expression of one of the sides of the hidden antagonistic forces acting in the public consciousness, namely: the dominant highest consciousness, which come to the peak in the opposition-minded, educated and honest people of intellectual labor – the dominant highest consciousness in these people counteracts the lowest consciousness predominating in the governing structures of communities (imperious elite) in which people of mental labor do not differ in honesty, self-respect, altruism, nobility, and they at best simple are forced to sail in the stream of hypocrisy, acquisitiveness, covetousness, deception and corporative interests.

As for the rest of the population, it is basically a soil for representatives of both intellectual layers from which they themselves grew hereditarily, accidentally, or thanks to certain skills, qualities, lifted them above the average level, and this soil they can spoil or improve, inasmuch population are usually passive for the most part because of the employment by monotonous labor for survival and pro-feeding or falling into the category of lumpen, for whom everything became indifferent; obdurate traditions; religious delusions; predispositions to negative impact of active promotion of the information bluffs, which dupe it; lack of due education level, that does not allow it to use in large quantities social elevators and to set before itself the high purposes: similar sad and gloomy life does not promote transformation of all mass of people into bright, creative, vigorous and communicable individuals. Only several percent of such persons is allocated out of all of population.