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.
The faceless masses of the people are gaining the development in the person of their representatives in power and in the informal intellectual opposition to the power. Informal intellectuals, pursuing mainly goals diametrically opposed to the goals of representatives of the imperious elite, are compelled to appeal to the people, proving own rightness and anti-people character of the elite-oppressor, and representatives of the power in its turn has to justify itself and stigmatize of the rotten dreamers-nonconformists, able only to speak, but not to operate and rule.
Thereby the people masses are being involved willy-nilly by energy of relatively few persons these into forward, and this motion can be evolutionary in case of the consent of the elite and the informal opposition to certain compromises in the interests of the working masses, but it can jump abruptly into a different direction if there is no such consent, which is reflected in the popular consciousness as an injustice, being transformed into more or less successful attempt of the removal of the ruling elite from power in the event of suitable conditions.
Nevertheless, the masses, in addition to being the basis for development, have their own trend, since they also have self-consciousness, though lower level in comparison with intellectuals. Therefore, the masses can independently, as it is happened repeatedly in China, and more often – in alliance with the informal intellectual opposition stratum, to promote the community's exit from the stagnant state into the development zone.
