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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.
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.
Follows from the arguments given above, that the factors described above, which authors-idealists consider to be the driving forces of the development of society, are one-sided and limited – they mostly lack the spirit of contradiction, which indicates that they are all products of the dynamics of human activity, but – not by internal basis of the development of society, i.e. – not by the true hidden source, the cause or driving force of the development of society.
A brief analysis of the factors that, according to their authors, are the driving forces of social development, shows their one-sidedness and external character, i.e. secondary nature of these factors with respect to the true driving force of the development of society, which we will try to reveal in the next lines.
2. Dynamics of local human communities in L. N. Gumilev's reflection
In the same context, it is worth turning to the life cycle of local human communities.
This cycle, calling it ethnogenesis, that is, the emergence, development and extinction of individual unified communities, tried to analyze and explain L. N. Gumilev with the help of introducing a new concept "passionarity".
Official science in the person of its representatives such as Yanov A. L, Klein L. S and many others rejected the passionary theory of the ethnogenesis of Gumilev because of its inconsistency with recognized criteria of scientific research, such as, for example, objectivity and verifiability.
On the one hand, it's hard not to agree with this, but on the other hand, not everything that does not meet the criteria of scientific research is pure fantasy, because the field of science is rather limited, and beyond it we may find a lot of interesting and unquestionable in the form of concrete facts and phenomena, which science ca
It is from this ultraboundary field of cognition that we criticize the concept of L. N. Gumilev, but not only, and we note both its negative and positive features, and try to give a slightly different explanation of the life cycle of local human communities in its basis, which Gumilev gives the name ethnoses, while official science as nations or peoples.
Each local community of people is a temporary, changing integrity, different from neighboring or more distant communities, because people in them are differently co
Exact definition to these communities (ethnoses, peoples, nations), without having noted their essence with evidence, it is impossible to give – therefore it at anybody did not turn out – until as there will be clear a basis of development of these human formations, and this basis in any materialistic or idealistic theories is not looked through.
What is offered in this regard by L. N. Gumilev?
His concept, to be brief, boils down to the following.
1. Gumilev put forward the following mechanism of emergence, existence and disappearance of holistic communities, calling them ethnoses: "… the relative duration of different phases of ethnogenesis can be very different, the phase of historical formation is short; the process is very intensive. The phase of historical existence at most of ethnoses is longer previous because in this period forms a complex uniqueness of the ethnos, comes to an end its expansion and conditions for formation of superethnic cultural formations are created. The phase of historical decline can vary especially strongly on the duration, so how it depends as from intensity of internal processes of decomposition of ethnos, and from its historical destiny determined by extent of development of the material basis which is saved up for the previous period, physiographic conditions of an area, and a condition of adjacent ethnoses. At last, the phase of historical relicts already entirely depends on historical and geographical features of this territory [14, p. 55].