Russian President Vladimir Putin’s October 2 call for “a philosophy of complexity” to be quickly devised and applied to diplomacy has been given a response, of sorts, this past Saturday, October 25. Those at work to construct what Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche calls “A New International Security and Development Architecture” by means of which the world might still navigate its way out of its present real and perceived chaos, know that this diplomacy of complexity is truly a necessity to both preserve and advance the human species.
At his Valdai speech, Putin has characterized it as “something akin to quantum mechanics, which is wiser and, in some ways, more complex than classical physics…. After all, linear unilateral solutions are impossible, while nonlinear and multilateral solutions require very serious, professional, impartial, creative, and at times unconventional diplomacy.”
On October 25 in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo XIV spoke to tens of thousands of people from over 90 countries about Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and his “theology of Hope.” “His name was Nicholas, and he came from Kues in Germany, and is known as Nicholas of Cusa. He can teach us that to hope also means not to know.…” Nicholas of Cusa could not see the unity of the church, shaken by opposing currents, and divided between East and West. He could not see peace in the world, or among religions. Yet as he traveled as a Papal diplomat, he prayed and reflected. For this reason, his writings are full of light.
“Many of his contemporaries lived in fear. Others took up arms and prepared new crusades. Nicholas, however, from a young age, chose to keep company with those who had hope, with those who delved into new disciplines, reread the classics, and returned to the sources. He believed in humanity. He understood that there are opposites which must be held together….” the Coincidentia Oppositorum—”coincidence of opposites”—is the most important of Cusa’s ideas, and the central idea upon which a “diplomacy of complexity’ must be based.
In 1976, Lyndon LaRouche, economist and statesman, described this as the theory of Higher Manifolds, writing a piece which appeared in New Solidarity newspaper with the formidable title, “Heuristic Application of the Higher Theory of Manifolds to the Current Strategical and Subsumed Tactical Situation.” But don’t be intimidated. Think of the word “heuristic,” in relation to the need to devise a method for discovery of a solution to a problem, which appears to have no solution, through the rigorous construction of a thought experiment. Einstein’s thought experiments on relativity, for example, allowed him—and us—to imagine, and therefore solve problems, with respect to processes that we could not directly experience. That is how we go beyond our senses to a higher order of truth.
Lyndon LaRouche contends, in his “higher manifolds” article, that “If one proposed to force existing governments to directly implement [the International Development Bank], the task must seem formally an impossibility. Yet, if the possibility for a rapid succession of intermediating developments is clearly understood, no such difficulty as initially appears to prevail stands in our way.”
The Bering Strait Tunnel is an example of such a higher manifold diplomacy.
“All of a sudden,” an idea that was called impossible or impractical for a century is described as eminently “doable.” It may well be possible that, using the Bering Strait Tunnel proposal as a diplomatic machine tool for re-engineering the physical-economic relations among not only the United States and Russia, but also China and Japan, North and South Korea, and even the most difficult case, the United States and Canada, an entirely different Pacific Ocean Basin than has been designed by the War Party can be “suddenly” implemented, even though that would have seemed impossible a short time ago.
In another realm, the recent Russian test of the Burevestnik nuclear cruise missile will force another sort of discussion of the necessity for a diplomacy of a higher order. For those who state that Russia could not have developed such a technology, consider that it was eight years ago, in March 2018, that Putin first publicly discussed such technologies. Compare that to the time it took to develop the atomic bomb, thought initially to be impossible to build, in the Manhattan Project.
It is time for the human race to put away childish things, like war. “Either mankind will put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” John F. Kennedy said. Mankind’s rendezvous with Nicholas of Cusa’s Coincidence of Opposites—the Bering Strait Tunnel proposal on the one hand, and the development of ever-more-lethal weapons of mass destruction on the other—requires a higher conceptual resolution from a higher manifold. The “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture” provides that guiding resolution. Implementing it, however, requires a “conversion,” a bootlegger’s turn away from the Hell of false axioms. Pope Leo XIV’s public education campaign on Nicholas of Cusa and “learned ignorance” are a good way to start that turn.
