VVP, Valdai, 2025

Pyotr Akopov:
Putin formulated six principles of the new world order

Borodino Anniversary
Written in 1831.

The Great Day of Borodino
We commemorate with a fraternal funeral feast,
They repeated: “The tribes were coming,
Threatening Russia with misfortune;
Wasn’t all of Europe here?
And whose star led her!
But we have become a solid heel
And they took the pressure with their chests
Tribes obedient to the proud will,
And the unequal dispute was equal.

And what happened? Your calamitous escape,
Boasting, they have forgotten now;
They forgot the Russian bayonet and snow,
Who buried their glory in the wilderness.
The familiar feast beckons them again –
The blood of the Slavs is drunk for them;
But the hangover will be hard for them;
But the guests’ sleep will be long
At a cramped, cold housewarming,
Under the grass of the northern fields!”

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

Full Poem In English

Full Poem In Russian

All Poems By
Alexander Sergeyevich

VVP mentions quantum mechanics in his speech:

Today’s world is an exceptionally complex, multifaceted system. To properly describe
and comprehend it, simple laws of logic, cause-and-effect relationships, and the patterns
arising from them are insufficient. What is needed here is a philosophy of complexity –
something akin to quantum mechanics, which is wiser and, in some ways, more complex
than classical physics.
Yet it is precisely due to this complexity of the world that the overall capacity
for agreement, in my view, nevertheless tends to increase. After all, linear unilateral
solutions are impossible, while nonlinear and multilateral solutions require very serious, professional, impartial, creative, and at times unconventional diplomacy.

For me, this language is déjà vu, poignant, even piquant. I was party to the same locution, to include the metaphor of quantum mechanics, during the late 60s and on through the 1970s. It was in fact not uncommon — although neither was it common — among futurists with whom I associated then.

It was especially common in the circle around Robert Theobald, next to the center of which — his wife Jean Scott — I labored between the years 1968 and 1971.

The great Peter Putnam, whose classes I sat, went farther. He proposed the entire physics of the human nervous system as the proper civilization-level metaphor for human interactions, at all levels from family to international diplomacy, finance & war. VVP is arrived at that recognition and tries to bring others along into this more human and natural — than industrial metaphor — way of thinking.

We discussed then a civilization-level change of fundamental metaphor. Theobald rightly called the passing-out metaphor Industry. The crowning metaphor he part-rightly called Communications.

The United States came into existence as a summation of the potentials, internal and external, of organizing a nation, even a civilization, from the metaphor of agriculture. The English, Scottish, Russian, German, French, Spanish, and Italian Enlightenments brought forth the metaphor of mechanisms to replace the metaphor of agriculture. Besides the usual names in this regard, there is also and importantly Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov.

However, beneficial to many in some tangible ways, the metaphor of industry (mechanics) brought forth some harsh regression from standards easily provided by the metaphor of agriculture.

The next civilization-level fundamental metaphor was crowning already in the USofA by 1775 and by 1802, when West Point came into existence, was breathing, fitfully, on its own. This metaphor was the industrial factory (mechanisms) governed by a clock and, finally, the assembly line. Simultaneously this metaphor was crowning in regions of Eurasia, to include Russia, Japan & the West Asian Peninsula (Europe, who are no longer so eu). The US American Civil War Between The States established this new civilization-level metaphor — factory, clock, assembly line — as fundamental to the self-understanding of US Americans.

The effect was immediate: degradation of the standard of living of many women, children, and elderly. In some places, very many! Overseas, whole populations and regions were carried off, exploited, extracted & put under colonization by powers uninterested in their longevity or welfare. A great cry went up. Marx and Engels were harmonics in that cry. So were others unrelated to those two.

Already by the 1960s, high-level awareness of losses — personal, group & national — in freedom, culture, & morality were in high-level discussion, some of that discussion, and then much of it, downright disorderly and violent. Charlie Chaplin, The CPUSA, The Free Speech Movement, The 1968 DNC Convention, Berrigan Brothers, Weather Underground, Fonda and Hayden, Harris and Baez, 5 prominent assassinations & numerous hidden ones illustrate high-level and total-society awareness of cruelty afoot when human beings, for the purpose of controlling others’ income, voting & events, are jammed together to fit the industrial metaphor of factory, clock, assembly line.

So, we knew in the late 1960s that The USofA was in trouble on account of our fundamental metaphor. Nor were we first to have this awareness. Nor did it escape our attention that others, and illustrious, had called for remedy well before we took up the labor.

We knew the issue was metaphor. Not forms of government. Not corporations. Not schools. Not money. Not good people vice bad. Rather, the fundamental metaphor for self-understanding used civilization-wide, society-wide & nation-wide. That was the issue.

I realized that being in close with futurists, whether academic or free-lance, was not going to yield an answer or effect remedy civilization-wide. Indeed, they have not. Most of those people have only made The USofA more desperate for a proper — meaning, workable — civilization-level metaphor.

Although not a mathematician or physicist by formal training, I have a degree of feeling for how those guys talk and why they do. The best ones talk and write in a way anyone truly interested in learning can understand or at least absorb and appreciate. I think of, for example, Richard Feynman. The truth is uncomplicated. Neither is it sequestered.

When first I heard descriptions of quantum mechanics and quantum physics — during the early 1960s, of course — I knew by direct experience that something important for our country was there. Not a specific set of formulae or concepts, but rather, a way of thinking which guides a way, or better, ways plural, of making decisions.

What I felt then later I elaborated to myself and heard elaborated by others. Testing it. This metaphor, quantum mechanics, is not the be-all of all end-alls WRT thinking, deciding & making actual remedy. But, being closer to spiritual discipline — man’s real friend — than all other possible civilization-level metaphors — SAVE ONE — quantum mechanics sounded and still sounds pretty good to me as candidate to supply our need to replace the industrial metaphor with a more human one.

So here is VVP doing just that!
Quantum Mechanics. Déjà vu.

There is one civilization-level metaphor which is the be-all and end-all of such metaphors. That is the botanical metaphor: The Tree of Life. All other metaphors, in fact, are elements of that one. If you want to go home quickly, start there and at its flower: