For a New World Order Based on the Coincidence of Opposites: Helga Zepp-LaRouche Addresses Paris Conference
Nov. 10—Here is the address of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche to the Paris con Nov. 8:
I want to speak to you about the new world economic order based on the principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum—the Coincidence of Opposites. I have to start with the following: An institution called Economic Society for Westphalia and Lippe, they and a jury of personalities in politics and business consisting of Sigmar Gabriel, Cem Özdemir, Friedrich Merz, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, decided to give the Westphalian Peace Prize for 2026 to NATO. The reason given is for the continuous peace work of NATO. The prize is €100,000. They have to split it with a youth organization called socioMovens, which is tasked to give the Western-oriented youth culture to Eastern Europe. So, it’s one of these typical NGOs trying to prepare color revolution kinds of things. If one wanted to be sarcastic, one could say that NATO urgently needs the money to get war-ready, because obviously they are not.
Next year, there is supposed to be a big celebration in the City Hall of the Peace of Westphalia in Münster. I don’t know if you have an idea of what a perversion and complete upside-down approach this is. So, I propose to give the Economic Society of Westphalia and Lippe the George Orwell Prize of 2026. Many of you know George Orwell. He has written many books, probably the most famous of which is 1984, which describes the absolute double-speak, double-think, Newspeak, out of which they then coined the notion of double-speak as the new word for lying and manipulation through language. So, for example, in 1984, the Ministry of Torture is called Ministry for Love. The Ministry for Lies and Propaganda is called the Ministry for Truth. The Ministry for Starvation Management is called the Ministry of Abundance. And so forth and so on. The obvious out-Goebbels-ing Goebbels made by such an approach you can see in the arguments given for the decision to give this prize to NATO. It is the responsible support for NATO for Ukraine, that NATO coordinates the aid in line with international law in solidarity, but without becoming itself a part of the conflict party.
This is quite unbelievable, because contrary to the official NATO narrative, which insists that everybody who speaks about Ukraine must start their speech with the phrase “the unprovoked illegitimate war of aggression by Russia.” This is obviously one of such absolute double-speaks we should not tolerate anymore. Everybody who has an historic memory will remember the promises given at the time of German reunification and the time of the end of the Cold War, when Secretary of State Baker and Hans Friedrich Genscher were promising to Gorbachev, to Shevardnadze, that NATO will not move one inch to the East. What followed were five eastward expansions of NATO, which are now six since Sweden and Finland have joined—without asking the population, by the way, if they agreed with it. So, it’s now 1,000 km to the East, plus a few. So, we have a full-fledged Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
NATO, if you have followed the events of the last decades, also has been an instrument to establish a unipolar world domination based on the Anglo-American special relationship. Under the aegis of NATO, you had regime change, color revolution, interventionist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and so forth.
By the time the prize is supposed to be given next year, there is no question that the Ukraine war will have been lost; because it is already lost now. If this dynamic is not supposed to lead into an escalation which would end up in a global nuclear war, we need a complete rejection of any form of double-speak, and a radical change in the approach to international politics in the West. We have to replace the policy that we have, to inflict a strategic defeat to Russia, because such a defeat is completely impossible. Russia is already by now the strongest nuclear power. With their latest weapons—Oreshnik, Burevestnik, and Poseidon—Russia has developed the technological military edge. Therefore, it cannot be defeated; but what can happen is that all of mankind is eliminated.
If you look at the situation in Southwest Asia, despite the ceasefire which started supposedly on October 11th, more than 200 people have been killed, more than 600 wounded. In just one night, over 100 people were killed, 46 of them children. Altogether, 10% of the entire Palestinian population has been eliminated.
Now the next chapter—the unprovoked war against Venezuela—is supposed to start. According to a new memorandum from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, this could lead to various degrees of bloodshed and potentially a complete revolt of the entire Latin American continent against the United States, where in the worst case, you could have an entanglement with Russia and China. Not to mention the coming war with China, which the warmongers have been dreaming of for quite some time.
So, if you take a step back and look at the present world as if you could see it from the International Space Station in space or an even higher point of view that you could look at the world from above space and time, what view of humanity would you see? We are obviously not a species of uneducated, nasty toddlers—not all toddlers are nasty, but I have had the experience that some of them kick quite well against your leg. Are we a nation or a continent of nasty toddlers, who, after playing Pokémon and violent video games, then play with nuclear missiles until we are all dead? Or, are we the creative species gifted with reason? The big question in front of all of humanity is, can we give ourselves an international order which establishes durable peace and a harmonious development of all nations and civilizations on Earth? Because it is exactly that which is needed.
Peace with Principles
We in earnest, very realistically and practically, need a new global security and development architecture, which must take into account the interests of security and development for every single country on the planet. There is a big precedent for that. Jacques [Cheminade] referred to it this morning—the Peace of Westphalia. In 1648, it ended 150 years of religious war in Europe, and it was the beginning of the establishment of international law, the law of the people. The most important principle which came out of it was that any peace does require that you always have to take into account the interests of the other. That for the sake of peace, you have to replace hate with love; that for the sake of peace, you have to forgive and forget all the crimes committed by one side to the other, and vice versa. Obviously, it established the principle of indivisible peace. All of these principles have been violated by NATO. It established the principle of sovereignty and non-interference; that every state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs. NATO clearly has violated that, if not in words, in principle, if one remembers the words of Victoria Nuland that the U.S. State Department spent alone for NGOs in Ukraine $5 billion, which was the reparation of the Orange Revolution and then the Maidan.
The Peace of Westphalia also established the principle of non-interference into the internal matters of other countries. For 20 years in Afghanistan, NATO tried to impose Western values. You all remember what the outcome was—the people hanging off the airplanes as they left Kabul. NATO is identical with the principle of interventionist wars; the right to protect the abandoning of the Peace of Westphalia. If you know this history, it’s such an insight to the intelligence of European and other citizens, to give the peace prize to NATO. The Peace of Westphalia also established the principle of cuius regio eius religio, which means that whatever country you are in, you have the right to your own religion. It guaranteed, for example, the right of Christians to practice their faith in public during designated hours. This has also been violated continuously by the demonization of Islam and by the demonization of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Peace of Westphalia also established that all states, regardless of their size or power, are equal under international law. It created a system of coexisting states, and it set as a precedent the principle of diplomacy for conflict resolution, not war. It ended war. It redefined the territorial boundaries across Europe, removed wartime trade barriers, guaranteed a degree of free navigation on the Rhine River, and created a new system of political order based on sovereign states. But most importantly, it established diplomacy as a way of conflict resolution. None of what NATO has done reflects the spirit of the Peace of Westphalia.
The different war parties came together at that time, because they realized that if the war would continue, there would be absolutely nobody left to enjoy the victory, given the fact that already one-third of the people, the animals, the villages had been destroyed. Is that even more the case now than ever, that if the war continues, nobody will enjoy the result, because nobody will survive a global nuclear war.
Recently, the U.S. think tank, the RAND Corporation, changed an earlier estimate that it would be better to have a war with China earlier. Because of the spectacular rise of China, it had to be expected that the longer one waited, the more China would have an advantage. So that policy just now has been replaced by something they call “controlled rivalry,” obviously because they realize that the train has left the station, and that the United States could not win a war with China at this point. But then, the paper concludes that a cooperative coexistence is not possible, because the two countries have no common interest. That is a very important axiomatic assumption which we have to attack. Because if mankind cannot move beyond this idea that two countries have no common interest, that there is nothing which unites them; then the logical outcome will be World War III.
The Pope Intervenes with Cusa
That is why we are giving such a very high importance to the intervention by Pope Leo XIV, when he, in his Jubilee address on October 25, invoked the name of Nicholas of Cusa, and the idea of the Coincidence of Opposites. I quote Leo XIV, who said:
“In another troubled age, the 15th century, the Church had a Cardinal who is still little-known today. He was a great thinker, and a servant of unity. His name was Nicholas, and he came from Kues in Germany, and he is known as Nicholas of Cusa….
“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. [And with those], he developed 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; that God is a mystery and what is in tension finds unity. Nicholas knew that he did not know and thus came to understand reality ever more deeply.”
For those who know Church history, this is an absolutely revolutionary statement, because there are two traditions in the Catholic Church. There is what you can call the fundamentalist faction: Those who say that only the Bible gives you knowledge of what Jesus Christ and Christianity are all about. But then there is another faction which was called the Augustinian tradition, which believed that there is no contradiction between faith and science. I make the argument that all progress in European history in science and art comes from the influence of the second tradition. While the first tradition has been the obstacle; these have been the people who got us into Crusades, into religious wars, into the worst chapters of humanity. Nicolaus of Kues was put on the index after the Council of Trent. That meant you could not read his writings; you were not allowed to praise his work. That lasted quite a while, and as a result, Nicholas of Cusa, despite the fact his absolutely super role in bringing about the Golden Renaissance in Italy was practically sidelined. There were some people who knew his books—in some monastery you had some writings, but it was not a common discussion.
As recently as the early 1990s, I went to Brazil, to a city in southwest Brazil—Annapolis. There I met with a whole Dominican order. It was a huge session about Cusa, because they knew that I was advertising Cusa. They brought books and said, “No, this is heresy! He does not belong to the Church.” We had a long argument lasting several hours in which they made a big point to convince me, to get me off this heresy. Obviously, they did not succeed.
But for the Pope to take that position not only means what I’m going to say now, but from the standpoint of the internal hygiene of the Church, because the Church always would put all the Popes and Cardinals in one line; they would not say, this was a good Pope, this was a bad Pope. For them, it’s Church history. But the Pope, in one speech saying that there were others who took up arms and prepared new Crusades, is a very clear factional statement against those who were behind the Crusades. Leo XIV’s extended reference to Nicolaus of Kues, which I only quoted from very briefly, is therefore of the highest strategic importance, because it is a method of thinking which makes the resolution of seemingly impossible problems possible. He introduces a completely different approach. In order to understand this method, one has to begin with a complete rejection of the Aristotelian method of thinking in contradictions, in opposites. For example, that A can never be B, which is one of the most important statements in the traditional logic which they regard as an ontological principle.
Fighting Aristotelian Thinking
Aristotle writes in his Metaphysics: “But the most certain principle of all, where an error is absolutely impossible … which one that is, we now want to state; because it is impossible that the same concerns the same in the same relationship and in the same time does not concern it…. But we have assumed just now that it is impossible that something is at the same time and is not.” That gives you in a nutshell the creed of the Logic school.
Nicolaus developed a different principle in his De Docta Ignorantia. However, it was only some years later that he found out that one of the most prominent German Aristotelian scholastics of his time, Johannes Wenck, had attacked that writing in a counter-writing called De Ignota Litteratura, calling it a heresy. Cusa answered this in a writing called Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, which is a short piece of writing. If you want to get into this difficult terra, because it’s all written in the language of the 15th Century, naturally, you can start with that Apologia; because that gives you the immediate center of the controversy. In that he says that unfortunately the Aristotelian sect, which is dominating the Church today, as Philo already emphasized, would not think on a higher level than the ratio, the rational thinking of animals. Because any animal can also think and draw conclusions out of things; that’s not a big accomplishment. Therefore, it would almost be a miracle if they (the Aristotelian sect) would abandon Aristotle and succeed to think on a higher level.
Unlike the Aristotelian method, which gets entangled in the fight between contradictions, the viewpoint of the Coincidence is as if watching the developments from a high tower. If you’re standing on a high tower, from above you see the searcher (the person who is searching), the searched (that what is being searched), and the process of the searching. In other words, you have a completely different dynamic view of the matter.
Nicolaus also developed the notion of prescience—the foresight of what to look for. Because without that prescience, you have a result, and you do not know if what you found is what you have searched for. That is obviously the fate of all people who are searching the internet all day, because they find things, but they don’t know if what they found is what they looked for because they have no criteria for what the method was.
In another writing called De Visione Dei—which is a beautiful writing which is written to the monks of Tegernsee (a lake in Bavaria)—he tries to describe how you can become self-conscious about this principle. He uses an icon, and he has all the monks standing around it in a half-circle. But by moving from one monk to the other, each one of them has the feeling that the icon of Christ is looking at them directly. So, it is a way of introducing in a manuductio (a pedagogical way) how you get to the wall of contradictions, where, as a last step you have to mentally jump over a wall; because you cannot access this wall of contradictions unless you completely change your outlook.
Cusa applied this method to solve a problem which all thinkers before failed to resolve—the quadrature of the circle. Cusa rejected the erroneous assumption of Archimedes, who had used the method of exhaustion. He added evermore corners to a polygon inside and outside the circumference of the circle, saying that one would eventually arrive at the commensurability of the two geometric forms; that the many-sided polygon and the circle would become one. Cusa rejected that and insisted that the more corners you added to the polygon, the more distant you become from the circle; because the two are incommensurable.
Nicolaus also developed what Professor Haubst, who was one of the founders of the Cusanus Society, and who deserves most of the credit for having brought about the renaissance of Nicolaus of Kues, because he knew where the different writings of Cusa were. He would tell his pupils, “Go to this British museum or library, and you will find it there.” Usually, they did; so he was very instrumental in recollecting the sermons and other writings; and actually caused an international excitement in the intellectual academic community around Cusa. Nicolaus developed what Professor Haubst called the “biogenic law of evolution.” It is the idea that in the hierarchy of species, no species is developed to its fullest potential unless it participates in at least one point in the next higher species. This goes not from the lower to the higher, but vice versa—from the highest to the lowest. In God, the One, all contradictory substantial causes exist in a fundamental connectivity before they separate into differentiations. Man is elevated to its fullest accentuation by participating in God through his vis creativa, his creative power. So, Man only is fully Man if he participates in God’s creativity and becomes a second God. The animal develops its utmost potential only by participating in Man. Everybody knows that, because of the difference between a house animal and a wild animal.
The Coincidence of Opposites as Applied Today
So, the method of thinking of the Coincidence of Opposites enables one to think of the One Humanity in all its complexity and development first; not in a static way, but one where the continuous development is of an ontological primary reality. Therefore, the resolution of conflicts is not done based on the Aristotelian method of contradiction where one can find a compromise based on the lowest common denominator or some arithmetic equation. One finds that inherent principle which emanates from the higher oneness which pulls up everybody; uplifts the orientation of all conflict parties to see the common interest and the oneness of their goal. That oneness is not uniformity, but on the contrary, it is a mutually beneficial cooperation between sovereign states which respect the different systems of society and work together as in a contrapuntal fugue in which the completion of each component interacts with and optimizes the next one; and where the energy of the system, so to speak, increases for all participants. Harmony in the macrocosm, peace on Earth, can only exist if all microcosms, all nations, develop their fullest potential and regard as in their best self-interest to support the development of all other microcosms, and vice versa. The more this occurs, the more the degrees of freedom are created, the richer the composition of mankind becomes.
Is that principle of the Coincidence of Opposites just a theory? No, it is actually the philosophical outlook in policies of leaders of the Global Majority trying to establish a new economic and political system. President Xi Jinping developed the idea of the shared future of mankind, which is the one humanity. But he also developed four initiatives called the Global Security, Global Development, Global Civilizational, and Global Governance Initiatives. Especially the last one, the Global Governance Initiative is a very beautiful, concrete elaboration of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia whereby it is exactly laid out how nations relate to each other. That it does not matter if they are small or large; each of them has an equal voice. Nobody can be overruled based on the sheer might of another; that non-interference must be respected even for the smallest countries. It’s a very elaborated concept.
But also, President Putin has called for a new Eurasian security architecture, where nations are cooperating like instruments playing together in a symphonic composition. In his speech at the recent Valdai Club annual meeting of intellectuals debating, he said: “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.” Here you have two leaders of major countries of the Global South with a clear rejection of the Aristotelian method.
So, let’s take this conception of Nicolaus of Cusa, of the Coincidence of Opposites to shape our policies towards all nations around the world. What means is, we have to make a holy commitment to get the countries of Europe and the United States to jointly cooperate with the BRICS, the SCO, ASEAN, CELAC, the Eurasian Economic Union, the African Union, the OIC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and similar organizations, to join hands in the industrialization of Africa.
Africa will have by the year 2050, 2.5 billion people, that is 1 billion more people than today. It’s the only continent with demographic growth; all others are stagnating. That means we have to create 1 billion new productive jobs in the next 25 years. One very beautiful example of how that can occur is the GERD—the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam—which was built in only a few years (I think five years) through a cooperation among Chinese, Ethiopian, Italian, and French companies. It cost only $5 billion; which in this case they raised through the issuing of bonds purchased entirely by Ethiopian citizens. The $5 billion will be amortized in five years, because it takes five years to cover $1 billion per year. After five years, it will be profitable. Ethiopia is already now starting to export electricity to its neighbor countries after fulfilling its own requirements. That is an absolutely feasible example which can be replicated with the Inga Dam in the Congo, with the Transaqua which would take 3-5% of the water from the Congo River at an elevation of 500 meters and bring it through a system of canals and rivers to Lake Chad. It would industrialize 12 countries along the way, and create irrigation in the Sahel zone, making agriculture possible and helping to fight instability in that region.
Obviously it needs to be connected with the Bering Strait Tunnel, which can be built; it could be started in a few weeks because it was a topic in the talks between the United States and Russia with Trump and Putin. That would then open up the infrastructure connection between the Americas and Asia so that soon you could travel via fast train from the southern tip of Chile and Argentina all the way up through Latin America, Central America, North America, Canada, Alaska, Bering Strait Tunnel, Eurasia to Spain, then in Gibraltar through the to-be-built tunnel under the Gibraltar Strait, and you continue all the way via a train system to the Cape of Good Hope. So, you can, practically in a few days, travel around the world. And other tracks naturally would go from China, Iran, India, Southeast Asia to the Philippines with ferries and other means. The idea of having an international infrastructure network which makes travel possible in a few days connecting all of humanity, will change the mentality of people totally. Because infrastructure changes the way people think; that has been proven in history every time it was done. It is one of the key ideas of Krafft Ehricke, the famous German rocket scientist, who developed the notion of the extraterrestrial imperative. He said the identity of people will fundamentally change once they do joint space travel; because the way people relate to each will be different. We see this with the astronauts on the ISS already, who never would think, “This is a Russian; this is an American.” They think, “We are the astronauts who look at the little planet Earth as just a tiny fragile blue planet in a huge universe of trillions and trillions of galaxies.” Just try to think about trillions of galaxies, and you get a sense of why we have to change our view completely and not have our nose on the ground; but look up to the stars.
A New Era of Mankind
We are the creative species, and therefore, we can create a new era of mankind. Rather than giving NATO the Westphalian peace prize, let’s in earnest build a new security and development architecture and dissolve NATO. Follow the advice of Leo XIV, who also said that what was special about Nicolaus of Kues was that he reread the Classics; which he did. He advertised like all the humanists of his time and all times that in order to find truth, do not read the footnotes of professors. Instead, go back to Plato, go back to Augustine, go to the sources. Because that is at the same time the best medicine against the Truth Ministry. It teaches you how to think for yourself and find the truth and be inoculated against such efforts of manipulation.
So, let’s with joy and optimism start this task!