I've just been listening to retired diplomats from so-called "western" (I'd say "Eurasian") countries bemoan the lack of collective memory and the resulting rudderlessness of the average diplomat today. The ones representing the EU are especially undiplomatic, in their outlook. Diplomacy has been corrupted by a lower form of intelligence: that of a dominant power expecting the capitulation of weaker ones, coercian and bullying in other words.
I wouldn't dispute their critique, but then memory is more than diplomatic history and the relations between "powers" in a geographic sense, as when we speak of Hittites and Egyptians as Potemkin did in his multi-volume history of diplomacy. There's the dynamic of "ideas" which are more freely floating, more like the "meme virus" of contemporary parlance, of which the "military industrial complex" would be a good example. It's a "complex" of a psychological sort, and anything else secondarily.
In the realm of ideas, you have a lot of subcultures investing in their narratives in order to propagate their story forward, diplomats being a good example of a subculture. The story of the diplomats might be one of their being undermined, by so-called "security services" meaning by institutions designed to outsmart and trick, deceive, distract. A security agent is closer to a stage magician, a prestidigitator, than to someone wishing to be forthright and honest, to the point, clear, and yet without guile.Here we might tap into philosophy. Contemporary curricula don't do this (I'm way ahead of my time) but the continuity from Nietzsche to Buckminster Fuller is very evident in that "beyond good and evil" (beyond a punishing and/or guilty mindset), as a concept, connects to "precession" in Fuller's lexicon. What diplomats might miss is that an absence of guile may not preclude use of what look to be "magic methods" from the standpoint of a moralizer.
When you've fallen in love with a planet your sense of commitment may lead to a partisan sense of who the goodies and baddies might be, whereas if you yet to beam down (you're still in orbit), your orientation will be less polarized and you'll be more on the verge of just wandering off versus inclined to take sides in a local battle of good versus evil. You might just change channels. Precessional space is a higher dimensional space not in the thrall of (not predicted by) any one of its component axes.
In Biblical terms (not my standard form of self expression), Jesus spends a lot of time drinking wine with tax collectors, Roman soldiers, and other characters who are clearly in the oppressor class from a Zealot's point of view. Or call it "consorting with the enemy" (what detractors might call it). Jesus: what enemy, you mean me? Ain't we all just collective humanity, God's creation?
Christians, over the centuries after Jesus (A.D.) would often have have the right temperament for diplomacy, even if their programming was bipolar (good vs evil). They had sufficient empathy to develop professional business relationships (not just friendships), a prerequisite for "telepathy" (by which we mean simply "access to the Zeitgeist" which many celebrities and politicians clearly have -- we call them media-savvy).
Tying back to what these ex-dips were saying, about the prevalence of memory holes, let's not forget about World Game, in which Fuller would counsel his most ardent players to consult the Russians as well as their own government when seeking data.
He was laying the groundwork for something more successful than German Idealism or Manifest Destiny Anglo-imperialism, which Nietzsche heralds, in marking a turn towards depth psychology (where are these notional "nations" anyway, if not in people's heads?) and existentialism.
I tell more of that story in my Graph Theory 2025 (a YouTube).
