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I don't know why I had expected people to understand what I had been dealing with at the mountaintop of Steve's science which I barely understood myself. I didn't realize then that one can't stand in front of a grade five mathematics class and expect them to understand differential calculus. I hadn't made that connection in the political realm. The basis for understanding advanced calculus is not been established at the fifth grade level. I wasn't even aware that I hadn't yet fully established the basis for our advances myself. Nevertheless it seemed to me that we had the world in our pocket.
In this 'trance' the Moscow conference appeared to be a piece of cake. Of course arrogance is always a perfect recipe for failure, and so I failed. I came to Moscow on the wave of a success that had opened that gate to the coming failure.
The Moscow conference became that kind of a paradox. Instead of solving the paradox I had made a mess of things. The reason might have been that our success in Venice had been hollow too, in real terms. Still, I rode forward with it, arrogantly and stupidly, while in the end only that counts which is based on what is real. The real basis had not been established for what I had tried to achieve both in Venice and later at the Moscow conference.
The Youth World Peace Conference, as it was called, appeared to have had the same kind of flaw built into it that had made our work in Venice hollow. Fred had suggested that the Moscow conference was designed to take the world a step further, a step past Venice, towards real peace and real security. I had told Fred not to worry, that it would be cakewalk. We would, without us going out of our way, cause a revolution. I didn't see then that our prior step in Venice that seemed like a cakewalk in retrospect had been on shaky ground from start to finish, with a faulty footing.
Fred just shook his head a my cakewalk talk. He turned out to be right. In Moscow, I did worse. I took us two steps backwards, nut just one. Nothing was resolved in Moscow and I got the blame for it. Fred, though, never said that the blame was deserved. He only said in the end that my bungling might have been the reason why the press at home had remained largely silent about the entire affair.
For a long time afterwards I felt badly about my failure. In the back of my mind, though shutting it out whenever it appeared, I had this feeling right from the beginning, including the feeling that I should have declined the invitation and stayed at home with my hammer, nails, and drywall boards, finishing the house. I didn't know why I had felt that way. It seems that I knew myself better than I wanted to admit. Since one's feeling don't count as a valid excuse for refusing an assignment I found myself involved on the world scene once again. I even told everyone, including myself, that I was looking forward to it. My excuse was, that this time I wasn't driving the project personally as I had in Venice. Also, we didn't come to Russia with an absolute agenda as in Venice, or something bigger and more binding than what we had been mandated to put forward in Venice. We came to Moscow with nothing more than a reputation to defend. That's how I saw it. So am I to blame when in the heat of the battle that was poorly defined I missed the mark by a mile?
I spoke three times in Moscow. I addressed the peace conference with a scientific thesis on the hierarchical model of the Byzantine Orthodox belief system and its continuing reflection in modern statecraft under the Soviet system. I didn't miss the mark technically. Everything that I had said was correct. It should have had an uplifting effect. It had been designed to honor the Russian achievements and to open the door for them to step up to higher ground. Instead, I ended up insulting all of Russia. My presentation had been intended to be a compliment to Russian endurance and resilience in an environment of top down domination that begun long before the Soviet State was born, and by which the state itself was now threatened. Well, sometimes things don't work out as planned when the prevailing perceptions stand miles apart and cannot be bridged. The Soviets thought they were the rulers of a far-flung empire that would stand forever. In reality they were ruled themselves like slaves by an ideology that was not really their own, which they simply bowed to and stood powerless to get away from.
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