“Clarity Is Not Optional”

January 3, 2026

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Ricardo F. Morin

January 3, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl.

Power, Sovereignty, and the Cost of Duplicity

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Venezuela’s transition and Ukraine’s survival now constitute a single test: whether power can be constrained without illusion, and whether the United States can act coherently even when its president cannot perceive coherence himself.

This text does not argue for a policy or predict an outcome. It marks the threshold at which coherence ceases to be discretionary and becomes a condition of survival.

The United States cannot act in one theater in a way that invalidates the principles it claims to defend in another. If sovereignty, territorial integrity, institutional continuity, and legal accountability are treated as binding in Ukraine, they cannot become flexible, provisional, or strategically inconvenient in Venezuela. And the reverse must also hold: if those principles are treated as binding in Venezuela, they cannot be relaxed, reinterpreted, or selectively applied in Ukraine. Once that line is crossed in either direction, coherence collapses—not only rhetorically, but structurally. Power ceases to stabilize outcomes and instead begins to manage decay.

This is not a moral claim; it is a functional one. Modern power does not fail because it lacks force, but because it loses internal consistency. When the same instruments—sanctions, indictments, military pressure, diplomatic recognition—are applied according to circumstance rather than principle, they no longer constrain adversaries. They instruct them. Russia and China do not need to prevail militarily if they can demonstrate that legality itself is selective, contingent, and subject to reinterpretation by whoever holds advantage in the moment.

For this reason, no transition can rest on personalization. Trust between leaders is not a substitute for verification, nor can rapport replace institutions. This vulnerability is well known in personality-driven diplomacy and has been particularly visible under Donald Trump in his repeated misreading of Vladimir Putin. Yet the deeper danger is not psychological; it is procedural. Policy that depends on who speaks to whom cannot survive stress. Only policy that remains legible when personalities are removed can endure.

Nor can outcomes be declared before institutions exist to carry them. Territorial control without civilian authority is not stability. Elections conducted without enforceable security guarantees are not legitimacy. Resource access without escrow, audit, and legal review is not recovery, but extraction under a different name. When the United States accepts results without structures, it postpones collapse rather than preventing it.

Equally corrosive is legal improvisation. Law applied after action—indictments justified retroactively, sanctions reshaped to accommodate faits accomplis—does not constrain power; it performs it. Once legality becomes explanatory rather than directive, it loses its disciplining force. Adversaries learn that rules are narrative instruments, not boundaries.

Finally, there can be no tolerance for proxy preservation. A transition that leaves intact militias, shadow financiers, or coercive intermediaries is not a transition at all. It is a redistribution of risk that guarantees future rupture. External backers may be delayed, constrained, or audited, but they cannot be placated through ambiguity without undermining the entire process.

The test is stark and unforgiving. If an action taken in either Venezuela or Ukraine could not be defended, word for word, if taken in the other—or if a compromise tolerated in one would be condemned if replicated in the other—then the axiom has already been broken.

What must therefore remain true, in both places at once, is this: power must submit to the same standard it invokes—without exception, without personalization, and without retreat into expediency disguised as realism.

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Authority Where Legitimacy Has Not Yet Converged

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This section does not assess democratic legitimacy or political merit. It observes how authority is presently constituted and enforced when coherence is under stress.

A question posed during a press conference—regarding the opposition coalition led by María Corina Machado and the electoral victory of Edmundo González Urrutia—elicited a dismissive response from President Donald Trump. Asked why a transitional leadership would not center on that coalition, he replied that there was “no respect for her,” implying an absence of authority within the country.

Taken at face value, the remark appears personal. Read diagnostically, it exposes a more consequential distinction: legitimacy does not presently translate into authority inside Venezuela. The same distinction—between legitimacy and enforceable authority—has shaped Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion, where legitimacy was established internally but had to be defended materially against external aggression.

Electoral victory, international recognition, and moral credibility confer legitimacy. They do not, by themselves, confer enforceable power. Authority, as it exists on the ground, flows from the capacity to compel compliance—whether through control of coercive institutions, resource chokepoints, or the operational machinery of the state. In Ukraine, that authority is exercised defensively to preserve an already legitimate sovereign order against external aggression. In Venezuela, it persists independently of electoral outcome, sustained by institutions and mechanisms detached from legitimacy.

In this sense, the question raised by Trump’s remark is not whether Machado’s coalition is legitimate, but what presently lends authority within the country—and who is capable of enforcing decisions, preventing fragmentation, or compelling compliance. The answer is neither rhetorical nor normative. It is about how authority is currently constituted and exercised under present conditions.

This distinction matters because transitions that confuse legitimacy with authority tend to collapse into disorder or entrenchment. Authority negotiated without legitimacy produces repression. Legitimacy asserted without authority produces paralysis. Durable transition requires that the two converge—but they do not begin from the same place, nor do they converge through the same means.

In Ukraine, legitimacy and authority are aligned but strained by external aggression; in Venezuela, authority persists in the absence of legitimacy. Treating these conditions as morally or procedurally equivalent obscures the obligations they impose. When support is conditioned more heavily where legitimacy is intact than where it is absent, coherence gives way to ethical imbalance.

Trump’s comment does not clarify U.S. strategy. It does, however, expose the fault line along which policy now risks fracturing: whether authority is assessed and transformed in relation to legitimacy, or accommodated independently of it in the name of order. The choice is not neutral. It determines whether power reinforces or undermines the principles it invokes.

The distinction between legitimacy and authority does not negate the requirement of coherence. It sharpens it. When coherence is abandoned selectively, collapse is no longer an accident of transition but a consequence of duplicity.

Tags: accountability, Authoritarianism, foreign policy, international law, political coherence, power, sovereignty, transition, Ukraine, Venezuela
Posted in Geopolitics, International Affairs, Political Analysis, Essays | Leave a Comment »

“Portrait of a President: Series II”

December 31, 2025

Ricardo Morín
**Portrait of a President**
14 x 20 inches
Watercolor, sumi ink, crayon on paper
2003

Ricardo F. Morín

November 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

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Author’s Note

This essay continues an inquiry begun in “Portrait of a President: A Diagnostic Essay on Power, Posture, and Historical Pattern,” where patterns of executive behavior were examined through observable action rather than declared intent. The present text shifts that inquiry from description to procedure and takes a recent executive order on artificial intelligence as a case through which decisions are advanced, reviewed, and sustained.

It follows The Arithmetic of Progress, which considers how contemporary narratives of advancement often detach calculation from consequence. Read in sequence, that essay establishes the broader conditions under which claims of inevitability and efficiency gain force; the present text examines how such claims operate within the executive process itself.

The essay also builds upon Governing by Exception: The American Executive, published earlier this year, which examined how exceptional measures become normalized within the modern presidency. Where that essay focused on the expansion of executive discretion, the present text examines the procedural consequences that follow when exception becomes routine.

This essay further stands in relation to Convergence by Design or Consequence? On Trump, Putin, and the Veiled Axis from Kyiv to Caracas, which addressed alignment among contemporary autocracies at the geopolitical level. Here, the focus moves inward, toward domestic executive procedure, to consider how similar methods of authority can emerge without explicit coordination or ideological declaration.

Each essay approaches the same problem from a different register—exception, calculation, procedure, and alignment—without requiring continuity of title or theme.

This essay occupies the center of that sequence of essays. Throughout the analysis, action designates executive action as it bears upon the other branches of the American government. It begins from an observation about executive ordering under conditions of urgency and traces how constitutional constraint may be displaced in practice without being formally abolished.

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Procedural Dislocation and the Rhetoric of Dominance

The recent executive order framing artificial intelligence as a matter of “global dominance” offers a useful example. Agreement with its stated aims is not required for the executive order to warrant examination. Its relevance does not lie in what it promises to achieve, but in the manner in which it propels decisions forward before the terms under which they should be evaluated have been configured.

Artificial intelligence enters this discussion not as a technical subject, but as a context in which executive action is presented as urgent. The order proceeds on the assumption that speed and centralized direction are necessary for success. As a result, decisions advance before existing forms of review, coordination, and regulatory formation have had an opportunity to shape their terms.

This ordering is significant. When presidential authority is asserted first, deliberation is relegated to constrained conditions. Institutional review—understood here as the pre-action criteria, thresholds, and sequencing through which decisions are ordinarily authorized—ceases to determine whether executive action should proceed and instead adjusts to action already underway. Once this sequence is fixed, subsequent forms of participation—whether arising from agencies, advisory bodies, or constitutional institutioins—may temper implementation without necessarily altering the direction of presidential decrees.

This essay treats the order as an instance of that ordering. It examines what follows when urgency governs the timing of decisions and broad assertions of purpose begin to do work normally performed by review, coordination, and rulemaking.

Executive decisions determine direction within the executive domain; executive action commits that determination to institutional consequence.

When decisions are taken prior to sustained review, the order of evaluation is reversed. Procedural review (as a condition of pre-authorization) no longer governs whether executive action is authorized, but instead becomes a step anticipated after executive action has already been set in motion. This inversion of review and authorization alters how responsibility is distributed within the executive process.

In this sequence, articulated criteria are deferred rather than established. Judicial review exists, but typically occurs after implementation, once policies have already taken effect. Congressional checks exist, but depend on coordination, timing, and political alignment that narratives of urgency actively compress, displace, and bypass. Constitutional remedies exist, but operate on temporal horizons incompatible with accelerated executive action. Standards by which a decision might be assessed—scope, limits, benchmarks, or conditions for revision—remain undefined at the moment of execution. The absence of articulated criteria is presented as provisional, even as executive action proceeds as though those criteria were already settled.

This analysis does not proceed from the assumption that constitutional checks are absent. Without articulated criteria, no stable reference exists against which a decision can be evaluated, adjusted, or halted. Review becomes reactive, tasked with accommodating decisions rather than testing their premises.

This sequence also alters the role of institutional participation. Agencies and advisory bodies are positioned to respond within post-implementation review rather than to contribute to the formation of the decision itself. Their involvement shifts from deliberation to implementation, narrowing the space for substantive input.

What emerges is not the elimination of review. Constraints remain formally intact, but no longer determine whether executive action proceeds; they intervene only after its action has already begun.

The result is not the elimination of constraint, but its displacement: mechanisms—designed to govern whether executive action should proceed—are repositioned to manage action already set in motion. Constitutional checks remain operative, but they now function downstream of execution rather than as conditions governing authorization.

III

Federal preemption is asserted before a substitute structure exists. In this case, state-level regulatory activity is set aside even though no comprehensive federal framework has yet been established to take its place. Rule by decree is asserted in advance of the mechanisms that would ordinarily support, coordinate, or limit executive action.

This is not a question of constitutional supremacy. Federal authority over state law is well established. The issue is one of sequence. Preemption typically displaces existing regulation by replacing it with a defined alternative through which responsibility, oversight, and accountability are reassigned. When that replacement is absent, displacement produces a gap rather than a transition.

That gap has practical consequences. Without a settled federal framework, there is no clear site for rulemaking, review, or appeal. Responsibility appears centralized in principle, but remains dispersed in practice. Executive decisions move forward, yet the means of evaluating or correcting them remain uncertain.

This reorders the role of the states. Rather than serving as sites of coordination, experimentation, or interim governance, they are treated primarily as sources of friction. Their regulatory efforts are characterized as interference even though no structure has been offered to absorb the regulatory functions being displaced.

What results is a form of authority exercised in advance of the institutional support required to sustain it. Preemption operates as assertion rather than as arrangement. The question that follows is not whether authority exists, but how the executive authority is expected to function once exercised without the structures that normally sustain it.

The executive order invokes a global “race” for dominance as a justification for urgency. This reference is introduced without specification of its participants, scope, or criteria. The reference is presented as a condition rather than as a claim requiring articulation or examination.

Because the race is not defined, it cannot be procedurally evaluated. No benchmarks are offered by which advancement or delay might be measured, and no temporal horizon is established against which executive actions might be paced. Yet the invocation is treated as decisive.

Once invoked, this global framing reshapes the timing and sequence of domestic review and coordination. Internal processes of review, coordination, and federal balance are measured against an externally asserted tempo. Procedural safeguards begin to appear as liabilities, not because they have failed, but because they operate at a pace deemed incompatible with the asserted race.

In this way, the invocation of a global ‘race’ does not specify what is at stake; instead, the invocation of global competition relocates the timing of decision-making to an externally asserted pace. The absence of specification enables acceleration.

The significance of this procedural reordering lies not in whether global competition exists, but in how its invocation alters internal sequence within the American executive. An external reference is imported as a procedural rationale and allows executive decisions to advance ahead of sustained review and articulated structure.

Alongside external competitive framing, internal pressure also alters when and how executive decisions move forward. This pressure arises from private actors with concentrated financial exposure to the development and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies. Their investments depend on acceleration, scale, and limited regulatory constraint.

These actors do not require coordination to exert influence. Their interests converge structurally. Delays associated with sustained review, layered oversight, or decentralized regulation introduce uncertainty into investment horizons. Acceleration, by contrast, stabilizes expectations and preserves potential revenue.

Such pressure operates prior to public deliberation. It is expressed through advisory roles, policy consultations, and formal lobbying mechanisms that exist outside the sequence of open review. The influence is not illicit; it is institutionalized. What distinguishes this influence is its timing and asymmetry.

Because these interests are not fully disclosed within the formal record of decision-making and review, their effects appear indirect. Yet they shape the conditions under which urgency is framed as necessity and executive preemption as inevitability. The absence of articulated criteria does not impede this process; it facilitates it by keeping outcomes flexible while direction remains fixed.

External competition supplies a rationale for acceleration, while the pressure of internal investment sustains it. In this way, procedural dislocation is reinforced from within the executive sequence itself. Together, they create an executive environment in which acceleration is continuously justified even as institutional review and the structures of substitution remain deferred.

What follows marks a shift not in policy substance, but in how executive action is oriented once procedural guidance no longer governs its timing.

When decisions continue to advance without articulated criteria or substitution structures, language begins to assume functions ordinarily carried by procedural guidance. By procedural guidance, this analysis refers to the articulated criteria, review thresholds, institutional sequencing, and substitution structures through which decisions are ordinarily evaluated, revised, or withheld before executive action proceeds. Instead, executive orders are used to frame executive action and to supply orientation where procedural guidance is missing.

In this context, words such as “dominance,” “necessity,” or “leadership” do not operate primarily as descriptions. Such terms establish direction without specification. The function of such terms is to move decisions forward while leaving objectives, limits, and measures unresolved.

This enlargement of language alters how executive action is understood. Rather than clarifying what is being done and under what conditions, language organizes attention around procedural momentum. Movement itself becomes the priority, even as the grounds for evaluation remain unsettled.

The effect is cumulative over time. As reliance on rhetorical framing increases, fewer procedural markers remain available to slow, revise, or redirect executive action. Language begins to carry responsibilities normally handled by review and specification.

At this stage, language has not displaced explanation entirely, but it has begun to exceed it. This language continues to refer to policy, yet it now performs additional work by sustaining executive action in the absence of settled procedural support.

VII

Requests for specification no longer lead to articulated criteria or review mechanisms, but to restatement of the original framing. Explanation gives way to emphasis, and emphasis to repetition, without resolving the underlying procedural gaps.

As language begins to carry responsibilities normally handled by review and specification, its relationship to explanation changes. Statements initially intended to orient understanding become reference points that are repeated rather than examined.

Over time, this pattern reduces the capacity to pause, reconsider, or revise decisions already underway. When language is relied upon to sustain action, revisiting its premises becomes more difficult. Adjustment appears as retreat, and reconsideration as delay, even though no settled standards have been articulated.

The effect of this rhetorical substitution is not overt resistance to review, but a narrowing of the scope of review. Review persists formally, yet review is increasingly tasked with accommodating decisions already advanced. The space for questioning sequence, authority, or criteria contracts without being explicitly closed.

At this point, language no longer merely advances executive action; it begins to shield it. Decisions remain explainable in broad terms, but they become less accessible to sustained examination. What has changed is not transparency, but the conditions under which clarification can still occur.

VIII

This section traces the consequences of earlier procedural substitutions by showing how evaluative reference points disappear even as executive action continues.

Outcomes are projected but not specified. Means are deployed but not measured against stable standards. A shared point of reference by which both means and outcomes might be assessed is absent. When decisions are taken prior to sustained review and sustained by rhetorical framing rather than articulated criteria, the available bases for judging decisions narrow.

In such conditions, projected outcomes can no longer function as checks on present executive action. Projected benefits remain abstract, deferred, or contingent on future clarification. Without defined benchmarks or review mechanisms, outcomes function more as justification than as objects of evaluation.

This places increased weight on the process. When ends remain indeterminate, procedural sequence becomes the only available measure of legitimacy. If that sequence is dislocated, no basis remains for distinguishing provisional executive action from settled direction.

Appeals to necessity gain prominence under these conditions. These appeals bridge the gap between uncertain means and unspecified ends by asserting inevitability. Yet inevitability does not supply measure; it advances executive action while deferring assessment.

What results is the suspension of evaluation, as judgment is deferred to outcomes that have not yet been defined. Executive means proceed without reference to ends that can be examined and leave evaluation suspended rather than resolved.

The significance of what follows lies not in escalation or collapse, but in the capacity of this governing pattern to persist without triggering a formal breakdown.

Viewed through the preceding sequence, the executive order appears less as a response to a technological challenge than as an expression of how presidential authority now operates. In this sequence, constitutional constraint persists formally while losing its capacity to govern presidential timing. What defines this mode of operation is not declared ambition, but the exercise of executive authority in advance of settled structure, review, and measure.

Despite the suspension of procedural evaluation, executive action continues to advance and stabilize as a governing pattern. Executive action advances without stable criteria, and evaluation follows rather than guides it. Rhetorical framing sustains continuity once authorization, specification, and review no longer govern the initiation of action, and inevitability substitutes for articulation.

Under these conditions, governance retains motion but loses procedural reference. Decisions remain intelligible in broad terms, yet increasingly difficult to assess, revise, or halt.

Rather than resolving into crisis, the condition persists through executive assertion rather than procedural sequence. Executive authority continues to function, but it does so with fewer internal points of correction.

The significance of this condition lies not in its novelty, but in its durability. When procedural dislocation becomes a stable feature of executive action, it reshapes how legitimacy is understood and how accountability can be exercised. What is produced is not exception, but a normalized way of proceeding.

A constitutional order presumes cooperation without being able to compel it in advance. Law establishes procedures, thresholds, and divisions of authority, but it cannot secure the disposition of the actors who must inhabit those roles. The responsibility for cooperation is therefore placed precisely at the point where predictability can no longer be secured—human judgment, ambition, fear, calculation, fatigue, pride. This is not a failure of law as text; it is a condition of law as lived structure.

Seen this way, instability is not an aberration introduced by bad actors alone. It is an ever-present possibility generated by the fact that constitutional systems rely on restraint exercised voluntarily, sequentially, and often against immediate interest. Where cooperation falters, procedures remain formally intact yet lose operational force in practice. Law persists on paper while its coordinating capacity weakens over time.

This is why the problem traced throughout this essay is ultimately ethical rather than moralistic. It does not ask who is right or wrong, but what can reasonably be expected of human agents operating under pressure, asymmetry, and incomplete trust. Constitutional governance assumes a minimum ethic of reciprocity—an agreement to wait, to contest, to defer, to revise. When that ethic fails to be sustained, the system does not collapse at once; it persists in a condition where coordination no longer governs action. The authority of the Executive fills the gap left by cooperation, often in the name of continuity.

This explains why displacement proves durable, why restraint remains fragile, and why systems can continue to function even as their ethical foundations lose sustaining force. The irony sustained here is not pessimistic; it is lucid as an end to the inquiry.

Cooperative frameworks are always provisional. They exist in tension with mistrust, strategic defection, and shifting circumstance. They are never resolved, only renegotiated. The ethical fact is not that mistrust appears, but that governance must function despite it.

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Pre-Procedural Conditions of Dislocation

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Political responsibility begins before governance does. It precedes programs, slogans, and institutional choreography. Long before authority is exercised, it is entrusted, and in that act a judgment is already made—not about policy detail, but about temperament, restraint, and capacity for self-limitation.

The ethical center of leadership is not revealed through ambition or rhetorical promise, but through signs that are immediately legible: flexibility without opportunism, firmness without domination, caution without paralysis. These qualities are visible almost at once, often within moments of exposure. To miss them is not a failure of intelligence, but of attention.

This responsibility cannot be displaced onto institutions after the fact. Nor can it be excused by urgency, fatigue, or personal grievance. Once authority is conferred, law is required to manage what has already been authorized, even when correction becomes costly or delayed. No procedural safeguard can fully compensate for ethical indifference at the moment of selection.

Political systems do not deteriorate solely because of those who govern. They also reflect the standards—explicit or tacit—by which leaders are chosen. Collective well-being depends less on promised outcomes than on the character permitted to command. In this sense, leadership is not imposed upon a society. It is recognized, accepted, and sustained by it.

Tags: accountability, artificial intelligence policy, authoritarian method, decision-making, executive process, federal authority, institutional review, legitimacy, preemption, procedural dislocation, rhetoric and governance
Posted in Political Analysis • Executive Power • Governance and Institutions • Contemporary Affairs | Leave a Comment »

“The Arithmetic of Progress”

December 25, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
***Still Six***: ***The Arithmetic of Progress***
Oil On Linen
14 by 18 by 3/4 inches
2010

Ricardo F. Morín

November 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor

Abstract

This essay examines the assumption that technological and scientific advances have produced a universal improvement in human life. While contemporary discourse often equates innovation with progress, the distribution of benefits remains deeply asymmetrical. Technological growth increases capacity but does not correct the structural inequities embedded in modern economic systems. What appears as collective advancement frequently reflects the consolidation of advantage among those already positioned to receive it. By distinguishing capability from justice, and aggregate trends from lived conditions, the essay argues that the notion of historical progress is less a measure of shared dignity than a narrative that obscures persistent hierarchies.

The modern argument for progress (understood as improvement) rests on a familiar premise: technological and scientific advances have made life better today than at any other point in human history. Thinkers such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker defend this view with empirical confidence—he points to increased life expectancy, reduced mortality, improved medical interventions, and the steady rise of global literacy. In this framing, innovation and macroeconomic expansion constitute not only evidence of historical progress but the very engines that produce it.

Yet the structure of this reasoning is fragile. It equates technical capacity with civic advancement and treats expanded tools as synonymous with expanded dignity. It assumes that the benefits of innovation distribute themselves naturally and uniformly across societies. It suggests that progress is a shared inheritance rather than a selective outcome. These assumptions flatten the complexities of economic life into a narrative that conceals the asymmetries on which contemporary systems depend.

The historical record offers a different picture. Technological growth has consistently increased the efficiency of extraction, the speed of accumulation, and the reach of centralized power. Growth has amplified productivity without altering the basic hierarchy of distribution. Knowledge expands, but the architecture of inequity persists. What appears as collective advancement is often a redistribution of advantage toward those already positioned to capture its rewards. This is not a failure of technology; it is the continuity of a primitive logic embedded within modern economic structures.

The Enlightenment promise—that reason and innovation would lift the condition of all—has, in practice, produced a dual economy. One part benefits from scientific capacity, medical improvement, and informational access. The other part experiences precarity, dispossession, and structural vulnerability despite living under the same technological horizon. Progress, in this sense, is not a universal fact but a statistical abstraction. It describes averages, not lived realities. It treats the mean as the measure of the moral.

Some defend the concentration of authority on the grounds that a virtuous ruler could achieve what plural institutions cannot. This argument, however substitutes character for structure. If justice depends on the accident of benevolence, it ceases to be a principle and becomes a contingency.

Macroeconomic narratives reinforce this illusion. Rising GDP is interpreted as evidence of collective ascent, even as wealth concentrates in increasingly narrow fractions of the population. Globalized production expands, but the gains consolidate among those with access to capital, infrastructure, and insulating privilege. The appearance of aggregate improvement obscures the internal asymmetry: growth for some, stagnation or decline for many. The arithmetic of progress becomes a rhetoric of reassurance rather than a diagnosis of social reality.

To question this framing is not to deny the achievements of science or the value of technological discovery. It is to refuse the conflation of capability with justice. It is to observe that our tools have advanced while our institutions have remained elementary—often primitive—in their allocation of power and opportunity. Inequity is no less entrenched today than in earlier eras; it has simply been rationalized under the banner of innovation.

If echoes of Thomas Paine emerge in this argument, they are not intentional. They arise from a shared intuition: that systems calling themselves enlightened can reproduce the conditions they claim to transcend. Paine confronted monarchy; we confront the monarchy of capital, which presents itself as progressive while it operates through concentration, asymmetry, and manufactured narratives of improvement.

The challenge is not to reject technological advancement but to assess its civic consequences without accepting its mythology. Progress exists, but its distribution is neither natural nor inevitable. Until the structures that allocate benefit are reexamined rather than presumed, the claim of historical improvement functions less as an account of justice than as a story societies tell themselves to avoid reckoning with its absence.

Tags: economic structures, illusion of progress, inequality, progress, technology, wealth concentration
Posted in Political Philosophy, Modernity and Conflict, Cultural Analysis, Political Economy, Structures of Power, Ethics and Public Life, Essays (English) | Leave a Comment »

“The Grammar of Punishment”

December 16, 2025

Ricardo F. Morín

November 2025

Bala Cynwyd, Pa

Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor

Author’s Note:

Societies respond to harm in two fundamentally distinct modes of action. One unfolds through the slow, cumulative patterns of behavior and belief that shape collective life; the other through the deliberate, codified interventions undertaken by institutions in the name of order. The Grammar of Conflict and The Grammar of Punishment are companion essays, each devoted to one of these modes of action. The Grammar of Conflict traces how hatred, victimhood, hypocrisy, tribalism, and violence intertwine into a self-perpetuating system—one that is sustained through repeated explanation at every turn and is endured not through necessity, but through the stories societies choose to tell. The Grammar of Punishment concerns the authority of the State, viz. a formal, structured exercise of power that imposes consequences within boundaries defined by lawful interpretation. The Grammar of Conflict traces how civic and political antagonism becomes habitual and self-justifying. The Grammar of Punishment addresses cases in which the State that exceeds its limits can turn injustice into a system of unreasoned laws. Taken together, the two essays offer complementary perspectives on the forces that perpetuate harm and on the deliberate choices that may interrupt its recurrence.

Abstract:

The Grammar of Punishment addresses the consequences a society imposes for wrongdoing and how the consequences shape the political order and the moral landscape. The essay treats punishment as a limited civic instrument and punishment as an entrenched practice. It describes conditions under which the same punitive act can either uphold shared rules or weaken these rules when the scope and purpose of the punishment exceed the original moral and civic justification for imposing them. The drift beyond that justification often occurs because punishment extends beyond accountability: when punishment becomes a vehicle for revenge, a demonstration of power, and a means of perpetuating the authority or moral narratives that allow it to continue long after the original violation has been addressed. This essay does not oppose punishment; it addresses conditions under which punishment displaces justice. At a time when punitive measures increasingly shape political discourse and public policy, understanding the internal logic of punishment is essential to preserving the boundary between justice and power.

The essay will trace how punishment evolves from a measured response to a specific wrongdoing into a self-perpetuating system of governing. It will show how institutions originally created to restore justice will come to assert authority, to sustain narratives of legitimacy, and to conceal the principles they were established to defend. The analysis will identify the conditions under which punishment remains credible (when the exercise of punitive authority is bounded by reason, procedure, scope, proportionality, time, and review) and the points at which punishment ceases to protect social order and begins instead to perpetuate harm. The essay, however, will neither dictate specific policies nor condemn the use of policies. Its purpose will be to clarify the roles attributed to punishment, the points at which those roles break down, and how continued reliance on punitive measures discloses deeper social choices about authority, responsibility, and the impulse to respond to injury—choices that reveal as much about a society’s values as about its fears.

1
Punishment is a public act that imposes a cost in response to a breach of law or shared norm. Punishment marks a boundary, declares a rule, and demonstrates its enforcement. This definition distinguishes punishment from prevention, restraint, accountability, and repair. Prevention concerns events that have not yet occurred. Restraint limits the capacity of an individual or group to cause harm. Accountability establishes facts and assigns responsibility. Repair addresses loss and attempts to restore what has been taken away. Punishment differs from these responses because punishment addresses a specific violation after the fact and imposes a consequence.

2
Any serious assessment of punishment must answer three questions: What is the purpose of punishment? To whom is punishment directed? And, what is the outcome of punishment? The first question concerns a reasoned intent as opposed to a vague one. The second question concerns the target and scope of the punitive act. The third question concerns its manifestation as opposed to the original intention of punishment. A punishment that claims deterrence yet produces recurrence, or resists compliance, errs not in degree but in comprehension of punishment as a tool. By ignoring cause, the application of punishment can mistake reaction for resolution and enact justice without insight—a cycle that corrects nothing because it understands nothing.

3
Four primary purposes of punishment are commonly recognized: boundary-setting, deterrence, incapacitation, and recognition. Boundary-setting defines the limits of acceptable behavior and affirms that rules retain meaning only when their violation entails consequence; those limits must be defined with clarity. Deterrence seeks to prevent future harm by making the cost of wrongdoing visible and measurable. Incapacitation protects society by restricting the offender’s ability to inflict further injury. Recognition satisfies the moral need to acknowledge that a wrong has occurred and that the community has responded to it. These aims are conceptually clear, yet their success depends on interpretation and application—each revealing whether the pursuit of order remains faithful to the idea of justice.

A penalty first intended to correct a specific wrongdoing can, over time, be turned by institutions into an instrument of government. This transformation begins when authorities broaden the reach of the penalty, apply it repeatedly as a mechanical demonstration, and treat its continuation as proof of the authority of the institutions and the legitimacy of the system. What begins as a targeted reaction applied to a specific violation is repeated, extended, and maintained beyond its original scope. Over time, the expectation of punitive action acquires a life of its own, and support for punishment becomes a marker of allegiance to the prevailing order. Actions that once aimed to correct behavior evolve into assertions of dominance, and dissent is recast as disloyalty. As this process deepens, penalties grow harsher, the circle of responsibility expands, and temporal limits dissolve. Punishment, once applied to resolve conflict, is continued under conditions that reproduce the same conflict. When a punitive measure must be repeated indefinitely merely to prove that a rule still holds, the measure is no longer reinforcing the rule; the measure itself becomes the rule. When punishment is applied habitually, its function changes—no longer of law but of power. Habit grants power a moral vocabulary that disguises its interest as principle.
When law borrows the tone of justice itself, punishment is presented as restoration.

Once power begins to speak in the place of law, the line between what is and is not permitted may remain obscure, but the penalty for transgression is certain. Such obscurity transforms the law from a boundary of understanding into a field of intimidation. Power gains elasticity by refusing clarity; it rewards those who conform and isolates those who interpret too freely. In this inversion, the rule of law survives only in form but its grammar—definition, proportion, and foreseeability—has been erased.

6
Legitimacy is the foundation on which punishment stands. Without legitimacy, punishment no longer functions as justice and becomes an imposition of unchecked power—an exercise of power without lawful foundation. Legitimacy demands definition; tyranny thrives on ambiguity. For punishment to be legitimate, the rules it enforces must be established in advance, written in language that the public can understand, and open to examination and review through lawful procedures. To write rules in advance is to bind power to reason; it makes punishment a civic act—foreseeable, accountable, and shared—rather than the decision of whoever holds command. When these conditions are met, punishment serves a civic purpose, reinforces the rule of law, and secures its own legitimacy instead of weakening it.

7
Time limits are essential safeguards that prevent punishment from becoming a permanent condition. A consequence without a defined endpoint ceases to address a specific violation and becomes a permanent structure of power. When the duration of punishment is not limited by purpose, punishment no longer serves the law, but replaces it. This principle applies both within societies and among them: a sanction imposed on an individual, a community, or a State follows the same moral and structural logic. In foreign relations, punitive measures such as sanctions or embargoes function as instruments of discipline between States, and they risk the same transformation—from response to domination—when no path toward resolution is defined. The possibility of restoration—whether through legal standing, political recognition, or the end of hostilities—is not an act of leniency but a precondition for stability. Without a defined point of closure, the punished party has no reason to change course, and opposition becomes the only rational response. Durable orders, civic or international, therefore require an exit from punishment if they are to secure lasting peace.

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Deterrence is often described as the most rational purpose of punishment, yet its logic frequently is invoked under conditions that include other motives. Under vague statutes, however, deterrence no longer warns; it confuses. Political authorities often invoke deterrence to justify harsher measures and claim that fear of consequence will prevent future harm. But fear imposes compliance without addressing underlying conditions that give rise to transgression. A punitive policy designed to frighten rather than to understand or correct those conditions becomes less an instrument of prevention and more a mechanism for asserting control. It teaches not respect for the rule of law but submission to power. When deterrence functions in this way, it ceases to serve justice and instead sustains the very instability it claims to prevent.

Uncertainty is an inherent condition of every system of punishment. Facts are often incomplete, motives are mixed, and consequences can rarely be predicted with precision. When the absence of reason is institutionalized under the pretext of uncertainty, the temptation arises to punish not for actions already committed but for those merely expected. Measures such as preventive detention or deportation are imposed not on verified conduct but on assumptions about future behavior. These actions, though defended as safeguards against possible harm, risk turning suspicion into verdict. This form of preemptive punishment blurs the distinction between justice and prevention, replacing evidence with prediction. As the reach of punishment extends beyond proven acts into the realm of conjecture, the obligation to justify its use must grow correspondingly heavier.

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There are cases in which punishment is not only justified but necessary. Certain violations—treason, systemic corruption, sustained violence—break the foundation of shared order. Ignoring violations signals that common rules no longer carry consequence; this breakdown in enforcement creates the conditions for further harm. In such circumstances, punishment functions as an act of preservation: it re-establishes lawful boundaries and affirms that no person or group stands above the rules that govern collective life. Yet the legitimacy of this response depends on proportion and restraint. When punishment becomes the automatic answer to every offense, it ceases to serve justice and instead entrenches a culture of retribution. Punishment fulfills its purpose only when it is applied after reasoned explanation, fair procedure, and tangible repair have failed to resolve the violation; under those conditions, punishment restores the boundaries of order without extending harm beyond necessity.

Mercy functions as a limiting condition within systems of punishment rather than as a negation of justice. Where legal systems retain mechanisms for clemency, review, or proportional adjustment, punishment remains bounded by its original civic purpose. Systems that apply punishment without the possibility of mitigation or termination treat duration as authority and convert consequence into permanence. Under such conditions, punishment ceases to respond to a specific violation and instead establishes an enduring relation of domination.

The availability of mercy alters the operation of punishment by introducing temporal and proportional limits. These limits prevent punitive authority from extending beyond the circumstances that justified its initial application. When legal procedure excludes such limits, enforcement persists independently of the conduct that prompted it, and legality is reduced to repetition rather than judgment. Under such circumstance, punishment is administered as a continuous practice rather than as a reasoned response.

Systems that incorporate mercy preserve a distinction between law and command by allowing punishment to conclude once its stated purpose has been met. Where that distinction is maintained, punishment remains an instrument within the law rather than a substitute for it. Where it is not maintained, punishment operates without reference to restoration, and civic membership is replaced by continued exposure to sanction.

These principles are not abstractions but safeguards that keep the exercise of power subject to the law. When institutions apply punishment within those limits, the law retains its credibility because the consequences remain connected to reason. When institutions exceed those limits, punishment replaces the law as the source of authority, and conflict grows within the space that reason has abandoned. Under such circumstance, punishment no longer resolves the doing of wrong; it reproduces it. Justice survives only when the law speaks with a clarity that power cannot rewrite.

Tags: civic order, conflict, governance, human condition, justice, law, legitimacy, political authority, punishment, responsibility, Society
Posted in Political Philosophy, Ethics and Public Life, Political Culture, Civic Agency, Structures of Power, Modernity and Conflict, Essays (English) | Leave a Comment »

“A Planetary Proposal”

December 15, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
***Triangulation 10*: *A Planetary Proposal***
22″ x 30″
Watercolor and wax pencil on paper
2007

Ricardo F. Morín

November 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor

PREFACE

This essay proceeds from a simple recognition: the political structures inherited by humanity no longer correspond to the forces that now shape its survival. Climate volatility, digital acceleration, economic interdependence, and cross-border vulnerability operate at a planetary scale. They pass through air, water, data, and supply chains without regard for territorial boundaries. Yet the world remains organized as a collection of discrete sovereignties, each responsible for risks it can neither contain nor resolve alone.

What follows does not issue from optimism, inevitability, or visions of harmony. It begins instead from insufficiency. The institutions that once stabilized political life were not designed for conditions in which disruption propagates globally and instantaneously. The proposal set out here—a layered system of planetary coordination, universal provisioning, and protections for cultural autonomy—does not attempt to predict what political forms will emerge. It offers, rather, a conceptual architecture for what has become thinkable if human continuity is to remain plausible under conditions of deep interdependence.

The essay unfolds in three movements. First, it outlines a framework proportionate to the scale of contemporary risk. Second, it confronts the strongest objections—psychological, cultural, geopolitical, economic, and historical—that constrain any such reorganization. The analysis turns to transitional forms through which local identity may persist and coordination may emerge under conditions where fragmentation has already introduced risk. The work does not prescribe a future; it remains within the horizon in which political imagination operates.

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FRAMING WITHIN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY

This essay draws on a growing body of political theory concerned with the widening gap between global pressures and the limited reach of the nation-State. Thinkers such as Ulrich Beck (World Risk Society, 1999), David Held (Democracy and the Global Order, 1995), Jürgen Habermas (The Postnational Constellation, 2001), and Saskia Sassen (Territory, Authority, Rights, 2006) have traced how climate change, digital systems, and economic interdependence now exceed the capacities of territorial governance. Beck identifies risk itself as global; Held and Habermas explore multilevel governance; Sassen traces how authority migrates across networks that bypass borders. This essay remains aligned with these insights and grounds its argument in material conditions already in force, rather than in the likelihood that existing States will unify.

World-risk theorists—particularly Beck and Anthony Giddens (Runaway World, 1999)—describe a world bound by shared vulnerability: climate instability, pandemics, financial contagion, and digital exposure. No State can contain these alone. This essay takes that diagnosis as given by treating shared risk as the central justification for institutional redesign. Research on overlapping sovereignty, including the work of Anne-Marie Slaughter (A New World Order, 2004) and Neil Walker (Intimations of Global Law, 2015), demonstrates that authority is already dispersed across levels. What follows is an observation: dispersion without structure produces fragility; shared authority depends on deliberate design rather than on processes that accumulate without coordination.

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Philosophers of global justice such as Martha Nussbaum (Frontiers of Justice, 2006), Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, 1999), and Thomas Pogge (World Poverty and Human Rights, 2002) argue that basic human capabilities can no longer be secured solely within national borders. Welfare and opportunity have become transnational facts. Environmental political theorists such as Bruno Latour (Facing Gaia, 2017) and Robyn Eckersley (The Green State, 2004) further show that ecological systems impose demands no single government can meet. This essay treats as consequential these claims by proposing institutions scaled to ecological and technological interdependence rather than inherited jurisdiction.

Debates on digital power reinforce this necessity. Scholars such as Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019), Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI, 2021), and Helen Nissenbaum (Privacy in Context, 2010) document how artificial intelligence, data infrastructures, and algorithmic systems operate across borders while they evade national oversight. Technological power now moves independently of the frameworks intended to regulate it. The proposal places technological governance at the core of planetary coordination, not as an auxiliary concern.

Taken together, these strands suggest that neither nationalist retrenchment nor abstract universalism is adequate to present conditions. This essay proceeds from contemporary theory to articulate a political horizon grounded in necessity: viz. governance scaled to the forces that now shape human survival. It is not oriented toward abstraction, but toward a readable and coherent proposal calibrated to the realities already unfolding.

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I. The Proposal: A New World for a Species in Convergence

Humanity now occupies a threshold at which inherited political forms can no longer absorb the pressures shaping collective life. Climate instability, digital acceleration, migratory displacement, and economic interdependence operate at planetary scale. They traverse borders with a velocity that state-based systems were never designed to manage. Under such conditions, the question of survival converges with the question of institutional redesign.

The proposal proceeds from the recognition that sovereign States fragment responsibility at the very moment when coherence becomes necessary. Risks propagate globally; accountability remains local. A planetary framework emerges not as aspiration, but as a proportionate response to vulnerabilities that exceed national capacity.

Such a framework is limited to exercising authority only where fragmentation produces systemic exposure: viz. public health, climate stabilization, migration, resource governance, and global technologies. Cultural, legal, and administrative autonomy would remain firmly vested in regional and local institutions.

Universal welfare forms the structural foundation of this arrangement. It functions not as charity, but as stabilization. In an interconnected world, deprivation in one region generates instability across many. Access to healthcare, essential resources, and meaningful education defines the minimum threshold for participation in collective life.

A reconfiguration of value follows. Markets continue to operate, but certain goods—health, education, environmental security, and digital access—are guaranteed as rights. Universal income gives way to universal provisioning: a commitment to the material and intellectual conditions required for dignity and resilience.

As these changes take shape, borders assume a different role. They persist as administrative markers, but their capacity to regulate risk diminishes. Climate systems ignore boundaries; pathogens cross unchecked; digital infrastructures dissolve territorial limits. A planetary architecture emerges not as an endpoint, but as an adjustment to conditions already in motion.

Articulating such a world is not an act of idealism, but of proportional reasoning. Contemporary pressures demand political imagination commensurate with their scale. This proposal does not predict the future; it remains within the horizon.

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II. The Counterarguments: A Devil’s Advocate Examination

The first objection concerns identity. Sovereignty functions not only as law, but as a vessel of memory, history, and emotional continuity. A planetary framework introduces an additional layer of identification without historical precedent.

Geopolitical resistance follows. States—particularly powerful ones—have little incentive to dilute strategic advantage. Any global authority risks being perceived as erosion rather than coordination.

A third objection concerns scale. Institutions operating at planetary scope risk opacity, inertia, or capture. Coordination at such magnitude may introduce new forms of fragility.

Economic critiques question feasibility. Universal provisioning demands distributive mechanisms of unprecedented complexity. Markets, despite distortion, remain adaptive; alternatives risk inefficiency or coercion.

Cultural arguments register homogenization. Even with formal protections, global systems may exert subtle pressures toward uniformity, diluting linguistic and cultural specificity.

Psychological objections emphasize limits of restraint. Planetary cooperation presumes capacities for empathy and self-limitation that may not persist without enforcement.

Historical memory sharpens skepticism. Integrative projects have often provoked fragmentation. A planetary framework could generate resistance precisely because of its scale.

Taken together, these objections outline a dense field of constraint—psychological, cultural, geopolitical, organizational, and historical—that complicates any transition toward planetary organization.

III. The Resolution: A Movement Toward Planetary Organization

A credible resolution requires incorporation of these objections rather than dismiss them. Planetary coherence must be built where resistance is strongest, not where agreement is easiest.

The first element takes the form of architecture. Governance must be layered, not monolithic. Global authority is limited to narrow domains of shared vulnerability; States retain internal autonomy. Legal boundaries, transparency, and distributed representation constrain concentration of power.

The second element concerns welfare. Universal provisioning establishes a structural baseline financed through global levies and coordinated national systems. Markets operate above this floor; essential goods are insulated from volatility.

The third element addresses identity. Planetary citizenship functions as a complementary affiliation rather than a replacement. Education and the media cultivate awareness of shared ecological and technological systems without erasing cultural distinction.

The fourth element concerns power. Institutions are distributed across functions, protected by rotating leadership, independent oversight, and digital transparency. Authority remains limited, visible, and divisible.

The fifth element concerns tempo. Transition unfolds through intermediary arrangements: enforceable climate compacts, standardized digital governance, pandemic protocols, and regional unions experimenting with cross-border welfare.

Across these arrangements sovereignty becomes layered, welfare foundational, identity dual, and governance proportionate to vulnerability.

What emerges is not a utopian design, but a navigable movement from fragmentation toward coherence—one by which organization becomes possible.

EPILOGUE

This essay was written from within a condition of recognition rather than from a position of outcome. It observed the emergence of planetary interdependence as a factual state—environmental, technological, and economic—without assuming that recognition itself would compel coordination, restraint, or shared action. The proposal rested on the visibility of scale, not on the expectation of response.

What has since become clearer is not that the planetary condition was misread, but that its implications were overestimated. Interdependence does not suspend political habit. Global exposure does not dissolve national calculation. The existence of shared risk does not neutralize mistrust, nor does it override the logic by which States preserve autonomy through delay, insulation, or selective engagement.

The absence that now stands out is not empirical but structural. A planetary condition can be acknowledged while responsibility remains local, fragmented, or deferred. Systems adapt to crisis without reorienting their priorities. Cooperation becomes conditional, provisional, or transactional, rather than binding. What persists is adjustment, not alignment.

This does not negate the planetary frame. It clarifies its limits. The world does not move toward coherence by recognition alone. It moves through negotiation, withdrawal, recalibration, and self-protection—often simultaneously. Balance, when it appears, is not designed; it is reached unevenly, through constraint rather than consensus.

Seen from this angle, A Planetary Proposal records a moment of clarity rather than a program. It marks the point at which global exposure became unmistakable, without presuming that such exposure would produce a corresponding form of action. What follows in later essays does not extend that proposal. It narrows the lens, attending instead to the conditions under which recognition stalls, agency fragments, and adjustment replaces resolution.

Tags: Anthropocene, global risks, global welfare, institutional design, interdependence, planetary governance, political imagination, sovereignty, Survival
Posted in Political Theory, Global Governance, Future of Democracy, Philosophy, Planetary Ethics | Leave a Comment »

“Portrait of a President”

December 12, 2025

Ricardo F. Morín

Dec. 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor

Author’s Note

This text is not an argument for or against a political figure, nor an exercise in moral adjudication. It is a diagnostic portrait grounded in publicly documented actions, observable conduct, and historically verifiable record. Where legal distinctions matter, they are observed; where perception diverges from motive, that divergence is examined rather than dismissed.

The purpose of the portrait is not to negate the experiences of those who perceive sincerity or warmth in the subject, but to place such perceptions within a broader structure of behavior over time. Momentary affect (Affeck), private demeanor, and selective encounters are not treated here as evidence of character continuity, but as elements that coexist—sometimes uneasily—with patterns that have had public consequence.

This approach also governs how claims about exceptional capacity are handled. Assertions that substitute myth for evidence—such as declarations of near-superhuman intelligence—are not taken at face value. Whatever one makes of erratic reasoning, procedural confusion, or repeated misapprehension of legal and institutional constraints, such claims require the suspension of observable reality. In this sense, they function less as description than as compensation: they are attempts to reconcile dissonance with an image of mastery. When coherence falters, recourse shifts elsewhere. Validation through untruth does not illuminate capacity; it neutralizes contradiction.

No medical, psychological, or pathological claims are advanced. The analysis remains strictly within the realm of conduct, posture, and recurrence. Interpretation is offered where warranted; restraint is exercised where fact alone must suffice.

Readers inclined toward affirmation or rejection are invited to suspend both impulses. The text asks only that actions be considered in sequence, and that patterns be examined without haste. Agreement is not presumed; careful reading is.

Ricardo F. Morín

Oakland Park, F.

December 12, 2025

A Diagnostic Essay on Power, Posture, and Historical Pattern

What follows does not treat the body as evidence of interior disposition, but as a public surface upon which habits of power, repetition, and assertion have settled over time.

At the threshold of his ninth decade, the president’s physiognomy does not merely register the natural course of aging, but a progressive separation between impulse and restraint, between reflex and those mechanisms that once might have moderated it. What appears is not absence, but misalignment: capacities that persist without coordination, reactions that proceed without mediation.

The depletion of mental reserves is visible in the face as sustained tension. Within it coexist—without reconciliation—ambition and denial, assertion and fragility. The friction between lived reality and unyielding aspiration registers as hardened pride, resistant to revision.

This disjunction was already visible decades ago. In 1989, during the Central Park gang-rape case in New York City, he acted publicly with a full-page newspaper advertisement that asserted guilt and called for severe punishment of five young men who had not yet been tried. That impulsive certainty contributed to the hardening of public condemnation and accompanied years of wrongful incarceration before their eventual exoneration. That judgment was not revisited. The episode did not merely reveal error; it revealed an instinctive structure: certainty displacing deliberation, accusation preceding process.

The same insistence on continuity over correction appears elsewhere, not only in conduct but in presentation. The carefully maintained architecture of the public image—down to the elaborate construction of the hair, preserved with remarkable consistency across decades—signals a preference for stabilization without altering course. Change is absorbed at the surface; the form is retained.

It is worth noting, however, that many among his followers—and even some who do not align with him politically but refrain from opposing him for reasons of self-preservation—describe him not as sycophants, but out of a genuine belief that there exists a side of him that is sincere, even warm. This perception should not be dismissed outright. It reflects an experienced reality for those who encounter him in limited or controlled contexts. Yet it merits examination, precisely because such impressions can collapse momentary demeanor with durable motive. Warmth, when unmoored from consistency or restraint, does not necessarily temper impulse; it may instead coexist with it, selectively deployed, while underlying patterns remain unchanged.

That same reflex remains latent now, seemingly undiminished by time. It reappears not as argument, but as posture.

The mouth, shaped by a retracted upper lip, indicates containment rather than speech. Impulse appears held in suspension rather than moderated. The eyes, asymmetrical and vigilant, remain oriented outward rather than inward, and register the surrounding environment less as a field of exchange than as a space to be assessed. The raised brows no longer convey conviction; they recur as a habitual assertion, repeatedly reaffirmed. The skin, excessively oxygenated and cast in a plated golden hue, emphasizes surface continuity over variation; it renders vitality as appearance rather than integration.

Breathing registers as effortful rather than relaxed, marked by insistence rather than ease. The slight forward inclination of the head does not solicit response; it precedes it and positions the surrounding world as something to be met rather than encountered.

Across these gestures, continuity replaces adjustment. The body sustains assertion even as conditions shift and preserves posture where recalibration might otherwise occur.

Subsequent years reinforce the structure already visible in earlier conduct. Civil findings, publicly documented associations, and recurring allegations—distinct in legal status yet convergent in pattern—consistently exhibit the same sequence: impulse preceding judgment, dominance supplanting restraint, consequence treated as incidental rather than corrective.

Taken as a whole, the portrait does not depict the disappearance of better instincts, but their displacement. They persist as non-operative remnants—present, yet sidelined—while more primitive reflexes increasingly shape gesture and response. What once might have moderated action now stands apart, as the figure continues to operate through inertia rather than integration.

On “Derangement,” Power, and the Loss of Measure

The term “derangement” entered public discourse not as a diagnosis, but as an accusation. It was used to explain opposition, dissent, and even tragedy. When a murdered individual was described as a victim of so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the phrase did not seek to describe belief. It functioned as displacement. Attention shifted away from the violent act and toward loyalty. The action was not examined; the critic was pathologized.

That inversion raises a broader question: whether the conduct it shields has precedents in American presidential history.

The United States has had impulsive, vindictive, and reckless presidents. Andrew Jackson governed through personal animus and disregarded judicial authority. Richard Nixon cultivated enemies and acted in secrecy against constitutional limits. Woodrow Wilson suppressed dissent and imposed ideological conformity during wartime. Each violated the ethical expectations of his time. Each altered the standards of the office.

In every case, however, an external measure remained. Jackson knew which law he defied. Nixon concealed his actions because concealment still mattered. Wilson justified repression by appealing to national unity and moral necessity. Their excesses were legible because the norms they breached were still recognized.

What distinguishes the present case is not the presence of ethical failure, but the absence of ethical reference altogether.

Disagreement is no longer treated as opposition, but as pathology. Responsibility is not debated; it is transferred. Facts are not rebutted; they are dismissed as hostile fabrications. Tragedy is neither examined nor mourned; it is absorbed as grievance. The categories that once structured judgment—truth, responsibility, proportion—are not merely violated. They are stripped of standing.

This is not only authoritarian behavior. It is governance by assertion. Repetition replaces justification. Loyalty replaces evaluation. The self becomes the measure through which reality is ordered.

Historical comparisons are tempting. Caligula. Genghis Khan. Other names surface by instinct. Not because the scale is comparable, but because the logic feels familiar.

Even so, tyrants governed within recognizable frameworks: divine right, conquest, destiny, lineage. Their cruelty operated within an order that produced meaning, however brutal.

No such framework is invoked here. Authority rests neither on the law nor tradition. It appeals to neither theology nor ideology. It rests solely on personal identification. Those who align are affirmed. Those who dissent are declared defective.

The danger does not lie in the breaking of norms—American history offers many such examples—but in the removal of the criteria by which a norm is recognized. When opposition is defined as illness, there is nothing left to debate. When tragedy is explained by belief rather than by action, there is nothing left to examine. The public is not asked to judge. It is asked to align.

This condition requires no diagnosis to be understood. It requires attention.

What is observable is sufficient: the language used, the repeated reversals, the ease with which responsibility dissolves into accusation. The portrait that emerges is neither one of exceptional intelligence nor of singular malice. It is that of a presidency exercised without measure, where contradiction no longer registers as contradiction and power asserts itself without external reference.

Such a presidency tests more than institutions. It tests whether citizens can still distinguish between disagreement and deviance, between explanation and excuse, between loyalty and judgment.

The portrait does not need to close with a warning. Observation is enough. What remains is a scene in which authority is sustained not by what is done, but by who aligns—and in which the office, stripped of measure, comes to reflect only the person who occupies it.

Tags: authoritarian posture, contemporary politics, diagnostic writing, ethics of power, historical accountability, impulse and restraint, leadership analysis, perception and motive, political power, public figures
Posted in Politics, Essays, Power and Leadership, Ethics, Cultural Criticism, Contemporary History | Leave a Comment »

“The Space Thought Finds”

December 11, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
***Still Eight***: **The Space Thought Finds**
Oil on linen mounted on wood panel
12 by 15 by 3/4inches
2010

Ricardo F. Morín

Dec. 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This essay examines a phenomenon that emerges in societies where civic limits and intellectual appetite coexist. It does not describe a psychological condition or a sociological trend, nor does it judge any nation. Its purpose is simpler: to observe how thought adapts when the public space in which it moves is narrower than the private space in which it develops.

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates how intellectual life often persists—even thrives—in environments where civic participation is restricted. It describes the structural conditions that make this coexistence possible, the historical habits that render it familiar, and the tensions it produces. Rather than seeking causes or proposing remedies, the essay observes how thought finds room to act when civic space contracts, and how this adaptation shapes cultural life.

Every society creates conditions in which thought must find its footing. In some places, civic life offers wide avenues for debate, dissent, and organized participation. In others, the avenues narrow: institutions limit expression, political continuity restricts competition, or public life becomes regulated by boundaries that citizens did not choose. Yet even within these limits, thought does not disappear. It looks for other spaces—quieter, more internal, less visible—where reflection can continue.

This coexistence is not contradictory. A population may cultivate disciplined study, meticulous reading habits, and a strong appetite for ideas while navigating restrictions on political voice. Intellectual inquiry can flourish in classrooms, libraries, private circles, or artistic practice even when formal participation in public life is constrained. The two conditions do not cancel one another; they unfold in parallel.

Part of this coexistence is historical. Societies inherit habits shaped over decades or generations. When public limits remain stable, they become part of the environment rather than an interruption. People learn to navigate around those limits, allocating some questions to public conversation and others to private reflection. Over time, this arrangement no longer feels provisional; it becomes a familiar pattern of life.

Another part of the coexistence is structural. Not every form of thinking requires the same degree of civic freedom. Institutional critique demands a wide public space, but philosophical examination, ethical reflection, and conceptual inquiry can develop in quieter settings. These forms of thought do not depend on protest or political leverage. They depend on attention, which can remain active even when public expression is not.

Yet this adaptation introduces a tension. Thought that flourishes privately may find no path into shared life. Insight lives in the individual but cannot circulate through institutions. The result is not silence but separation: intellectual depth on one side, civic restriction on the other. Each remains intact, but the bridge between them is narrow.

This tension is not a paradox but a structure. Intellectual inquiry survives by adjusting its location. It moves inward, turning the private sphere into a workshop for ideas. It becomes a form of endurance rather than resistance. This endurance is neither passive nor resigned; it is a way of continuing to think when public avenues are limited.

The phenomenon is neither exclusive to one region nor confined to a single political model. It appears wherever civic limits coincide with cultural ambition—whether shaped by history, institutions, or circumstance. What differs from one society to another is not the existence of this tension but how it is lived: as normalcy, as compromise, or as a quiet imbalance accepted as part of daily life.

The deeper question is not why this coexistence happens, nor whether it should be otherwise. The question is what this coexistence reveals: that thought seeks space even when civic space contracts; that reflection persists even when public expression narrows; and that the need to understand does not vanish under limits. It simply relocates, finding equilibrium—uneasy, stable, and always in motion.

Tags: civic limits, civic structure, constraint, cultural adaptation, cultural analysis, historical conditioning, intellectual inquiry, Perception, private reflection, public space
Posted in Essays, Civic Philosophy, Political Structures, Cultural Reflection, Intellectual Life | Leave a Comment »

“CIVIC AGENCY”

December 9, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
***Teratological Topographies Series One***: **CIVIC AGENCY**
Oil On Linen
Quadtych: Each panel: 14 by 18 by 3/4 inches
2009

Ricardo F. Morín

November, 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor, NY, NY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This essay examines conditions frequently distorted by ideology, moral inheritance, or historical narrative. Questions of sovereignty, occupation, revolution, exile, and national identity are often debated through claims that appeal to absolutes—religious entitlement, historical grievance, or revolutionary legitimacy. These claims differ in language but share the same structure: they place a single idea over civic realities of people whose lives are structured by such narratives.

To address what is obscured by these narratives, the essay turns to a structural factor that cuts across these differences: civic agency, understood as the capacity of people to shape the conditions of civic life through their participation, representation, and lawful processes. When civic agency is removed—whether through external control, internal authoritarianism, or deterrence directed at displaced populations; the form of the constraint may change, but the civic effect remains constant.

This essay does not compare political histories. It examines how State power, in its various configurations, regulates civic life. It considers how ideology obscures this regulation and how populations experience the consequences of decisions in which they have little or no role. The goal is not to reduce political conflict but to call attention to the structures that determine whether freedom is possible or remains beyond reach.

ABSTRACT

This essay will argue that the most reliable way to understand situations that appear politically incompatible—such as Palestinian statelessness and Cuban authoritarian sovereignty—is to examine the structural absence of the civic agency that defines both. Although the forms of constraint differ, the civic condition comes together: the State, whether external or internal, restricts the capacity of the population to shape its own civic life. By analyzing how State regulation limits participation, suppresses representation, or fragments jurisdiction, this essay will show how civic agency becomes the central measure of freedom. It will further examine how ideological narratives, policies of deterrence, and migratory pressures hide this structural reality. The aim is not to adjudicate political claims but to bring to light the conditions under which civic life can be formed, protected, or denied.

Every attempt to understand political life must begin with the recognition that populations do not experience freedom as an abstraction; they experience it through the structures regulating their civic existence. These structures determine how decisions are made, how authority is exercised, and whether or not people can participate in shaping the conditions for their own lives. Civic agency is therefore not an ideal but a condition that either exists or not. When it is absent, freedom appears as a formal claim rather than a lived condition.

Civic agency consists of three components: participation, representation, and lawful process. Participation allows individuals and communities to influence public decisions. Representation provides continuity between the governed and the governing body. Lawful processes ensure that authority is exercised within defined limits. When any of these components is removed, the people lose their capacity to shape the civic environment they inhabit. This loss may occur by external regulation, internal authoritarianism, or policies reducing civic life to a set of restrictions that diminishes a shared domain.

The absence of civic agency can take different forms. A population may be governed by institutions that do not recognize the communities’ sovereignty and thus leave civic agency subject to regulations that the people have no significant role in its shaping. Alternatively, a people may inhabit a sovereign State that suppresses political pluralism, restricts lawful dissent, and monopolizes institutional authority. In both cases, the civic condition is suppressed: the people are without the ability to influence the rules that govern them.

The Palestinian case illustrates the first form. Multiple authorities regulate movement, territory, and public life without providing unified jurisdiction or sovereign protection. Decisions made by external States define daily existence and leave the population without consistent civic rights or a stable institutional framework. The absence of sovereignty is not only territorial but civic; this absence takes away the mechanisms by which participation and representation are possible.

The situation with Cuba represents the second form. Although the State possesses sovereignty, it concentrates political authority within a single institutional apparatus and restricts lawful avenues for dissent, competition, or structural reform. Citizens live under a system that maintains political continuity by restricting avenues for participation. Sovereignty prevails; civic agency is limited.

Palestine and Cuba differ, of course, in history, structure, and origin; yet they align in one respect: the State, whether external or internal, restricts participation in ways that make civic agency unattainable. The absence of agency is the common element that marks the civic condition beneath political narratives. This absence also provides a framework through which populations that experience different forms of constraint are to be understood without conflation.

Ideological narratives frequently align with existing distributions of power. Religious entitlement asserts that land is secured by divine mandate rather than civic protection. Revolutionary rhetoric proclaims that political authority is justified by historical struggle rather than accountability. Both forms of narrative elevate an absolute over the civic realities of the population. They replace agency with allegiance, and they interpret restriction as necessity, and not as a failure of representation.

Migration provides a third lens through which the limits of civic agency become visible. People leave their countries when the structures regulating their lives collapse or become uninhabitable. They seek stability, protection, and the ability to rebuild civic participation in new surroundings. Yet policies of deterrence in host States often mirror the pressures that displaced them. The new States restrict the migrants’ movements, their access to social institutions, and narrow the possibilities of belonging to a civic order. These policies do not reproduce the original dilemma, but host States reintroduce the experience of living under rules that they cannot influence.

For many asylum seekers, these restrictive measures narrow the distance between the pressures that forced their departure and the pressures they encounter upon their arrival, a shift that makes stability hard to distinguish from exclusion. European examples such as Denmark and the United Kingdom reveal how deterrence is used to discourage asylum without acknowledging the civic vacancy it creates. The United States employs similar policies at its borders and presents deterrence as an instrument of order, which leaves migrants suspended between exclusion and unresolved civic status.

The structural argument is not that these situations are equivalent, but that the absence of civic agency creates a civic condition transcending political differences. Populations ruled without participation, governed without representation, or confined within systems that restrict lawful processes experience freedom as external to their civic environment. This condition cannot be explained by ideology because ideology addresses identity, justification, or legitimacy—not agency.

Understanding civic agency clarifies the difference between political claims and civic realities. Sovereignty does not guarantee freedom; revolution does not guarantee participation; religious entitlement does not guarantee protection. Civic agency exists only when people can shape the conditions that guide them. When this becomes impossible, the people do not inhabit a civic order but a regulated space.

When civic agency becomes the measure through which political life is understood, ideological narratives lose their authority, and the structure of constraint becomes visible. This visibility does not resolve conflict but reveals the conditions under which freedom can either emerge or remain unapproachable. Civic agency is where the possibility of civic life begins and where its absence becomes structurally apparent.

Tags: asylum seekers, civic agency, civic freedom, Cuba, ideology, legal processes, migration, Palestine, participation, representation, sovereignty, state authority, structural analysis
Posted in Essays, Civic Philosophy, Comparative Politics, Migration, State and Citizenship | Leave a Comment »

“River Grass”

December 7, 2025

Ricardo F Morin

Dec. 6, 2025

Naples. Florida

*

Author’s Note

This diptych, “River Grass” and “Naples in the Morning,” brings together a reflection on continuity and a brief observation of everyday life. Two scenes—one sustained, the other fleeting—register how experience, silence, and attention shape presence. The first part, “River Grass,” does not present an argument, a confession, or a theory. It offers an observation shaped over time by proximity rather than distance. The focus is not on individual psychology or relational conflict, but on patterns that take form across generations and persist quietly within everyday life.

What follows avoids moral explanation and narrative resolution. It attends instead to continuity—how restraint, generosity, and presence may be transmitted not through instruction or memory, but through posture, habit, and orientation. The intention is to describe without adjudicating, and to clarify without assigning cause where cause cannot be cleanly isolated. What is traced here represents one possible orientation among many, shaped by inheritance but not exhaustive of its effects—an invitation not to mistake the channel for the ocean.

Orientation of “River Grass”

What follows attends to what persists when lives are shaped by continuity rather than interruption.

I. Inheritance

Not all inheritance arrives as memory. Some is conveyed without story, without date, without language. It enters through atmosphere rather than narrative—through cadence, restraint, posture, and a preference for continuity over display. In such cases, history is not recalled; it is carried.

This form of inheritance does not announce itself as trauma. It leaves no single scene to revisit, no episode that can be isolated and explained. Instead, it appears as a way of moving through the world: measured, attentive, resistant to excess. The past exerts influence not by instruction but by shaping what feels permissible, sustainable, or necessary.

Under these conditions, restraint is not experienced as loss. It functions as orientation. Accommodation does not signal submission but competence. Stability reflects not the absence of desire but the quiet placement of desire among other priorities. What is transmitted is not fear but caution—an ethic of endurance refined over time.

Because no event is foregrounded, little invites interpretation. The absence of visible distress encourages the assumption of ease. Life appears ordered, generous, and intact. Yet the inheritance remains active and structures conduct without requiring acknowledgment. It persists not as memory but as form.

Such inheritance often resists recognition precisely because it has succeeded. The past has not repeated itself. Continuity has been preserved. What remains is a posture oriented toward sustaining that continuity—a vigilance so normalized that it passes as temperament rather than history.

II. Restraint

Restraint, in this context, does not operate as inhibition or denial. It functions as a stabilizing orientation—an internal calibration shaped over time. Action is guided less by expression than by proportion and durability. What governs choice is not moral judgment but coherence.

Such restraint often coexists with clarity and decisiveness. Boundaries are maintained without conflict; decisions are made without excess emphasis. What is avoided is not agency but surplus. Expression is moderated not through fear of consequence, but through an internal sense of sufficiency.

Accommodation here is frequently misread. It does not arise from compliance or uncertainty, but from an assessment of impact. Space yielded to others reflects confidence in structure rather than retreat from position. Presence remains intact even when it is not foregrounded.

This orientation produces a stability that can appear effortless. Friction is minimized. Demands are rare. The absence of insistence is readily mistaken for ease or contentment. Yet the restraint at work is active, not passive—and continuously shapes what is articulated, deferred, or left unspoken.

Over time, restraint becomes difficult to distinguish from identity. It ceases to register as a choice among alternatives and hardens into posture. The question of expression recedes, replaced by an emphasis on responsibility, proportion, and non-disruption.

III. Generosity

Generosity shaped by inherited restraint rarely announces itself. It does not seek recognition or reciprocation, nor does it depend on visibility for validation. It appears instead as availability, as the quiet removal of obstacles, as the willingness to yield space without narrative or sacrifice.

In this form, giving is non-transactional. No balance is tracked; no return anticipated. What is offered is steadiness rather than favor. Support unfolds without appeal, often unnoticed, absorbed into ordinary conduct. The absence of demand is integral rather than incidental.

Because it imposes no weight, such generosity leaves little trace. Others encounter freedom without sensing its source. Autonomy is enabled without attribution. The one who gives remains present yet unmarked.

Over time, the habit of making room for others becomes more practiced than the habit of entering it. Attention turns outward and refines responsiveness while narrowing self-directed articulation. What persists is not loss, but redirection.

This configuration resists conventional readings of imbalance. No grievance emerges; no conflict announces asymmetry. Generosity remains intact, even exemplary. What shifts subtly is internal emphasis: presence exercised through allowance rather than assertion.

IV. Desire

Desire, within this orientation, is neither denied nor suppressed. It is repositioned. Its legitimacy is not questioned, but its urgency is diminished. What is set aside is not longing itself, but the expectation that longing must organize life.

Desire is acknowledged yet rarely centered. Expression is permitted elsewhere more readily than inwardly claimed. Attention gravitates toward what preserves stability rather than what intensifies experience. Satisfaction arises from coherence rather than culmination.

This produces no vacancy. Life remains engaged and responsive. What diminishes is insistence. Continuity comes to matter more than appetite; durability more than immediacy.

Because this arrangement is not framed as renunciation, it escapes notice. No moral language surrounds it. Nothing is named as sacrifice. Desire persists at a distance—observed, managed, deferred without struggle.

Over time, identity becomes shaped less by pursuit than by maintenance. Expression gives way to stewardship. Meaning accrues not through arrival, but through the avoidance of rupture.

V. Virtue

Patterns organized around restraint and continuity are often mistaken for moral attainment. Composure is read as wisdom; accommodation as maturity; silence as depth. Because no disturbance arises, the orientation escapes examination. What functions smoothly is presumed complete.

This misreading is reinforced by social frameworks that reward stability over inquiry. Absence of conflict is taken as evidence of balance. Generosity without demand is praised rather than interrogated. Its costs remain obscured precisely because they impose nothing on others.

Virtue, in this setting, becomes indistinguishable from habit. Adaptive orientation solidifies into character, and character into expectation. Reliability is affirmed repeatedly, deepening its hold.

The result is not deception but omission. The steadiness is genuine. What goes unrecognized is how fully such an arrangement organizes life around preservation rather than presence. The question of displacement remains unasked, not refused.

Misreading occurs through success. Relations endure. Structures hold. No obvious harm appears. And so the deeper configuration—quiet, durable, historically shaped—continues beneath the language of virtue.

VI. Continuity

At a certain threshold, continuity shifts from supporting means to governing end. Life becomes organized not around fulfillment, but around preservation. What matters most is that nothing essential is exposed to rupture, whether through excess demand or through untested assertion.

Fulfillment is not rejected, but subordinated. Satisfaction arises from duration rather than intensity. Time is oriented toward extension, not culmination. What is valued is the capacity to carry forward intact.

This proves effective. The past does not recur. Stability holds. Loss is contained rather than amplified. Inherited imperatives are honored not through recollection, but through conduct.

Yet when continuity occupies this position, the range of permissible movement narrows. Change must justify itself in advance. Desire must demonstrate durability before enactment. Expression yields to maintenance.

The future is approached as responsibility rather than as open terrain. Meaning accumulates through safeguarding what is essential rather than through the exploration of possibilities. Success becomes synonymous with the preservation of continuity.

VII. Presence

Presence, in its final form here, does not organize itself around position or priority. It functions laterally and sustains structure without becoming its focus. Life is held together through attentiveness rather than through claims to authority or justification. The course of life proceeds without pressure to arrive at an explanation that secures its coherence.

This mode of presence resists visibility. It does not seek recognition or assert precedence. Its efficacy lies in what remains intact rather than in what is achieved. Others move freely, often unaware of the support permitting such freedom.

To remain outside the center is not withdrawal. Engagement continues—measured, responsive, intact. What is avoided is domination, not participation. Influence is exercised through stability rather than direction.

The image implied by the title takes form. A river that advances without force, reshaping terrain through the sustained persistence of its course. Motion without spectacle. Endurance without inscription. The course is maintained by flowing around obstruction rather than confronting it.

What remains is continuity itself—quietly sustained, seldom noticed, and difficult to name.

*

“Naples in the Morning”

I sat across from my husband at a breakfast place in Naples, Florida. Diagonally behind him sat a young couple. The woman was small—almost childlike in scale—next to her husband, who stood well over six feet.

None of us had ordered yet. She carefully arranged her silverware and napkin, aligning them with deliberate precision, almost ritualistic. Her hair fell forward, parted to either side of her face like curtains drawn closed. When she lifted her chin, her facial features—Asian in appearance—came briefly into view. Despite her slightness, her posture suggested control rather than fragility.

When our glances crossed, she held my gaze longer than expected, nearly staring. She then lowered her head, hiding again behind her hair. Moments later, she lifted it once more and made the sign of the cross—forehead, chest, shoulder to shoulder—before turning fully back toward her husband. No words were exchanged.

When the food arrived, she resumed the same careful demeanor. She sliced her omelet into small, uniform squares, placed the knife down, and paused. Each piece was lifted individually, slowly, with unbroken repetition, as if rehearsed. The sequence carried the quality of performance. Though she remained oriented toward her husband, her torso shifted intermittently, angling slightly in my direction.

When they finished and moved toward the register, she rose first and walked ahead, chin lowered, hair once again masking her surroundings. He followed—tall, broad, moving through the room with visible ease. His stride was expansive, unguarded.

They left without speaking.

Diptych.

Tags: continuity, Endurance, ethics, generosity, inheritance, interior life, Memory, observation, Presence, restraint
Posted in Essays, Reflection, Culture, Ethics, Art and Thought | Leave a Comment »

“Geographies of Survival”

December 2, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
***Still Thirty-seven: Geographies of Survival***
Oil on linen & board
15″ x 12″ x 1/2″
2012

Ricardo F. Morín

November 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Author’s Note

This essay examines how human groups respond to instability when the conditions that once sustained them begin to fail. Its focus is not on specific crises, events, or regions, but on the structural pressures that compel populations either to relocate or to defend their ground. I approach the subject without moral interpretation and without attributing virtue or fault to the choices communities make under duress. The aim is simply to describe the grammars of behavior that arise when survival becomes uncertain and to trace how identity, claims to legitimacy, and patterns of continuity reorganize themselves under those pressures. The essay does not propose solutions or anticipate outcomes; it observes the patterns that emerge when stability dissolves and the land itself ceases to offer guarantees.

Abstract

Geographies of Survival explores two fundamental responses to instability: migration and entrenchment. When climate disruption, scarcity, or civic breakdown exceed a community’s capacity to endure, populations seek stability either through movement or through defending their position. Migration reorganizes identity through adaptation to new conditions; entrenchment intensifies identity to preserve continuity in place. These responses arise from the same pressures and function as parallel strategies for survival rather than opposing moral positions. The essay examines how claims to legitimacy, patterns of identification, and the search for continuity are reshaped by these pressures, and how the friction between movement and resistance reflects structural forces rather than cultural incompatibility. Its purpose is to illuminate the conditions under which these survival grammars emerge and the ways they transform the meaning of land, stability, and collective life.

Migration is often described as the movement of people from one place to another, but this description obscures the deeper forces at work. Migration is not merely geography in motion; it is also the expression of a survival grammar that becomes visible whenever a community faces conditions it can no longer absorb. Climate shifts, failing economies, collapsing states, and persisting insecurities create pressures that exceed the capacity of existing structures. Under these pressures, a population confronts a choice so fundamental that it precedes ideology: to move or to entrench.

These are not parallel options. They are opposing responses built from the same materials—fear, instability, and the search for continuity. Migration seeks stability by relocating; entrenchment seeks stability by confronting the agents of instability directly. Neither response is superior. Neither is voluntary. Both emerge from conditions that compress judgment, narrow possibility, and force communities to defend themselves against forces too large to negotiate.

Migration begins when a group concludes that the geography that sustained it can no longer guarantee survival. The land fails, or institutions collapse, or the future narrows. Movement becomes the only remaining form of protection. Yet movement does not dissolve identity—it reorganizes it. A migrating population must redefine its internal coherence in relation to unfamiliar surroundings. Identity becomes adaptive not by preference but by necessity. Adaptation is not reinvention; it is survival.

Entrenchment moves in the opposite direction. When a group chooses to remain in place, it must defend what movement would surrender: territory, memory, continuity, and the stability that comes from rootedness. Entrenchment therefore intensifies identification rather than loosening it. Boundaries become rigid. Narratives harden. Conflict becomes a strategy rather than an interruption. A community that fights to remain where it is must believe that displacement would erase it. Confrontation becomes a method of preservation.

Cultural confrontation arises most sharply when a migrating population settles on land that another group interprets as an extension of its own continuity. To the migrant community, the land represents safety, possibility, or relief from pressures that made departure unavoidable. To the entrenched community, the same land represents memory, inheritance, and the boundary that protects its historical coherence. Each group sees the other as the agent of potential erasure: migrants perceive exclusion and hostility; entrenched populations perceive encroachment and loss. Conflict escalates not because either group seeks domination, but because each interprets survival through a different grammar—adaptation for one, preservation for the other.

Policies adopted in countries such as Denmark and the United Kingdom illustrate how entrenched societies respond when migration is perceived as a threat. For many asylum seekers, these deterrent measures narrow the distance between the pressures that forced them to leave and the pressures they encounter upon arrival, a condition that makes stability difficult to distinguish from exclusion. Governments frequently defend entrenched policies by arguing that the resources needed to support asylum seekers are limited, and that extending those resources further would risk weakening existing systems of welfare, housing, and public order.

These responses of movement and entrenchment seem incompatible, yet they describe a single reality: populations under pressure behave according to the survival strategies available to them, not according to idealized accounts of culture or volition. When migrants and entrenched populations come into contact, each sees the other through the lens of its own pressures. Migrants see protection; the entrenched see threat. Migrants carry adaptation; the entrenched carry defense. Each posture misreads the other because each is responding to different forms of danger.

Climate change intensifies these divergent responses, not by determining them but by tightening the conditions under which communities must choose. Climate does not produce conflict by itself; it alters the margins within which stability is possible. Regions once predictable become irregular; resources once continuous become intermittent. As these margins narrow, some populations interpret movement as the only viable safeguard, while others interpret remaining in place as the only defensible continuity. The same pressure exposes different vulnerabilities, and each community responds according to its own history, capacity, and thresholds of endurance—rather than to climate alone.

The friction between these grammars—movement and entrenchment—should not be mistaken for a clash of civilizations. It is a collision between two interpretations of threat. One group treats survival as relocation; the other treats survival as resistance. Both postures emerge from instability; both use identity as a tool shaped by circumstance rather than as a fixed inheritance. Identity becomes an instrument of continuity, shaped by conditions that leave little room for negotiation or reflection.

The world often interprets these collisions through moral, ideological, or geopolitical frames, but such interpretations obscure the deeper movement: instability reorganizes identity faster than identity reorganizes the world. When geography shifts, populations adapt. When populations adapt, meanings shift. Collective life becomes contested not because cultures are inherently antagonistic, but because survival pressures force groups into patterns they would not otherwise choose.

If there is a universal character to the present century, it is this: the pressures that produce migration are the same pressures that produce conflict among those who refuse to migrate. To understand one without the other is to misunderstand both. Movement and entrenchment are not opposites but consequences—expressions of the structural instability that now shapes every region, every culture, every claim to continuity.

The question that follows is neither predictive nor ideological. It is simply the next step in the logic of this analysis: What forms of stability become possible when migration and entrenchment are understood not as opposing moral positions but as parallel responses to the same changing world? The answer is not yet visible, but the conditions that will shape it already are.

Tags: adaptation, climate pressure, collective behavior, conflict structures, continuity, entrenchment, geography, Identity, instability, migration, structural forces, survival strategies
Posted in Essays, Civic Ethics, Global Dynamics, Structural Analysis | Leave a Comment »

“Stirrings—Remociones”

November 30, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
**Triangulation 6: Stirrings—Remociones**
22″ x 30″
Watercolor and ink
2006

Ricardo Morin

November 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Author’s Note

Stirrings is a four-part haiku cycle that traces the quiet movement from openness to pain, from endurance to renewal. Each poem enters the body—breath, joints, thought, sweetness—to reveal how life continues in fleeting moments of air, light, and vitality. The sequence is presented in parallel English and Castilian Spanish.

heart thrown wide

breath cradled in blood—

the world stirs the air

corazón abierto

el aliento en la sangre—

el mundo agita el aire

joints drawn tight

thought held within pain—

the day lifts its light

articulaciones tensas

el pensamiento en el dolor—

el día alza su luz

III

may I be love

through the deepening lows—

to rise once again

que yo sea amor

en estos hondos descensos—

para alzarme otra vez

sweet peaches warm

their juice the taste of life—

as if death forgot

melocotones tibios

su jugo el sabor de la vida—

como si la muerte olvidara

Tags: bilingual poetry, breath, contemplative writing, embodiment, haiku, minimalism, Mortality, pain, renewal, short-form, sweetness, tetralogy
Posted in • Poetry • Bilingual (English–Spanish) • Haiku Sequence • Contemporary Short-Form • Reflections / Meditative Work | Leave a Comment »

“The Masquerade of Small Government”

November 27, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
***Silent Quadtych: The Masquerade of Small Government***
Each Panel: 22’ x 30”
Watercolor, graphite, gesso, acrylic on paper
2010

Ricardo F. Morín

November, 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Author’s Note

The idea of shrinking government in the United States has recurred across administrations, yet the national deficit persists and the central obligations of public life (Social Security, Medicare, rising healthcare costs, and the long-term fiscal imbalance) remain structurally unresolved. Initiatives framed as efficiency programs often divert attention from these enduring commitments. This essay examines the distance between the performance of reform and the realities that persist beneath that performance, and asks what remains concealed when a portrayal of reform is presented as transformation—particularly the corporate interests that benefit when regulatory and oversight functions are reduced.

The recent closure of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reveals more than an administrative shortfall. The initiative began with the extravagant promise of saving several trillion dollars, yet concluded with an unverifiable claim equivalent to roughly three percent of the federal budget. The disparity is not a technical miscalculation but a symbolic one. The disparity exposes a political pattern in which sweeping reform is announced, performance is staged, and the result is a gesture that bears little relation to the scale of the aspiration. What had appeared to be a disciplined restructuring of government became instead an example of how ambition can detach from feasibility.

The language of efficiency has long exerted a nearly irresistible appeal. That language suggests a vision of governance freed from excess, guided by prudence, and aligned with fiscal virtue. Yet efficiency functions as a metaphor rather than a principle. The metaphor conceals assumptions about what government should do, what citizens require, and what modern complexity demands. One assumption is that public obligations can be met with fewer instruments; another is that smaller institutions inherently serve the public better. Both assumptions overlook the fact that intricate societies require robust capacity, and that such capacity necessarily entails cost.

When such programs collide with the operational realities of administration, their limits become evident. Federal agencies exist because the responsibilities they discharge cannot be managed by private initiative alone. These agencies coordinate infrastructure, regulate markets, monitor systemic risks, and mediate conflicts among large and often competing interests. Attempts to severely curtail these functions rarely yield the projected savings, because the underlying needs do not disappear. Reformers confront a simple truth: indispensable functions cannot be eliminated without consequence.

What emerges instead is appearance without substance. The promise of cutting government satisfies a cultural demand for acts that signal restraint, even if the result satisfies little else. That promise affirms a narrative in which bureaucracy is imagined as the obstacle to national well-being and institutional reduction as the remedy. Yet an appearance of reform often substitutes for substantive reform. Procedural actions are elevated to the status of outcomes, and the declaration of change is treated as proof that change has occurred.

Behind this representation stands a deeper strategy. When government is weakened, the scope of public oversight contracts. Such contraction reallocates authority rather than removing it. In the absence of robust public institutions, nongovernmental power centers (corporations, high-wealth individuals, and other privately controlled entities operating without electoral accountability) assume a wider sphere of influence, operating with fewer obligations and almost no transparency. The rhetoric of shrinking the State therefore conceals a different movement entirely: the expansion of discretion outside the channels of democratic accountability.

This expansion is most visible in the consolidation of wealth. When regulatory and investigative capacities narrow, the constraints on large fortunes diminish. Concentrated capital extends its reach across industries, infrastructure, data, and information systems. Efforts to limit the scope of government therefore operate as a shield under which private power accumulates with minimal resistance. What is framed as the removal of constraints becomes, in practice, the removal of limits on private authority from public scrutiny.

Such conditions foster the autocratic temptation. When wealth operates beyond institutional counterweights, the boundary between influence and authority begins to fade. Private actors acquire the ability to shape policy, steer public discourse, and redefine norms without democratic mandate. The critique of ‘big government’ becomes a means of creating conditions in which private actors function as informal sovereigns—powerful, unelected, and increasingly indispensable to the ordinary functioning of civic life.

It is no coincidence that this rhetoric often appears in the language of populism. Appeals to public frustrations convert structural imbalances into cultural grievances. Bureaucracy is framed as the adversary, even when the real impediment to civic dignity lies in the widening distance between concentrated power and the public interest. What presents itself as a defense of the people frequently advances interests far removed from those it claims to champion.

These dynamics reflect a recurring pattern: the appeal of concentrated wealth, the weakening of public constraints, and the claim that progress can be invoked without being shared. The call to shrink government fits within this broader pattern. That call functions as a contemporary iteration of a familiar strategy in which reformist rhetoric obscures the concentration of advantage. The pattern endures because its surface language is persuasive while its underlying mechanisms remain concealed.

If an effective path forward exists, it does not lie in diminishing institutions but in strengthening the mechanisms through which they remain accountable to a diverse society. The measure of the State is not its size but its integrity—its ability to respond to complexity without ceding its responsibilities to private authority. What weakens when institutions are diminished is not efficiency but democracy itself. Defending the public sphere requires clarifying what is lost when reform devolves into appearance alone, when efficiency becomes a language intended to conceal power rather than distribute it.

Tags: civic ethics, democratic oversight, governance, government efficiency, political analysis, political rhetoric, privatization, public institutions, state capacity, wealth concentration
Posted in Politics and Governance, Civic Ethics, Public Institutions, Political Economy, Contemporary Analysis | Leave a Comment »

“The Crossroad”

November 25, 2025

*

Ricardo Morin
***Series ID***: ***The Crossroad***
Oil On Linen
14 by 18 by 3/4 inches
2009

Preface

This reflection approaches a subject whose contours continue to shift. Its purpose is descriptive rather than conclusive: to observe the language, geography, and patterns of recognition that shape how this area of Western Asia is referenced today. The inquiry does not presume a fixed framework; it notes developments that may clarify, over time, how the region is understood.

The term “Middle East” emerged from Western strategic vocabulary and has been applied for more than a century to a portion of Western Asia that occupies a space between Europe, Africa, and the broader Asian continent. The designation did not originate from the internal characteristics of the area; it offered an external classification for a geography that did not align neatly with categories such as “Oriental,” “European,” or “African”. The reflection that follows describes current adjustments in how this geography is perceived and does not seek to assign cause, consequence, or judgment.

The physical terrain identified by that term predates the name by millennia. It consists of land and sea routes that link three continents and create points of passage between the Mediterranean basin, the Indian Ocean, and adjacent inland regions. Empires expanded across these routes at different periods. Commercial networks relied on them. Religious and linguistic traditions developed near them and spread outward from them. Over time, the area accumulated symbolic associations connected to its position rather than to any single narrative. These associations appear in historical records, scriptural references, diplomatic terminology, and administrative documents.

Political conditions in Western Asia have altered in the past decade. Syria, once described as a fragmented state, now functions with a measure of stability under authorities who previously operated outside established state structures. Their participation in regional discussions reflects an adjustment in diplomatic practice. Similar adjustments are visible elsewhere in the region, where governments coordinate on matters of trade, security, and infrastructure through channels that do not correspond to earlier Cold War arrangements. Oil-producing states in the Gulf have increased their global presence through investment and development initiatives that extend beyond their immediate surroundings.

These developments occur alongside demographic shifts, economic disparities, and regional security concerns that intersect at this geographic juncture. The area often registers these pressures because it remains a corridor through which goods, populations, and strategic interests move. Its visibility in global reporting reflects this position. Multiple explanatory frameworks—historical, religious, ideological, and strategic—are applied to the same geography by observers with distinct vantage points. These frameworks coexist with the operational considerations that shape policy decisions, including territory, transit routes, energy networks, and external dependencies.

References to religious identity, civilizational memory, or inherited political narratives appear in public discourse both within and outside the region. These references coexist with material concerns related to governance, trade, and stability. Their coexistence does not resolve the question of how the region should be described; it indicates that the geography accommodates multiple layers of meaning at once. The persistence of these layers demonstrates the extent to which external projections, internal dynamics, and physical location all contribute to the region’s ongoing visibility.

As the term “Middle East” is reconsidered, older geographic designations—such as Western Asia or Eastern Mediterranean—appear with greater frequency. Whether these terms will replace or simply accompany the older one remains uncertain. The geography itself remains constant, while the categories used to describe it continue to shift. This raises a straightforward question: when the projections applied to this ancient crossroad recede, which features of the region become most visible, and how do those features influence the language used to describe it?

Tags: cross-continental routes, geography, geopolitical reflection, global corridors, historical analysis, regional terminology, Western Asia
Posted in Western Asia, geography, global politics, symbolic narratives, regional studies | Leave a Comment »

“The Ethics of Perception, Part I”

November 20, 2025

Ricardo Morín
***Triangulation 4***: ***The Ethics of Perception***
22″ x 30″
Graphite on paper
2006

Ricardo F. Morín

October 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

Introduction

Perception often seems immediate and uncomplicated. We see, we hear, we react. Yet between that first contact with the world and the choices we make in response, something slower and more fragile takes place: the formation of meaning. In that interval—between what appears and what we assert—not only understanding is at stake, but ethics as well.

This essay begins with a simple question: what changes when understanding matters more than assertion? In a culture that prioritizes reaction, utility, and certainty, pausing to perceive can seem inefficient. Yet it is precisely this pause that allows experience to take shape without force and keeps the relationship between consciousness and the shared world in proportion.

The Ethics of Perception does not propose rules or moral systems. It examines how sustained attention—able to receive before imposing—can restore coherence between inner life and external reality. From this basic gesture, ethics ceases to operate as an external norm and becomes a way of being in relation.

Perception

Perception may be understood as the emergent outcome of mechanisms collectively designated as intelligence in the abstract. These mechanisms do not operate solely as interior cognitive functions, nor are they reducible to external systems, conventions, or instruments. Perception arises at the continuous interface between interior awareness and exterior structure, where sensory intake, pattern recognition, and interpretive ordering converge through sustained attunement.

Such a relation does not presume opposition between internal and external domains. Cognitive processes and environmental conditions function as co-present and mutually generative forces. Disruptions frequently described as pathological more accurately reflect misalignment within this reciprocal relation rather than intrinsic deficiency in any constituent mechanism. When normative frameworks privilege particular modes of perceptual attunement, divergence is reclassified as deviation and difference is rendered as dysfunction.

Models grounded in categorization or spectral positioning provide descriptive utility but often presuppose hierarchical centers. An account oriented toward attunement redirects emphasis away from comparative placement and toward relational orientation. Perceptual coherence depends less on position within a classificatory schema than on sensitivity to the ongoing exchange between interior processing and exterior configuration.

Claims of authority over perceptual normality weaken under recognition of ubiquity. If the interaction between cognitive mechanism and environmental structure constitutes a universal condition rather than an exceptional trait, no institution, metric, or discipline retains exclusive legitimacy to define deviation. Evaluation becomes contextual, norms provisional, and classification descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Within this framework, perception is not measured by conformity, efficiency, or accommodation to dominant systems. Perception denotes the sustained capacity to remain aligned with the dynamic interaction of interior awareness and exterior articulation without collapsing one domain into the other. Such an understanding accommodates analytical abstraction, scientific modeling, artistic discernment, contemplative depth, and systemic reasoning without elevating any singular mode of intelligence above others.

Considered in this light, perception resists enclosure within diagnostic, cultural, or hierarchical boundaries. What persists is not a ranked spectrum of cognitive worth but a field of relational variance governed by emergence, attunement, and reciprocal presence.

Understanding begins with seeing the world as it is, before any claim or assertion shapes its meaning. My disposition turns toward perceiving, attending, and responding rather than toward struggle or untested impulse. This orientation works as a discipline through which clarity and proportion take form. Thought, in this sense, does not impose significance; it receives it through the living exchange of experience. Perceiving gathers the immediate presence of the world, and understanding shapes that presence into sense. Both arise from the same motion of awareness, where observation ripens into comprehension. Philosophy then ceases to be an act of mastery and becomes a way of seeing that restores balance between mind and existence.

Philosophy has long been driven by the impulse to assert rather than to understand. From antiquity to modern times, thinkers built systems meant to secure certainty and protect thought from doubt. Nietzsche inherited that impulse and inverted it by turning volition into affirmation. His view freed reason from dogma yet confined it within self-assertion. Understanding, by contrast, grows from recognizing that meaning arises in relation. The act of grasping does not depend on force but on perception. When thought observes instead of imposing, the world reveals its own coherence. Ethics springs from that revelation, because to understand is already to enter into relation with what is seen. Comprehension is therefore not passive; it is active participation in the unfolding of reality.

Perception becomes ethical when it recognizes that every act of seeing carries responsibility. To perceive is to acknowledge what stands before us—not as an object to be mastered but as a presence that coexists with our own. Awareness is never neutral; it bears the weight of how we attend, interpret, and respond. When perception remains steady, recognition deepens into connection. A single moment makes this visible: watching an elderly person struggle with opening a door, the mind perceives first, then understands, and then responds—not out of impulse, but out of the recognition of a shared human condition. Art enacts this same movement. The painter, the writer, and the musician do not invent the world; they meet it through form. Each creative gesture records a dialogue between inner and outer experience, where understanding becomes recognition of relation. The moral value of art lies not in a message but in the quality of attention it sustains. To live perceptively is to practice restraint and openness together: restraint keeps volition from overpowering what is seen, and openness lets the world speak through its details. In that steady practice, ethics ceases to be rule and becomes a way of living attentively within relation.

Modern life tempts the mind to react before it perceives. The speed of information, the immediacy of communication, and the constant surge of stimuli fragment awareness. In that climate, unexamined volition regains its force; it asserts, selects, and consumes out of bias rather than understanding. What vanishes is the interval between experience and reflection—the pause in which perception matures into thought. Ethical life, understood as living with awareness of relation, re-emerges when that interval is restored. A culture that values perception above reaction can recover the sense of proportion that technology and ideology often distort. The task is not to reject innovation but to exercise discernment within it. Every act of attention becomes resistance to distraction, and every moment of silence reclaims the depth that noise obscures. When perception reaches the point of recognizing another consciousness as equal in its claim to reality, understanding acquires moral weight. Such recognition requires patience—the willingness to see without appropriation and to remain present without possession.

All philosophy begins as a gesture toward harmony. The mind seeks to know its bond with the world yet often confuses harmony with control. When understanding replaces conquest, thought rediscovers its natural proportion. The world is not a stage for self-assertion but a field of correspondence where awareness meets what it perceives. To think ethically is to think in relation. The act of grasping restores continuity between inner and outer life and shows that knowing itself is participation. Each meeting with reality—each moment of seeing, listening, or remembering—becomes an occasion to act with measure. The reflective mind neither retreats from the world nor dominates it. It stands within experience as both witness and participant, and lets perception reach its human fullness: the ability to recognize what lies beyond oneself and to respond without domination. When thought arises from attention instead of struggle, it reconciles intelligence with presence and restores the quiet balance that modern life has displaced. In that reconciliation, philosophy fulfills its oldest task—to bring awareness into harmony with existence.

Tags: attention, Awareness, comprehension, Consciousness, ethics, modernity, moral thought, Perception, philosophy, reciprocity, relation
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“Governing by Exception: The American Executive”

November 18, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
***Untitled #3: Governing by Exception***
10″x12″
Watercolor
2003

By Ricardo F. Morín

October 10, 2025

Bala Cynwyd, Pa

Power unexamined becomes its own justification—Anonymous civic maxim.

Prologue

Governance is the moral discipline of order—the effort to keep authority aligned with conscience so that power remains a function of justice, not an instrument of self-interest. Government enacts that discipline: necessary, fallible, and ever in danger of mistaking permanence for legitimacy.

Political history rarely unfolds as a straight line. It accumulates as a palimpsest in which new regimes—imperial, republican, authoritarian, and democratic—write their doctrines over the residues of previous orders. Institutions and laws rarely vanish; they survive as layers of precedent and practice that later governments reinterpret to serve new purposes. The present political moment in the United States should be examined within that structure of accumulation. What appears to be a radical break with constitutional tradition is, in fact, the latest rewriting of an existing template. The mechanisms that once safeguarded the republic now expand the reach of executive power; these mechanisms reveal how continuity and rupture coexist in the same act.

During the first half year of the Trump administration’s return to office, the political system of the United States has entered a state of controlled dislocation. Executive directives have overridden congressional appropriations, suspended statutory programs, and reorganized entire departments under provisional authority. A government shutdown, declared an administrative necessity, has become a method for restructuring the State. Mass dismissals, selective funding freezes, and the redefinition of agency mandates have become coordinated tools for concentrating authority in the executive branch. These are not isolated disputes between branches of government. These actions reveal a coherent strategy of reconfiguration, executed through administrative acts that appear lawful but are designed to disfigure the balance of powers from within.

The guiding principle of this transformation is the normalization of exception. Powers that earlier generations considered temporary—emergency measures to be used only under extreme threat—have become ordinary instruments of governance. The invocation of the Insurrection Act, intended for rebellion or lawless obstruction, now functions as justification for domestic military deployment in states governed by political opposition. The use of this authority is framed as a response to rising crime, even when verified data show a national decline. In this inversion of logic, the declaration of emergency precedes its necessity. The government generates the crisis it claims to confront and allows coercive measures to appear both inevitable and legitimate. What dissolves in this process is not only institutional restraint but the moral discipline of order—the very principle that once bound authority to conscience: i.e. the active faculty of perception through which recognition becomes responsibility and seeing acquires ethical weight.

This redefinition of authority as authoritarianism is reinforced by judicial doctrine. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States established that a president enjoys absolute immunity for “core official acts” and presumptive immunity for all other actions undertaken in an official capacity. This ruling altered the meaning of accountability. It placed the office of the president above ordinary legal scrutiny by presuming legality wherever official duty could be claimed. The decision inverted the constitutional order that once defined the presidency as a position constrained by law. Under this new interpretation, legality flows from function rather than from statute. The Court did not invent executive supremacy; it legalized its evolution. By insulating the executive office from the consequences of its acts, the judiciary, perhaps unintentionally, became an instrument of the very transformation it was designed to prevent.

Measured against the triad of government powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—the present equilibrium reveals a pronounced distortion. Each branch retains its formal outline, yet its interior authority has thinned. Congress’s control of the purse has been undermined by impoundment and selective disbursement. Administrative agencies have been hollowed out through abrupt firings and structural reorganizations. The judiciary, bound by its own doctrines of deference and immunity, finds itself unable to intervene effectively. What remains of institutional balance depends less on constitutional principle than on administrative inertia. The machinery of government continues to function, but its continuity now rests on habit rather than on law.

This condition does not yet constitute overt dictatorship. It represents a subtler phenomenon—a system that operates through legal forms but concentrates power in practice. Authority remains constitutional in appearance while using those same procedures to entrench unilateral control. The pattern can be recognized not through proclamations but through measurable actions: decrees replacing legislation, “temporary” orders renewed without expiration, funds withheld from political adversaries, and federal troops dispatched to jurisdictions where disorder has not been empirically established. Each measure, taken alone, seems limited and justified. Together they form an architecture of exception—an invisible framework that reorganizes power without declaring revolution. Beneath this architecture lies the decline of the moral discipline of order, where legality endures but conscience recedes.

A forensic approach must therefore focus not on accusation but on diagnosis. The purpose is to identify where practice diverges from principle, and where legal continuity conceals political mutation. The question is not whether democracy has vanished, but how far the republic has drifted from its own operational norms. This drift can be measured empirically through ordinary data: the number of appropriations ignored or delayed, the duration and scope of emergency declarations, the ratio of confirmed officials to acting appointees, and the frequency with which presidential immunity is invoked to block review. Each indicator marks a step away from the rule of shared power that defines constitutional democracy.

The concept of the republic, in its classical and Enlightenment sense, presupposed a balance between power and virtue: the rule of law safeguarded by citizens free from dependence. In contemporary practice, that idea has been reduced to a partisan label. The republicanism that once demanded civic responsibility now coexists with mechanisms—PAC financing (Political Action Committee: An organization that raises and spends money to elect political candidates), factional loyalty, corporate influence—that transform governance into an instrument of private interest. Thus the very word that once signified restraint now conceals its opposite: a system where representation serves its sponsors more faithfully than its citizens.

History suggests that constitutional systems rarely collapse through open defiance. They decline through adaptation. The Roman Republic did not abolish its institutions; it gradually converted them into imperial offices. Modern democracies follow similar paths when crisis is used to justify the consolidation of power. Executive authority expands, legislative restraint weakens, and judicial caution hardens into complicity. The American case fits this pattern. The existing framework of the Constitution remains in place, yet its meaning shifts incrementally through interpretation, precedent, and administrative habit. The transformation proceeds without formal amendment because each deviation is defended as continuity.

The metrics of decline are structural rather than moral. When legality depends on will—the self-legitimating impulse of power once detached from moral accountability—and will is shielded from scrutiny, the architecture of restraint loses coherence. Here the moral discipline of governance yields to the self-justifying logic of power. What follows is not anarchy but organized dislocation—a condition in which institutions operate as before yet serve opposite purposes; in truth it is anarchy disguised as its own absence. Procedures are observed; substance is inverted. The outward appearance of democracy persists, while its inner logic is replaced by a system that governs through perpetual exception.

The task for observers and citizens alike is not to forecast collapse but to recognize mutation. Political systems rarely announce their turning points; they disguise themselves as routine. The test of civic intelligence is the capacity to detect when law becomes vocabulary, when oversight becomes performance, and when the state of exception ceases to be temporary. The republic continues to function, but it functions under altered premises. The preservation of legality therefore depends not only on the design of institutions but also on the vigilance of those who interpret them. Justice endures only where institutions remember that they exist to limit power, defend the vulnerable, and preserve the moral foundation from which authority derives its right to act.

The endurance of the republic will therefore depend not on the spectacle of its elections but on the recovery of its first obligation: to keep authority answerable to the moral idea from which it draws its right to act. Justice endures only where institutions remember that they exist to limit power, defend the vulnerable, and preserve the moral discipline of order through which freedom remains lawful and law remains human. When that memory fades, what remains is administration without soul—a government still standing, but no longer governing.

Tags: American democracy, civic vigilance, constitutional crisis, constitutional law, executive power, governance, institutional balance, judiciary, legality, political analysis, rule of law, separation of powers, state of exception, Trump administration, United States
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“Before Form: Part One”

November 17, 2025

*

***Landscape I:*** ***Before Form***
16″ x 24″
Oil on linen
2000

Ricardo F. Morín

November 17, 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

Some encounters begin before language is ready for them.

Two minds meet without settling.

Nothing takes shape, yet something unmistakable occurs.

The truest account is the refusal to explain.

Certain ideas resist inheritance.

Two ways of seeing collide briefly, then separate.

Meaning leans forward; form steps back.

The moment matters without offering a reason.

Some connections pass like weather fronts.

They do not teach; they alter the air.

Nothing holds still.

Memory keeps only a shift in the light.

Some experiences never fully arrive.

A brush, not a presence.

A pulse without source.

What remains is the recollection of almost remembering.

There is a threshold just before silence.

Perception moves, finds no edge.

The air changes, just barely.

A faint trace lingers, directionless and unnamed.

There is a stillness that gathers rather than empties.

It reveals nothing yet asserts itself.

A held breath before form begins.

Being, unclaimed by identity.

Tenderness sometimes appears without announcing itself.

A nearness so slight it restores by existing.

A small warmth rekindles what had dimmed.

Then loosens, but never truly leaves.

Some forces do not arrive; they simply are.

They seek no interpretation.

Existence affirms itself without intent.

A brief spark of the world recognizing its own pulse.

Energy releases its need to be something.

It does not vanish; it unravels.

Nothing returns, because nothing was apart.

Dissolution restores possibility.

Coda

The cycle erases its own footprint.

Everything returns to its opening field.

No conclusion remains—only quiet.

And if anything rises again,

it will come without memory of having been.

Tags: abstract reflection, atmospheric writing, contemporary poetics, dissolution, early awareness, fleeting encounters, liminal thought, minimal prose, nearness, Perception, poetic fragments, pre-form experience, quiet tension, subtle emotion, threshold moments
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“BEFORE FORM II”

November 17, 2025

*

**Impressions, Diptych:** ***BEFORE FORM II***
18″ x 48″
Oil on board
2000

Ricardo F. Morín

Nov. 17, 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

There are relationships in which language arrives too early.

Two minds meet, and each brings its own architecture—one built of corridors, the other of thresholds.

Nothing coheres. Nothing resolves. Yet something is exchanged.

Perhaps the only way to describe it is to refuse description.

What passes between the two is not influence, nor authority, nor instruction.

It is the faint recognition that creation does not always arise from tradition,

and tradition does not always arise from clarity.

One mind preserves structure because it fears dissolution.

The other preserves freedom because it fears enclosure.

Neither is right, neither is wrong, and neither can become the other.

If there is a lesson, it is not philosophical.

It is simply that some encounters generate form only by refusing to take one.

Some dynamics can be seen only by letting them remain unsettled.

Not a system.

Not a method.

Not an alchemical transformation.

Just the quiet knowledge that meaning does not always arrive in recognizable shapes—

and sometimes the refusal of structure

is itself the most honest form.

This is neither alchemy nor allegory.

It does not mirror academic tropes.

It does not explain itself.

It simply stands.

There is a place where thought has not yet chosen its weight.

Where nothing must resemble anything.

Where no lineage can be traced because the idea has not agreed to be inherited.

Two minds meet there sometimes, though neither intends to.

One arrives with tools, the other with openings.

One tries to recognize what appears; the other lets appearance undo itself.

No roles persist in that space.

No teacher, no student, no authority, no dissident.

Only the slight disturbance of something wanting to become meaning

and something else resisting the invitation.

Perhaps the exchange exists only in the refusal to define it.

Perhaps it is nothing more than two ways of seeing colliding for a moment

before each retreats to its natural distance.

There is no lesson.

No transformation.

Not even understanding—

just the faint impression that the encounter mattered

in a way that cannot be justified.

Some relationships never enter language fully.

They touch the threshold and withdraw,

leaving only a shape that refuses to become a shape.

What remains is not story, not insight, not metaphor.

Only a quiet remainder:

that something passed between two minds,

and it does not wish to be named.

Some encounters move like weather across the mind—arriving without intention,

passing without conclusion.

They do not teach; they do not claim.

They shift the air and leave a pressure change that takes days to understand.

Two temperaments can drift into the same moment like front and current.

One carries the weight of accumulated seasons,

the other moves with the quiet urgency of what is still forming.

Neither is stronger.

Neither is clearer.

They simply meet, and the atmosphere changes.

There is no point of balance.

No point of conflict.

Just a tremor in the air between them,

as if the room itself were listening for something that never quite becomes sound.

Thought loosens in that space.

Meanings approach, circle, and recede.

Nothing settles long enough to be named.

Nothing wants to.

Some relationships never become narrative because narrative would freeze them.

They remain suspended—felt more than understood,

remembered less as moments than as shifts in light,

like a room darkening for reasons the sky doesn’t explain.

When they part, it is not an ending.

It is a dispersal, like mist thinning at the edge of dawn.

Each carries a trace of the other’s weather,

a change in temperature that lingers long after the shapes have dissolved.

What remains is not knowledge.

Not conclusion.

Just the faint sensation that something passed through—

and continues to pass through—

quietly, insistently,

without ever agreeing to take form.

There are moments that never arrive fully.

Not as meaning, not as feeling—more like a faint shift,

a drift in the periphery.

Two presences cross, neither entering nor leaving.

A pressure, a thinning, a pulse without source.

Not connection, not distance—an interval that hovers.

Nothing coheres.

Nothing insists.

There is only the sense of something lightly touching thought

and withdrawing before thought can respond.

Contours don’t form here.

Edges blur as soon as they appear.

The exchange—if it can be called that—dissolves into the same air that carried it.

A pause lengthens,

not to reveal anything

but to remind that revelation is unnecessary.

This is not atmosphere; even atmosphere has structure.

It is less.

A faint impression that doesn’t land,

doesn’t settle,

doesn’t belong to either mind that felt it.

Later, one might remember a flicker—

not an idea,

not a moment—

just the residue of an approach that never closed.

No clarity follows.

No resolution.

The experience continues only as dispersal,

the way fog continues after your body has walked through it.

What remains is not being,

but the trace of something that preferred not to become one.

There is a place where awareness thins,

not into silence,

but into something before silence—

a faint trembling at the boundary of what the mind can hold.

Nothing shapes itself here.

Outlines gather, loosen, drift apart.

Perception moves like breath against a surface it cannot see,

feeling only its own hesitation.

Two currents brush past each other—

not touching, not avoiding—

simply passing through the same unmarked space.

No exchange takes place, only a slight alteration in texture.

The air feels different by a degree so slight

you question whether it changed at all.

Sensation approaches but does not declare itself.

It folds and unfolds at the edge of recognition,

as if deciding whether to become experience

or to recede without consequence.

Thought cannot follow it.

Emotion cannot name it.

Language reaches out but finds nothing to hold,

its grasp closing on the faint imprint of something

that prefers not to be caught.

There is no meaning here,

only the suggestion of one—

a whisper of form that vanishes when looked at directly.

What remains is the after-feel:

a soft pressure,

a disturbance without cause,

a nearness with no direction.

It lingers not as memory

but as the memory of almost remembering—

the residue of a touch

that occurred just beyond the threshold

where understanding begins.

At the edge of sensation,

nothing is known.

Yet everything feels about to become.

There is a quiet that does not empty the world but concentrates it—

a quiet that draws breath around itself.

Nothing is spoken, yet everything leans forward,

as if waiting for a pulse to reveal where it has always been.

The stillness is not rest.

It is tension held with care,

a subtle hum beneath awareness,

a throb the body recognizes

before the mind opens its hands to feel it.

You could call it presence,

but even that word is too heavy.

It is not being,

only the soft insistence

that something is unmistakably here.

Light moves differently in this quiet—

slower, denser,

as if thought itself thickens the air.

It is the moment before meaning,

before shape,

before the world chooses a direction.

Alive, but without calling attention to its life.

Silent, but without conceding to silence.

A current passes through,

barely perceptible,

yet carrying enough force

to rearrange everything

it does not touch.

What remains is only this:

a breath held between two states—

not message,

not impression,

just the warm gravity of being

before it becomes anything else.

It comes softly,

so softly you cannot tell whether it arrived

or whether you only stopped long enough to feel it.

A warmth gathers at the edge of awareness—

not heat,

but the suggestion of nearness,

like breath that barely lifts the air.

Nothing speaks,

yet something touches you

in the place where words would break it.

It moves the way light moves across closed eyes—

a tenderness that does not seek to be seen,

only to be known without knowing.

It is the quietest kind of nearness,

the kind that asks nothing

and in asking nothing

restores a part of you you did not realize

had gone dim.

It grazes the soul like a hand

that never quite touches—

a promise of contact,

a murmur of care,

a soothing traced along the inner surface

of being itself.

No message,

no direction,

only the gentle reassurance

that something in the universe

has noticed your existence

and answers with a softness

equal to your need.

A whisper,

not into the ear

but into the space behind the heart,

where feeling wakes before thought understands.

It lingers there—

a quiet pulse,

a sheltering nearness—

not holding you,

but letting you rest

as if you were held.

And then, barely,

it recedes—

not leaving,

just loosening—

like the last warmth of a hand

still felt long after it has gone.

It appears without approach.

Not rising, not entering—simply there.

A pulse without rhythm,

a force without weight,

life showing itself in the smallest possible gesture.

No softness here,

no harshness either—

only the unqualified fact of energy

standing in its own clarity.

It does not warm,

does not startle,

does not soothe.

It simply asserts a kind of being

that needs nothing to validate it.

Not spirit.

Not breath.

Not sensation.

Just the unmistakable surge

that accompanies existence

whenever it remembers itself.

A being unshaped by intention

moves through the moment,

neither touching nor retreating,

neither demanding nor yielding.

Its essence is activity without aim—

motion held within stillness,

potential without need for direction.

It does not call attention to itself.

It does not fade.

It does not speak.

It remains—

a clarity,

a tension,

a spark of the world’s own self-recognition

before language arrives to claim it.

Alive,

unadorned,

without echo or interpretation—

just the force that underlies all form,

manifest for an instant

in its simplest,

most unmediated state.

At last the force loosens.

Not fading—simply releasing its hold

on being something.

The pulse ceases to define itself.

The clarity thins.

What was formless being unravels

into the same unbounded quiet

that preceded it.

No retreat,

no vanishing,

only the simple act

of no longer remaining.

The vitality that stood so plainly

lets its edges dissolve,

not into darkness,

not into silence,

but into the untouched space

that asks nothing of it.

What stays behind

is not trace or echo

but the openness that held it—

a vastness indifferent to form,

yet origin to all form.

This is not return

because nothing was ever apart.

It is not ending

because nothing concludes.

It is the unmaking

that restores everything

to the ground of its own possibility.

Where force once stood,

there is now only the expanse

from which force arises—

the nothingness that is not absence

but the pure condition

of all that can become.

Here, being and unbeing

are the same gesture.

Life dissolves

into what has always held it.

And the dissolution is complete.

CODA

Nothing follows.

What has unfolded returns to its origin,

not as echo,

not as meaning,

but as the same quiet field

that allowed each motion to appear.

The cycle leaves no imprint.

The trace erases itself.

The movement completes by letting the world resume its stillness.

There is nothing to gather,

nothing to carry forward,

nothing to understand.

The unfolding has ended where it began—

in the openness that holds all beginnings

and requires none.

What remains is not conclusion

but the calm that arrives

when even dissolution has dissolved.

And from that calm,

if anything were ever to arise again,

it would do so without memory of having been.

Tags: abstraction, aesthetics, atmospheric writing, Consciousness, contemplative writing, contemporary art, dissolution, experimental prose, form and formlessness, interiority, liminality, metaphysics, nonduality, Perception, phenomenology, poetic essay, poetic philosophy, Presence, sensory awareness, thresholds
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“Air Remembers”

November 17, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
***Untitled #1: Air Remembers***
10″x12″
Watercolor
2003

By Ricardo F. Morín

October 2025

Oakland Park, Fl.

Memory is air where perception retrieves it.

We are memory; air is its cradle.

Before morning enters, scent holds what the night has carried away.

Before air's touch, we recognize all is breathing.

Each breath returns us to presence:     nothing explained, everything renewed.

Scent reaches us before thought;

Air remembers as we breathe:     recollection becomes present.

Breath is the body’s intelligence:     the mind’s foremost messenger.

Redolence provokes inquiry—the instinct to understand before it is named.

With moisture the world returns to us.

Scent travels on, sound softens, and the body recognizes again itself.

In excess, humidity—once restorative—begins to bury the senses.

All breathes through us and we through all to elicit change before there is voice.

Tags: air, language, Memory, morning, Perception, Poetry, Presence, Ricardo F. Morin, Silence
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“The Industry of Suspicion: Propaganda and Manipulation of the Digital Era in Latin America”

October 15, 2025

By Ricardo F. Morín

Oct. 14, 2025

In the post-truth landscape of Latin American media, where outrage has become currency, few figures illustrate the fusion of ideology and marketing as clearly as Inna Afinogenova. She has become the most recognizable voice of authoritarian suspicion in the Spanish-speaking sphere. From platforms such as Canal Red Latinoamérica, her discourse forms part of a vast network of disinformation spreading across the region, cloaked in the rhetoric of critical thinking and popular emancipation. These networks—spanning Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and several Latin American governments—follow a single script: to dismantle trust in liberal democracy, to weaken institutions, and to turn permanent doubt into a substitute for conscience. In the name of informational sovereignty, they replace debate with discredit, analysis with suspicion, and truth with narrative. Their power lies not in blatant falsehoods but in the emotional manipulation that transforms confusion into conviction. Within this context, Afinogenova stands not as an isolated commentator but as the emblem of a sophisticated propaganda apparatus—one that disguises obedience to twenty-first-century autocracies beneath the costume of dissent.

Inna Afinogenova, born in Dagestan in 1989, is a Russian journalist who worked as deputy director of RT en Español until May 2022. She resigned citing her disagreement with the war in Ukraine and the imposition of a state-sanctioned narrative of aggression. Since then, she has collaborated with geopolitical and Latin American media such as La Base, produced by the Spanish newspaper Público, and participates in Canal Red, an audiovisual project led by Pablo Iglesias (former vice-president of Spain and founder of the left-wing party Podemos, now active in political media). There she directs and hosts programs like CaféInna and contributes to political analysis, particularly on Latin America. Her audience is broad and her reach on digital platforms considerable, which makes her an influential figure in the political and informational debates of the Spanish-speaking world.

Her trajectory, however, has not escaped controversy. During her tenure at RT en Español, she was one of the network’s most visible faces in Latin America, amplifying narratives that portrayed Western powers as inherently deceitful and predatory. An opinion column in The Washington Post described her as “the Spanish voice of Russian propaganda,” citing her recurring defense of positions favorable to the Kremlin. In December 2021, two months before the invasion of Ukraine, she used her program Ahí les va to mock Western intelligence warnings of an imminent attack and predicted that “January will come, then February, and still no invasion,” implying that the media hysteria served the interests of NATO. Such episodes, though later overtaken by events, exemplify her rhetorical method: to transform skepticism into disbelief and disbelief into persuasion.

Following her departure from RT, Afinogenova has continued to operate in media circles ideologically aligned with the Latin American left, reinforcing a discourse that equates the Western press with manipulation and imperialism. Outlets such as Expediente Público have noted her role in shaping narratives within partisan campaigns, often echoing state-sponsored or geopolitically motivated lines from Russia, China, or Iran. Through Canal Red and Diario Red, both associated with Pablo Iglesias, she participates in content ecosystems that frequently recycle material from international broadcasters like CGTN. In countries such as Honduras, she has been accused of contributing to media strategies that favor left-wing candidates under the guise of “sovereign communication.” While the evidence does not show a direct chain of command linking her to a specific regime, the pattern of thematic consistency reveals a coherent ideological alignment rather than independent journalism.

This alignment has provoked renewed debate since the release of her recent video, “¿Premio Nobel de la Paz… o de la Guerra?”, where she presents the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to María Corina Machado as a maneuver of geopolitical design rather than a moral recognition. The video does not examine facts so much as it interprets intentions, suggesting that the award serves Western influence instead of honoring civic courage. The argument, though rhetorically effective, confuses correlation with causality. It is possible to acknowledge the imperfections of international institutions without denying the ethical weight of public bravery. The Nobel Prize, like every human institution, reflects judgments; but in this case, it distinguishes a life of civic risk undertaken without weapons, privileges, or access to the coercive power of the State.

Questioning motives is legitimate; insinuating conspiracies without evidence is not. Every critical voice bears responsibility, for truth demands proportion, not projection. The struggle of María Corina Machado cannot be reduced to the rhetoric of “Western intervention” or dismissed as “fabricated dissent.” It belongs to the conscience of a people seeking self-determination through legitimate means after decades of dispossession. Respecting pluralism requires granting others the same intellectual good faith one demands for oneself. Debate ennobles democracy only when grounded in verifiable facts and moral clarity, not when suspicion itself becomes the argument. Between necessary skepticism and systematic suspicion lies a moral frontier: crossing it is to pass from thinking freely to serving without knowing it.

Tags: Authoritarianism, Canal Red, civic ethics, democracy, disinformation, information warfare, Inna Afinogenova, Latin America, Maria Corina Machado, media manipulation, Nobel Peace Prize, Pablo Iglesias, political communication, propaganda, RT en Español, russia
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“María Corina Machado: The Inheritance of a Republic”

October 14, 2025

By Ricardo Morín

Oct. 14, 2025

There are lives that seem to recapitulate the destiny of a nation, as if history, in search of renewal, gathers its scattered promises into one mortal form. María Corina Machado stands within that rare order of beings in whom blood, memory, and conviction converge—not as privilege, but as burden. She was not merely born into Venezuela’s republican lineage; she was summoned by it. The call that first thundered through the assembly halls of Caracas in 1811—when its independence was declared and its first republican constitution conceived—still vibrates beneath her name.

Her ancestry reaches into the first pulse of the Republic. From the Rodríguez del Toros, who set their signatures beneath the Act of Independence, to the Zuloaga engineers who electrified a nation, hers is a genealogy woven into the civic arteries of Venezuela. It is a lineage that chose service over title, innovation over indulgence, and fidelity to the law over the ease of silence. In that tradition, the notion of freedom is not an abstraction—it is inheritance, obligation, and vocation. It is the thread that binds a people to their conscience.

When the institutions that once defined Venezuela began to crumble, when legality became theater and words lost their weight, Machado stepped into the void with the gravity of someone aware that retreat was impossible. Her defiance was not theatrical—it was ancestral. Every gesture, every refusal to submit, bore the quiet authority of history fulfilled. She spoke as one who understood that to preserve dignity in times of humiliation is the purest form of resistance. There is, in her manner of being, that rare synthesis of intellect and steadfastness that defines the moral personality of a nation at its best—lucid, unbending, and human.

Yet today, her adversary is not one but many. Before her stands not only a narco-state that has hollowed out Venezuela’s sovereignty, but a fractured opposition—an archipelago of parties and personalities bound less by principle than by convenience. Factionalized, transient, and transactional, these groups have transformed plurality into pretext and compromise into commerce. Many have learned to live off the dictatorship they denounce. They negotiate freedoms for themselves even as the country sinks deeper into captivity. Against that duplicity, Machado’s presence has become a moral indictment: her clarity exposes their corruption; her endurance, their opportunism.

Around this internal disarray, the world circles in watchful appetite. Venezuela’s vast natural wealth—its oil, gas, gold, and rare minerals—has become the prize of criminal networks and multinational investors alike. Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, each cloaked in rhetoric of salvation, compete not to free the country but to secure a share of its exhaustion. Behind the diplomatic masks of assistance lies the same calculation: that chaos can be profitable, that a nation weakened by hunger and fear can be managed more easily than one restored to its sovereignty. This, for twenty-five years, has been Venezuela’s condition—a field of material, moral, and human extraction; its people scattered, its institutions despoiled, its memory pawned to the highest bidder.

In such a landscape, María Corina Machado stands as both witness and counterpoint. Her struggle has never been for power but for coherence—for the recovery of a civic language capable of naming what has been lost. To speak of law, truth, and justice amid pervasive corruption is to resurrect meaning itself. Her voice has become the thread that gathers the nation’s scattered conscience, reminding Venezuelans that dignity cannot be negotiated, and that no foreign savior will restore what only citizens can redeem.

To see her walk through the streets, welcomed not by luxury but by faith, is to glimpse a country remembering itself. She has become, willingly or not, the mirror through which Venezuelans rediscover their own moral architecture: decency, courage, compassion, and an unextinguished appetite for truth. In her endurance, the long-interrupted dialogue between people and Republic resumes.

The Nobel Peace Prize, bestowed upon her, is therefore not a coronation but a recognition—an acknowledgment that her struggle transcends the moment and becomes emblematic of the human spirit’s refusal to yield to despair. In awarding her, the world affirms that Venezuela’s republican dream—born in fire, preserved in conscience—still breathes through one of its daughters. It is the dream of a nation that believes peace must be built not upon submission, but upon moral clarity; not upon silence, but upon the unwavering voice of the citizen.

What María Corina Machado represents is more than opposition to tyranny. She is the embodiment of continuity—of the idea that a Republic, like a soul, survives so long as there remains one person willing to bear its weight with dignity. Her ascent is not accidental—it is the return of an ancient promise. In her composure, Venezuela recognizes itself once more: wounded yet unbroken, luminous in defiance, faithful to the destiny inscribed in its first act of freedom.

Tags: citizenship, civic virtue, conscience, corruption, democracy, Dignity, freedom, Latin America, Maria Corina Machado, moral inheritance, Nobel Peace Prize, political ethics, Republic, republican lineage, Resistance, Rodríguez del Toro, sovereignty, tyranny, Venezuela, Zuloaga family
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“The Veil of Liberation: Venezuela and the Machinery of Power”

October 10, 2025

Ricardo F. Morín — Oct. 10, 2025

Although the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize (2025) to María Corina Machado brings joy and honor to those who still believe in the possibility of a democratic Venezuela, it also reveals a far more complex reality; one that demands reflection.

The international press has yet to grasp the dream surrounding the supposed liberation of Venezuela from a narco-state. Venezuelans continue to wait indefinitely for liberation. Beneath this hope lies a deeper bondage: the nation’s territory continues to be bound to multinational interests (Chinese, Russian, American, and others) driven not by ideology but by competition between investors and criminal networks. For all of them, a prolonged conflict in Venezuela is convenient; it serves as a bridge to a regional metamorphosis and justifies the expropriation of the natural resources of the country; it aims at consolidating hemispheric dominance by the multinational interests. The situation in Venezuela is therefore not only political but also structural; it is an experiment in which sovereignty is traded for access and resistance itself becomes a form of captivity.

The crisis in Venezuela reveals a moral conflict in modern politics: how suffering can both be exploited and perpetuated when comprehension yields to fantasy. The dream of liberation has become one of the nation’s most persistent fantasies. Behind the language of emancipation lies a silent convergence of global interests; each one sustains the very conflict it claims to oppose. In Venezuela, disorder legitimizes intervention and chaos provides the pretext for extraction. In this sense, Venezuela is not merely a nation in distress but also a stage upon which the grammar of domination continues to be enacted through the vocabulary of deliverance

The challenge is no longer to imagine freedom as an external rescue but to comprehend how dependence disguises itself as salvation. Only comprehension (the act of seeing beyond grievance and beyond consolation) can pierce the veil of liberation and restore meaning to the very idea of freedom.

Editor: Billy Bussell Thompson

Tags: comprehension, conflict, democracy, freedom, global interests, hemispheric influence, illusion, Maria Corina Machado, moral reflection, Nobel Peace Prize, political analysis, power structures, sovereignty, Venezuela
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“The Grammar of Conflict”

October 9, 2025

Ricardo F. Morín
***Untitled #2***
Watercolor
10”x12”
2003

By Ricardo F. Morín

Oct. 9, 2025

Bala Cynwyd, Pa

Abstract

Conflict endures not only because of the grievances that ignite it, but also because of the internal logic that sustains it. Hatred, victimhood, hypocrisy, tribalism, and violence do not operate as separate forces; they form an interdependent system that is justified at every turn. This essay examines a system of conflict as a grammar—a set of rules and patterns through which antagonism shapes thought, legitimizes action, and perpetuates itself across generations. The objective is not to judge but to expose how conflict becomes self-sustaining, how violence evolves from an instrument into a ritual, and how contradiction becomes the very foundation upon which societies act in ways that betray their own professed values.

Conflict, when stripped down to its structure, is less an event than a language. Conflict is learned, repeated, and transmitted—not as instinct alone but as a structured framework through which people interpret events and justify actions. Violence is only one expression of conflict; beneath the act lies a sequence of ideas and reactions that not only precede violence but also weave hostility deliberately into a fabric of continuity. Understanding this grammar of conflict is essential, because it shows how human beings can remain locked in cycles of harm long after the original reasons have disappeared—not by accident, but because the rhetoric sustaining conflict extends the original violence far beyond its initial cause. What appears spontaneous is often scripted, and what seems inevitable is, more often than not, the cumulative result of choices that have hardened into reflex.

Hatred is the first syntax of this grammar. Conflict does not erupt suddenly but accumulates over time, layer upon layer, through memory, myth, and selective narration. Conflict is presented as a defense against a perceived threat or subordination; yet its deeper function is preservation. Hatred sustains identity by defining itself against what it is not. Conflict, once entrenched, ceases to depend on immediate threat. Conflict becomes self-justifying. It becomes a lens that reinterprets evidence in conformity with its narrative and expectations. Conflict prepares the ground on which it thrives and provides ready-made explanations for future disputes.

Victimhood gives hatred an enduring vocabulary. It converts the suffering from a past event into a permanent political and social resource. Suffering is a condition we all inhabit. Yet to make suffering the core of collective identity is strategic. Suffering allows communities to claim moral authority and to legitimize otherwise illegitimate actions. The story of injury becomes a foundation for retaliation. Herein, however, lies a trap: identity anchored in victimhood threatens the cessation of its narrative. Without the presence of an adversary, legitimacy loses potency. The original wound remains open—remembered and weaponized for all that follows. Each new act of aggression is framed as a defense of dignity and as a reaffirmation of suffering.

Hypocrisy is the structure holding this system together. Hypocrisy enables simultaneous denunciation and deployment of violence. It is a proclamation of ideals systematically violated. Hypocrisy not only conceals contradiction; it embodies it. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to invoke justice, to speak of universal rights, and to decry cruelty. The resulting duplicity is essential. Hypocrisy presents violence as a legitimate principle, domination as protection, and exclusion as necessity.

Once hatred, victimhood, and hypocrisy have aligned, violence becomes a ritual—not a reaction. This ritual can claim instrumental goals: the recovery of lost territory, the righting of past wrongs, or the assurance of safety. But over time, the purpose fades and the pattern remains. Each act tries to confirm the legitimacy of the last and to prepare a justification for the next. The cycle no longer requires triggers; conflict sustains itself through momentum. Violence becomes a means through which the collective is used to consolidate identity and to institutionalize memory.

Tribalism is a ritual of emotional power. Conflict reduces the complexity of human experience to affiliation and exclusion. Within this framework, radically different standards judge shifting actions according to who commits them. What outsiders called terrorism becomes a defensive force within the tribe. The tyranny of an enemy becomes the tribe’s strength. Tribalism turns contradiction into coherence; it makes hypocrisy acceptable; it transforms violence into allegiance and reprisal into obligation. The more deeply divisions define a society, the more indispensable conflict becomes to its sense of purpose.

Violence is no longer a response; it is a condition. Violence persists not because it serves immediate goals, but because it affirms permanence. Ending a cycle means dismantling its sustaining narratives; it means acknowledging an enemy is not immutable; victimhood is no longer unique; ideals no longer coexist with betrayals.

The illusion of inevitability is insidious. If conflict frames destiny, accountability dissolves. Reaction explains every action as defensive. Herein, recognition diminishes agency; violence becomes not a choice but a forced external condition, an illusion allowing the cycle to continue.

Breaking the continuation is neither difficult nor mysterious. Hatred as an explanation simplifies and legitimizes the narrative; it offers ideological reassurance; it sustains a false sense of control. Together they form a system that seems natural, but familiarity is not fate. The grammar of conflict is learned; what is learned can be unlearned. The first step is to elucidate and to recognize what seems inevitable is only a choice disguised as a reaction. Thus societies can construct new grammars, without enmity, without vengeance, and without domination.

To diagnose conflict is not to diminish suffering or to excuse violence. An understanding of how suffering and violence endure reveals that each helps to sustain the other. Profound injuries are not those inflicted once but are those kept alive by stories repeated about them. The cycle endures because unreason has its own reason; it preserves the stories that keep us injured and persuades us of their necessity. It is not that people act without reason, but that they rationalize the irrational until irrationality itself becomes the organizing principle of their behavior. Exposing their grammar is not a solution, but it is a beginning: a way to make visible the architecture of antagonism and, perhaps, to imagine forms of coexistence that no longer depend on perpetual conflict for their justification.

Edited by Billy Bussell Thompson, Oct. 9, 2025, NYC, NY

Tags: collective identity, conflict, forensic essay, hatred, human condition, hypocrisy, ideology, justice, Memory, Peace, political analysis, power, societal dynamics, tribalism, victimhood, Violence
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“The Myth of Rupture:

September 30, 2025

Continuity as the Enabling Condition of Change”

Ricardo F. Morín
Untitled #6
Watercolor
2003

BY Ricardo Morin

September 30, 2025

Bala Cynwyd, Pa

Nothing human begins from nothing. Institutions, languages, belief systems, and works of art all arise from what preceded them. Creation is not the rejection of inheritance but the transformation of it. Every act of making draws upon accumulated perception, memory, and experience. This insight is crucial to understanding contemporary culture, where claims of unprecedented change often conceal deep continuities beneath the surface of novelty. Human beings, bound by temporality, cannot detach themselves from what has been; they can only reorder and reinterpret the materials already available to them.

The notion of invention is often described as a break with the past, a leap into the unknown. Yet even the most radical departures are shaped by what came before. The ideals of modern democracy, for example, did not emerge spontaneously. They were built upon classical Greek ideas of citizenship as a shared civic responsibility, rooted in isonomia—equality before the law—and in the belief that legitimate authority derives from the deliberation and participation of free citizens. They also drew deeply on Roman conceptions of law as a universal and rational order capable of binding diverse peoples into a common political framework, and on the Roman principle of res publica, which conceived the State as a public entity oriented toward the common good rather than the will of a single ruler. These foundational ideas, adapted and reinterpreted over centuries, provided the intellectual architecture on which modern democratic institutions were constructed. Perception frames invention. It provides the vocabulary, assumptions, and conceptual tools that make new ideas possible. What seems entirely new still carries the imprint of what it sought to move beyond. On closer examination, the products of creativity are not isolated acts of originality but reconfigurations of existing structures. Evolution, rather than spontaneous emergence, governs how ideas, institutions, and cultures take shape.

Memory underlies this process. It is not a passive record of events but an active medium through which possibilities are conceived and action becomes intelligible. Imagination draws its material from memory; it combines and redirects memory toward conditions not yet realized. This is nowhere more evident than in the idea of freedom, a concept that resists simple definition yet has long carried two complementary meanings. The first, articulated most clearly in the classical Greek tradition, understands freedom as eleutheria—the condition of living without domination or external constraint, a state in which individuals are not subject to arbitrary power. The second, rooted in the Roman legal and civic tradition, conceives freedom as libertas—the capacity to participate actively in the governance of a political community and to shape its laws and institutions. Both meanings reveal how deeply freedom depends on historical precedent: it requires language to articulate its claims, institutions to guarantee its exercise, and collective memory to frame its significance. Far from existing apart from what has been, freedom is shaped and enabled by what has already been conceived, argued, and enacted. Prior experience supplies the references and alternatives against which choices acquire meaning. Without that reservoir of knowledge, novelty would lack coherence and direction, and the exercise of freedom would collapse into arbitrary impulse. Human beings do not invent in a void; they work within the continuity of time and adapt what has been lived and learned into forms suited to what is yet to come.

This same dynamic defines the formation of identity. Selfhood is not an isolated act of invention but a continuous negotiation with what has been received. The very idea of the self has itself evolved through history: in classical philosophy, it was often conceived as a psyche—an inner essence shaped by reason and virtue and embedded within a larger cosmic order. Christian thought reinterpreted this understanding through the notion of the soul as a unique bearer of moral responsibility, oriented toward salvation and defined by its relationship to God. Early modern thinkers such as John Locke then transformed this inheritance by grounding personal identity in memory and consciousness — a conception that would later inform modern ideas of individual autonomy. Even the impulse to define oneself against the past relies on categories inherited from it. Identity is therefore neither static nor wholly self-created; it is a process of reinterpretation through which the individual positions what is given in relation to what is chosen. Human beings exist in the tension between inheritance and aspiration, between the weight of memory and the desire for renewal. That tension is not an obstacle to authenticity but its condition, for without the framework provided by the past there would be nothing from which to depart. Continuity and change are not opposing forces. Without continuity, there is no ground on which to become. Without change, continuity hardens into mere repetition. The act of becoming depends on the dynamic between the two.

Viewed from this perspective, the human condition is defined less by pure invention than by the capacity to transform. What is called “new” is the familiar reorganized with new intentions, the established redirected toward new purposes. Recognizing this does not diminish creativity. It clarifies its nature. Humanity’s most significant achievements—in politics, art, science, and thought—are not escapes from what has been. They are deliberate reinterpretations of what has been, shaped to answer new questions and confront new circumstances. In the sciences, paradigmatic shifts often described as revolutions still follow this pattern. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not erase Newtonian mechanics; it incorporated and extended its principles, a revision that revealed their limits while preserving their usefulness within a broader understanding of space, time, and motion. This same principle governs artistic innovation. The Renaissance revival of classical forms did not merely reproduce antiquity; it reinterpreted ancient visual languages to express the spiritual and humanistic concerns of a new era. The evolution of digital communication and artificial intelligence reflects a comparable continuity. The internet did not replace human interaction; it expanded its reach and scale, a transformation that altered how language circulates, how memory is archived, and how collective knowledge is formed. Similarly, artificial intelligence—often portrayed as autonomous or unprecedented—rests on centuries of linguistic, mathematical, and conceptual developments. These systems extend rather than supersede the cognitive inheritance from which they originate. The future is built in this way: not in its rejection of the past but in its continuous interaction with it.

Resistance to this understanding persists wherever the idea of evolution is denied. Such resistance is rarely a matter of evidence alone. It reflects a desire for permanence—for a beginning that is untouched by change and a truth that stands apart from time. It offers certainty where process allows none and promises stability in place of adaptation. Yet even this resistance is shaped by the forces it seeks to escape. Languages evolve, beliefs adjust, and traditions adapt, even as they proclaim their immutability. Those who defend what is fixed do so with concepts and arguments that themselves have been shaped by historical change. The very doctrines that claim timeless authority — such as the medieval conception of divine sovereignty, once invoked to legitimize monarchies and later transformed into the principle of popular sovereignty in modern constitutional systems—reveal this dependence: they persist not by remaining unchanged but by being continually reinterpreted to meet new contexts. The contrast, therefore, is not between evolution and its absence, but between recognition and refusal. The reality remains: existence unfolds through transformation, and humanity, whether consciously or not, participates in that unfolding—a truth with profound implications for how societies remember their past, shape their present, and imagine their future.

“Ritual: A Philosophy of Necessity”

September 20, 2025

Ricardo Morín
***New York Series, Nº 5***
54″ x 84″
Oil on canvas
1992

Preface

This essay seeks to define rituals without reliance on metaphors, abstractions, or moral judgments. The method of this essay begins with etymology, then traces its biological foundation, and follows the extension of ritual into human conduct. Ritual is treated as repetition with form, carried out by necessity to contain forces uncontrollable by command or intention.

The analysis will distinguish ritual from belief and superstition. Belief attributes power beyond immediate function. Superstition arises when belief assigns causality where none exists. Ritual is not a belief, but only a procedure. Its function is to regulate life through ordered repetition.

The chapters that follow address the principal domains in which ritual operates. In sexuality, ritual prevents destabilization by giving desire a form through which it can move without collapse. In distrust, friendship, enmity, and love, ritual contains states that resist control and makes them livable. In governance, ritual holds ideological differences within limits that preserve continuity of community.

Ritual is necessary for existence. It does not eliminate instinct, emotion, or conflict. It gives them form and allows life to continue without disintegration. This necessity is not external, but generated by life itself. Where forces exceed control, ritual provides order.

Ricardo Morin. September 12, 2025, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.

The word ritual comes from the Latin ritus (a prescribed act performed in an ordered manner). Its essence is repetition. To speak of ritual is not to speak of tradition or abstraction, but of a necessity carried out for primal longing.

The biological basis of ritual is clear. In many species, conflictive instinctive drives are contained by repeated actions which reduce uncertainty. Birds perform dances before mating. Wolves display submission to prevent attack. Primates groom one another to ease tension. These actions do not alter the external world. They do not ensure mating, nor prevent danger, nor eliminate aggression. They work by regulating behavior in ways preventing destabilization. They arise from necessity: without them, reproduction, survival, or cohesion could be placed at risk.

Human conduct extends this biological principle. The handshake is a repeated act signaling non-aggression between strangers. A funeral orders grief into sequence and allows the bereaved to endure loss. A meal shared among people affirms cooperation and reduces the possibility of conflict. Not one of these actions are effective because of a belief in causality. They are effective because they are the product of repetition and recognition within the group. They are necessary because without them, mistrust, grief, or rivalry would remain uncontained.

Instinct and emotion generate uncontrolled command or intention. Repetition gives them form without elimination. Herein lies the necessity: life produces forces beyond control, and ritual provides their procedure without collapse. Thus further inquiry rests here.

Belief begins where an act or event is taken to hold power beyond its immediate function. To believe is to attribute meaning not evident in the act itself. Belief provides orientation, but also creates vulnerability.

From belief grows superstition. Superstition occurs when a gesture, a sign, or an accident is taken to determine good or bad luck. Breaking glass is said to bring harm. A number is said to bring luck. The act or sign is given power it does not possess. Superstition is belief that’s misdirected. It relies on the conviction that external hidden forces govern external events and become accessible through signs and gestures.

Ritual does not depend on belief that an act can change fate or invoke hidden power. Its effectiveness does not rest on what is imagined but on what is enacted. A handshake obviates mistrust because it is repetition and recognition, not because of its magic. A funeral allows provides ordered sequence and allows grief, but it does not alter death. A meal shares cooperation through its mutuality, not because it calls luck.

The distinction is exact. If ritual is the form, desire is the current that moves within it. Religious traditions have often cast desire as a deficit, a disorder, or a temptation to be repressed. But desire is neither deficit nor disorder; it is vitality itself: an energy that presses toward expression. Ritual does not restrict this force; restriction belongs to fear and suffering. Ritual contains fear and keeps excess within the limits of endurance and necessity. Fasting, for example, does not abolish hunger but holds it in rhythm; it makes appetite a measure rather than a punishment. By contrast, a prohibition that denies the legitimacy of desire transforms vitality into anxiety altogether. In this way, ritual and desire are not opposed but interdependent: the former is the channel, the latter the stream.

III

Sexual drive is pervasive in human life. Left without form, it destabilizes both the individual and the community. Its power lies in persistence. Command cannot dismiss desire. Desire presses for expression. Every culture has developed rituals to contain and to regulate it.

Yet the grounds of sexual ritual are not repression but replication. Nurture marks the human condition from birth: in lactation, nurture consists in being fed, held, and sustained through another’s body. In this original state, intimacy secures survival. Later, desire repeats the structure. The quest for union is both a return to that first condition of dependence and a transformation of it into adulthood. Sexual ritual prolongs that first experience: it carries within it the imprint of nurture. It is not a matter of shame or judgment, but of continuity.

Courtship is the model. Repeated gestures mark the approach to intimacy. Ceremonies (words, gifts, dances) structure the encounter. Desire is not eliminated, but gives form to sexuality and allows it to proceed without immediate conflict. Marriage extends the process and establishes rules for its conduct within a recognizable frame. Ritual transforms a disruptive force into a relation that can be carried within order.

Different cultural examples exemplify the variety of this process. In Japan, tea ceremonies and formal visits have structured the first stages of marital negotiation. In Victorian England, the presence of chaperones functioned as a mode of surveillance and set boundaries for courtship. Among the Navajo in North America, the Kinaaldá ceremony marks a girl’s transition into womanhood and links individual desire and fertility with the continuation of the community. In each case, ritual does not extinguish instinct but channels it into social life.

When desire cannot be enacted without risk, individuals turn to patterned acts that provide release without collapse. Monastic traditions across cultures developed rituals of celibacy, which are supported by prayer, fasting, and other disciplines, containing sexual force. In everyday life, other people turn to imagery (fantasy, dream, or artistic representation) and stage symbolically acts they long for but cannot realize. Still others establish habits (exercise, meditation, or creative work) that redirect sexual energy into manageable outlets. Longing, however, is not erased. Its structure makes sure that desire moves within set limits without becoming overwhelming.

Obsession arises when desire remains unresolved and intrudes upon thought; it repeats itself without relief and it threatens stability. Ritual is a way to contain obsession. Through repetition, it acknowledges the force and gives it shape. Though not eliminated, it has boundaries.

Ritual in the sphere of sexuality is not an option but a necessity. It provides form where instinct would exceed measure.

Reason alone does not govern human beings. Emotional states persist in ways that resist control. Distrust, friendship, enmity, and love cannot be removed by decree or maintained by thought. Each requires ritual to provide continuity and containment.

Words alone cannot erase suspicion. Distrust is one of the most persistent of these states. Suspicion cannot be erased by emotion. Suspicion lingers and destabilizes interaction. Ritual reduces its scope. A greeting, an oath, or a contract are ceremonial acts repeated across encounters; they establish a minimum ground on which cooperation can occur. These acts do not eliminate suspicion, but they allow engagement to proceed in spite of it.

Friendship depends on feelings, but feelings without form fade. Ritual gives duration to friendship. Shared meals, recurring visits, exchanges of favors, and so forth, are patterned acts that affirm a relation. By themselves, they do not create friendship, but without them friendship weakens. Rituals sustain that which cannot be commanded—the persistence of trust and attachment across time.

Enmity is no less powerful. Unbounded hostility escalates until destruction follows. Rituals channel hostility into limited form: a duel, a contest, a formal debate—each provides a frame in which enmity can be expressed without collapse. Even in war, treaties operate as ritual forms that restrict violence to recognizable limits. Without them, conflict loses proportion.

Love in itself is unstable. It begins in impulse and only lasts with repetition. Daily gestures, renewed promises, anniversaries, and continuous acts of care provide a form to sustain it. These rituals do not guarantee permanence, but they give a structure to love within which it can endure. Without these rituals, love dissipates.

In all these states, ritual serves the same function. It gives order where the force cannot be controlled directly. It does not remove distrust, friendship, sexuality, enmity, or love. It makes them livable.

Governance is the state where human forces are amplified by scale. Distrust, enmity, and competing loyalties appear not only among individuals but among groups. Ideological differences cannot be eliminated; they can be managed. Ritual provides the procedure by which this is done.

One example is Parliamentary procedure. Debate, order of speaking, and voting are repeated acts that permit conflict to be expressed without dissolution. The forms themselves do not create agreement. They provide limits within which disagreement can persist.

Civic ceremonies perform a related function. Inaugurations, public oaths, and national commemorations do not change political conditions in of themselves. Their repetition affirms the continuity of authority and gives recognition to transitions of power. The acts are symbolic only in appearance; their real function is procedural stability.

Elections are more direct. They do not remove ideological division. They provide a repeated method for channeling conflict into outcomes recognizable by opposing sides. Without elections, or when their results are not acknowledged, division tends toward rupture.

Ritual is necessity. Governance depends on it. Across species, ritual arises from the need to manage forces that exceed direct control. Human conduct continues this principle.

In ancient Athens, the assembly and the use of the lot allowed opposition to be expressed without dissolving civic order. Later, parliaments and councils provided ritual structures for negotiation between absolute monarchs and subjects. In modern democracies, constitutions and electoral cycles maintain continuity by repeating forms that regulate the transfer of power. When such rituals fail, the outcome is predictable. Governance is a ritual that makes ideological differences livable. Without ritual, politics reduces itself to domination and resistance, a cycle that cannot sustain order.

Annotated Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah: On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963. (Arendt emphasizes the role of civic procedures in sustaining governance; this underlies Chapter V’s claim that ritual makes ideological difference livable.)

Douglas, Mary: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. (Douglas’s work on ritual boundaries informs Chapter IV’s discussion of distrust, enmity, and the management of instability through repeated acts.)

Durkheim, Émile: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995. (Durkheim argues that ritual is the foundation of social cohesion, an idea reflected in Chapter I’s claim that rituals regulate behavior and prevent destabilization.)

Freud, Sigmund: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. (Freud’s psychoanalytic discussion of sexual drive and obsession parallels Chapter III’s treatment of private rituals and the containment of unresolved desire.)

Geertz, Clifford: The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. (Geertz treats ritual as “models of” and “models for” reality; his ethnographic analysis supports the essay’s extension of ritual from sexuality to governance in Chapters IV and V.)

Habermas, Jürgen: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. (Habermas shows how ritualized procedures in discourse and law preserve governance under conflict; his thesis supports the essay’s treatment of parliamentary debate and elections.)

Jung, Carl Gustav: Symbols of Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. (Jung traces how instinctual drives, especially sexuality, become ritualized in both individual psychology and collective culture; his analysis complements Chapter III.)

Turner, Victor: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. (Turner’s analysis of liminality informs Chapter III and IV, where sexuality, friendship, and enmity are shown to require ritual frames to carry disruptive forces without collapse.)

Tags: anthropology, containment, culture, desire, human condition, I’m ritual, morality, religion, restriction, sexuality, vitality
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“Memories”

September 16, 2025

Author’s Note

Written years apart, Intervals and Memories reflect different moments of reckoning. Each stands on its own.

Ricardo Morín

September 14, 2016

New York City.

Memories

We are mirrors of the people in our lives, and through them we come to know ourselves. When I see you, I see myself also. To be vulnerable is to admit our fears and limitations. To grow is to accept them and other things as well—even that we are moving to the rhythm of a diverse and chaotic universe. Infinity is vast and varying time loses its hold.

Aging is part of the cycle that gives us birth and death. These are expressions of life. At every moment we end and begin anew. We let go of our ambitions so that we can live in the present. Our mind resists this and clings to the idea of independence, that it can re-create even itself.

Yet, the universe is a whole and we are part of it. We are free as persons, but never apart from that around us. Loneliness may be built into us and the mind may be in exile, but no barrier separates from the whole.

Tags: Acceptance, aging, Belonging, cycle of life, memories, reflections, renewal, solitude, Vulnerability
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“Intervals”

September 2, 2025

Design cover by Ricardo Morín
***Aposento Nº 2***
29″ x 36″
Oil on canvas
1994

Author’s Note

Intervals is written in a cadence held taut at the threshold of life and death. It does not withhold itself, though its language remains stripped of explanation. Ambivalence may be inescapable, but it is not the aim. The anonymity of the speaker is deliberate, to keep attention on what is spoken rather than on who speaks.

Ricardo Morín, September 11, 2025. Bala Cynwyd, Pa.

Intervals

To heal himself, he would cover his body in mud and then rinse it away. Crouched beneath the burning sun, he stared diagonally from a corner across the far end of the yard. From the clothesline he hung a black umbrella, upside down. Into it he cast the last handful of potions. From its collapse, heavy with weight, he hoped to avoid his own death.

He covered his books with a black sheet; blindly he pulled one out at a time and, after finding a sentence giving meaning to his thoughts, he put it back. He waited for revelation. His mother, now old, took another book out and searched for a better reply.

Exhausted and sleepless, he lay wrapped in a red blanket with his back to the mirror. Drenched in tears, he felt undone. Shivers traced his spine, as though his entrails were on fire.

He woke to the sound of running water. His mother would scrub his garments until the fabric began to fray. He had painted the walls white; the doors ceased to be brown. An intruder leapt over the fence. Then, with a surprising strength, he tore up the garden.

Nights followed without sleep. He was unaware of sunken cheekbones; only his neighbors’ gaze could see him wasting away. He managed to fly afar. Though attentive to life, he found disappointment.

On arrival the hotel summoned an ambulance. After a ten-hour flight, septic shock seized him; a nurse asked him to choose a destination. Shivers returned. He saw many dying, though it was not his turn. Days later, his flesh returned to life.

With the memory of past ties, he departed again disappointed. He crossed another distance and knew how fragile his solitude was.

You rescued him and he you. A bridge was built out of longing. Three years of passion did not mend the abyss; he took his life and you remained.

A Roman curate attended his mother’s cries, while he twisted her son’s. Little did the curate know that it was by his own design. He called for you, a new love, to come. To love, to sustain the bond of the moment.

Epilogue

Intervals rests on our fearful perception of death, solitude, survival, and rupture (an interval is the rhythm of time and its ending is the emptying of what the consciousness of fear carries in it). An interval seeks neither consolation nor resolution; it remains with what occurs, in the exposure where solitude and fracture reveal the fragility of existence.

Tags: anonymity, austerity, bond, cadence, death, image, Intervals, life, Loss, Memory, resilience, rupture, solitude, Survival
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“Bound and Unbound:

August 31, 2025

The Articulation of Desire and Sin“

Cover design by Ricardo Morín
***00032***
Oil On Linen
18 by 24 by 3/4 inches
2009

Author’s Note

This essay considers how cultures have spoken about desire through the language of sin, pathology, and identity. The aim is not to defend or condemn, but to observe how words have carried judgments across time and how those judgments still shape our understanding. The reflections that follow are an attempt to restore clarity, to see desire as part of life’s vitality rather than as a distortion imposed by inherited vocabularies.

Abstract

Historically, desire has been articulated through terms such as sexuality, fetishism, morality, and religion. Over time, these words shifted from description to judgment, producing a confusion between nature and culture. Evidence from animal behavior, biology, and public health demonstrates that variation in desire is neither anomaly nor pathology. By grounding ethics in dignity and consent rather than shame, desire can be recognized as a natural expression of vitality rather than a source of suspicion.

The Burden of Words

Our most familiar words already betray the history of our confusion. Sexuality, from the Latin sexus, once indicated simple biological differentiation; only in the nineteenth century did it expand into a comprehensive category, enveloping desire, identity, and conduct (Laqueur 1990). Fetishism, from the Portuguese feitiço (“charm” or “sorcery”), was first applied to African religious objects before being imported into European science, where it came to signify irrational sexual attachment (Foucault 1978). Morality, from mores (“customs”), originally described communal practices but hardened into prescriptions against desire, particularly under Christian influence. Religion, from religare (“to bind”), once meant binding communities into shared ritual but eventually came to bind individuals to guilt and suspicion about their own bodies. Here the meaning of Bound and Unbound comes into view: words that once bound desire to order and judgment now carry within them the possibility of unbinding, of returning desire to the realm of vitality rather than suspicion. Each of these terms began in description and shifted into judgment. When we use them today, we inherit their distortions.

The Articulation of Desire and Sin

Culture has long gazed upon desire not as part of life’s ordinary richness but as a threat to be monitored. Theologies cast it as sin; medical texts classified it as pathology; social codes framed it as danger (Foucault 1978). This does not clarify, it distorts. Sexuality becomes at once overexposed and diminished: in public, it is the subject of rules and prohibitions; in private, it collapses into unrealistic expectations that either inhibit expression or exaggerate it into fetish. What should be natural is turned into a negotiation with shame.

Nature provides a more honest account. Same-sex interactions have been documented in over four hundred species (Bagemihl 1999). Rams form lasting male–male bonds, often rejecting female partners. Dolphins employ genital contact across sexes to cement alliances (de Waal 2005). Swans, gulls, and penguins engage in same-sex pairings that rear offspring as successfully as heterosexual pairs (Roughgarden 2013). Among bonobos, sexual contact occurs across nearly every configuration and functions as a mechanism of peacekeeping and social cohesion (de Waal 2005). Even in insects, behaviors that humans describe as “homosexual” occur routinely as part of dominance rituals or sheer abundance of sexual drive. None of this destabilizes the species; rather, it integrates sexuality into the fabric of survival and affiliation.

Humans display similar variation. Chromosomal conditions such as Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) or Turner syndrome (XO) illustrate that biological sex is not a rigid binary but a spectrum (LeVay 2016). Hormonal influences during gestation shape attraction and behavior before culture applies its labels (Hrdy 1981). Neuroscientific studies suggest correlations between hypothalamic structures and orientation, though no single cause accounts for desire (LeVay 2016). What emerges is not a fixed order but a continuum. The insistence on strict categories—heterosexual or homosexual, normal or deviant—is not nature’s doing but culture’s imposition.

Yet culture continues to conflate desire with identity and narrows it into fixed roles. These categories can be politically useful, but they risk obscuring the fluidity of experience that biology reveals. When identity becomes prescriptive, individuals live their own vitality under suspicion, measuring themselves against cultural ideals that deny variation. The result is estrangement: desire filtered through shame.

An alternative frame already exists. The World Health Organization defines sexual health as “a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being” that includes the possibility of safe and pleasurable experiences (WHO 2006). The World Association for Sexual Health has gone further, affirming sexual pleasure as a fundamental human right (WAS 2019). Such frameworks do not police desire; they protect individuals against coercion and exploitation. They suggest that the role of culture is not to dictate what desires are permissible but to ensure dignity and consent. Once these conditions are secured, desire resumes its natural role: a source of intimacy, bonding, creativity, and balance (Gruskin et al. 2019).

To confront nature’s complexity is to resist its reduction into morality plays of vice and virtue. Desire does not require validation from cultural obsession, nor does it deserve condemnation from inherited vocabularies of sin. It is an aspect of life, as ordinary and vital as hunger or sleep. To acknowledge it without fear is to reclaim joy. By lifting the burden of shame, we return desire to its proper place in the living order: not an aberration requiring defense, but a manifestation of vitality—one that connects us to each other and to the exuberance of nature itself.

Annotated Bibliography

Bagemihl, Bruce: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. (A landmark survey documenting same-sex behaviors in more than 450 species. Bagemihl’s research undermines claims that homosexuality is “unnatural” and illustrates the diversity of sexual expression across the animal kingdom. It is essential for grounding sexuality in biological rather than cultural terms.)

de Waal, Frans: Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. (Drawing on primate studies, de Waal emphasizes sex as a social tool among bonobos and chimpanzees, used for alliance-building and conflict resolution. His work demonstrates that sexual behavior is not confined to reproduction but serves broader social and evolutionary functions.)

Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. (In this foundational text on the cultural construction of sexuality, Foucault argues that sexuality is not a timeless natural category but a discourse shaped by power and institutions. Provides the conceptual framework for understanding how morality and pathology have distorted natural instincts.)

Gruskin, Sofia, et al. “Sexual Health, Sexual Rights and Sexual Pleasure.” Global Public Health, 2019, 14(10): 1361–1372. (This article situates sexual pleasure within global public health frameworks. It underscores that fulfillment and pleasure are inseparable from health and rights, reinforcing the need for ethics based on dignity rather than prohibition.)

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer: The Woman That Never Evolved. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. (Hrdy reinterprets female primate behavior and shows active strategies in mating and alliance formation. Her work dismantles the myth of female passivity and demonstrates that sexual agency is integral to evolutionary success.)

Laqueur, Thomas: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. (Laqueur traces the cultural and historical shift from the “one-sex” model of antiquity to the modern “two-sex” binary. His work shows how scientific language helped construct cultural categories of sexuality and gender, making him central to the etymological and historical analysis of desire.

LeVay, Simon: Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. (LeVay synthesizes research on brain structures, genetics, and prenatal influences and argues that sexual orientation emerges from a complex interaction of biological factors. Useful for contextualizing the continuum of human desire.)

Roughgarden, Joan: Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. (Roughgarden challenges traditional Darwinian views of sexual selection, highlighting diversity in gender and sexuality across species. She bridges nonhuman variation and human experience and offers a scientific argument against binary understandings of sexuality.)

World Health Organization (WHO): “Defining Sexual Health.” Geneva: WHO, 2006. (This report defines sexual health as a state of well-being that includes the possibility of safe and pleasurable sexual experiences, free of coercion or violence. It offers authoritative language to argue that sexual fulfillment is a health matter, not a moral one.)

World Association for Sexual Health (WAS): “Declaration on Sexual Pleasure.” Mexico City: WAS, 2019.(This report affirms sexual pleasure as a fundamental human right. This declaration situates pleasure within global health and rights discourse, supporting the essay’s call for ethics rooted in dignity rather than shame.)

Tags: animal behavior, biology, cultural history, desire, etymology, Human Rights, morality, natural diversity, pathology, public health, religion, sexuality, sin
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“When All We Know Is Borrowed”

August 29, 2025

Author’s Note:

This essay concludes the trilogy begun with The Colors of Certainty and continued with The Discipline of Doubt. It reflects on perception, ambiguity, and ambivalence as conditions that complicate our access to truth, especially in an age of mistrust. The trilogy as a whole asks how certainty, doubt, and ambivalence each shape the paradoxes of human understanding—and how reality is always encountered in fragments, never in full possession.

The purpose of this essay is not to resolve these tensions but to articulate them. Its value lies less in offering solutions than in clarifying the paradoxes that underlie our shared attempts to understand reality.

Ricardo Morín, Bala Cynwyd, Pa. August 30, 2025.

Abstract:

This essay examines perception, ambiguity, and belief as distinct but interrelated conditions that shape human access to reality. Ambiguity marks the instability of meaning; perception denotes our filtered and partial contact with the world; and ambivalence names the paradoxical ground on which truth is sought. Ambivalence sustains the search even as it undermines the certainty that truth has been attained. Writing and reading reveal these dynamics with particular clarity. Through writing, thought evolves; the writer participates in this evolution and discovers that meaning may remain both untranslatable and questionable. Yet this very incompleteness expands understanding, even when what is grasped cannot be fully shared. Extending beyond communication, the essay suggests that reality itself is encountered only in fragments—through gestures, silences, and misperceptions that weaken the line between appearance and reality. Artificial intelligence illustrates this condition in two ways: as a tool, it amplifies practical doubts about authorship and authenticity; as a mirror, it reflects the deeper ambivalence that precedes it. The essay concludes that ambivalence is not a detour from truth but the paradox through which truth, if it arises at all, briefly appears.

Perception

The word perception carries within it a history that mirrors the shifting ways in which cultures have understood reality. From the Latin perceptio, it meant first a “taking in,” a “gathering,” or even a “harvest.” To perceive was to collect impressions, as one might collect grain from a field: passive in form, but active in intent.

In Greek thought, perception was bound to aisthēsis—sensation was the contact one felt with the world. Here it stood closer to the arts, to the immediacy of feeling, than to the systematic reasoning of philosophy.

During the Middle Ages, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aristotle’s writings were recovered and incorporated into Christian scholastic thought. What had been a pagan philosophy of sensation and intellect was reinterpreted by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas within a theological framework of knowledge. Perception was defined as the reception of sensory data by the intellect, a necessary stage through which sensation was elevated into understanding.

With the rise of modern philosophy, the term fractured. For Descartes, perception could deceive; for Locke, it formed the foundation of experience; for Kant, it was structured by categories that both opened and constrained our access to reality. By then perception had already become ambivalent: indispensable for knowing, but never certain in its truth.

Today the word extends further still, connoting not only sensation but also interpretation, bias, and opinion. To say “that is your perception” is no longer to affirm contact with the real but to indicate distance, distortion, or subjectivity. The evolution of the word reveals a semantic instability that parallels the essay’s claim: our access to reality is always shaped by ambivalence. What perception grants, it also unsettles.

Ambivalence, and the Limits of Truth

Perception is never a simple act of receiving what is already there. It is always mediated by memory, expectation, and predisposition. In every exchange—whether in words on a page or in silence between two people—meaning shifts, unsettled and provisional. From this shifting ground arises ambiguity, and from ambiguity, the unease that unsettles belief.

For the reader, this instability is unavoidable. Every response, even silence, is colored by trust or mistrust, sympathy or suspicion, openness or fatigue. Rarely does a reader approach a text in innocence, for every act of reading is shaped by assumptions that condition the reception of words.

The author is not exempt from this interpretive burden. The act of writing does not end with publication but continues in the uncertain work of reading readers. A pause in conversation, a fleeting acknowledgment, or a lack of reply can be interpreted as disinterest, disapproval, or indifference. In this way, writing interprets interpretations and multiplies the layers of ambiguity until the meaning of the work appears not only untranslatable but also questionable. Yet it is precisely through this reflection that writing continues, for without it thought cannot develop. By persevering in this process, the writer participates in a widening of understanding, even when that understanding cannot be fully shared.

Such uncertainty is not a flaw of communication but part of its structure. Anyone who seeks to understand through writing must accept that clarity will always be provisional and that expression will always fall short. The act of putting thought into words reveals the distance between intention and reception, but it also creates the possibility of seeing reality from new angles. Even when what is expressed cannot be communicated in full, the process itself enlarges understanding and deepens awareness of what is partial and in flux.

Ambivalence, therefore, is not hesitation but the paradoxical condition in which the search for meaning takes place. It joins conviction and doubt, the desire for certainty and the recognition of its limits. To write within ambivalence is to continue searching even when the result cannot be communicated without loss. This condition—and not the illusion of final clarity—enables thought to move forward.

Truth, if it is ever reached, emerges despite the unstable ground of perception and ambiguity. We arrive at it in spite of ourselves, our tensions, and our limitations. It is not only major errors that weaken certainty: a nuance misperceived, a pause misunderstood, or an ambiguous gesture may also diminish trust. Daily experience shows that the line between appearance and reality is too thin to provide lasting assurance.

But this tension is not limited to writing or reading. It extends more deeply, into our relation with reality itself. Ambivalence is not only a feature of communication but also a feature of existence. To perceive is always to partake of the world incompletely; to live is to do so under conditions of partial presence. At times we see clearly, at other times dimly, and often not at all. This rhythm of presence and withdrawal marks every relationship—between persons, between societies, and even between humanity and nature.

Technology has sharpened our awareness of this condition. Artificial intelligence, for example, dramatizes the instability already present in human perception. As a tool, it enables refinement of expression while amplifying doubts about authorship and authenticity. As a mirror, it reflects the deeper ambivalence that precedes it and shapes all mediation. Thus AI does not diminish thought but magnifies the unease that accompanies human access to reality: the sense that what is offered is incomplete, unreliable, and never fully participatory.

The task, then, is not to eliminate ambiguity but to recognize it as part of reality itself. Perception is interpretive, belief is unstable, and mistrust is a constant companion. Ambivalence is not a detour from truth but the path along which truth—if it comes at all—must travel. The challenge is not to restore a certainty that never existed but to learn to live within partial participation, to accept that what we call reality is always encountered in fragments.

In this sense, perception, ambiguity, and belief will always remain unsettled. The writer cannot control how words are read, nor can the reader fully grasp what was meant. No one can claim full possession of reality. Every relation to the world depends on fragile conditions, where appearance and reality touch without ever coinciding. If truth appears at all, it does so briefly and incompletely, arising only through ambivalence. Yet ambivalence itself is a paradoxical condition: it sustains our search for truth even as it undermines the certainty we long to possess. Truth cannot confer ownership because it never rests.

Annotated Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Arendt analyzes action, labor, and work as distinct ways of engaging reality. Her distinction between appearance and reality, and her insistence that truth emerges through shared human activity, is directly relevant to the essay’s theme of perception and ambivalence.)

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1975. (In this foundational text in hermeneutics, Gadamer explores how understanding arises through interpretation rather than objectivity. His view that truth is approached dialogically supports the essay’s claim that truth emerges “within ambivalence rather than beyond it.”)

Girard, René: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. (Girard’s theory of mimetic desire shows how interpretation, desire, and misunderstanding shape human relations. His work underlines the fragility of belief and the unstable boundary between appearance and reality.)

Nussbaum, Martha: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Nussbaum argues that public emotions—such as love, compassion, and solidarity—are essential to sustaining justice. Her insights reveal how belief is fragile and shaped by interpretation; it resonates with the essay’s concern about trust, ambivalence, and human participation in reality.)

Turkle, Sherry: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. (Turkle investigates how technology mediates human relationships and perceptions. Her work frames AI as a mirror of doubt; it shows how mediation both enables connection and erodes authenticity—an idea central to the essay.)

Tags: AI, ambiguity, ambivalence, authenticity, Perception, philosophy, reading, Reality, Truth, writing
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“Uprooted Influences”

August 25, 2025

Ricardo Morin, August 25, 2025

From the Alice Maguire Museum at Saint Joseph’s University in Lower Merion Township, we moved among its holdings. The stained-glass windows were luminous and unsettling: John the Baptist with the Sacred Lamb, a Madonna and Child, a Pietà, a Return of the Prodigal Son. Once embedded in the walls of churches, they now stood uprooted from their sacred setting, their narratives suspended. Freed from liturgical purpose, they spoke instead through pure rhythm—cobalt and ruby, emerald and gold—colors as commanding as Veronese or Tintoretto, structures as fractured and daring as Picasso or Soutine. In their displacement, their dramatic effect delighted both the eye and the mind in their own right.

Another room revealed the Heavenly and Earthly Trinities of colonial Peru, the anonymous painters of Bolivia, and the Hispano-Philippine baroque sculptors: nameless hands shaping images to satisfy imperial taste. Their works obeyed the conventions of European devotion, yet beneath the surface ran other currents. A palette tinged with local sensibility, a face, an ornament not found in Seville or Rome—small gestures of persistence within the language of conquest. The absence of names testified to a system where identities were erased, but expression still found a way through brushstroke and chisel.

And then, standing apart, an eighteenth-century Mexican vargueño. A desk suited to a monarch’s scribe, its fall-front concealing drawers and secrets, its ironwork and gilding gleaming like a promise of empire. Imported as form but transformed by New World artisanship, it became a hybrid of Spanish order and Mexican material richness. Not merely a piece of furniture, but a portable stage of authority that bears within it the weight of rule and the quiet labor of those who made it.

Leaving the museum, we stepped into the arboretum. The shift was immediate. The bright lawn spread before us, lilacs already past bloom, the air holding the mixture of late summer and the first breath of fall. In the distance I saw David at the forest’s edge, as he was pointing to the broken silhouettes of trees—some uprooted, others scarred by the saw. It was difficult to tell whether their loss came from the slow processes of age and decay, or from the harsher pressures of climate change. The sight of those old, magnificent trunks reduced to stumps and exposed roots carried the weight of both inevitability and warning. I whistled to catch up with him, the sound bridging the distance between us and the wounded landscape.

The grounds themselves bore another absence. This land, once owned by Dr. Albert Barnes, preserves his legacy in plaques and praise, yet his presence is no longer here. Like the uprooted trees, the founder has been torn from the landscape—remembered in word but not in flesh. His vision endures in the collections and in the cultivated order of the arboretum, but the man himself is gone, leaving only traces: the architecture, the gardens, the echoes of intention.

Even the memory of Barnes is shadowed by discord. His decision to raise a ten-foot wall, blocking the view of his neighbors, was more than an act of stubborn privacy—it became a testament to the conflict between ways of seeing, both in art and in life. Just as his collection challenged the conventions of museums, so too his wall imposed his vision upon the landscape, as his efforts uprooted not only visibility but also harmony with those around him.

The uprooting of the collection has been chronicled not only in print but on film. Don Argott’s The Art of the Steal (2009) captures the drawn-out conflict between Barnes’s will, his Merion neighbors, and the powerful interests that sought the collection’s relocation: the film portrays the move as both civic triumph and cultural betrayal. More recently, Donor Intent Gone Wrong (Philanthropy Roundtable, 2022) framed the dispute as a cautionary tale about institutions overriding individual vision. Together, these accounts testify that the collection’s dislocation was never merely architectural: it was an uprooting of purpose as much as of place.

A collection of modern art—though invaluable and managed by the Pew Foundation at an estimated value of sixty-seven billion dollars—does not carry the same intensity as Barnes’s once-private holdings. A new museum dedicated to his collection now stands in its own building on Philadelphia’s museum row along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, beginning with the Franklin Institute of Science and ending with the Barnes Museum eastward. What was once an idiosyncratic, fiercely personal vision now exists under the stewardship of curators who inevitably impose a different order. Where Barnes once arranged paintings shoulder to shoulder—Renoirs beside African masks, Cézannes and Matisses above medieval ironwork—the new installation gravitates in misalignment with the grammar of conventional museums, categorized by school, chronology, or theme, yet still incongruous with the artifacts mixed among them. The intimacy of a domestic space has been exchanged for the grandeur of a public institution, and with it the friction between his vision and institutional norms becomes palpable. Visitors now move through broad galleries instead of the dense, almost confrontational ensembles he once defended.

What endures, however, is the sense of the collection as Barnes’s own installation, authored in the spirit of both philosophy and biography. His juxtapositions were deliberate compositions: Renoirs beside iron hinges, Cézannes above ladles, African masks flanking Impressionist portraits. Around them clustered the objects he loved to collect—door latches, lock plates, wagon parts, Pennsylvania German chests, Navajo textiles, and hundreds of wrought-iron hinges and utensils. These were never curiosities: for Barnes, each hinge, each utensil, each mask was an equal actor in the ensemble, sharpening the perception of form and rhythm in the canvases above. Influenced by his friend John Dewey, Barnes believed that art should be experienced democratically, where the humble and the exalted shared the same plane of visual inquiry.

The paradox is that the collection has never been more visible, yet perhaps never less itself. In its transformation from private sanctuary to public museum, from the defiant eccentricity of a man’s will to the polished authority of the Parkway, it has acquired a new layer of politics. Praise for its accessibility is constant, but so too is the quiet sense that something has been uprooted: the personal order replaced by the institutional, the disruptive vision softened by curatorial compromise. And yet, despite these shifts, the collection still resists full assimilation. The paintings, the juxtapositions, the sheer density of presence retain their charge, as they remind us of the one man who dared to see differently—even when it set him against his neighbors, his city, and the established conventions of art.

Annotated Bibliography

Argott, Don, dir. The Art of the Steal: The Untold Story of the Barnes Collection. 2009. Film. Maj Productions and 9.14 Pictures.— A riveting documentary tracing the decades-long legal and civic battle over the relocation of the Barnes Foundation from Merion to Philadelphia. It highlights neighborhood opposition, donor-intent controversies, and the institutional forces that uprooted Barnes’s educational vision—ideal for understanding how physical displacement mirrors conceptual disruption.

Barnes Foundation. The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012.— A richly illustrated volume presenting the paintings, sculptures, and ensembles of the Barnes collection as installed on the Parkway. Demonstrates how Barnes’s juxtapositions survive in a new space that reflects the transformation of a private vision into an institutional context.

Bernstein, Roberta. “The Ensembles of Albert C. Barnes: Art as Experience.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 24 (3): 1–15. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990.— Examines Barnes’s arrangements through the lens of John Dewey’s philosophy of experience. Highlights how his inclusion of hinges, ladles, and ironwork was not eccentricity but pedagogy, designed to democratize perception and erase hierarchies between fine and decorative art.

Caamaño de Guzmán, María. El barroco mestizo en América: Escultura y devoción en los Andes. Madrid: Sílex, 2018.— Explores the hybrid styles of Hispano-American baroque, focusing on the Andes and Philippines. Provides context for the anonymous Bolivian painters and Hispano-Philippine sculptors mentioned in the essay, situating their work as simultaneously colonial and locally expressive.

Chidester, David. Religion: Material Dynamics. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.— Discusses how religious objects like stained glass are transformed when removed from liturgical settings into museums. Useful for framing the “uprooted” character of Maguire’s stained-glass windows and their re-contextualization from devotion to aesthetic contemplation.

Fane, Diana, ed. Art and Identity in Spanish America. New York: Brooklyn Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1996.— A key reference on colonial Latin American art, documenting how objects such as the vargueño embodied both European forms and indigenous contributions. Provides scholarly grounding for interpreting the vargueño as a portable stage of authority and hybridity.

Fleming, David. Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020.— Chronicles stained-glass commissions in Philadelphia’s Catholic churches, many later dispersed into museum collections. Offers context for the Maguire collection, showing how local sacred art became uprooted into secular settings.

Greenhalgh, Paul. The Persistence of Craft: The Applied Arts Today. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.— Explores the intersection of decorative art and modern aesthetics. Resonates with Barnes’s integration of ironwork and everyday utensils into his ensembles, treating them not as curiosities but as visual equals to painting.

Hollander, Stacy C. American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.— Investigates how anonymous or vernacular artisans contributed to national artistic heritage. Relevant for the essay’s discussion of anonymous Bolivian painters and Hispano-Philippine sculptors, whose erasure mirrors the treatment of folk and colonial artisans more broadly.

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Introduction to Medieval Stained Glass. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.— Classic introduction to stained-glass art as both narrative and abstraction. Supports the reading of Maguire’s stained glass as luminous color freed from symbol, while it acknowledges its devotional roots.

Philanthropy Roundtable. Donor Intent Gone Wrong: The Battle for Control of the Barnes Art Collection. 2022. Short documentary. In Wisdom and Warnings series.— A concise 10-minute film examining how Barnes’s explicit instructions for educational, small-group engagement were overridden by broader institutional ambitions. It underscores the theme of uprooting through the betrayal of intent and reinforces how the displacement was as moral as it was spatial.

Viau-Courville, Olivier. The Vargueño: Spanish Colonial Furniture and Power. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2021.— Focused monograph on the vargueño, explaining its symbolic role in the Spanish empire as a marker of authority and hybrid craftsmanship. Directly underpins the essay’s interpretation of the vargueño as suited to a monarch’s scribe and transformed by New World artisanship.

Tags: Albert Barnes, art legacy, Barnes Foundation, Cézanne, colonial art, displacement, ensembles, Franklin Parkway, Maguire Museum, Matisse, Modigliani, museum politics, Philadelphia, Renoir, Soutine, stained glass, uprooted, vargueño, wrought iron
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“The Discipline of Doubt”

August 24, 2025

Author’s Note:

This essay is the second part of a trilogy that examines certainty, doubt, and ambivalence as conditions shaping our understanding of reality. It turns to doubt as both discipline and burden: a practice that unsettles claims of knowledge yet makes understanding possible. Here doubt is not treated as weakness but as a necessary stance within human communication. Its value lies not in closure but in keeping open the fragile line between appearance and reality. The trilogy begins with The Colors of Certainty and concludes with When All We Know Is Borrowed.

The Discipline of Doubt

Skepticism and doubt are often spoken of as if they were the same, yet they differ in essential ways. Skepticism inclines toward distrust: it assumes claims are false until proven otherwise. Doubt, by contrast, does not begin with rejection. It suspends judgment, while it withholds both assent and denial, so that questions may unfold. Skepticism closes inquiry prematurely; doubt preserves its possibility. Properly understood, inquiry belongs not to belief or disbelief, but to doubt.

This distinction matters because inquiry rarely follows a direct path to certainty. More often it is layered, restless, and incomplete. Consider the case of medicine. A patient may receive a troubling diagnosis and consult several physicians, while each offers a different prognosis. One may be more hopeful, another more guarded, yet none entirely conclusive. The temptation in such circumstances is to cling to the most reassuring answer or to dismiss all of them as unreliable. Both impulses distort the situation. Inquiry requires another path: to compare, to weigh, to test, and ultimately to accept that certainty may not be attainable. In this recognition, doubt demonstrates its discipline: it sustains investigation without promising resolution and teaches that the absence of finality is not failure but the condition for continued understanding.

Even within medicine itself, leaders recognize this tension. Abraham Verghese, together with other Stanford scholars, has pointed out that barely half of what is taught in medical schools proves directly relevant to diagnosis; the rest is speculative or unfounded. This observation does not aim to discredit medical education but rather to underline the need for a method that privileges verification over uncritical repetition. Clinical diagnosis, therefore, does not rest on an accumulation of certainties but on the constant practice of disciplined doubt: to question, to discard what is irrelevant, and to hold what is provisional while seeking greater precision.

History provides another vivid lesson in the figure of Galileo Galilei. When he trained his telescope on the night sky in 1609, he observed four moons orbiting Jupiter and phases of Venus that could only be explained if the planet circled the sun. These discoveries contradicted the Ptolemaic system, which for centuries had fixed the earth at the center of creation. Belief demanded obedience to tradition; skepticism might have dismissed all inherited knowledge as corrupt. Galileo’s path was different. He measured, documented, and published, while he knew that evidence had to be weighed rather than simply asserted or denied. The cost of this doubt was severe: interrogation, censorship, and house arrest. Yet it was precisely his refusal to assent too quickly—his suspension of judgment until the evidence was overwhelming—that made inquiry possible. Galileo shows how doubt can preserve the conditions of knowledge even under the heaviest pressure to believe.

Literature offers a parallel insight. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the young prince is confronted by the ghost of his murdered father, who demands vengeance. To believe would be to accept the apparition’s word at once and to kill the king without hesitation. To be skeptical would be to dismiss the ghost as hallucination or trickery. Hamlet does neither. He allows doubt to govern his response. He tests the ghost’s claim by staging a play that mirrors the supposed crime, as he watches the king’s reaction for confirmation. Hamlet’s refusal to act on belief alone, and his unwillingness to dismiss the ghost outright, illustrates the discipline of doubt. His tragedy lies not in doubting, but in stretching doubt beyond proportion, until hesitation itself consumes action. Shakespeare makes clear that inquiry requires balance: enough doubt to test what is claimed, enough resolve to act when evidence has spoken.

The demands of public life make the difference equally clear. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens were asked to place immediate trust in official pronouncements or, conversely, to dismiss them as deliberate falsehoods. Belief led some to cling uncritically to each reassurance, however inconsistent; skepticism led others to reject all guidance as propaganda. Doubt offered another course: to ask what evidence supported the claims, to weigh early reports against later studies, and to accept that knowledge was provisional and evolving. The uncertainty was uncomfortable, but it was also the only honest response to a rapidly changing reality.

A similar pattern emerged after the September 11 attacks. Governments urged populations to choose: either support military intervention or stand accused of disloyalty. Belief accepted the justification for war at face value; skepticism dismissed all official claims as manipulation. Doubt, however, asked what evidence existed for weapons of mass destruction, what interests shaped the rush to invasion, and what alternatives were excluded from consideration. To doubt in such circumstances was not disloyalty but responsibility: the attempt to withhold assent until claims could be verified. These examples show that doubt is not passivity. It is the active discipline of testing what is said against what can be known: to resist the lure of premature closure.

Verification requires precisely this suspension: not the comfort of belief, nor the dismissal of skepticism, but the discipline of lingering within uncertainty long enough for proof to take shape. One might say that verification becomes possible only when belief is held in abeyance. Belief craves closure, skepticism assumes falsehood, but doubt stills the mind in the interval—where truth may draw near without the illusion of possession.

The same principle extends to the temptations of success and recognition. Success and fame resemble ashes: the hollow remains of a fire once bright but now extinguished, incapable of offering true joy to an inquiring mind. Ashes evoke a flame that once burned but has spent itself. So it is with fame: when the applause fades, only residue lingers. Belief, too, provides temporary shelter, yet it grows brittle when never tested. Recognition and conviction alike promise permanence, yet both prove fragile. A mind intent on inquiry cannot find rest in them. It requires something less visible, more enduring: the refusal to define itself too quickly, the discipline of anonymity.

Anonymity here does not mean retreat from the world. It means withholding assertion or purpose until knowledge has ripened. To declare too swiftly what one is—or what one knows—is to foreclose discovery. By necessity, the inquiring mind remains anonymous. It resists capture by labels or the scaffolding of recognition. Its openness is its strength. It stays attuned to what has not yet been revealed.

Our present age makes such discipline all the more urgent. Technology hastens every demand for certainty: headlines must be immediate, opinions instantaneous, identities reduced to profiles and tags. Social media thrives on belief asserted and repeated, rarely on doubt considered and tested. Algorithms reward speed and outrage, punishing hesitation as weakness and contradiction as betrayal. To cultivate doubt and anonymity is therefore a form of resistance. It shelters the subtlety of thought from the pressure of velocity and spectacle. It refuses to allow inquiry to be diminished into slogans or certainty compressed into catchphrases.

The discipline of doubt teaches that truth is never possessed, only pursued. Success, fame, and belief may glitter briefly, but they collapse into ashes. What endures is the quiet labor of questioning, the patience of remaining undefined until knowledge gathers form. To believe is to settle into residue; to doubt is to stand within the living fire. To question is to stir the flame; to believe is to collect the ashes.

** Cover Design:

Ricardo Morín: Newsprint Series Nº 2 (2006). 51″ × 65″. Ink, white-out, and blotted oil paint on newsprint. From the Triangulation series.

Annotated Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah: Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Press, 1961. (Arendt examines the importance of thinking without absolute supports and illuminates how the discipline of doubt resists political and social certainties).

Bauman, Zygmunt: Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. (Bauman describes the fluidity and precariousness of certainties in modern life and reinforces the idea of doubt as a condition in the face of contemporary volatility).

Berlin, Isaiah: The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. (Berlin analyzes the pluralism of values and the impossibility of single certainties and supports the need to live with unresolved tensions).

Bitbol-Hespériès, Annie: Descartes’ Natural Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2023. (Bitbol-Hespériès examines how Cartesian natural philosophy emerges from a constant exercise of methodical doubt; she offers a contemporary reading that links science and metaphysics in Descartes’ thought).

Han, Byung-Chul: In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. (Han critiques the pressure of transparency and digital acceleration; he provides insights into how technology disfigures the patience required for doubt).

Han, Byung-Chul: The Disappearance of Rituals. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. (Han explores how digital society weakens spaces of repetition and anticipation to highlight the urgency of recovering anonymity and slowness in inquiry).

Croskerry, Pat, Cosby, Karen S., Graber, Mark, and Singh, Hardeep, eds.: Diagnosis: Interpreting the Shadows. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2017. (Croskerry, Cosby, Graber, and Singh address the cognitive complexity of diagnostic reasoning: they show how uncertainty is inherent in clinical practice and how disciplined doubt can reduce diagnostic error).

Elstein, Arthur S., and Schwartz, Alan: Clinical Problem Solving and Diagnostic Decision Making: Selective Review of the Cognitive Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. (A landmark study in medical decision-making, it shows how diagnostic reasoning is less about static knowledge and more about methodical doubt and verification).

Finocchiaro, Maurice: Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. (Finocchiaro explores the trials and historical reinterpretations of Galileo’s case; he shows how scientific doubt clashed with religious authority and how it has been re-evaluated in modernity).

Gaukroger, Stephen: Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (An intellectual biography that situates Descartes in the cultural context of the seventeenth century and illuminates how Cartesian doubt was also a strategy against religious and scientific tensions).

Garber, Daniel: Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (Garber analyzes the close relationship between Descartes’ science and his philosophical method and underscores how scientific practice reinforced the discipline of doubt).

Graber, Mark L., Gordon D. Schiff, and Hardeep Singh: The Patient and the Diagnosis: Navigating Clinical Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. (Graber explores how physicians manage uncertainty and emphasizes that precision in diagnosis emerges from structured methods rather than unquestioned knowledge).

Machamer, Peter, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Galileo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. (In this collection of updated essays presenting Galileo’s work from historical, philosophical, and political perspectives, Machamer illuminates how empirical doubt transformed cosmology).

Nussbaum, Martha: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Nussbaum examines how liberal institutions can responsibly cultivate public emotions—such as love, tolerance, and solidarity. Her arguments enrich the section of the essay on civic-life, which shows how emotional cultivation, beyond belief or skepticism, supports societal inquiry).

Popkin, Richard: The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. (In this historical study of skepticism, Popkin shows how skepticism evolved between radical distrust and the discipline of inquiry).

Shakespeare, William: Hamlet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. (This play offers a literary embodiment of doubt as an ambivalent force: it functions both as the engine of inquiry and the risk of paralysis).

Shea, William, and Artigas, Mariano : Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. (An accessible and well-documented narrative of Galileo’s conflict with the Church; it illustrates how persistence in verifying doubt had vital and political consequences).

Verghese, Abraham, Saint, Sanjay, and Cooke, Molly: “Critical Analysis of the ‘One Half of Medical Education Is Wrong’ Maxim.” Academic Medicine 86, no. 4 (2011): 419–423. (Authored by Stanford-affiliated leaders in medical education, the report argues that much of medical teaching lacks direct relevance to diagnostic accuracy and underscores the necessity of disciplined doubt and re-evaluation).

Tags: anonymity, civic life, doubt, Galileo, Hamlet, inquiry, philosophy, skepticism, technology
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“The Colors of Certainty”

August 23, 2025

Author’s Note:

This essay is the first part of a trilogy that explores how human beings approach reality through certainty, doubt, and ambivalence. It begins with certainty—how the desire for stability drives thought and belief, even when what appears secure is already open to change. Though written from personal inquiry, its scope is broader: the question of certainty concerns not one life but the fragile conditions of shared reality. The trilogy continues with The Discipline of Doubt and concludes with When All We Know Is Borrowed.

Ricardo Morín, Bala Cynwyd, Pa. August 23, 2025

The Colors of Certainty

We live in an age unsettled by division. The subtleties of thought that once allowed us to pause, to weigh, and to distinguish are increasingly swept aside by the demand for immediate clarity. Everything is urged toward opposites: yes or no, ally or enemy, awake or asleep. The pace of public life, accelerated by technology and amplified by conflict, leaves little patience for nuance. Contradiction, which once signaled the restless work of an honest mind, is now treated as treachery. In this atmosphere, to admit complexity is to risk mistrust, and even the smallest hesitation is judged as weakness. We are asked, again and again, to define ourselves as though identity were a single stroke, not a layered drawing made across time.

Symbols flourish in such a climate while they reduce complexity into consumable images. Few have proven more enduring than the pill metaphors drawn from The Matrix film. When it appeared in 1999, the scene of choosing between a red pill and a blue pill was a cinematic device, which dramatized the tension between reality and illusion. Its influence grew gradually, as the film became a generational touchstone. Over the decades that followed, the pills slipped into online communities and political rhetoric only to harden into modes of thought that now shape how we imagine truth and the identity of belonging. To take the red pill became a declaration of awakening, access to hidden truths. To take the blue pill was to be mocked for complacency. Eventually the darker black pill emerged into both despair and fatalism embraced as destiny.

Once this logic takes hold, the world itself is reduced to a theater of absolutes. Disagreement becomes disloyalty, and belonging is measured not by shared life but by categorical allegiance. I have felt this even in conversations with people I have known for decades. In one such exchange, I remarked that I was appalled by Noam Chomsky’s recent habit, even in his nineties, of opposing Western hegemony over Russia as though that stance could excuse the war in Ukraine. Yet in another context, I expressed admiration for Chomsky’s earlier work on linguistic relevance in science four decades ago, which continues to illuminate how language shapes knowledge. To my interlocutor, these two statements seemed incompatible, as if they could not both be true. The expectation was that my judgment had to be seamless: either I rejected Chomsky entirely or endorsed him wholly.

Why must one justify such distinctions, as though every judgment were required to form a single line of allegiance? The contexts are not the same—one belongs to the 1980s, another to the present; one to the realm of linguistics, another to geopolitics. Yet in today’s climate, the demand for congruence is relentless. It reflects the pill logic that has seeped into our speech and habits of thought: one is either awake or asleep, aligned or opposed, consistent across every domain or untrustworthy in all.

That same craving for certainty also gave us Infowars—the radio podcast. Founded in 1999, the very year The Matrix was released, it became a commercial theater of the red pill metaphor. Infowars thrived on dramatizing crisis, telling its audience that elites, governments, or hidden forces manipulated events at every turn. What institutions explained as complexity, Infowars simplified into betrayal. The clarity it offered was intoxicating: good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny, awake versus deceived. It was not simply ideas being sold, but certainty itself—packaged with survival kits, supplements, and slogans. In seeking to liberate its audience from illusion, Infowars created a new one, offering not understanding but a permanent performance of awakening.

The narrowing of discourse is not only about politics and ideology, but it also extends to who is permitted to speak. I was reminded of this in a private exchange, where writing itself was dismissed as the work of an “armchair liberal” or a “limousine socialist.” According to this view, only those directly scarred by battle may speak of war, only those who have suffered prejudice firsthand may give voice to injustice, and to write as an observer is to mock the reality of struggle. It is a charge meant to discredit, as though the act of “fighting with a keyboard” were less real than hand combat in a bloodied field. Yet such suspicion denies what writing has always been: a means of bearing witness, of preserving memory, of shaping the conversation through which societies recognize themselves. The pen has never replaced experience, but it has always transformed it into something shareable and durable. To demand firsthand suffering as the sole qualification for speech is to reduce witness to autobiography and to strip dialogue of the breadth that comes when voices join from different vantage points.

Another difficulty lies in language itself. Writers who seek precision—who stretch language to its sharpest edge—often find that what emerges are metaphors. Even when grounded in substantiated terms, description requires figures of thought, images, and analogies that can never be wholly exact. The question is how precise language can ever be. Even the most brilliant minds struggle with definitions, because in their best formulations they remain presumptive theories. To acknowledge this is not to diminish language but to recognize that our dependence on tropes is not weakness but necessity. Story lines and metaphors are the bridges of comprehension, without which complexity would dissolve into noise. To lean on metaphor is not necessarily to abandon truth but to approach it by way of what can be shared.

What began as a film’s conceit has become a method of thinking, and in many ways a prison. The Matrix offered its audience a vision of awakening through choice, but our culture has taken that image and turned it into a grid of loyalties, where every stance is measured by whether one has swallowed the right capsule. Infowars amplified this posture; it dramatized the hunger for certainty until conspiracy became a substitute for thought. Suspicion of the writer’s position narrowed it further while it mocked reflection as inauthentic and demanded that speech bear the scars of direct experience before it could count as legitimate. And beneath it all lies the frailty of language itself: its inability to define with absolute precision, its reliance on metaphors that shape the very realities they describe.

To speak today of red pills, blue pills, or black pills is not only to reference a film or a subculture; it is to acknowledge the grip of a society that prefers binaries to dialogue, antagonism to complexity, performance to reflection. To resist that grip is to remember that thought is not a pill to be swallowed but a conversation to be carried, a conversation sustained in the fragile medium of language itself. However uncertain, however provisional, it is in that ongoing act of speaking and listening that culture remains alive—where friendship can endure, where witness can be honored, and where the truths no single color can contain still find their voice.

About the cover image:

Newsprint Series Nº 9, 2006, by Ricardo Morín (47” × 74”): Translucent dyes, ink, white-out, and blotted oil paint on newsprint.

This image belongs to a series that transforms fragments of printed matter into layered fields of color and erasure, this piece speaks to the instability of certainty itself. The pigments veil and expose in turns, while the newsprint beneath reminds us that truth is mediated, provisional, and never free of interpretation. As with language in the essay, meaning emerges only through contrast, through what resists containment.

Annotated Bibliography

Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Harper Business, 2006. (A classic study in behavioral psychology showing how persuasion exploits binary choices and authority cues, useful for understanding the appeal of pill metaphors and the certainty promised by conspiracy movements.)

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark: Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. (A foundational text on metaphor in cognition and language, relevant to the essay’s argument that even the most precise use of language depends on tropes and figurative structures for human comprehension.)

Marwick, Alice, and Lewis, Rebecca: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. (This analytical report documents how conspiracy narratives spread through online ecosystems; it highlights the role of platforms in amplifying symbolic binaries such as “red pill” awakening.)

Pew Research Center: “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2023”. Washington: Pew Research Center, 2023. (Presents longitudinal data on the decay of institutional trust in the United States and offers a data-driven context for why audiences turned to alternative voices such as Infowars.)

Southern Poverty Law Center: “Male Supremacy”. Montgomery: SPLC, 2019. (A report classifying the Incel subculture and related groups within the larger “male supremacist ecosystem,” cited in connection to the black pill ideology and its links to violence.)

Sunstein, Cass R., and Vermeule, Adrian: Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. (This book explores why conspiracy theories flourish and frames them as efforts to create certainty in moments of social disorientation. It is highly relevant to the discussion of Infowars as a commercial theater of the red pill metaphor.)

Taguieff, Pierre-André: The New Culture Wars. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020. (This book is a political-philosophical treatment of identity politics and binary antagonisms in Western democracies: it offers a perspective on how pill metaphors entered the broader theater of culture wars.)

Tversky, Amos, and Kahneman, Daniel: Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (A landmark in cognitive science explaining why people reduce complex realities into simplified binaries; it anchors the essay’s meditation on the lure of certainty.)

Tags: binaries, black pill, blue pill, conspiracy, culture, culture wars, discourse, Identity, Infowars, language, metaphor, red pill, The Matrix, writing
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“The Politics of Erasure: Authoritarianism and Spectacle”

August 22, 2025

By Ricardo Morín, In Transit to and from NJ, August 22, 2025

Authoritarianism in the present era does not present itself with uniform symbols. It emerges within democracies and one-party states alike, in countries with declining economies and in those boasting rapid growth. What unites these varied contexts is not the formal shape of government but the way power acts upon individuals: autonomy is curtailed, dignity denied, and dissent reclassified as threat. Control is maintained not only through coercion but also through the appropriation of universal values—peace, tolerance, harmony, security—emptied of their content and redeployed as instruments of supression. The result is a politics in which human beings are treated as expendable and spectacle serves as both distraction and justification.

In the United States, the Bill of Rights secures liberties, yet their practical force is weakened by structural inequality and concentrated control over communication. After the attacks of September 11, the USA PATRIOT Act authorized sweeping surveillance in the name of defending freedom, normalizing the monitoring of private communications (ACLU 2021). Protest movements such as the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020 filled the streets, but their urgency was absorbed into the circuits of media coverage, partisan argument, and corporate monetization (New York Times 2020). What begins as protest often concludes as spectacle: filmed, replayed, and reframed until the original message is displaced by distractions. Meanwhile, the opioid epidemic, mass homelessness, and medical bankruptcy reveal how millions of lives are tolerated as expendable (CDC 2022). Their suffering is acknowledged in statistics but rarely addressed in policy, treated as collateral to an order that prizes visibility over remedy.

Venezuela offers a more direct case. The Ley contra el Odio (“Law against Hatred”), passed in 2017 by a constituent assembly lacking democratic legitimacy, was presented as a measure to protect tolerance and peace. In practice, it has been used to prosecute journalists, students, and citizens for expressions that in a democratic society would fall squarely within the realm of debate (Amnesty International 2019). More recently, the creation of the Consejo Nacional de Ciberseguridad has extended this logic to place fear and self-censorship among neighbors and colleagues (Transparencia Venezuela 2023). At the same time, deprivation functions as a tool of discipline: access to food and medicine is selectively distributed to turn scarcity into a means of control (Human Rights Watch 2021). The state’s televised rallies and plebiscites portray unity and loyalty, but the reality is a society fractured by exile, with over seven million citizens abroad and those who remain bound by necessity rather than consent (UNHCR 2023).

Russia combines repression with patriotic theater. The 2002 Law on Combating Extremist Activity and the 2012 “foreign agents” statute have systematically dismantled independent journalism and civil society (Human Rights Watch 2017), while the 2022 law against “discrediting the armed forces” criminalized even the description of war as war (BBC 2022). Citizens have been detained for carrying blank signs, which demonstrates how any act, however symbolic, can be punished if interpreted as dissent (Amnesty International 2022). The war in Ukraine has revealed the human cost of this system: conscripts drawn disproportionately from poorer regions and minority populations are sent to the frontlines, their lives consumed for national projection. At home, state television ridicules dissent as treason or foreign manipulation, while parades, commemorations, and managed elections transform coercion into duty. The official promise of security and unity is sustained not by coexistence but by the systematic silencing of plural voices, enforced equally through law, propaganda, and ritual display.

China illustrates the most technologically integrated model. The 2017 Cybersecurity Law and the 2021 Data Security Law require companies and individuals to submit to state control over digital information and extend surveillance across every layer of society (Creemers 2017; Kuo 2021). Social media platforms compel group administrators to monitor content and disperses the responsibility of conformity to citizens themselves (Freedom House 2022). At the same time, spectacle saturates the landscape: the Singles’ Day shopping festival in November generates billions in sales, broadcast as proof of prosperity and cohesion, while state media showcases technological triumphs as national achievements (Economist 2021). Entire communities, particularly in Xinjiang, are declared targets of re-education and surveillance. Mosques are closed, languages restricted, and traditions suppressed—all in the name of harmony (Amnesty International 2021). Stability is invoked, but the reality is the systematic denial of dignity: identity reduced to an administrative category, cultural life dismantled at will, and existence itself rendered conditional upon conformity to the designs of state power.

Taken together, these cases reveal a common logic. The United States commodifies dissent and normalizes abandonment as a permanent condition of public life. Venezuela uses deprivation to enforce discipline and the resulting compliance is publicly presented as loyalty to the state. Russia demands sacrifice and transforms coercion into patriotic duty. China fuses surveillance and prosperity and engineers conformity. Entire communities are suppressed in the name of harmony. The registers differ—commercial, ritualistic, militarized, digital—but the pattern is shared: dissent is stripped of legitimacy, lives are treated as expendable, and universal values are inverted to justify coercion.

References

ACLU: “Surveillance under the USA PATRIOT Act”. New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2021. (This article documents how post-9/11 legislation expanded state surveillance in the United States and framed “security” as a justification for reducing privacy rights.)

Amnesty International: “Venezuela: Hunger for Justice. London: Amnesty International”, 2019. (Amnesty International reports on how Venezuela’s Ley contra el Odio has been used to prosecute citizens and silence dissent under the rhetoric of tolerance.)

Amnesty International: “Like We Were Enemies in a War: China’s Mass Internment, Torture and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang”. London: Amnesty International. 2021. (Amnesty International provides evidence of mass detention, surveillance, and cultural repression in Xinjiang carried out in the name of “harmony” and stability.)

Amnesty International: “Russia: Arrests for Anti-War Protests”. London: Amnesty International, 2022. (Amnesty International details the systematic arrest of Russian citizens, including those holding blank signs, under laws claiming to protect peace and order.)

BBC: “Russia Passes Law to Jail People Who Spread ‘Fake’ Information about Ukraine War.” March 4, 2022. (News coverage of Russia’s 2022 law criminalizing criticism of the war shows how “discrediting the armed forces” became a punishable offense.)

CDC.: “Opioid Overdose Deaths in the United States. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”. 2022. (The CDC provides statistical evidence of widespread loss of life in the U.S. and underscores how entire populations are treated as expendable in public health.)

Creemers, Rogier: “Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China”: Translation with Annotations. Leiden University, 2017. (An authoritative translation and analysis of China’s 2017 Cybersecurity Law illustrate how digital oversight is institutionalized.)

UNHCR: “Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Venezuela: Regional Overview”. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2023. (This report offers figures on the Venezuelan exodus and highlights the mass displacement caused by deprivation and repression.)

Tags: Authoritarianism, censorship, China, Dissent, freedom, Global Comparisons, Human Rights, Politics, power, russia, Silence, spectacle, surveillance, United States, Venezuela
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“The Seventh Watch”

August 6, 2025

Introductory Note

Ricardo Morin is a writer and researcher of the history of thought as a dynamic and evolving practice—a student of unspoken gestures, a language stronger than words, especially when interlocutors no longer listen to each other. Drawing on reflections on the cycles of life and a personal experience approaching the last, he invites readers to consider how quiet vigilance and tenderness can shape a meaningful existence. The Seventh Watch emerges from decades of living attentively, offering a humble testament to dignity through perseverance and care.

71 Years

I’ve lived seventy-one years. That alone still surprises me—not because I ever expected an early end, but because each year has asked more of me than the last. There was no dramatic fall, no single crisis to point to. Just a slow, constant shaping—of the body, of temperament, of the will.

Illness didn’t come in childhood. It arrived later, in my early twenties, during a snowbound winter in Buffalo. I was just beginning to live on my own, full of ambition and unfinished dreams. The diagnosis was mononucleosis—but it wasn’t the name that mattered. It was the way it interrupted momentum, slowed my pace, and revealed something deeper: the lifelong task of learning to live within my own limits.

That was the beginning—not of a medical history, but of a different kind of vigilance. Not directed outward, but inward. A quiet realization took root: that survival, if it was to be meaningful, required not just endurance, but restraint. A way of protecting myself from myself. That discipline wasn’t harsh—it became a kind of devotion. Not to self-denial, but to finding the clarity of a peaceful mind. To living with more care than urgency.

I don’t see illness as noble, but I do see in it a mirror—not for the pain, but for the truth it reflects. What can be tended, what must be relinquished, what deserves attention. I don’t claim wisdom from illness, but I recognize what it’s taught me to let go of: illusion, pride, and the frantic chase after things that do not last—such as the accumulation of wealth or power.

I’ve come to think of it simply as endurance—the kind illness teaches when you stop resisting and begin listening. There’s an ethical arc in this awareness—not born of dogma or belief, but shaped by experience. It bends not toward triumph, but toward tenderness.

This isn’t a story of pathology. It’s a story of attention—of refining the self without hardening it. Of discovering that maturity means knowing when to persist and when to pause. That the quiet act of sustaining one’s life—daily, attentively—is its own form of courage.

I never set out to write a testament. But seventy-one years in, I see the outlines more clearly. And in that, there is dignity.

Yet, dignity is not a reward. It arrives without announcement, without ceremony. It builds slowly—through the daily rituals of rising, of choosing what to carry and what to set down. It does not shield one from sorrow, nor make suffering easier to bear. But it gives the days a certain weight.

I’ve come to cherish that weight—not as a burden, but as proof. Proof that I’ve lived through each season not untouched, but intact. And that, even now, the task is not to escape life’s demands, but to meet them with steadiness.

What I’ve learned isn’t mine alone. Anyone who lives long enough will be asked to reckon with time—not as a thief, but as a sculptor. Illness, especially, teaches us how little control we truly have—yet how much presence we’re still capable of. It humbles and joins us. Not in sameness, but in mutual recognition.

Endurance, I’ve found, is not passive. It’s not about waiting for pain to pass. It is active, quiet, often unseen. It means choosing how to live when choice feels narrow. It means tending to life not with haste, but with attention.

There is no finish line to this work. Just the quiet act of continuing.

So I continue—not because I must, but because life, even in its reduced dimensions, still offers room for meaning. Some days that meaning is faint. Other days it is simply the act of rising, or writing a letter, or remembering the snow. But it is there. And as long as it is, I remain.

Tags: aging, attention, care, Dignity, Endurance, illness, inner life., intimate writing, Memory, perseverance, Reflection, Time
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“A Memorandum on Knowing Oneself”

August 2, 2025

Ricardo Morin
Triangulation 40
22″ x 30″
Body color, sanguine, sepia and Sumi ink on paper
2008

By Ricardo Morin

August 2, 2025

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

There are nights when sleep does not bring rest, but fire. Waking comes not from habit, but from the certainty that something must be understood. Not in a romantic sense of inspiration, but from the need to bring coherence to what is felt and remembered. Writing becomes a form of release: a counterweight to fatigue, an effort that both exhausts and restores.

Some days end in hollow silence, especially after confronting old wounds or noting the latent tensions in family history. What begins as scattered, even frantic thought gradually takes shape. A curve appears: from confusion to focus, and from focus to clarity. In that quiet progression, peace returns.

This rhythm is not chosen for comfort. It comes with broken sleep, exposed emotions, and an urgency born not of excess, but of necessity. Circumstances press in. When thought accelerates and the need to give it form becomes insistent, it is not excess but response.

Yet, nothing in this process happens in isolation. Even when no voices are named, no clarity arises without attunement with others—some near, some distant, some unknown. The work does not emerge from a single hand, but from a convergence of attentiveness, reflection, and exchange. Support comes not as authorship or possession, but as atmosphere, influence, and a presence that accompanies.

What is written here is not a record to own, nor a declaration to be remembered. It is a mark—a point of reference, placed not out of fear, but with lucidity. Whether revisited or left behind, it offers a place to return to if the journey darkens again. Nothing more is asked of it. Nothing less is owed.

Tags: companionship, creative process, emotional clarity, inner journey, introspection, Memory, nocturnal thought, reflective writing, self-awareness, understanding
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“Cape Cod 2009”

September 9, 2009

To my beloved

On a bright sunny day with temperatures in the mid-seventies, we rambled along the trails surrounding the delta-like shape of Long Pond. From there we continued on to the much larger adjoining Mashpee and Wakeby Ponds—first in the morning sun, before lunch, and later in the cooler light of the afternoon after three. Along the shores, we saw men and women with their pets playing at the water’s edge.

The clearings, unforgettable amid the surrounding forest, were bathed in clean sunlight. Their green patterns seemed to rival the timid Gothic forms that human hands have built in an effort to imitate nature.

Roots covered in emerald moss rose in steps toward translucent tunnels, leading us through a chance arrangement of natural colonnades and buttresses beneath open canopies. The fresh, aromatic air revived the errant heart as we walked through gullies and groves, at ease with the rhythm of the soul beside me.

Tags: clearings, contemplation, forest, landscape, Long Pond, Mashpee, Massachusetts, nature, Poetry, short prose, sunlight, trails, Wakeby Ponds, walking
Posted in On the Nature of Perception and Human Interconnectedness, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

“The Monroe Axiom: What It Is—and What It Is Not”

January 4, 2026

Ricardo F. Morin

January 4, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl

Wannabe Axiom I

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The Monroe Doctrine is often treated as a historical policy. Increasingly, however, it operates as something more elemental: an axiom. In this form, it no longer argues its case. It establishes the conditions under which argument is permitted. An axiom does not persuade. It assumes.

When the Monroe Doctrine functions axiomaticly, it ceases to appear as a contingent claim about hemispheric order and becomes an unspoken premise about who may decide, when intervention is justified, and what forms of consent are considered sufficient. What requires examination is not the doctrine as written, but the axiom as it now circulates.

The Monroe Axiom asserts unilateral authority while presenting itself as regional responsibility. It presumes that stability in the Western Hemisphere is inseparable from U.S. primacy, and that this primacy does not require reciprocal authorization. Consent is not sought; necessity is interpreted. Decision precedes deliberation.

In its contemporary articulation, the axiom rarely declares dominance openly. Instead, it presents itself as reluctant, unavoidable, or benevolent. Intervention is framed not as choice, but as consequence. Exhaustion replaces consent. Democracy is invoked not as a process to be preserved, but as an outcome promised in advance. Once inevitability replaces argument, the axiom becomes self-sealing. Opposition is no longer disagreement; it is reclassified as denial of reality.

Attempts to rehabilitate the Monroe Doctrine by assigning it a benevolent purpose do not alter its structure. They merely obscure it. The ethical failure is evident, but the logical failure is decisive. An axiom of unilateral authority cannot be transformed into a mutual ethic through intention alone. Benevolence is not a constraint; it is a promise. Ethics requires limits that operate prior to the exercise of power, not assurances offered afterward. Nor can exhaustion confer legitimacy. Political fatigue may explain acquiescence, but it cannot generate authorization. What is endured is not thereby endorsed.

The Monroe Axiom fails the test of reciprocity. A principle that justifies intervention outward but rejects it when reversed is not a principle. It is asymmetry protected by habit. When unilateral authority no longer feels obliged to justify itself, ethical language ceases to clarify and begins to anesthetize. At that point, the axiom does not announce domination. It normalizes it.

Tags: hegemony, hemispheric politics, implicit assumptions, legitimacy, Monroe Doctrine, normalization, unilateral power
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Power, Sovereignty, and the Cost of Duplicity

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Authority Where Legitimacy Has Not Yet Converged

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Author’s Note

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Procedural Dislocation and the Rhetoric of Dominance

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Pre-Procedural Conditions of Dislocation

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Abstract

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Author’s Note:

Abstract:

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PREFACE

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FRAMING WITHIN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY

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I. The Proposal: A New World for a Species in Convergence

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II. The Counterarguments: A Devil’s Advocate Examination

III. The Resolution: A Movement Toward Planetary Organization

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Author’s Note

A Diagnostic Essay on Power, Posture, and Historical Pattern

On “Derangement,” Power, and the Loss of Measure

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABSTRACT

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Author’s Note

Orientation of “River Grass”

I. Inheritance

II. Restraint

III. Generosity

IV. Desire

V. Virtue

VI. Continuity

VII. Presence

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“Naples in the Morning”

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Author’s Note

Abstract

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Author’s Note

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Author’s Note

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Preface

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Introduction

Perception

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Prologue

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