Young people grow up hearing a language of promise. School principals, teachers, and commencement speakers present the civic language of freedom, equal worth, and opportunity in classrooms, school assemblies, and commencement ceremonies. Young people enter life expecting that dignity belongs to them not by achievement but by right.
The world in which adolescents grow up reveals another measure of value. Universities select applicants. Employers choose candidates. Newspapers, screens, and social media present visible distinction as a standard of value. In this environment value becomes linked less to the fact of being alive than to results obtained: grades, admission, income, recognition. Public language affirms equal dignity and opportunity, while everyday life rewards distinction.
The consequences of this tension in adolescence cannot be reduced to a single cause. Yet the statistics describing adolescent suicide provide an observable point from which to examine the pressures affecting young lives. In the United States, suicide ranks among the leading causes of death for those between fifteen and nineteen years of age. Thousands of adolescents take their own lives each year. Similar figures appear in other countries whose laws and public speech affirm freedom and dignity. These figures do not reveal the thoughts of any single adolescent, yet they show that many young people reach a point at which life appears closed to them.
Each suicide carries its own history. Parents search for reasons in school pressure, humiliation, loneliness, or despair that no one recognized in time. Physicians prescribe medicine. Counselors offer guidance. These efforts help some adolescents and fail to reach others. The continued rise of these deaths directs attention to the world in which adolescents grow up.
From early childhood many students learn that recognition follows visible success. Teachers and schools praise the highest scores and celebrate the strongest performers. Young people watch classmates receive awards and admission letters while others receive neither. Under such conditions adolescents begin to measure their own lives against the success of others.
The acquisitive and ostentatious character of contemporary life becomes visible on screens, in the media, and across social networks. In them, mastery and social status predominate. Young people learn to present themselves as exceptional before they come to know themselves, and they learn not only to observe these images but also to reproduce them. The surrounding culture celebrates achievement while leaving little room for hesitation or failure, even though both belong to the passage into adulthood.
Failure forms part of learning, and discovery begins with uncertainty. That understanding arises from repeated observation across history and from the process of discovery itself. Within that process, error is gradually set aside until what is intelligible and comprehensible comes into view. Yet the surrounding environment continues to place visible honor on success. The young therefore encounter two messages at once: encouragement to endure failure and a public display that celebrates achievement.
Within this environment the work of forming human relations grows difficult. Friendships break. Intimate relations begin with uncertainty. Sexual experience rarely matches the images that circulate in public view. These difficulties belong to the slow formation of adult life. Yet the contrast between public images of fulfillment and the experience of life can lead some adolescents to judge themselves as failures.
The judgment of value does not remain external. It becomes shame. Shame seeks concealment. An adolescent who carries shame may continue to appear among friends, classmates, and family while inwardly withdrawing. Recognition promises to confirm value, yet it awakens a need for worth that cannot be founded by recognition itself. Beneath that shame lies another absence: the absence of self-love. Without some measure of regard for one’s own existence, recognition from others becomes the only source of worth, and failure becomes a verdict upon the self.
Family expectations may deepen this burden. Parents often transmit hopes formed by their own experience. They may believe that success will protect their children from the difficulties they themselves encountered. When the achievements of the young appear to confirm the sacrifices or aspirations of earlier generations, the pressure can grow heavier than a simple wish for well-being.
Communication surrounds young people with images and activity. An adolescent may sit among many signals and still face distress alone. Social encounters become occasions for display rather than opportunities for trust to form through time. The adolescent appears present in social life while carrying a sense of emptiness. When the language of dignity no longer corresponds to the experience of life, the public words themselves begin to lose their meaning.
Adolescence does not create this condition; adolescence reveals it. Many adults live under the same pressure to prove worth through success and recognition. Work, family, and routine allow life to continue, yet the sense of insufficiency does not always disappear. Some carry it for decades. Adolescents encounter the condition before such supports take hold. Some confront it before they possess the strength required to bear it.
This condition does not belong to the present alone. Records from earlier centuries describe the same despair, the same shame, and the same act of self-destruction among the young. The forms surrounding life have changed across time. Religious authority once imposed its judgments. Family honor and inherited status placed other burdens on the young. Human vulnerability has remained constant even as the surrounding environment has changed.
The question does not lie in whether despair among the young is new. The question lies in how the conditions of the present shape that vulnerability within a society that speaks often of dignity and opportunity yet still produces circumstances in which some young people come to believe that life offers no place for them.
A society may create conditions that intensify despair, shame, and pressure. Those conditions deserve examination and criticism. Yet the act of ending one’s life cannot be assigned to others in the same way that those conditions can be examined collectively.
Over time many people come to recognize a difficult distinction: to feel another person’s pain deeply is not the same as bearing responsibility for their choice. One may carry empathy, grief, and even a lingering sense of connection to that suffering without having been the agent of the act itself.
When deaths accumulate in this way, observers turn to specialized language in search of explanation. Academic terms attempt to describe the problem through categories and theories. Such language may organize discussion, yet the words themselves do not remove the fact that thousands of adolescents take their own lives each year. The numbers remain visible without the help of technical vocabulary.
“Geometric Allegory” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)
Author’s Note:
This installment marks a transition in the Unmasking Disappointment series. The chapters that follow move from symbolic orientation to institutional diagnosis—from the ethical measures by which governance may be assessed to the historical mechanisms through which those measures were steadily displaced.
The opening chapters do not propose an ideal government as a program, nor do they advance allegory as metaphysical instruction. They establish, instead, a standard of measure. Without some articulation of justice, restraint, and judgment as relational constraints, disappointment risks collapsing into mere grievance or retrospective outrage. Allegory appears here not as escape from political reality, but as a means of identifying when political language has been emptied of substance.
The chapters that follow trace how resentment, military authority, and party asymmetry gradually supplanted those constraints in Venezuela. What emerges is not a singular rupture but an accumulation: ideals invoked without limit, institutions mobilized without restraint, and power exercised without symmetry. Disappointment, in this sense, is not an emotional response but a structural outcome—one produced when virtue survives only as symbol, no longer as practice.
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On ethical geometry before political distortion
Chapter VII
The Allegorical Mode
Resistance to authority often makes use of symbolism that requires interpretation and thereby detaches meaning from responsibility. In the spirit of Plato, I propose that the true philosopher is an inverted allegorist. Rather than merely deciphering symbols, the philosopher distinguishes between what signifies and what governs.
Symbols and allegories are not mere reflections of the material world but serve as gateways to something beyond it. Allegory functions as recognition only where symbols have ceased to orient conduct—an orientation toward that with which the philosopher strives to align.
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Chapter VIII
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The Ideal Government and the Power of Virtue
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Allégorie de la Géométrie by French Baroque artist Laurent de La Hyre [1606-56], oil painting circa 1649 (40 7/8 x 86 1/8 in.) – Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Museum purchase, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund.
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Allégorie de la Géométrie, by Laurent de La Hyre (1649), evokes a conception of ideal government understood as a geometry of virtues, in which balance depends on proportion rather than invocation. Justice, temperance, and wisdom form a triad whose significance lies not in their enumeration but in the relations they establish. As in geometry, stability is maintained only so long as those proportions hold.
Just as the philosopher moves beyond symbols toward discernment, so too must governance be assessed by standards not governed by the whims of power. In the spirit of Plato’s Forms, an ideal government reflects justice, temperance, and wisdom—principles that do not fluctuate with circumstance. Such a government stands in contrast to politics organized around power alone.
The concept of virtue in governance transcends moral abstraction; it operates as a relational condition between rulers and the governed. Virtue does not belong exclusively to either, but emerges in the form that relation takes and the limits it sustains. Where virtue operates, governance is not organized around the accumulation of power but around constraints that regulate its exercise—justice to restrict arbitrariness, temperance to contain excess, and wisdom to discipline decision.
Government understood as a form structured by virtue exposes abuses of power not as exceptional deviations but as structural failures. When symbols such as equity or plurality are detached from their regulating functions, they become available for use as instruments of control. Where virtue retains an operative role, such symbols cease to obscure power and resume their function as limits on its exercise.
Chavismo, as it emerged under Hugo Chávez and continued under Nicolás Maduro, stands in direct contrast to these conditions. Although the regime relied extensively on the language of justice and equity, those references ceased to function as constraints on power. Symbols associated with virtue were detached from their regulating roles and redeployed as mechanisms of legitimization. Governance thus persisted in the vocabulary of virtue while operating without its limiting functions.
Virtuous governance assumes the form of a balanced structure: one not governed by the current of power but constrained by justice. Such a system does not privilege the will of the ruler over the common good, nor does it rely on appeals that fluctuate with circumstance. Where these constraints hold, order becomes possible—not as aspiration, but as condition.
Ricardo F. Morín Viability Watercolor frottage and white corrector on drafting vellum 20″x30″ 2005
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The question is often posed as to why certain corrupt regimes become objects of political action while others, no less compromised, do not. At first glance, this appears to demand a comparative moral explanation. In fact, it does not. The difficulty lies not in the absence of information, but in the assumption that such actions are guided by a coherent and generalizable system of principles.
What can be observed is not the application of a principle across cases, but decisions taken one case at a time. Political action does not follow a rule that can be applied in advance to different regimes. For that reason, comparisons between Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Argentina obscure more than they clarify. They assume a standard of decision-making that is not, in practice, a guiding action.
The actions examined here are those taken by Donald Trump in his capacity as a political actor. His name is introduced not to explain behavior through personality or intention, but to locate responsibility. The analysis proceeds from observable decisions and the circumstances in which those decisions were taken, rather than from suppositions about character, motive, or disposition.
The more relevant question is therefore not why some regimes are confronted and others ignored, but under what circumstances a country presents few obstacles to action, and which immediate interests align to make that action feasible. This reframing shifts the analysis away from moral judgment and toward observable circumstances.
Understood in these terms, the issue admits a response—not as a rule, but as an account of how decisions are made in specific cases. There is no way to infer, from the level of corruption alone, whether action will occur. There is, however, a way to explain why, in particular circumstances, action proceeds.
In the Venezuelan case, several conditions converge.
First, immediate external resistance is limited. Venezuela lacks allies willing to impose material, military, or economic consequences in response to pressure or limited intervention.
Second, state institutions do not act in a coordinated manner. Administrative agencies, security forces, and political authorities do not reliably operate under a single command, reducing the ability to mount a unified response and making external action easier to pursue.
Third, Venezuela can be publicly described as an exceptional case—marked by collapse, criminal conduct, and administrative failure—which allows actions to be presented to domestic audiences without invoking a general principle that would need to apply elsewhere.
Fourth, economic interests operate through short-term negotiation rather than long-term alignment. Venezuelan oil, under sanctions and administrative disorder, can be folded into ad hoc bargaining without requiring stable commitments or enduring partnerships.
Finally, pressure on Venezuela does not trigger immediate disruption to major markets or strategic balances. Unlike cases involving Saudi Arabia or Russia, action does not risk cascading economic or military responses.
None of these factors amounts to a moral explanation or a guiding doctrine. Taken together, they describe when an administration acts through foreign policy: not because corruption is greater, but because resistance is limited, interests converge quickly, and a domestic account of the action can be sustained—conditions absent in many cases of equally severe corruption.
This does not explain the world. It explains a decision.
The Monroe Doctrine is often treated as a historical policy. It operates, however, 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 as an axiom, 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 count as sufficient. What requires examination is not the doctrine as written, but the axiom as it circulates.
The Monroe Axiom asserts unilateral authority while presenting itself as regional responsibility. It presumes that stability in the Western Hemisphere depends on U.S. primacy, and that this primacy does not require reciprocal authorization. Consent is not sought; necessity is declared. Decision precedes deliberation.
Attempts to rehabilitate the Monroe Doctrine by assigning it a benevolent purpose do not alter its structure. Such revisions change tone, not authorization. A claim of unilateral authority does not become mutual through intention. Benevolence serves as reassurance offered after power has been exercised, not as a limit operating before it. Political fatigue may explain acquiescence, but it does not supply authorization. What is endured is not endorsed.
In its contemporary articulation, the axiom does not declare 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.
The Monroe Axiom fails the test of reciprocity. A principle that justifies intervention outward but rejects reversal is not a principle. It is asymmetry protected by habit. When unilateral authority no longer justifies itself, normative language ceases to clarify and begins to anesthetize.
Hegemony does not normally operate through open domination. It operates through consent. Power becomes durable not because it is feared, but because it is accepted as legitimate. The central mechanism is not repression, but agreement: the willingness to recognize an authority as natural, necessary, or unavoidable.
In this condition, governance no longer depends primarily on force. It depends on institutions, economic structures, technical systems, and narratives that define what appears normal and reasonable. Over time, these arrangements narrow what can be questioned. Authority no longer justifies itself. It comes to define the terms under which justification occurs.
What emerges is a form of rule whose primary objective is continuity rather than the public good. Stability becomes the overriding value. Accountability becomes subordinate to preservation. The preservation of existing arrangements takes precedence over the purposes those arrangements were meant to serve.
Such systems do not collapse through confrontation. They weaken when consent withdraws. The decisive change occurs when people no longer believe the narratives that sustain authority, no longer accept the inevitability of existing structures, and no longer participate in their maintenance. At that point, power is forced to justify itself. And once justification becomes necessary, hegemony has begun to fail.
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On Self-Authorizing Executive Judgment
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As hegemonic justification weakens, authority shifts from consensual legitimacy to executive judgment. What an axiom enables at the level of doctrine, executive practice completes at the level of justification. Authority no longer presents itself as procedurally derived. It presents itself as self-authorizing. Decisions are framed as judgments rather than actions subject to institutional review. The language of prudence—stability, timing, coordination—serves not as an articulated framework, but as a justificatory surface applied after the fact.
In this mode, power does not describe a process by which decisions were tested, constrained, or evaluated. It describes internal certainty. Judgment is treated as sufficient warrant. Review is recast as delay. Constraint is reframed as irresponsibility. The executive becomes both actor and auditor, collapsing the distinction between discretion exercised within a republic and sovereignty asserted by an individual. What persists is not the absence of the law, but a reordering of when the law is permitted to speak.
This transformation does not reject democratic language. It inhabits it. At that point, justification is treated as unnecessary. Authority no longer explains itself to institutions. It explains itself to itself.
This displacement does not stop at intervention. It extends into how moral authority is articulated in relation to executive power.
What once appeared as rhetorical excess has been confirmed as formal executive communication. In a documented text exchange with Norway’s prime minister, later shared by the Norwegian government, Donald Trump linked his failure to receive the Nobel Peace Prize to a withdrawal of moral restraint and a reassertion of territorial entitlement. He stated that because Norway had “decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 wars,” he no longer felt obliged “to think purely of peace,” and could instead focus on what was “good and proper for the United States of America.” From that premise, he dismissed Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland as historically arbitrary, asserted an equivalent U.S. claim, and concluded that “the world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland.”
This is not a metaphorical slippage of tone; it is an axiomatic substitution enacted in plain language. Moral recognition becomes a precondition for continued restraint. Legal sovereignty is reframed as folklore. Collective security obligations under NATO are inverted into a debt relationship owed to executive initiative. The structure of justification no longer proceeds from treaty, the law, or institutional reciprocity, but from unilateral narrative authority. The episode does not illustrate a policy position; it reveals a mode of reasoning in which executive power ceases to argue its case and declares the conditions under which argument itself will be recognized.
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A recent procedural illustration of this logic appears in the treatment of Venezuela’s 2024 electoral outcome. That election produced a determinate locus of constitutional legitimacy grounded in publicly documented tallies, corroborated by international observation, and reinforced by prior external recognition of the opposition coalition represented by María Corina Machado’s party. Together, these elements constituted a juridical fact: authority derived from electoral procedure rather than from bilateral negotiation or executive preference.
Subsequent engagement by the United States executive branch with Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s acting executive did not contest that electoral outcome. It displaced the outcome operationally. This displacement did not arise from a competing evidentiary claim about the vote count or from a legally articulated challenge to the election’s validity. It arose from an external strategic preference for transactional stability over constitutional continuity. Recognition was detached from electoral legitimacy and reassigned on the basis of expedient functionality.
This maneuver reflects a category error with institutional consequences. Diplomatic leverage authorizes negotiation, pressure, and conditional engagement. Policy discretion authorizes the selection of strategies aligned with national interests. Neither authorizes redefinition of the internal locus of sovereignty within another State. By treating these domains as interchangeable, U.S. executive policy practice converted foreign-policy discretion into a surrogate sovereignty-assigning authority. What was presented as pragmatic statecraft functioned as jurisdictional substitution.
The displacement cannot be stabilized by invoking realism. Realism explains why States behave instrumentally. It does not supply a legal warrant for nullifying electoral outcomes. The American executive branch did not demonstrate that the 2024 Venezuelan election failed to generate legitimate authority. It demonstrated that the authority produced by that election was operationally inconvenient for the strategy pursued by the American administration. In institutional terms, this constitutes not correction but override of another country’s sovereignty.
The structural consequence extends beyond Venezuelan governance. When electoral legitimacy is superseded by bilateral endorsement, elections cease to function as determinative acts and become advisory signals contingent on foreign approval. Sovereignty is no longer derived from domestic mandate but from external recognition calibrated to strategic utility. Authority shifts from constitutional process to diplomatic transaction.
This transformation does not announce domination. It normalizes it. Recognition becomes an instrument for reallocating jurisdiction. Intervention becomes a method for reassigning legitimacy.
On Recognition Substitution and Jurisdictional Drift
In this register, moral authority no longer functions as an external constraint on power. Distinction ceases to operate as a limit placed on authority and becomes an accessory of it. When moral standing is derived from proximity to executive certainty, independence dissolves without coercion. What appears as endorsement is, structurally, a transfer of judgment from the moral sphere to the political one.
The failure of the Monroe Axiom is not confined to its original doctrinal form. It persists because the axiom no longer needs to appear as doctrine. Its logic circulates in a different register, one that does not argue for unilateral authority but presupposes it by altering the terms under which legitimacy is evaluated.
In this register, political conflict is no longer treated as a relation among agents operating under shared constraints. It is reclassified as a condition to be managed rather than a position to be answered. Once this shift occurs, reciprocity no longer functions as a test of legitimacy. Action is justified not by reversibility but by asserted necessity.
Within this framework, intervention is no longer judged against reversible standards. It is judged against urgency. Delay becomes negligence. Restraint becomes complicity. The language of limits gives way to the language of care, and coercive force is presented not as domination but as treatment. The axiom is not rejected. It becomes unnecessary.
This shift produces asymmetry. Where reciprocity once constrained legitimacy, diagnosis now authorizes action. The governing question is no longer whether an act could be defended word for word if positions were reversed, but whether the condition has been declared terminal. Once that declaration is made, consent becomes secondary, proportionality becomes implicit, and accountability is deferred to an undefined recovery phase.
This transformation has a structural consequence. When political communities are redescribed as incapacitated, authority no longer justifies itself in relation to equals but in relation to asserted necessity. Measures that would otherwise require justification are absorbed into administration.
Authority proceeds by classification rather than justification. Once legitimacy is grounded in declared condition, the criteria for ending intervention no longer operate in advance.
Under this displaced logic, material claims can be advanced without appearing as seizures, and control can be asserted without being named as such. What follows is not an exception to the axiom but one of its most concrete expressions.
Under this logic, nationalization is no longer interpreted as a sovereign act. What had been established within Venezuelan territory, regulated by Venezuelan authority, and later incorporated into the Venezuelan law is reclassified as an asset whose ownership is said to precede Venezuelan authority. Past participation is invoked not as historical involvement but as proof of continuing entitlement. Time is not treated as a boundary but as confirmation. This conversion treats prior participation as if it conferred a residual claim that survives its own settlement, a claim that neither contract nor sovereignty sustains.
Once this redefinition is accepted, the decline of Venezuela’s oil industry is no longer understood as a domestic failure affecting Venezuelans. It is described as damage to U.S. interests. Mismanagement inside Venezuela is translated into harm to the United States. Venezuela’s inability to maintain its industry becomes evidence that it should no longer control it.
From there, the reasoning shifts. The claim is restated in corrective terms. Control is framed as reestablishment of a prior condition rather than initiation of a new one. What is transferred is described as something that never ceased to belong elsewhere. Performance replaces consent as the measure of legitimacy. Ownership becomes conditional, evaluated against outcomes rather than jurisdiction.
The argument adopts the language of vulnerability. Disruption within Venezuela is described as exposure elsewhere. Energy production is treated as a condition of stability rather than an object of agreement. What had been governed through jurisdiction is presented as a requirement of continuity. Under this framing, intervention aligns with prevention. Choice becomes indistinguishable from obligation.
In this sequence, ownership is no longer treated as a settled legal condition. Jurisdiction is referenced, insofar as outcomes meet external expectations. Control persists while its legal basis becomes contingent.
Claims initially framed as interests are restated as standing expectations. Those expectations are treated as conditions that must be met in advance of consent.
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.
Recent commentary surrounding U.S. engagement with Venezuelan actors has made this distinction operational rather than abstract. The marginalization of María Corina Machado has not turned on questions of democratic legitimacy, electoral mandate, or international recognition. It has turned on her unwillingness to participate in transactional arrangements with the existing technocratic and financial strata that currently exercise control within the State. In contrast, figures such as the Vice President Delcy Rodríguez are treated as viable interlocutors precisely because they command enforceable authority through continuity with those mechanisms—coercive, financial, and administrative—that persist independent of legitimacy. Criminality, in this logic, is not disqualifying. It is evidence of control. What is being selected for is not moral credibility, but negotiability under pressure.
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.
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
I
The recent executive order framing artificial intelligence as a matter of “global dominance” offers a useful example on procedural dislocation and the rhetoric of dominance. 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.
II
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 only after executive action has been set in motion, rather than governing whether that action may proceed.
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. The constitutional framework governing federal preemption state law is well established even as its application remains contested. 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.
This sequence 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.
The result of this ordeering 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.
IV
The executive order invokes a global race of dominance as a justification for urgency. This reference is introduced without specification of its participants, scope, or criteria and 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.
V
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.
VI
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.
IX
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.
X
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.
*
Pre-Procedural Conditions of Dislocation
*
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.
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.
1
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.
9
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.
Ricardo Morin The Grammar of Punishment 10″x12″ Watercolor 2003
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.
4
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.
5
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.
8 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.
9
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.
10 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.
11
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.
12
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.
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.
*
FRAMING WITHIN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY
i
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.
ii
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.
iii
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.
iv
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.
v
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.
*
I. The Proposal: A New World for a Species in Convergence
1
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
*
II. The Counterarguments:A Devil’s Advocate Examination
8
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.
9
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.
10
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.
Cultural arguments register homogenization. Even with formal protections, global systems may exert subtle pressures toward uniformity, diluting linguistic and cultural specificity.
13
Psychological objections emphasize limits of restraint. Planetary cooperation presumes capacities for empathy and self-limitation that may not persist without enforcement.
14
Historical memory sharpens skepticism. Integrative projects have often provoked fragmentation. A planetary framework could generate resistance precisely because of its scale.
15
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
16
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.
17
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.
18
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.
19
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.
20
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.
21
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.
22
Across these arrangements sovereignty becomes layered, welfare foundational, identity dual, and governance proportionate to vulnerability.
23
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.
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.
Ricardo F. 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.
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.)
Ricardo Morín Still Thirty-three: When All We Know Is Borrowed Oil on linen & board, 15″ x 12″x 1/2″ 2012.
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.)
Composite cover design for “Uprooted Influences by Ricardo Morin: It features a paintings by Renoir (Bathers), Matisse (Joy of Life), Cézanne (Large Bathers), Soutine (Still Life with Pheasant), and Modigliani, clustered with wrought-iron hinges from the Barnes collection. The juxtaposition echoes Barnes’s ensembles, where masterpieces and everyday objects shared the same visual plane.
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.
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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 CatholicPhiladelphia. 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.
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.
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** 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).
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
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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.
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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.)
Cover design for the essay “The Politics of Erasure: Authoritarianism and Spectacle.” The composite image juxtaposes surveillance, militarization, propaganda, and mass spectacle to underscore how authoritarian regimes render lives expendable while legitimizing control through display.
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.)
Ricardo Morin Still Forty-three Oil on linen 14″ x 18″ x 3/4″ 2012
For those who know that the sharpest word cannot replace the simple act of responding with tenderness.
Ricardo Morin — August 13, 2025 — Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania
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Tenderness is a deliberate openness that seeks the well-being of another through a gesture of welcome, through gentleness and respect. Aggression, by contrast, is the forceful assertion of one’s will in a way that can wound, constrain, or dominate. Each can exist without the other, yet they often meet in the same moment, altering the course of a conflict or softening its edge. One sees this when, in the middle of an argument, a person instinctively offers a chair to the other. The dispute remains, but its weight has shifted.
In a world haunted by resentment and the fear of being hurt—feelings as real as they are sometimes exaggerated—tenderness emerges not as a denial of those forces but as their modulation. It interrupts the cycle of suspicion, as when two adversaries, after heated words, lower their voices to hear one another. The hostility remains, but it is tempered, displaced by the recognition that another’s presence is not solely a threat.
Where causality would claim to measure our emotions as predictable reactions, what becomes evident are instead our habits and inclinations—patterns that oscillate between the delicate pull that calms and the impulse that wounds. These shifts reveal that tenderness is not the opposite of aggression, but a mirror exposing how both are woven together from the same human ground.
Tenderness, then, is not the absence of aggression but a mirror showing the weave in which both share a common origin. Consider the exhausted nurse who, after an endless shift, still takes the time to straighten a patient’s blanket. The act is small, yet it springs from the same human ground where impatience and fatigue could just as easily have given way to harshness.
Tenderness carries an ambiguity that makes itself as disarming as it is unsettling. Its apparent fragility dismantles aggression without force, compelling it to see itself in an unexpected reflection: a gentle act that interrupts the urge to harm and leaves it without footing.
Tenderness is not a calculated ruse but a natural pull toward memories older than mistrust—when contact was a need rather than a threat. One sees this when, after years of silence and estrangement, a son returns to care for his ailing father. Resentment remains, yet in the act of tending beats the same root that once sustained closeness.
In such moments, fear loosens, hostility softens, and what seemed a battlefield becomes an uncertain but open passage toward relief. Tenderness does not erase conflict, but shows how—even within it—something older and deeper still binds us. I witnessed this once on the New York City subway. A man, angered when a disabled stranger asked for help, turned his glare on me as our eyes met. He moved toward me as if to strike, bringing his face close to mine. I closed my eyes and eased my expression. Deprived of the stare that had fueled his aggression, he stepped back—uneasy, but no longer advancing. I walked away, marked by how a single gesture can quiet the arc of a confrontation.
There lies a primary bond that ties us to the source of life, where tenderness and aggression are not isolated poles but two expressions of the same human fabric. A sister, in a tense exchange, tells her older brother that she learned her combative stance from him. He bristles at the remark, yet both know they have carried that same hardness for years, and neither can fully blame the other. The recognition does not bring easy reconciliation, but it narrows the distance between them.
From the first bond, the body learns to read the smallest signals: the warmth that welcomes, the pressure that threatens, the pulse that quickens or slows. One sees it when, in the midst of battle, a soldier offers water to a prisoner who only moments before was his enemy. Long before words exist, such gestures shape the habits we later call preferences or fears. This is why tenderness can yield to aggression without conceding defeat: it exposes aggression to an involuntary recognition, restoring the memory of its own root. And in that recognition, even the most hostile impulse finds, if only for a moment, its disarmament.
Tenderness does not eliminate conflict or erase its causes, but it can shift its course. It opens a moment where the certainty of harm gives way to the possibility of presence and care. It is not a cure for all, yet in its quiet way of calling and being heard, tenderness shows that even the firmest aggression seeks acknowledgment. In that acknowledgment, both tenderness and aggression reveal that they spring from the same human ground.
The presence of tenderness in our exchanges is not merely a private virtue but a civic necessity. It sustains the trust and recognition without which communities fracture and cannot endure.
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Annotated Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Hannah Arendt examines the active life of human beings—labor, work, and action—tracing their historical meanings and showing how modern society has altered the conditions for political and civic engagement.)
Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (René Girard explores the role of violence in human culture, arguing that ritual sacrifice emerged as a mechanism to contain social conflict, and linking these dynamics to myths and religious practices.)
MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. (Alasdair MacIntyre critiques modern moral philosophy, contending that the loss of a shared Aristotelian framework has left moral discourse fragmented and emotive, and proposing a return to virtue ethics.)
Nussbaum, Martha C.: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Martha Nussbaum investigates the emotional foundations of a just society, arguing that cultivating compassion, love, and a sense of shared humanity is essential for sustaining democratic institutions.)
Ricardo Morín (Triangulation Series) Musica Universalis Silk quilt streched over linen 37″ x 60″ 2013-18
A geometrical construction of a dodecahedron within a Fibonacci composition, reinforced by a right-angle triangle: A meditation on the harmony of the universe, where mathematics and language converge yet never fully enclose reality.
Ricardo Morin, August 20, 2025
Abstract
This essay examines the interdependence of language and mathematics as the twin pillars of knowledge, each indispensable yet incomplete without the other. While mathematics secures precision and abstraction, language renders reasoning intelligible and shareable; together they approximate, but never fully capture, a reality richer than any formulation. The discussion situates artificial intelligence as a vivid case study of this condition. Marketed at premium cost yet marked by deficiencies in coherence, AI dramatizes what happens when mathematical power is privileged over linguistic rigor. Far from replacing human thought, such systems test our capacity to impose meaning, resist vagueness, and refine ideas. By weaving philosophical reflection with contemporary critique, the essay argues that both mathematics and language must be continually cultivated if knowledge is to progress. Their partnership does not close the gap between comprehension and reality; it keeps it open, ensuring that truth remains an unending pursuit.
Language, Mathematics, and the Price of Artificial Intelligence
Every society advances by refining its tools of thought. Two stand above all others: mathematics, which distills patterns with precision, and language, which gives form and meaning to reasoning. Neither is sufficient alone. To privilege one at the expense of the other is to weaken the very architecture of knowledge.
Artificial intelligence dramatizes both their promise and their limitations. The announcement of a $200 monthly fee for access to ChatGPT-5 is revealing. Marketed as a luxury service “for those who can afford it,” it underscores the widening gap between technological privilege and cultural necessity. Those with resources can fine-tune their productivity; those without are left behind. Yet even for the well-equipped, the question persists: what exactly is being purchased?
The machine dazzles with speed and scale, but its deficiencies are equally striking. Engineers may be virtuosos of algorithms, but grammar is not their instrument. The results are too often colloquial, vague, or lacking in rigor. To extract coherence, the user must not be a passive consumer but an editor—capable of clarifying, restructuring, and imposing meaning. The paradox is unmistakable: the tool marketed as liberation demands from its operator the very discipline it cannot supply.
This paradox reflects the larger truth about knowledge itself. Mathematics and language are both indispensable and both incomplete. Mathematics achieves abstraction but leaves its results inert unless language renders them intelligible and shareable. Language conveys thought but falters without the rigor that mathematics provides. What one secures, the other interprets.
Yet both are bound by a deeper condition: reality exceeds every formulation. Our theories—whether mathematical models or linguistic descriptions—are approximations shaped by the observer. Language cannot exhaust meaning; mathematics cannot capture finality. Knowledge is never absolute: it is a negotiation with a reality richer than any model or phrase.
Artificial intelligence lays bare this condition. It can automate structure but cannot provide wisdom; it can reproduce language but cannot guarantee meaning. Its true value lies not in replacing the thinker but in testing our capacity to resist vagueness, impose coherence, and refine thought. What is marketed as freedom may, in truth, demand greater vigilance.
To dismiss language and the humanities as secondary, or to imagine mathematics and computation as sufficient unto themselves, is to misunderstand their interdependence. These disciplines are not rivals but partners, each refining the other. AI magnifies both their strengths and their deficiencies; they remind us that progress depends on the continual refinement of both—mathematics to model reality, language to preserve its meaning.
The path of knowledge remains open-ended. Language and mathematics do not close the gap between our finite comprehension and the inexhaustible richness of reality; they keep it open. They allow us to approach truth without presuming to possess it. Artificial intelligence, as every tool of thought, shows us not the end of knowledge but its unending condition: a dialogue between what can be measured, what can be spoken, and what forever exceeds us.
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Annotated Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah: The Life of the Mind. Vol. 1: Thinking. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971. (Arendt examines the act of thinking and the limits of expression, which shows how thought requires language to become shareable while never able to exhaust reality. Her work reinforces the essay’s claim that reasoning without expression cannot advance knowledge.)
Bender, Emily M., and Koller, Alexander: “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data.” Proceedings of ACL, 2020. (Bender and Koller argue that large language models process form without true understanding; this highlights the gulf between mathematical pattern recognition and linguistic meaning—it supports the essay’s caution that AI dazzles with form but falters in coherence.)
Chomsky, Noam: Language and Mind. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. (Chomsky explores the innate structures of language and their role in shaping cognition; this affirms that language conditions the possibility of thought while it still remains limited in capturing reality.)
Devlin, Keith: Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. Stanford: Keith Devlin, 2012. (Devlin explains how mathematical reasoning distills structure and pattern while acknowledging abstraction as approximation; this reinforces the idea that mathematics, as a safeguard of precision, cannot exhaust the world it models.)
Floridi, Luciano: The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. (Floridi situates digital technologies and AI within a broader history of self-understanding, which enriches the essay’s argument that mathematics and language—extended into computation—remain approximations of a reality beyond full control.)
Lakoff, George, and Núñez, Rafael: Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books, 2000. (Lakoff and Núñez argue that mathematics arises from metaphor and embodied cognition, which reveals how dependence on human interpretation and the affirmation that mathematical theories, as linguistic ones, remain bound to the observer.)
Mitchell, Melanie: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. (Mitchell provides a critical overview of AI’s capabilities and limits; it shows how the advancement of pattern recognition does not close fundamental gaps in understanding and parallels the essay’s critique of AI’s grammatical poverty.)
Polanyi, Michael: Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. (Polanyi emphasizes tacit knowledge and the need for articulation in validation; it echoes the view that mathematics and language refine understanding but never achieve closure.)
Snow, C. P.: The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 [1959]. (Snow diagnoses the divide between sciences and humanities; this undergirds the essay’s call to treat language and mathematics as complementary pillars of understanding.)
Ricardo Morin The Mirage of Exceptionalism (Template Series) 1st out of six Each 30″x 22″ = 66″h x 66″ overall Watercolor on paper 2005
To the paradox that divides in the very act of seeking unity.
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By Ricardo Morin August 18, 2025, Bala Cynwyd, PA
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Across traditions, faith has sought to articulate humanity’s highest aspirations. Scriptures, rituals, and doctrines were meant to give form to gratitude, humility, and reverence for creation. Yet time and again, these same legacies have been drawn into the service of division. The paradox lies in how beliefs that profess universal truth harden into claims of exceptional status and turn revelation into rivalry.
The Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—rooted themselves in texts anchored in antiquity. This permanence can inspire continuity, but when transposed into political life, belief risks becoming dogma, and dogma exclusion. What began as a celebration of humanity and its creator becomes instead an engine of contention.
Exceptionalism is not confined to any single tradition. It arises wherever uniqueness is mistaken for superiority, wherever the memory of a chosen people or a sacred covenant becomes a license to deny the dignity of others. Creationism, visions of Heaven, doctrines of righteousness—all contain the seeds of inspiration, but also of antagonism when set against rival paths.
In this sense, exceptionalism is less about the divine than about the human need to define boundaries. By exalting one path as singular, communities cast shadows on others. They forget that the multiplicity of belief might reveal instead the vastness of what humanity seeks to comprehend. The question is not whether one tradition is more luminous than another, but whether clarity itself can be hoarded without dimming the shared horizon of human dignity.
The tragedy of conflating exceptionalism with uniqueness is that it mistakes a gift for a weapon. To be unique is not to be superior; to inherit a tradition is not to monopolize truth. Religions, when true to their essence, point toward a mystery larger than themselves. When they lapse into rivalry, they obscure it.
The challenge before us is whether humanity can learn to let religions serve as languages of gratitude rather than banners of conquest. If belief is to celebrate creation, it must embrace the unity of humanity rather than sabotage it. Otherwise, the promise of transcendence is reduced to a struggle for dominance, and what was meant to honor the creator becomes instead a mirror of our most destructive instincts.
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Annotated Bibliography
Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. (Armstrong explores how traditions across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have produced militant forms of fundamentalism. She shows how claims of absolute truth often distort original spiritual intent and feed conflict instead of unity.)
Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (Girard argues that societies often channel violence into ritualized sacrifice. His insights illuminate how religious exceptionalism, rather than reducing violence, can redirect it toward outsiders deemed threatening to communal “uniqueness.”)
Küng, Hans: Christianity and the World Religions: Paths of Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. New York: Doubleday, 1986. (Küng advocates for dialogue across faiths, stressing that no single religion can claim monopoly on truth. His work directly challenges exceptionalist claims and encourages the search for shared ethical ground.)
Said, Edward W.: Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage, 1997. (Said critiques the portrayal of Islam as uniquely threatening, showing how narratives of exceptionalism become entrenched in political and cultural discourse. His analysis highlights how external perceptions reinforce divisions.)
Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. (Taylor examines how modernity has shifted the role of religion and has complicated claims of universality. He shows how belief persists in pluralist societies, while exceptionalist frameworks struggle to adapt within a diverse human landscape.)
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Edited by Billy Bussell Thompson, August 18, 2025, NY, NY.
Politics (from the Greek politikós, “of, by, or relating to citizens”) is the practice and theory of influencing people at the civic or individual level.
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By Ricardo Morin
August 10, 2025.
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From their earliest formulations, constitutional frameworks have been more than foundational legal agreements; they have stood as declarations of political philosophy, and defined how power should be organized, how it should be restrained, and to whom it must be answerable. Contemporary governance, to a large extent, continues those experiments, shaped over centuries of trial and adaptation. Yet these forms can endure in appearance while being emptied of substance. In more than a few States today, constitutions proclaim liberty while they narrow its scope, define rights in ways that exclude, and preserve the interests of a governing elite. Partisanship exploits the perceived limitations and vulnerabilities of others as grounds for exclusion; self-righteousness becomes a tool for domination, silences opposition, and suppresses dissent. The worth of a constitutional framework, therefore, is measured not only by its letter but by the ethical integrity of those who sustain it. Without ethics, politics loses its meaning; without civic virtue, the law ceases to serve peace and becomes an instrument of dominion.
The separation of powers, vigorously defended by Montesquieu, rests on the conviction that liberty survives when power is compelled to check power. This principle is distorted when institutions are subordinated to partisan or personal interests. In recent years, several States have formally preserved an independent judiciary while, in practice, subjected it to appointment processes controlled by the Executive or the ruling party. Such hollowing-out is not merely a technical failure; it reflects a political culture in which ambition, fear, or indifference among citizens permits the disfigurement of the very mechanisms designed to protect them. It also reveals how institutional strength and civic responsibility are bound together in ways that cannot be separated.
Historical constitutions continue to shape how political communities imagine authority. They bequeath principles that, at their best, offer adaptable frameworks for meeting new challenges without renouncing their essential core: that the legitimacy of a Government rests not on the strength of its rulers but on the solidity of the structures that limit them.
Yet these structures endure only when citizens reject duplicity and sectarianism. Divisions of ideology must not harden into exclusive loyalty to one’s own group at the expense of a shared civic framework. They endure only when citizens resist the idolatry of power, because authority loses its legitimacy once it is treated as sacred or unquestionable. And they endure only when citizens repudiate the cult of personality, in which a leader is raised above criticism through image-making, propaganda, and personal loyalty.
The durability of constitutional order, then, does not lie solely in written texts or institutional arrangements. It rests equally on the civic ethic of those who inhabit them. When ambition, fear, or indifference allow citizens to tolerate duplicity or surrender to sectarian loyalty, the limits on power become fragile. Conversely, when vigilance and responsibility prevail, constitutions retain their strength as both shield and compass—guarding against arbitrary rule while orienting political life toward justice and restraint.
True reform is not solely institutional but also internal: a revolution in the individual and collective sphere, in which each person accepts the responsibility to act with integrity, openness, and commitment to the common good, in harmony with oneself and with others. Only through the alignment of institutional structures with civic responsibility can any Constitution preserve its meaning and endure as a safeguard against arbitrary power.
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Annotated Bibliography
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Ginsburg, Tom, and Aziz Z. Huq.; How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. (Ginsburg and Aziz examine the legal and institutional pathways through which democracies weaken, from court-packing to the erosion of independent oversight. They draw on comparative examples from the United States, Hungary, and elsewhere to show how constitutional mechanisms can be used to consolidate power while preserving a façade of legality.)
Landau, David: “Abusive Constitutionalism.” UC Davis Law Review 47 (1), 2013: 189–260. (Landaudevelops the concept of “abusive constitutionalism” to describe how incumbents exploit constitutional change to entrench their rule. Uses Latin American and other global cases to illustrate how amendments and reinterpretations weaken checks and balances, alter electoral systems, and undermine judicial independence.)
Levitsky, Steven, and Way, Lucan A.: Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Levitsky and Way analyze regimes that preserve the formal institutions of democracy but manipulate them to ensure ruling-party dominance. They introduce the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” as a framework for understanding how constitutional norms are hollowed out while democratic forms are maintained.)
Levitsky, Steven, and Ziblatt, Daniel: How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018. (Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that modern democracies often decline through the gradual decline of norms rather than coups. The book shows how leaders exploit constitutional ambiguities, stack courts, and weaponize law to suppress opposition, eroding both civic trust and institutional integrity.)
Photo 0f Catarina (Kitty) O’Bryan-Erlacher by Ricardo Morin. Kitty is holding the book Steuben Glass: An American Tradition in Crystal by Mary Jean Madigan. This appears to be the revised and expanded edition, as indicated in the lower left corner of the cover
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For Kitty O’Bryan-Erlacher, whose friendly grace, profound clarity, and genial wit made a brief moment feel like a lasting gift.
Ricardo Morin — Corning, New York, August 2025
In transit to our cousin Shayna’s wedding to Johnny, we passed through Corning, New York, and spent a few unhurried hours browsing the shops along West Market Street. The sky had the muted softness of a Monday unbothered by haste. On a quiet corner, we came upon the Erlacher Steuben Glass Shop—a space luminous with its own kind of luster.
Inside, we found what would become the wedding gift: a round crystal plate titled Vesta Plate (1993) by Peter Drobny (born 1958). It was displayed simply but with taste, as museum art waiting patiently to be understood. Alongside it stood two glass vases—bold and elegant: one translucent ultramarine, the other an opaque, intense lavender. We decided they too should come with us.
The shop, we learned, was founded in 1960. Its steward now is Catarina (“Kitty”) O’Brian-Erlacher, born in 1938—a woman of 87, with a deep well of charm, intellect, and quiet fortitude. Her husband, Mr. Roland (Max) Erlacher (1933, Vienna – July 2022), had arrived from Vienna in 1957 to work for Steuben Glass (founded in 1903 by Frederick Carder). There, in Corning, he met Kitty. Their story became the store’s story—one of craft, beauty, and the steady guardianship of glass as both object and art.
When I first approached Kitty, I mistook her for a fellow client. We began talking easily, without expectation. Art turned into astrology; numerology followed. I was caught in the kind of exchange that slows time—until my husband, David, interrupted, suggesting I was perhaps being too talkative. I teased, calling him “the boss.” Kitty, smiling, said, “You’re very smart.” I replied, “We should aim to be smarter,” and turned the compliment back to her. She graciously demurred.
As it happened, the cost of our three selections (including one from the Vitrix Hot Glass Studio and another from the Corning Museum of Glass) would, in Kitty’s words, “cover the shop’s needs for the entire month of August.” That small admission made our brief encounter feel suddenly momentous. The wrapping of the pieces—particularly the Vesta Plate—proved difficult. The oversized plate resisted all the available box sizes. Instinctively, I offered help and reassembled one of her boxes to fit the plate precisely. Kitty, watching with both amusement and admiration, called it brilliant.
She then brought out a reference book on her husband’s work. The exuberance of his designs, rooted in the lineage of Art Nouveau, seemed to fill the room with light. But when she spoke of him, words failed. Her eyes grew teary, and all she could manage was, “He was the kindest man.” I paused, gave her a long, knowing glance, and offered only silence in return—more interested in cheering her up than inviting grief.
When David and I finally parted from her, I lingered a moment amid the quiet exchange of goodbyes. Then, slowing my pace as we crossed the threshold, I turned and said softly, “God bless you, dear.”
Ricardo Morin The Seventh Watch (Template Series, 5th panel) Watercolor over paper 22” x 30” 2005
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.
Elders and chiefs from the 21 First Nation signatories of the Robinson Huron Treaty at the June 17, 2023, announcement of the proposed settlement. Standing at left: Gimaa Craig Nootchtai (Atikameksheng Anishnawbek); centre: Gimaa Dean Sayers. Photograph by Jenny Lamothe. Courtesy of SooToday / Anishinabek News.
Introduction
The 2023 Robinson Huron Treaty settlement announcement—captured in a widely circulated image of leaders and Elders assembled in solidarity—marks a moment of continuity in Indigenous governance once silenced by colonial displacement. I write not as a member of these communities, nor as a Canadian citizen, but as an observer who engages with testimony and documented evidence. Beneath the natural serenity of Parry Sound lies a wound deepened by continued neglect, one that requires not only recognition but structural change.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, issued in 2015, outlined a comprehensive plan across justice, health, and education. Nearly a decade later, the Yellowhead Institute reports that only 13 of the 94 have been completed—and none in 2023. This inaction reveals the gap between commitment and execution, showing how reconciliation remains more rhetorical than structural.
It is telling that the tensions between First Nation tribes and Canadian institutions reveal how a country that celebrates cultural diversity can remain in conflict with its Indigenous peoples.
By Ricardo Morin, August 6, 2025; Isabella Island, Parry Sound, Ontario, Canada.
*
The boat across Parry Sound glides over still water, southward to Isabella Island. The surrounding beauty—dense pines, scattered rock formations, and open sky—stands in sharp contrast to what my cousin Marc reveals once we disembark: that beneath this serene northern Ontario landscape lies a persistent story of abuse, erasure, and systemic abandonment. Marc, a seasoned youth justice specialist in Ontario’s legal system, has spent over thirty years advising police departments and courts on indictments involving minors. His experience covers nearly every youth murder case in the province, but his most wrenching insights, he says, do not come from what the law sees—but from what it omits.
This omission is not accidental. The First Nations peoples of this region—the Anishinaabeg, including the Ojibway, Odawa, and Potawatomi—have lived for generations under policies that turned colonial violence into institutional neglect. Residential schools, operated primarily by churches and endorsed by the Canadian government, aimed to assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly removing them from their families and culture. Physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, and psychological trauma were widespread. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which published its final report in 2015, called this system “cultural genocide.” Yet despite official acknowledgment, its legacy remains embedded in law enforcement, education, housing, and incarceration.
As Marc recounts, the present-day effects are not merely residual—they are cumulative. Indigenous communities in the Parry Sound district, he explains, are often subjected to outright racist harassment. He described instances where Indigenous people have been kidnapped by white residents, driven miles from their communities, and abandoned in the freezing wilderness—half-dressed, humiliated, and physically endangered; some have died. These are not rare stories. They are carried in silence, in mistrust, in patterns of disappearance and criminalization. “Depression and petty crimes,” Marc continues, “lead Indigenous youth to prison. But it is Indigenous women who suffer most.”
Today, nearly 70 percent of Ontario’s incarcerated female population is Indigenous—a figure that defies proportionality and demands scrutiny. The equivalent male figure is 20 percent, itself shockingly high. What accounts for the extreme overrepresentation of Indigenous women? Neutral data suggest a convergence of risk factors: intergenerational trauma, poverty, lack of access to healthcare, disrupted education, and systemic police bias. Indigenous women are also the most frequent targets of domestic and sexual violence, often left unprotected by a justice system that fails to recognize their vulnerability until it criminalizes their survival. They are far more likely to be imprisoned for crimes rooted in trauma—substance-related offenses, minor thefts, or breaches of conditional release. In these cases, incarceration substitutes for care; silence substitutes for accountability.
Legal frameworks fail to acknowledge this chain of causation. Where the justice system claims impartiality, it often operates as a mechanism of historical amnesia. Political neutrality becomes moral indifference. The courtroom speaks in terms of individual guilt, severed from social context. What justice omits is precisely what history insists upon: that a wound, left untreated, does not heal—it deepens.
Resistance has not been absent. Local First Nations have organized to reclaim land rights, restore language, and establish health services rooted in traditional knowledge. Movements as Idle No More and the work of leaders such as Cindy Blackstock and Tanya Talaga have elevated the national conscience. Yet the machinery of redress moves slowly. Reports are written, apologies are issued, commissions are concluded. Meanwhile, communities remain under-resourced, youth remain vulnerable, and women continue to disappear—sometimes into institutions, sometimes into obscurity.
This essay does not indict any single actor. It seeks to illuminate what institutions routinely fail to see: that harm is not only historical but structured; that healing is not only personal but political; and that justice, without history, risks becoming an empty performance.
The waters of Parry Sound appear peaceful, yet they conceal the contradiction of a nation that pledges reconciliation while leaving it incomplete. Between 2015 and 2023, only 13 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action were implemented—none in the last year. Such inaction does not erase testimony; it amplifies the wound. I cannot claim to speak for First Nations, but I can bear witness to the record, to the words of those who live these realities, and to the silence that persists when promises remain unmet. Healing requires more than acknowledgment; it requires accountability and the structural change that Indigenous voices have long demanded. The role of an outsider, if it has any legitimacy, is not to dictate, but to listen, to learn, and to make visible what is already being said.
Appendix: Sources and Monitoring Data
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report: Volume 5: The Legacy. Montreal & Kingston: McGill‑Queen’s University Press, 2015. (This report includes 94 Calls to Action across justice, education, health, etc.)
[1]. Office of the Correctional Investigator, “Annual Report, 2020–2021.” Ottawa: Office of the Correctional Investigator, 2021. (This report documents that Indigenous women represent over 50% of federally incarcerated women in Canada. It contrasts this alarming rise with the still-high but less sharply increasing incarceration of Indigenous men.)
[2]. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report, Volume 5: The Legacy. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. (This volume establishes a historical continuum between residential school trauma and present-day legal inequities. Drawing on survivor testimony, it details the systemic removal of children, cultural suppression, and intergenerational psychological effects.)
[3]. Statistics Canada, “Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report.” Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2020. (This statistical overview highlights gender-specific incarceration trends and emphasizes the overrepresentation of Indigenous women in custody, often for administrative or non-violent infractions.)
[4]. Public Safety Canada, “Risk Assessment and Indigenous Offenders.” Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2016. (This government report analyzes how standard risk assessment tools disproportionately assign higher security levels to Indigenous offenders—especially women—owing to trauma-linked factors that are misread as criminogenic.)
[5]. Parliamentary Budget Officer, “Costing Restorative Justice Programs.” Ottawa: Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 2020. (This study notes the disparity in funding and access to restorative justice programs, which shows how Indigenous women receive fewer diversionary options than men or youth and reflects systemic neglect.)
[6]. Department of Justice Canada, “Indigenous Overrepresentation in the Criminal Justice System.” Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2018. (This policy brief provides statistical data on pretrial detention, bail denial, and sentencing outcomes; it underscores administrative causes of Indigenous overrepresentation in prison, particularly among women.)
[7]. Tanya Talaga: Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2017. (Through the investigation of seven Indigenous youth deaths in Thunder Bay, this book exposes a pattern of institutional failure and systemic racism within policing, education, and the Canadian justice system.)
[8]. Idle No More, “About the Movement.” Saskatoon: Idle No More, 2012–present. https://idlenomore.ca/about-the-movement/. (This official web page traces the origins, aims, and activities of the Idle No More movement, which arose in defense of Indigenous sovereignty and the environment. It emphasizes the vital leadership role of Indigenous women in mobilization and education.)
This story forms part of a narrative triptych alongside In Tenebris [2021] and In Darkness [2022], three pieces that explore the same murder trial through a different angle.
In Tenebris addresses the deliberation from within; In Darkness proposes an open-ended reimagining; Between Law and Conscience returns to the experience from a reflective distance—to examine what the justice system leaves out.
*
The trial took place seven years after the murder.
It was difficult to grasp how something so grave could have waited so long. No weapon had been recovered.The witnesses gave halting, conflicted testimony.The victim had been fourteen when he was shot. The defendant—who looked barely older than twenty at the time of trial—must have been about the same age back then. Both boys, really.What had unfolded in those missing years—before and after—was never addressed.
We were told the crime stemmed from a turf dispute between youth gangs. Not a premeditated act, but a flare of violence born in a world where survival, for some, is its own daily labor. Children—some no older than primary school age—trapped in loops of retaliation, where fear and poverty set the rhythm. None of that—none of what might explain how violence germinates where options vanish—was part of what we were allowed to consider.
There may have been earlier proceedings. Maybe the case began in juvenile court. Maybe there were appeals, delays, witnesses who refused to testify. Or maybe the file just sank, for a time, under the sheer weight of the judicial backlog. By the time we—the jury—entered, none of that background was available to us. Our task was to begin where the case file did: with the event. As if time had left no mark. As if the intervening seven years had not eroded memory or reshaped the young man who now sat before us.
The purpose, formally, was to determine guilt or innocence. But from the outset it felt like we were being asked to apply a blunt question to a situation that resisted such clean edges. This was not just about what had happened—but about what could not be said.
We were instructed to confine ourselves to the evidence. And we tried. But the questions kept tugging—quietly, steadily. How could we not see that this was a killing between teenagers? That it unfolded in a context already stacked against them? How could we not feel that something vital had been left out of the frame?
No one spoke of the defendant’s time in custody—how long he’d waited for trial, whether he’d been offered a plea, or had access to counsel early on. And that expression on his face—unreadable to some, unsettling to others—may have carried traces of confinement, of growing up inside a system that offers little room for grace. I couldn’t know. But I kept wondering.
Despite our best efforts to remain disciplined, the questions kept returning. What chances had that boy really had to escape the fate that claimed him? What might his life have looked like if different choices—his or others’—had been possible earlier? Was it fair, even legal, to weigh his guilt without considering the conditions that had shaped him?
But those thoughts were not admissible. They weren’t in the record. The judge’s instructions were clear: such context, however compelling, was irrelevant to the task before us. Justice, we were told, required a kind of tunnel vision—stripped of background, stripped of time.
So the proceedings followed their course: objections, testimony, forensic accounts, cross-examinations. The weapon was never found. Both the prosecution and the defense had their lapses—moments where arguments frayed or confidence gave way to fatigue. But what lingered wasn’t the strength or weakness of the case. It was the feeling that something essential remained unspoken, unreachable. That the full truth—if such a thing existed—had been sealed off long before we arrived.
Some jurors were ready to decide quickly. For them, the evidence presented was enough to convict. Others, myself included, were less sure—not out of sympathy, but because the case felt incomplete. I kept returning to a quiet unease: were we being asked to judge a person, or only the narrow outline the system permitted us to see?
During deliberations, the tension thickened. One juror said that the defendant’s withdrawn posture looked like guilt. Another saw in it exhaustion. I couldn’t say. But I kept asking myself—what does innocence look like after seven years in pretrial detention? What shape does presence take in someone who has lived under constant suspicion?
On one afternoon, before we adjourned for the day, the youngest among us—barely twenty—spoke up. His voice was low but certain:
“I grew up in a neighborhood too, where you were more likely to be stopped for how you looked than to be seen as someone worth protecting. I don’t know if he did it. But I do know what it feels like to be judged before you understand who you are.”
No one responded. But something in the room changed. The atmosphere softened. Our conversations grew less defensive, more reflective.
It took us nearly three weeks to reach a verdict. Not because the case was complex in a technical sense, but because we all—each of us—had to confront not only the facts but our own expectations of justice. Doubts lingered. The discussions were civil, even quiet, but weighted. It was as if the jury room had become something else—a kind of confessional, where what we revealed was not just about the case, but about ourselves.
I thought of my father, who used to say that justice must be blind, but never deaf. That one must listen for what’s withheld, not just what’s claimed. That memory stayed with me as we signed the verdict: not guilty.
There were quiet cheers from the defendant’s side. The victim’s mother wept. We, the jury, didn’t feel resolution—only the tremor of uncertainty. The judge thanked us for our service. We exited through a narrow corridor, shielded from the public, down a service elevator, then out.
I don’t know what became of him after that. Maybe he disappeared again into the margins of a city that had already marked him. Maybe he tried to begin again. I can’t know. But I do know this: that trial was not only about one act of violence. It was about the quiet violence of exclusion—of what the law, in its procedures, often refuses to see.
And it is that omission—silent, sanctioned, systematic—that places justice itself on the stand.
The ‘I’ believes in pleasure, laughter, good food, sex. The ‘I’ believes in itself, sometimes it is proud of itself but sometimes ashamed of itself. Who does not carry the stain of shame, a faux pas, a lost opportunity that, just remembering them, cures us of the threatening hubris of believing ourselves, in Mexican terms, the mero mero, the cat’s meow, the king of the forest, the bee’s knees?
Carlos Fuentes, This I Believe: An A-Z of a Writer’s Life; The I. p. 315. Bloomsbury Publishing, London; Translated by Kristina Cordero, Copyright 2004.
*
INTRODUCTION:
Writing for me is the result of reasoning through experience, sifting agenda whether mine or those of others. In shaping my narratives, the process inevitably extends long beyond the scope of a story. I cannot define my emotions unless I have spent time examining them. Unlike a professional journalist, on purpose I avoid writing on commission or for any kind of financial gain. For a few years now, owing to the Covid Pandemic, I have substituted writing for my brushes and painting studio. Spontaneity defines these narratives just as it had my abstract paintings. I struggle for disinterestedness: a universality intrinsic to every work of art.
Thus, a narrative’s introduction is ironically an epilogue. Initially, the conversation taking place between David and me had not been set. It is through the course of this cruise that evocations are gleaned from the past. They are our way of understanding ourselves as spouses.
This exploration of the West Indies and the Caribbean held des énigmes. For us, it was the exploration of an unknown continent. Among these southern lands resided that Little Venice[Venezuela], the source of my current distress: Why did I have to leave there a half century ago for a frigid Western New York? This story illustrates both my father’s culture and my own perspective.
In the mutability of time, confessions seek understanding. Memory comes from/out of habit, opinion, desire, pleasure, pain, and fear. Each manifests a change. Like jetsam in times of distress each one of these resurfaces, though not preserved, but transformed into something new. The succession of worn-out ideas is an act of replacement.
A wanderer’s hope and prayers I add for those left behind. In pondering these memories, I examine my own validity and ambiguities. This reliquary of contradictions stands between intuition and fact. I seek the readers’ empathy as a transition.
Each alliance of loyalty between fact and intuition can place us in a better universe. It is our beliefs that the human spirit can rise above life’s vicissitudes.
Here, I wish to include special thanks to Professor Andrew Irving, Ph.D., head of the Department of Anthropology, University of Manchester, England, for his generous support and guidance. I have known Andrew for the past 26 years, and once I had the opportunity to collaborate on a research project, entitled The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice (2017). Since before the publication of my WordPress’s web page Observations on the Nature of Perception (Visual Art, Aesthetic Plasticity, and a Free Human Mind) – a repository for short stories published as of 2008 – I had already shared with him a number of testimonials on aesthetics, which became crystalized in my post Acts of Individual Talent(2009). These had evolved over our conversations in the course of thirteen years, starting in 1997 since we met for the first time:
Ricardo realized that the true measure of a painter is the making of art despitethe obstacles and challenges one has to endure. Ricardo was particularly motivated by the fact that there have been innumerable artists whose accomplishments did not depend on engaging with the marketplace. He was drawn to “all the great works by anonymous artists from Greek and Roman Antiquity, that were plundered, destroyed, and stigmatized during the Dark Ages,” as well as Cézanne, who endured forty years of obscure labor before landing a first one-man-show, and Van Gogh, whose sublimely “outsider” creations were only recognized after his death. For Ricardo, the term “outsider art” often denotes a prejudice toward individuals perceived to be riddled by some sort of physical or psychological health impairment. As such, both academia and the art establishment tend to divide art on the basis of its cultural import or through an underlying bias that Ricardo suggests evolves according to market demands. Another term is folkloric art, deemed to refer to the art of the colonies or the cultural heritage of a nation, which is associated with ideas of shared roots and lived experiences. “Are these terms in some way similar or different from the issues involved in art produced during the struggle over chronic or terminal disease?” Ricardo asked after reading this chapter, “and while the notion of mutuality is essential to understanding the shared human condition, can it also help to expand sensibilities about understanding human expression in an interdisciplinary scientific context, bound by the myriad circumstances that may engulf human pathos besides biology, be it in sociological survival to fit in or as an effort to therapeutically survive a chronic or terminal disease?” Ricardo’s response and analysis continued: “There is great intelligence in the creative efforts made by the human mind to survive any circumstance. Besides, it is undeniable that bodily pain and mental pain are ubiquitous in life, be it one of privilege or alienation. The logical concepts of cognitive science with averages, classifications, and algorithms will serve no other purpose than to provide a mere approximation to understanding the complexity of human expression, its diversity, heterogeneity, and inenarrable nature. Can we really come to understand the ways in which different modes of inner expression – such as people’s ongoing interior dialogues, un-articulated moods, imaginative life-worlds, and emotional reveries – if they remain hidden beneath the surface of public activities, hence hidden from research? Ultimately, that which is mystical about the cycle of life and death may not be elucidated by a tactical approach, but through a profound introspection that is very difficult to articulate.” In 2008, Ricardo was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, a cancer associated with AIDS that affects white blood cells and can emerge when the immune system is weakened for prolonged periods. Throughout his illness, chemotherapy treatment,and convalescence, Ricardo spent many months sitting in silence in his chair. Beds and chairs are often dynamic sites of thought, expression, and memory for people living with an extended period of illness, whose thinking ranges freely across the past, present, and future. People remain thinking and speaking beings even when lying or seated in silence for long periods and may be negotiating critical issues, dilemmas, and decisions regarding treatment, work, or faith and be engaged in emergent streams of interior dialogue, thought, and emotion. It was during this state, which Ricardo describes as one of “high inertia” that he came to recognize the simplicity, power, and aesthetics of silence, especially “when compared with all the noise and visual cacophony of the tangible world at large.” Of course, a silence is never simply a silence. Different days are mediated by different silences; an uncertain silence, a good silence, a heroic silence, a surreal silence, a painful silence. A silence can contain the faces of the people closest to you, thoughts of suicide, images of the world outside, daydreams, and future-orientated life projects. After months of dwelling in silence, Ricardo wrote a “Manifesto of Silence” to help him think through and articulate his thoughts. It begins as follows: “The verbalization of an aesthetic reality implies its own death; no matter how precise, its very accuracy of words resists the magnitude of that reality. It is found in the open space of silence, in the virtuous stillness of a meditative contemplation, in the freedom itself of the known, free to observe with a heightened attention, where questions are unnecessary and responses trivialize the very observation.” After finishing the chemotherapy, Ricardo came down with severe tendonitis, which meant he no longer had the requisite strength to stretch canvases in order to paint. Consequently, when he started painting again he did so on hanging scrolls. Ricardo came to understand the scroll material and how it behaved in its simplest of terms and in relation to his own physical limitations. Between 2009 and 2010, Ricardo started to work on a scroll series called Metaphors of Silence, in which “it was this incidental simplicity of the medium of scrolls and my empathy for the nature of silence that produced the subject matter.”
When I last revised my post Acts of Individual Talent in 2020, I concluded: What use would creativity or intellect be to us without compassion?, would we not need to assess our system of valuation, perhaps even our own cultural rationality?
More recently, on February 3, 2023, Andrew and I also had a long discussion via Zoom, which was based on my WordPress post Meditations on Ortega y Gasset(2022). At that time, he provided a critical analysis with extensive bibliography, which, he felt, would enhance my perspective about the Enlightenment and its limitations.
Furthermore, I extend my gratitude to my friend and editor for the past 36 years, Billy Bussell Thompson, Ph.D., professor emeritus, Hofstra University, Department of Romance Languages. It is thanks to Billy that I remain hopeful in developing my skills as a writer.
Fort Lauderdale, March 24, 2023
*
Plato’s Symposium: Diotima on the wisdom of love.
–– “So do not be amazed if everything honors by nature its offshoot; for it is for the sake of immortality that this zeal and eros attend everything.”
— “ . . . in as much as in the case of human beings, if you were willing to glance at their love of honor, you would be amazed at their irrationality, unless you understand what I have said and reflect how uncanny their disposition is made by their love of renown, ‘and their setting up immortal fame for eternity’; and for the sake of fame even more than for their children, they are ready to run all risks, to exhaust their money, to toil at every sort of toil, and to die.” [Location p. 37, 207a-208]
Plato’s Symposium: a translation by Seth Bernardete with commentaries by Allen Bloom and Seth Bernardete, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
*
I
Clouds loomed, as if mountains, over the horizon. From the balcony of our stateroom, we watched the wake’s effervescent whiteness. Gulls pierced rolling waves and cawed their disputes.
II
Our travels across the Bahamas and along the coasts of Central America had begun five days ago on the Eurodam. On January 4th we had left Fort Lauderdale. Already we have passed by north of Cuba and and south of Hispaniola. Now, we are approaching Aruba, a mere 76 miles from Venezuela. A pilot boat will guide us to moorage. But a fire alarm has gone off, and the stench of diesel permeates the air. A few minutes later the captain announces: Everything has been brought back to normal. The emergency has been aborted.
III
David and I are speaking; emergency lights are still flashing.
It’s been fifty years since I left. I was 17.
IV
We disembark in Oranjestad.
Eighty-five years today my parents were ostracized from Germany. Five years later they married in the United States, where they lived happily until their deaths.
For my parents, leaving the country was never an option and their marriage was unhappy.
Did you ever come with them to Aruba?
Only as a child.
V
How was your relationship with them at that time?
My parents emphasized independence. For me they were a bridge to the country, still. They understood I had to go abroad. There was no other choice. From my love for them, ties to Venezuela have never wavered. Our proximity now, however, elicits no nostalgia, only recollections. I do care, though.
VI
You must have some memorable moments from then?
Camping out with the Boy Scouts on the Andean plateau. That honed my vision.
Anything else?
I remember the ashrams of the Universal Fraternity. There were monks, followers of Serge Raynaud de la Ferrière (in Valencia, Maracay, and Caracas). I frequented all three of them, during the summers. These ashrams schooled its attendees in a mixture of natural sciences and Buddhism: For me this was more stimulating than listening to church sermons, with their evocations of sin and the shadows of shame. That’s when I began yoga and meditation.
What impressed you the most?
I was drawn by the emphasis in self-denial. But I disliked being dependent on other people. I just wanted to expand beyond myself.
VII
In those years, I was attached to nothing in particular. Was I a dilettante?
You were inquisitive; it was a time for discovery.
I went to seminars on musicology; I took German lessons; it was a time for Hesse, Kafka, Gibran, Thoreau’s Walden, and Skinner’s Walden Two.
VIII
I read, but unsystematically. I liked philosophy, history, painting, and writing, but I wasn’t yet dedicated. Only slowly, did it all become part of me.
These things awakened your spirit.
I was free from obligations and they expressed my relationship to the world.
You were learning to be original. You sought your own voice. You didn’t mimic other people.
The more I felt, the greater my involvement. It was just a way to express myself. I wasn’t looking for success, or distraction.
IX
We disembarked and walked over to the shopping malls. From Main Street we veered into the side ones. On both sides, most storefronts were boarded up. The façades showed signs of a better time, perhaps, from when Venezuelans were flamboyant. Now only makeshift stands crowded the sidewalk, manned by folk with a distinctive Venezuelan lilt: In friendly conversation, the word marico floated amongst them.
Papá once watched me sitting on the curb of a street next to an old watchman who worked for us on weekends and was known for having an unpredictable temper. The watchman awaited my family’s departure to the city. I had often befriended him, peppering him with questions. Later, Papá said I was the only person who related to this man.
Your resilience was your best attribute.
X
In the late sixties, our family hosted the daughter of Venezuela’s President Rómulo Betancourt, Virginia. She and her husband stayed in one of our houses in Valencia. At that time, Virginia Pérez was the head of the National Library in Caracas. I was thirteen and Papá asked me to take my paintings from the rooms where the guests were staying. According to him they were out of place. One day, after having finished lunch, I brought a framed watercolor over to Virginia and began to speak. My father objected, but she said, disavowing him: “No, please, leave him alone.” I continued: “It shows the spirit of a young man in search of freedom.” Sweetly she responded: “I like your way of thinking; I want to hear more.” Words now failed me.
(David chuckling), you told me this once before.
XI
Can you tell if you fit into a pattern, or is your life just a series of episodes?
I don’t see the disconnections; I can’t say if there’s a pattern. I was just bold then. My speech, vocabulary, and the way I looked must have seemed provocative, perhaps, even epicene. I threatened expectations. I was different from my older brother, who was athletic and had lots of friends. I was a loner. For my lack of sport, maybe Papá found me not only vulnerable, but also naïve. Was it dissatisfaction or was it nonconformity? I only found solace in my private inventions. Shortly afterwards, I erased, slashed, tore two years of paintings, only to regret this later. Papá said I was rebelling against my own culture.
Your father knew you couldn’t survive a world of machismo and its deeply rooted biases.
That’s the point. I hadn’t understood that yet. Papá saw my creativity as a target for victimization. He told me I couldn’t be a lawyer. I wouldn’t fit in. When I argued I could go into international law, he was equally incredulous.
Perhaps, for that same reason, he never got involved in politics; he knew human imperfections carried their own risks; he recognized the kind of dishonesty that pervaded Venezuela. He wanted you to be safe. That’s why you had to leave.
XII
I’ve come to understand that exceptionalism is a myth. Disappointment is powerful. I had to leave.
XIII
Even if I am surrounded by falsehood, I must not be cynical. What does that serve? Human imperfections can’t be freed from themselves. I feel uncomfortable, however, when people ask where I am from, as if they are diagnosing who I am.
Most people don’t mean anything by it.
It’s my own reaction. I suppose it proves I am not comfortable with English. It feels as if people are placing me in a niche.
Most people can identify with that, I do for one. Few of us ever get the questions right.
Does anyone, really? If they did, answers would be unnecessary.
XIV
That night, it rained. A full moon unveiled itself from behind the clouds. We stepped again onto the balcony and admired the kaleidoscope of twinkling lights across the island.
In the first few years outside of Venezuela, I was enamoured of life in the United States. Long before going there, my Aunt Lina’s place in Buffalo had filled my dreams. She was able to flee the Holocaust. Her rose garden was just what I had imagined. Her graciousness was the same as when I had met her in Venezuela. Her garden left a lasting impression on me.
XV
That morning we anchored in Willemstad, Curaçao, surrounded by a rumpus of pelicans near the pier.
On my first visit back to Venezuela, Papá asked me what I thought about the inflation in the United States. I never knew why he posed that question. Its irony was not lost on me 50 years later, when Venezuela has accrued one of the highest rates in the history of the world.
XVI
We went sightseeing in Willemstad. The city’s old buildings, streets, and bridges were reminiscent of Amsterdam. We took photographs and wandered around slowly. Then thinking of our families, we shopped for table linens.
Do you think your father foresaw the disintegration of Venezuela?
The world where I grew up was always on the brink. Papá used to say he did not know how we were going to manage without him. He feared for every aspect of our lives, and even for every Venezuelans’ families. He even feared a total civil brutality in that landscape of pervasive dishonesty. How could it be prevented?
XVII
Keeping to ourselves, we had a full day at sea. We ate alone. We had little in common with the other passengers: all two thousand of them.
After twenty-four years later, I came back. Without a gallery’s contract, again I have thought about destroying my paintings. This time, I was tempted to burn them, but the flames might have engulfed me and my home. This thwarted me. I could only store them.
Couldn’t somebody have helped?
Papá did the best he could, even inciting jealousy among my brothers and sisters. Perhaps, he felt sorrier for me …. When I was interviewed by a local newspaper concerning my work in the United States, a lot of our neighbors thought the interview self-serving. Then Papá died and I became even more of an outsider.
What happened to him?
By the age of 70, he had become delusional, untethered from his own will. His last five years coincided with Venezuela’s disintegration, and family members sought safety in Europe and elsewhere in America. For me art became secondary.
XVIII
What about your brothers and sisters?
It’s sad to say. Their sense of entitlement has complicated matters. My older brother claimed the right of primogeniture, though he had no legal authority for such. We denied it to him, but lacked the resources to challenge him. He kept the rents mostly for himself. With the passing of years, the properties have lost value and some have been taken over by squatters, and some even expropriated by the government. Out of concern for his safety, I made an offer to help him. He rebuffed me saying he counted on the first Lady of Venezuela. He added that he could not leave Venezuela and lose his identity as a lawyer.
These explanations are puzzling. And what about your two sisters and younger brother? What has happened to them?
My youngest sister moved to Madrid with her husband and two young daughters. My other sister and younger brother have stayed in Venezuela. They protect each other as well as they can. For the last ten years, I have been helping them and my paternal aunts.
I remember meeting your aunts. That was when I traveled to Venezuela with you. We celebrated your mother’s eightieth birthday and your older brother’s remarriage. I also remember his son’s grief. He seemed inconsolable. Didn’t he move to Argentina with his partner?
Yes. We also did our best to console him, such as when he met my former partner, Nelson. He felt reinforced by our presence, and my relationship with Nelson triggered a validation that his father had always feared. All along my nephew sought his father’s acceptance. I told them there was no place for shame.
XIX
Not too far from where we are, in a small fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela stands a plinth. It pays homage to guerrillas sent by Cuba to Venezuela in the 1960’s. Their campaign collapsed. Five decades later, Hugo Chávez helped achieve Cuba’s fantasy – this time without firing a shot.
I cannot judge Venezuela nor its history, for I no longer am part of it. I have not suffered the lash of Venezuelan repressions. For the past 50 years, I have been in the United States, where measures of rectification constantly challenge authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
Recently, you spoke to my friend Cindy, who is an analyst at the US treasury. She told you quite frankly that the American government’s sanctions on corrupt Venezuelan individuals are not simple issues. The flight of fortunes from countries like Venezuela cannot be easily controlled where there is flagrant corruption.
Indeed, that’s a reality no one can manage.
XX
In your opinion, is there any hope for Venezuelan stability?
It’s complex. It is inexplicable how, for instance, billions of dollars are acquired out of nowhere by the children of local politicians. They care not at all for its constituency or for their country: A nation of laws has ceased to exist.
XXI
Have you ever interacted with Venezuelan officials?
Only indirectly, through second and third cousins (who worked in the executive branch and the Ministry of Foreign Relations) as well as my own brother (who was a legal advisor to a State governor). Aside from them, I have only engaged a would-be reformer, who now lives in Florida. In 1999, he was one of the congressmen involved in writing the last Venezuelan constitution. Currently, among expatriates, he has a large following. In one of his podcasts, he took issue with me over the lack of maturity in Venezuelan politics. He replied furiously to my allegations of self-interest: ¿Y quién coño eres tú?”[And, who tha fuck are you?]. Later, I sent him a text “in general most reformers fail to address what they intend to reform,” and he replied: ¡Ay, por Dios, éste es un gran maricón![Oh, my God, this man is just a faggot]. Then he blocked me.
XXII
We arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, where we toured the old walled city and the Fortress of San Felipe. Long undulating promenades (covered by trellises draped in bougainvillea) were delightfull and hugged the walls of the malecón. The guide spoke of the father of Greater Colombia, Simón Bolívar, who had died at Santa Marta. He pointed out a wine-colored fortress where Gabriel García Márquez had resided.
Even though I did not take part in the protests, with my keyboard I favored dissenters and insurrectionists alike. This was my cri du cœur. Though we have all failed, for me the morality of this call has never gone silent.
It’s your voice.
Time itself is an instrument that balances the absence of truth, the swing of delusion, and the debris of extremism. As time unfurls, it allows us to come to an understanding.
It heals our madness.
Maybe, justice will prevail. Maybe, harmony will be achieved in a new generation.
Also, when we least expect it, despots may usurp our freedoms.
XXIII
We were now in the Panama Canal about to enter the Gatún Locks. Pulled by trains on each side, the ship climbed up through three locks until reaching the waters of Lake Gatún. The architectural feat of the Canal sparked my imagination (suddenly I thought about the Egyptian Pyramids). We reached the shore of the lake on tenders and from there we made a tour by bus. We zigzagged through hundreds of military buildings and army barracks until we arrived at the Locks of Miraflores on the Pacific. From there we drove to the Old City, where we photographed its colonial buildings and plazas. Clustering across the bay, we could see the skyline of present day Panama City. Then we drove to Colón on the Atlantic. Just before boarding back on the Eurodam, we walked through a small zoo leading to the pier. Roaming around, among mammals and tropical birds, we saw a giant anteater and its long tongue, swallowing a thousand morsels. David brings up politics:
No country is exempt from the excesses of partisanship.
But we don’t know the reasons.
Do you think an apolitical consciousness is called for?
I only know that extremism is no remedy for human uncertainty.
The danger is always that polarization can turn into warfare.
XXIV
We arrived in Costa Rica, anchoring in Limón. We disembarked to board a tourist bus. Then we got off to navigate in small boats through the channels that ran along the edges of the jungle. In heavy, intermittent rain, we saw monkeys, sloths, toucans, snakes, alligators, and crocodiles. Once the ride was completed, we got back on the bus, which took us to higher altitudes. When we arrived, we took a cable car into the heart of the rainforest until reaching a research lab, a butterfly garden, and a trail that led to waterfalls. The wooden stairs of the path were slippery from rain. Unable to proceed farther, we heard the thunderous sound of the cataracts.
I was born in a land of wealth, which is what attracted my ancestors. They came to Venezuela as early as 1745, both from Europe and the Canary Islands. Between 1799 and 1804, the German geographer, Alexander von Humboldt, in his writings, lauded the colony as a paradise for the advancement of science. Today this paradise struggles for its own survival.
XXV
On May 13, 2014, I received an answer to one of my queries from the White House’s website for foreign relations, on behalf of President Obama. The email bore the letterhead of the White House, though obviously pro forma. In closing, it read … With our international partners, the United States is continuing to look at what more we can do in support of that effort [i.e. ‘for an honest dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition’]. America has strong and historical ties with the Venezuelan people, and we remain committed to our relationship with them. Their fundamental freedoms and universal human rights must be protected and respected.
To an impartial reader this email may seem either empathetic, or even propagandistic; but the reality is that Venezuela may need the United States, not the other way around, at least not at this time.
XXVI
The last two days at sea, we dined in private restaurants. I took notes of our conversation. David indulged my writing and editing until he complained that I wasn’t paying enough attention to eating. Writing seemed to be the one habit I could not ignore.
It was my solace. That last night, when passing along the southwest coast of Cuba, the rough waters of the sea made walking unstable. Before midnight, we packed our bags and placed them in the hallway outside the cabin door.
Past, present, and future time collided: Chávez’s death in 2013 led me to think about Papá’s in 1997. The year before, I had taken him to urgent care at a private hospital. A neurologist there said he had suffered a brain injury and there was little to be done. He was 74. He could no longer speak. Suddenly, surprisingly, he sat up in anger; something obviously gnawed at him deeply. He threatened.
To the bitter end, your father was tormented. You could neither appease nor redeem him.
XXVII
Next morning was our twelfth and last day, as we arrived in Fort Lauderdale. We went to breakfast on deck two and, again, we ate alone. Then, returning to deck eight, back in our stateroom, we waited to disembark. We were the third group, color red, and, finally at 11 am, were summoned. We went down to deck one and lined up with the other passengers. After our ID’s were scanned, we walked down the ramp to the terminal, collected our luggage, and exited. We called a Uber to take us home, where we arrived 12 minutes later.
Papá’s and Hugo Chávez’s death spared them both from the torment of national crisis.
For Venezuela’s new generation, social inequities are rooted in differences of ideology.
Is the new generation a throwback to the Cold War?
Can the new generation examine itself?
As long as the inquiry is not reactionary: i.e. an inquiry into truth.
This dilemma is not unique to Venezuela. Over this, the whole world struggles.
EPILOGUE
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Plato’s Symposium: Agathon’s encomium on Eros.
–– “And don’t we know that . . . he whom Eros does not touch remains obscure?”
— “. . . he is the one who makes
‘Peace among human beings, on the sea calm/
And cloudlessness, the resting of winds and sleeping/
Of care”. [Location p. 25, 197 a, c]
Plato’s Symposium: a translation by Seth Bernardete with commentaries by Allen Bloom and Seth Bernardete, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
*
Love’s grace suggests a continuation of learning. As David raised the shades (allowing the sun’s rays to stream into our living room), he hummed: “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” In response I:“How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed.” We continued:
First, I would like to share with my readers my utmost gratitude to Billy Bussell Thompson (b. November 23, 1942), Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Hofstra University, for his generosity in being a mentor and editor. His scholarly trajectory goes from 1963 to 1993. Among his most salient publications in English, we have: Relic and Literature . . .; Bilingualism in Moorish Spain; The Myth of the Magdalen . . .; etc. . . .
II
Since 1989, our friendship has extended over more than three decades. We have worked in close proximity on at least a dozen articles and short stories (published in WordPress). I have been fortunate to count on his frankness and support. He has never minced words. He has been blunt, when any of my drafts seemed without merit. When that was the case, the articles went into a shredder, and I was satisfied by the integrity of his prose, as well as by my understanding of my own limitations as a writer. Prof. Bussell Thompson (B.B.T.) usually compares the skill of prose writing with that of a narrowing cone of vision. This selective cone of vision is akin to the aesthetic integrity of a visual work of art. With the present endeavor, Prof. B.B.T. believed, from the very beginning, in the possibility of bringing forth this story as a team. Even though we live in different regions – geographically far apart – of the USA, we have had no trouble communicating via phone and email.
III
This narrative seeks to explain the confusion found in society and politics, and even their seeming lack of purpose. For this reason, I dedicate my narrative to the readers.
IV
Initially, I knew not where this would lead. I submitted a five-paragraph draft to professor B.B.T. As he began to read, he paused and asked if I was alluding to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Surprised, I asked him to stop. I replied that his reference to Plato placed me in a different perspective. Gratefully, I added that his question was most welcome; at that point, I wanted to read more before continuing.
V
He encouraged me to reread Plato’s dialogues. To this he added that I take into account any ambiguity associated with Plato’s conception of the ideal authority of the State (politeia) or Nation. He referred to the Platonic ideas controversial in current discussions. He also recommended reading José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). He included The Revolt of the Masses[1929]and The Dehumanization of Art[1925]. He suggested that I be aware of Ortega’s meritocratic liberal perspective (though we believed that Ortega had not been known for openly endorsing any political ideology) and to heed the relevance Ortega gives to the man who is aware of his limitations – opposed to the man who is unaware: both the bourgeoisie and the mass man (who exemplify, for him la razón sinrazón [the reason for unreason]) – as explained in The Revolt of the Masses. And finally, I focus on the distinction between “content” and “form,” to explain the break by the avant-garde from the bourgeoisie.
VI
Professor B.B.T. and I also had an exchange of ideas over the parallels between the Platonic and Orteguian thought. He advised me then to read anew Meditations on Quixote[1914] both in Spanish and in English. There, B.B.T. thought that I could find a significant or productive landscape of ideas on which to reflect and, thus, be able to develop my own interpretations about the nature of knowledge, its limits, and how to find the meaning of the ideal of truth.
VII
In writing my last short story, entitled In Darkness, Professor B.B.T. had already urged me to note the meaning for circunstancia1 (“circumstance”) as defined by Ortega in Meditations on Quixote. It was clear to us that both Ortega’s phenomenological approach to “circumstance” and Plato’s thesis on the transformation of the individual (through knowledge) shared commonalities, which nurtured my own narrative.
VIII
But, the narrative journey proved to be just as challenging as Professor B.B.T. had pointed out. His criticism, even then, never ceased being constructive and energetic. His compassion was present as long as I was mindful of the necessity for clarity and precision. Often, he would cite Ernest Hemingway’s authenticity and precision.
IX
Time and time again, I experienced enormous pain in trying to comprehend what I wished to express. Freeing my prose from superficiality was like taking a deep breath to exhale the vagueness of my anxieties. Sometimes I was unable to get away from the obvious. Other times, either I hid behind the complex, or I would cling to abstract and cryptic thinking: the reductive jargon of the social sciences. Professor B.B.T. repeatedly suggested succinctness: I needed to respect the simplicity of language and find a way to its accessibility. Bringing Plato and Ortega to the reader was my responsibility. I was not to imitate them nor to think like them, but to represent them authentically. My first obligation was to the reader. For this I had to avoid euphemisms, randomness, and diversion. The affirmation of effective communication is an objective worth the effort. I would only understand myself, if I were to understand the reader.
X
B.B.T.’s exhortations and criticisms, I welcomed enthusiastically. His challenge became mine. He has been exorcising my limitations for two decades: Every time we have worked together, I have discovered something new in myself. I have become more attuned to both English and Spanish. I have had to be my own translator. In these instances, I have grown more respectful of the two languages. I have had to capture their essence by comparing them: the one informs the other.
*
Prologue
In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus[circa 369 B.C.E.], Socrates proposes that the extraordinary extraction of ideas is like bringing forth a new life and purging what is unnecessary. Likewise, the aim here is to produce and discuss what enlightenment is, and the obstacles to its achievement. Socrates has helped me in my definition of knowledge: Is morality universal, or is objective morality even possible? For these ideas I am indebted both to Plato and to Ortega y Gasset.
Ricardo F Morin, December 19, 2022
Editor Billy Bussell Thompson
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Plato, Roman marble bust copied from Greek original, 4th century B.C.E., Capitoline Museums, Rome.
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Socrates, Roman marble bust copied from Greek original, 2nd half of the 4th century B.C.E., Capitoline Museums, Rome.
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José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), detail of photograph of his impersonation of Honoré de Balzac, circa 1900.
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One way to objectivity is to recognize one’s own subjectivity. Metaphors for understanding reality are rare. One sees the world primarily through one’s own experience. It is difficult (though not impossible) to understand what one has not experienced. Truth never rests: It is not singular, but always plural.
Anonymous
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1
Index
1. Awareness of the Transformation of One’s Self:
The highest principle of inquiry is consciousness of one’s self. In inquiry lie the beginnings of change.
2
Index
2. The Absence of Trust:
In our age of disbelief, the stories we tell each other about the past and the present seem to be in a state of collapse. There is a lack of continuity in the social order, increasingly suffocated by misinformation and distrust. We challenge each other over what is real and what is not.
3
Index
3. The Unassailable Truth:
For most of us an ultimate truth remains unattainable and the stories we share from the past and the present no longer seem useful. Along with the disappearance of our past stories, both the person who seeks truth and the act of giving a person his due are in crisis. Our society finds itself defined by a decline in trust both in government and its institutions. Despairingly, the challenge is that the creation of new stories has become an act of preservation. Likewise, autocracy is on the ascendance. A lack of faith has sown aimlessness. What can change this course of despair? What will bring enlightenment to us?
4
Index
4. Consciousness:
Knowledge is constantly changing and the result of this destabilization carries us into greater disorder. For this reason clarity is more necessary than ever to understand ourselves. Even if clarity is not always possible, to know oneself is imperative. Thus arises the tension between continuity and change. Here lies the quest for survival.
5
Index
5. Not Knowing:
Not knowing is the essential condition of existence, despite one’s apparent desire for knowledge or for authority. To know is to inquire. Reality, though fleeting, inspires reflection. Change begins with the recognition that one is not in isolation. Not even the one (who seeks self-sacrifice for his spiritual advancement) by absolute cloister could get rid of his entanglement with the world. It is by relating to other people and his environment that this person comes to know who he is. Not even he (who despises the symbols of fear) is capable of freeing himself from his anguish. The fear of not knowing hangs over all of us. It is possible that striving without measure (in the aspiration for rationality) only leads us to end up being irrational: Here lies the origin of complexity given the absence of innocence.
6
Index
6. The Energy of Life:
In his theory of cultural attributes (Meditaciones del Quijote, Meditaciónpreliminar; Índice8, Lapantera o del sensualismo, pág. 21), José Ortega y Gasset gives us his concept of razón vital2, which means reason is expressed through life itself. Ortega parses the European mind into two archetypes: the Germanic and the Mediterranean. The former is meditative and the latter sensuous. Of the sensuous he says: The predominance of the senses usually implies a deficiency in inner powers. What is meditating as compared with seeing? As soon as the retina is hit by the arrow from without, our inner personal energy hastens and stops the intrusion. The impression is registered, subjected to civilized order; it is thought, and in this way it is integrated in the building up of our personality, and cooperates within it – Evelyn Rugg and Diego Martín’s translation – Notes and Introduction by Julián Marías – pp. 85-86. The Orteguian admonition here is to find the balance between extremes: between the excesses and deficiencies of these two archetypes.
7
Index
7. Human Agency and Its History:
A second source for my understanding of the mind and the senses is found in Plato’s Republic (politeia) – Socrates’s dialogue of the allegory of the cave at the beginning of Book Seven. There have been many interpretations. Mine differs. My purpose is to rid suffering from the mind of the freed slave. Once freed from shackles, the mind of the freed slave (who ascends to the mouth of the cave) discovers its own vision of the world. Despite the sun’s glare, the uneducated mind is transformed by the newly found ideal of truth. But the awareness by the prisoner (who has remained behind) is inseparable from the condition of the freed man: The slave (remaining in shadows of suffering) is not entirely separable from the memory of the freed man. Because of suffering, the freed man’s mind is aware of its inability to know. At the same time, the freed mind learns how its own transformation may be dependent on the new course of its history. This mind’s actions allow participation in change, and change is possible through self examination. The mind examines itself through meditating. Meditation is not an obligation, but a necessity. Meditation is the result of the mind’s freedom and it is the means to understanding its own choices in its approach to truth: But this effort is only an approximation to the infinity of truth. The freed mind (facing the visible world) is lacking here. Thus, the freed mind recognizes that neither its actions nor the course of its history is predictable. They (i.e. the mind’s actions and the course of its history) come from multiple possibilities about belief.
The freed mind realizes that time is an illusion: Time is fleeting, false, and deceitful. The mind, habitually trapped in its past, remains mired in pain. Anger (which comes from the past in search for justice) has for its sole purpose the manifestation of resentment. But anger only manages to put its existence on hold, awaiting compensation. Just as time is an illusion for the mind, the quest for emotional reparation is also an illusion. For the mind, there is no vindication by being trapped in the labyrinth of illusion. Only the rationality of active love can compensate for anger. If the mind of the lover of truth can project itself lovingly in the direction that it resents, then a liberating sense of bravery arises towards itself. Anger and sentimentality are one and the same. As the force of love sheds sentimentality, one’s desires dissipate and with them anger as well. Thereby, violence ceases to exist. Socrates’s allegory of the mind (freed from suffering) carries all these implications and comparisons towards a goal of Ideal Truth.
8
Index
8. Alertness:
In an effort to understand Ortega’s concept of circumstancia (“circumstance”), his Meditación preliminar, Indice 6,Culturamediterránea, explains to us that when he goes through the landscape of ideas he has to meditate with alertnesson the influence of his experiences. Needless to say, this includes all his past and present relations, the geographies he has occupied, and everything he has done in life. Ortega forewarns us of the risks in this act of meditation: We are accompanied by a keen suspicion that, at the slightest hesitation on our part, the whole world could collapse, and we with it. When we meditate, our mind has to be kept at full tension; it is a painful and integral effort – Index 6, Mediterranean Culture, translated by Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín (Introduction and notes by Julián Marías [a favorite student of Ortega y Gasset]), p. 34. In Plato’s dialogues, the same “effort” is found: Through the act of meditation, Socrates’s freed man draws transformation and redemption from the narrow crevices among ideas. Meditation helps the lover of truth get closer to his existential condition; it offers him the possibility of reacting differently, and sustains him with the very energy that life provides.
9
Index
9. Faith:
For the one who fears meditation, having faith in one’s own actions and changes are not sufficient for inquiry. History is not alive for him: It is at a point of no return; it is dead. This person is in a world of despair and surrounded by the proverbial dancing of shadows. This person is bound in his own chains, is overwhelmed by a lack of confidence, and is, without trust, unable to make a leap of faith. Neither the notion of individuality nor the concept of free will seems satisfactory any longer. This person relinquishes personal power and is unaware of the forces influencing his mind and his senses. His refusal to face reality becomes a conscious decision for the suppression of truth. This refusal is antithetical to life itself. For him, life becomes enslavement and stands in opposition to the freed man, who fearlessly ponders the reality of the visible world, and passionately delves into the exploration of the unknown. The mind of the freed man represents Ortega’s concept of razón vital, desirous to be absorbed by it.
10
Index
10.Deliverance:
Distractions can be multiple. In Ortega’s playful analysis, he implies that if meditation is extraneous to the fears of the mind, it can succumb to obsession, and even fall despairingly into manias. Ortega values the relevance of every influence. He understands that a human being and his landscape are not separate. The unity of the two means his salvation by circunstancia (“circumstance”): Thus his appreciation of circunstancia: Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo – Al Lector, Índice, pág. 41 (which I translate as “I am myself [in a world of perceptions] and also the material world that surrounds me; if I don’t save them, I don’t save myself”). Incidentally, here Ortega preempts his conclusion with what he has read in the Bible: Benefac loco illi quo notus es3 (loosely translated into English as “do good in the place where you are known”). With these remarks, Ortega reinforces the idea that he is unable to disassociate himself from his surroundings. If he is to flourish and to find salvation, it will be necessary for him to understand and protect what he shares with his environment.
Parallel to Ortega’s analysis is Plato’s Socratic allegory, which teaches us the effect that the visible world has on our mind. From these two perspectives, the mind tends to be discouraged by what it does not understand. Awareness of the visible world’s influence is for both thinkers an instinct for survival. To be aware, therefore, means to be silent, away from the deafening sound of fear. As long as there is fear, promoted by the progress of civilization, there will be no movement or separation from distractions. Confronting fear means dispersing it, making it disappear. Dispersal of fear is fundamental to the understanding of self. Releasing oneself from fear is confronting one’s not-knowing. Enslavement (at the depth of the cave) is equivalent to accepting the impositions of fear. Both, for Ortega and Plato, the opposition to indifference is found through meditation; thereby one is able to be alert and know oneself.
11
Index
11. Perception and Storytelling:
True confidence is living in uncertainty. An overriding fact is that human beings organize themselves around the making of stories. Every story we create is an act of piety that consoles the mind. Yet new stories and old ones are provisional tools that fill the gap of our faith, filling in the void of our ignorance. Whether the story be true or not, storytelling rescues us from ourselves. Storytelling is our razón vital. It seeks to expose us to the best possible meaning of ourselves: Meaning in storytelling is found by investing oneself with the willpower to exceed adversity. Meaning is found by creating something new within oneself. Meaning is found in one’s vulnerability and in the constant pain to overcome it. The process of finding meaning reveals that one cannot control Truth. Happiness depends on how one accepts the absence of control, and how we can stop disliking our limitations.
Storytelling persuades us to think that one’s actions will spread deeply into one’s consciousness. One may not always be able to defeat the element of preconception, for bias is always with us. As long as suffering, uncertainty, and the effort to overcome them exist, bias will persist. Bias lurks behind our thoughts, quiet and insidious, yet it is there for a reason in spite of its harmful effects. The irony is that if one banished preconceptions, there would be no further progress. In any story, if the hero overcomes the villainy of bias, it is because he is able to change: If one does not overcome bias, one does not grow and there is no transformation. Success is not as important as the struggle to overcome bias. Every time adversity comes to us, it is an opportunity for the recognition of those preconceptions that still reside in ourselves. Success does not provide happiness. Happiness is only possible through self discovery. As such, one becomes symbolically the whole of humanity. This is its highest expression: The creation of something new as we face adversity, and the worse the adversity, the greater the opportunity.
12
Index
12. Reasoning (sentience vs sapience):
Awareness of fiction is the appreciation of the paradox between what is and what is not. Knowledge expresses not only the awareness of one’s own intuitions and senses, but also the reasoning about those intuitions, senses, and impressions. That is, every time we examine the perception of our memory, we are editing our understanding. Thus, the way we organize and observe ourselves comes from our desires and senses at that moment, and this comes from our memories. For instance, it is difficult for us to agree on a common origin or a common thread uniting us as a species, even if that may be true. Whether we wish it or not, we define ourselves by the histories we create either in groups or in countries. In doing so, we are actually imagining separate and fragmented believes that we belong to separate locales, cultures, and races. Yet, there is an unavoidable thread that connects us as a species. Such composition is found in our common and preponderant origin, though our perception may resist being part of it. We endow ourselves with differences dictated by the conditioning of our perceptions. InThe Revolt of the Masses, Ortega refers to this condition as la razón de sinrazón (“reason without reason”), which explains our deeply rooted irrationality and fragmentation. Knowledge implies greater content than what is gained through the form of our perceptions. Our minds tend to abbreviate history, even believing that it does not exist. Yet the more expansive the “circumstance” or condition of apprehending truth, the greater the maturity our existence demands from us.
13
Index
13. Maturing Emotional Intelligence:
If a human being is the measure of all things, then also one comes to appreciate that knowledge is always inconclusive. Thus, meditation strengthens our mind, our memory, our learning, our attention, and our self awareness. Meditation on the past, the present, or the future depends on emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is based on capturing the import of influences from all areas of a man’s life, from one’s behavior to one’s relationship with others and one’s environment. Ultimate reality depends on the level of maturity of a person, and it is through meditation that one matures. Hence, how a person chooses to act depends on meditation and his level of emotional intelligence. For the fanatic (obsessed with fear) meditation seems impossible. For the fanatic, doubt is not the issue. The fanatic seeks to reiterate cycles. The fanatic fails to understand that fear of change is irrational because it is inevitable that the world is constantly evolving. The fanatic seeks to change what is beyond his control. From the Orteguian point of view, this person,within a closed valuation system, does not find consolation because his mind fears what it does not understand.
14
Index
14. Our Connection to the Universe:
From Ortega’s perspective of Cervantes’s Don Quixote[1605-15], we learn that the courage granted by Love – not hate – impels us towards understanding …the useless remains of a shipwreck that life, in its perpetual surge, throws at our feet. – To The Reader, p. 31. Loveis a divine architect who, according to Plato came down to the world – ὥστε τὀ πᾶν αὐτῶ ξυνδέδέσθα – so that every thing in the universe might be linked together: Separation means extinction. Hatred, which separates, isolates, and pulls apart, dismembers the world, and destroys individuality – To the Reader, p. 33.
Hence, Ortega explains that the imperative for the individual is to reflect on one’s circunstancia (in medias res), … to arouse the desire of understanding the universal in its particulars. – To the Reader, p. 31: To ignore the fact that each thing has a character of its own, and not that we wish to demand of it, is, in my opinion, the true capital sin, which I call a sin of the heart because it derives its nature from lack of love. There is nothing so illicit as to dwarf the world by means of our manias and blindness, to minimize reality, to suppress mentally fragments of what exists. This happens when one demands that what is deep should appear in the same way as what is superficial. No, there are things that present only that part of themselves which is strictly necessary to enable us to realize that they lie concealed behind it. – p. 62.
15
Index
15. A Heroic Perspective:
Knowledge comes before fanaticism. Fanaticism is, for Ortega, the rejection of the perspectives of others. Ortega points to reasoning as an act of charity, which uncovers differences, and suggests that understanding is akin to the circling of an eagle in flight. To be oneself, for Ortega, is the same as it is for Cervantes. The act of being a hero takes place through a sensitive exploration of the nature of reality. In Ortega’s view, as well as for Cervantes’s, the will of the hero belongs only to the persona of Don Quixote: Because to be a hero means to be one out of many, to be oneself if we refuse to have our actions determined by heredity or environment, it is because we seek to base the origin of our actions on ourselves and only on ourselves. The hero’s will is not that of his ancestors, nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism. – First Meditation, 15, The Hero, p. 149. … I do not think that there is a more profound originality than this practical, active originality of the hero. His life is a perpetual resistance to the habitual and customary. Each movement that he has to make has first had to overcome custom and invent a new kind of gesture. Such a life is a perpetual suffering, a constant tearing oneself away from the part of oneself, which is given over to habit and is a prisoner of matter. – First Meditation, 15, The Hero – p. 149.
16
Index
16. The Fear of fate:
A Socratic life is heroic, but if unexamined, of no value. In the pain of living, one has to embrace the fact that the examination of fear is part of life. Alongside this examination, fate is never artificial. Fate does not deceive, even in our misfortunes. Fate is not illusive, though our perception of time may be. Instead, fate challenges us to change. In change, fate protects us from stagnation. What appears to be random is, in fact, an opportunity for learning. Consequently, fate exists not for attacking, but for stimulating our transformation. Fate does not move against us, but challenges us to change by confronting obstacles. Fate attacks fear, because one’s fear takes away one’s ability to make choices. Narratives of fear turn out to be self-fulfilling prophesies. Fear deceives and defines us. It hampers survival. Fear prevents our evolving, it paralices us: We resist giving up habits because of fear. Thus one languishes and fails to overcome disbelief.
17
Index
17. Boundlessness and Humility:
The shadow of shame represents one’s flaws. The shadow is what one wishes not to be, though its shadow be part of oneself. Only, when the shadow is accepted with humility, do its flaws dissolve in the act of loving oneself with compassion. Ultimately, the fanatic will recognize his incompleteness and become aware of his own insignificance: The incapacity for completeness looms over all of us. Only through risk does one learn the extent of one’s bounds and how much further one may go. We advance through humility and humility appreciates neither truth nor falsehood. Humility is the acknowledgment of one’s inexorable estrangement from an infinite truth. Only the humble voice recognizes the struggle for understanding and change. Both depend on a flight from despair. For Ortega and for Plato, the mark of the highest values is found in our vulnerability. If we surrender absolutely, then we find redemption.
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Index
18. Epilogue:
My perspective treats Plato and Ortega outside of any theistic justification. I leave aside any application of Plato to theological thought. Likewise, I ignore any attempt to ascribe religious respects to Ortega’s theory of values. For me their notions, when applied to theology, are not credible. I understand Plato and Ortega in their search for the limits of human perception and rationality. Efforts to apply their philosophies as religious foundations are outside of my purpose.
The depth of Plato and Ortega’s thought is not to be found in a method for objective morality. Nor is it ethical relativism, nor even is it found in a claim of universality. Ideologies on morality are derived from norms dictated by theologians, seemingly unwilling to relinquish authority. The role of the lovers of truth is not to dictate virtue nor to define the godhead. Their teachings are centered on rationalism. Their humanism is based on a concept of justice that is antithetical to fixed norms. The paradigm of true knowledge – according to Plato and Ortega – is derived from love based on the originality of heroism. This love does not reside outside of the individual. This love is not found in the promise of a transcendental world. This love finds man’s salvation in the present. This love calls for self examination. And above all, this love is a liberation from the numbness of the mind.
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Endnotes:
1 For Ortega circunstancia, is a representation of the sum total of influences in the consciousness of a man, thus expressing the reason for his existence.
2Razón vital stands as Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy which views that reason is, in of itself, an expression of life.
Ortega y Gasset, José, Meditaciones del Quijote: Meditación Preliminar y Meditación Primera, (Madrid: PUBLICACIONES DE LA RESIDENCIA DE ESTUDIANTES, SERIE II.—VOL. I, Universidad Central de Madrid, 1914)
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha[1605–1615] (Cambridge: Harvard Publishing Company, 1893. Translated by John Ormsby. 4 vols. in 8 books. Limited Edition No. 71/320. 1st edition.
Platón. Teeteto. Introducción, traducción y notas de Marcelo Boeri. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2006.
Ortega y Gasset, José, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid: Editorial Revista de Occidente, 1928). Fue publicado inicialmente en 1927 como una serie de artículos en el diario El Sol, antes de ser recopilado en formato de libro en 1928 por Editorial Revista de Occidente en Madrid.
Following a suggestion to makeIn Tenebris shorter, I have adapted it for readers who understand that myriad concrete circumstances cannot be subsumed under a single dimension. Explanations are pointless when confronting human dramas and temperaments. Clarity is open-minded: It is attached to what is vital and to the reader’s own intuition. In these explorations complexity becomes all encompassing and signification multiplies.
Ricardo F Morin, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.; June 30, 2022
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Time Magazine named the “Silence Breakers” of the #MeToo movement its 2017 Person of the Year; the President cursed the Press as “fake news,” and temperatures in New York City felt higher than ever.
Amidst all of this, I became juror number 12 in the murder trial of a fourteen-year-old boy. Now, the search for truth loomed foremost in my mind. Bias and suspicion, how were they to be treated?
The defendant–young, dressed in a crisply starched white shirt and tie–sat barely 30 feet away from us, the jury. His pleading the fifth and his twisted grimace of a grin were disturbing.
We put aside our apprehensions. If doubt were to play a part in the case, it would have to come from the evidence.
As a jury we were surprised at the lack of cohesion in the allegations: what witnesses stated didn’t correspond to what the prosecutor argued. No weapon nor DNA pointed to the identity of the perpetrator. “What justified the accusation of this young man as a murderer?”
On the 18th day, each of us would have to reach an approximation as to the truth.
The deliberation room was barely large enough for the long table and its 12 uncomfortable chairs. The air conditioning was old and inefficient. The temperature was as stifling as it had been in the courtroom.
We jurors were diverse and had little in common. The foreman was an office manager, comfortable in his role as moderator. His communication skills were excellent. Some of us had been reticent and never had voiced an opinion one way or the other. Others were more voluble. A teacher remained calm throughout; she listened to others before expressing her own views. Another juror, number seven, was impatient about the length of the trial; she had a toddler to care for at home. Aside from myself, there were two other retirees, one of whom was a corporate lawyer.
From the first days of the deliberation, we were uncertain whether the accused had taken any part at all. On our fourth day, I said: “the principle eye witness was not credible”; juror number five, the young woman who had been most adamant about the guilt of the accused, began to waver. Though most jurors still thought him innocent, four remained unconvinced. The more jurors accepted their own limitations, the more difficult it became to form an opinion. The phrase “blind justice” turned piercingly poignant.
The majority argued with the four holdouts. Tensions rose with the thermometer. The heat of the midday, the humidity, and the noise from the street made us increasingly fractious. With the windows closed, we turned on the anemic air conditioner and became more fearful than ever of not measuring up.
Our variances put us on edge. Juror number five persisted categorically: “the principal eyewitness was not lying.” The crucial moment, though, for all of us, was when juror number seven voiced in fury: “the only features visible on the security cameras could have been any one else’s in the gang.” Slowly, we moved toward common ground. The decision was unanimous, innocent.
After we had returned to the court room, the judge polled us individually. Indelibly imprinted on our faces was the murdered child’s mother’s face. Her sorrow contrasted sharply with the clawing glances of the defendant’s family. I felt deflated, even inadequate. “Were we right, or wrong?,” I asked myself.
The jury disbanded. We collected our belongings and moved to an elevator at the opposite end of the court house. Below, the family of the acquitted awaited. At our approach, they shouted deafening thanks.
We the jury, the lawyers, and the witnesses were only actors in this absurdity.
Although. . . victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity,. . . without totalitarianism we would never have known the true radical nature of evil.
Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951 – First Edition), pp.46-70.
If liberalism were to succeed as the core of a new world order, it would be based on a belief in the rule of law and a constitutional order: one that limits executive power in favor of the ability of individuals to make decisions for themselves about the course of their lives; which is only guaranteed through a system of democratic rights and laws.
Francis Fukuyama [Liberalism and Its Discontents (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)]: Excerpt from television interview (Channel 4, UK) “Putin’s vision of Russia is not ‘desirable to almost anybody”, April 1, 2022[1].
I
In her book “Difficult Decisions, about Vladimir Putin” (2014), Hillary Clinton tells us that, as Secretary of State, she attended a ceremony at the St. Petersburg Monument erected to the victims of the Nazi invasion of Leningrad, after which she dined with Putin. Putin shared with Clinton that his father had served on the front lines of the war against Germany in Leningrad and that he had had the uncanny experience of having rescued his wife alive from a pile of corpses, just before they were being buried. Putin added that his mother, having survived an almost certain death, gave birth to him after the war (Vladimir had two brothers who had died of natural causes before and during the war). Understandably, she felt a kind of compassion that these events had left on his psyche. In her book Clinton poses to the reader the question as to whether these events could explain Putin’s mythology about what it meant for him to be Russian. For her, correct or not, however, it must be taken that this story gave an account of Putin’s perception of his own history and that of Russia.
II
From the US Secretaries of State, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Rex Tillerson, we have learned that Putin expected and demanded respect and recognition of Russian capabilities. The key would not be to respect his values or actions, but rather to respect the importance of his role as a leader. According to these Secretaries, the key to negotiations must correspond to the present, recognizing that Putin is ambitious in his purposes, and that, although he can adapt to circumstances as they arise, he remains unpredictable. We would have to expect his opposition to Western ideas, in particular on the basis of his own notions of equality. These are salient features of the Russian president, particularly with regard to his relations with the United States. Nevertheless, in the past, Putin has maintained long-standing collaborations with the US, regarding the sanctions against Iran, the nuclear agreement with Iran, and the air corridor over Russia to resupply American troops in Afghanistan.
III
On November 8, 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed at a state dacha the Belovezh Agreement (the Creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States) to dissolve the Soviet Union: a move that Putin later proclaimed as “ the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”[2].
IV
Following the closing down of the East German KGB in 1991, Putin returned to Russia, where he then first rose to the post of first deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in 1994. In 1996, he joined the presidential staff of Boris Yeltsin as a deputy to Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin’s chief administrator. In July 1998, President Boris Yeltsin appointed him director of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB) and, shortly thereafter, he became secretary of the Russian Security Council.
In the beginning, Yeltsin nominated Putin as prime minister in 1999. Rising crime, institutional corruption, and economic difficulties marred Yeltsin’s regime. Suddenly, on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin announced his resignation and named Putin interim president. Vowing to rebuild an already weakened Russia, Putin was victorious in the March 2000 elections, winning 53 percent of the votes. His campaign promised to eliminate corruption and create a strong market economy. Afterwards, Boris Yeltsin came to lament his support of Putin. In March 2004, Putin won a second term as president with more than 70 percent of the vote after oil prices fueled a consumer boom and raised living standards, a trend that continued for another four years. In 2007, Putin advocated the principles of democratic equality in his speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference, when he accused the US of imposing a unipolar world and attacked its EU participants for complicity[2]. Then with a controversial constitutional provision, Putin was forced to step down in 2008. Putin chose Dmitry Medvedev as his successor and Medvedev, in turn, nominated Putin as the country’s prime minister within hours of taking office on May 7, 2008.
V
In 2008, prime minister Putin directed the annexation of two parts of the Republic of Georgia by military force and, in 2009, suppressed the separatist movement in Chechnya. Putin cultivated a nationalist fervor, being re-elected president for a third time in 2012, and nominating Medvedev as primer minister. Violent measures quelled the resulting popular uprising in the capital and the rest of the country. According to information sources of journalists in exile[3], the mortality rate of the opposition rose significantly. Putin’s measures were to repress the opposition through incarceration, as well as poisoning them and extorting them, inside and outside the country. In line with his aspiration to reinforce a Soviet like Federation of Russia, Putin began to affirm that the prestige of the past had been lost and that he intended to restore it. This is reflected in his 2013 New York Times op-ed[4]—“A Plea for Caution from Russia” — where he once again focused his distrust on the US. On Feb. 27, 2014, Russian troops started annexing Ukraine’s Crimea region after Ukrainian protesters had ousted pro Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. The following month, Russia incorporated Crimea after a Russian referendum. Subsequently, both the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions.
On September 30, 2015, Russia launched air strikes in Syria in its biggest Middle East intervention in decades, turning the tide of the conflict in favor of President Bashar al-Assad. In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States after having promised to improve ties with Moscow. American authorities have determined that Russia tried to interfere in the election in favor of him. On March 19, 2018, Putin won his re-election in a landslide with a mandate that would keep him in office until 2024. In 2021, he approved constitutional amendments that would allow him for re-election through 2036.
VI
In 2021, before Russia’s invading Ukraine, the Biden administration was already completing the withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan, a policy incidentally initiated by the former president Donald Trump. It coincided with Putin’s article, “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” [5] as preamble to the war against Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022.
VII
Now in its tenth week, the war in Ukraine appears to be evolving into a protracted conflict. Although Ukraine has accomplished a somewhat successful first phase of the war, Russian belligerence has centered on eastern and southern territories of the country. Without an increased support of NATO, Ukraine is faced with a more difficult situation than it has been in the past.
Having not succeeded in overthrowing Ukrainian government, Putin has begun a second phase to the eastern Dombass region. His new goal seems to be the separation of the Dombass from the rest of Ukraine and, thus, to control access to the Black Sea.
VIII
For Putin, one of his propaganda vehicles is his defense of the Russian language, which would be equivalent to the assumption of England annexing the United States of America as a reason to protect the English language. On Russian television, Putin explains to a 12-year-old girl that the “tragedy” in the Donbass is that Ukraine was committing “genocide” against Russian-speakers[6].
In the context of this narrative, Russian state television broadcasts that “the special military operation is one to establish peace.”
IX
Ukraine’s offers for peace continue to be rejected by Vladimir Putin[7]. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has maintained that a compromise should be negotiated from where it all began: in Crimea in 2014. For Putin, however, the annexation of Crimea, just as the invasion of Ukraine, is historical revisionism. Many observers say that the war is not so much an existential crisis for Russia, as it is a struggle for the survival of the regime itself.
X
Is it possible that Putin’s failure in this war will bring to a halt future attacks by a totalitarian regime against its neighbors? We can ask ourselves if there could be a united front against these attacks. If not, then the question remains.
[5] http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181— published in July 2021 by Putin’s presidential office, in which he explained Western support for Ukraine as a nefarious conspiracy against the unity of the Russian Federation. In it, Putin plays a questionable role as a historian to justify his determination to confront the powers that intervene in the sovereignty of his country.
I recognize the contributions provided over the course of eight years by my brothers and sisters, Alberto José, Andreína Teresa, Bonnie María Teresa, and José Galdino, to whom I am most grateful for their safeguarding these memories. I am also indebted to my cousin Eduardo Morín Brea, son of Calixto Eduardo Morín Infante for the biographical Morín family’s summaries. I also thank my Uncle Calixto Eduardo for his guidance at the beginning of my education in the United States. Likewise, I am grateful to my father José Galdino Morín Infante for the incentives he made possible there. I also express my gratitude and affection to our mother for her warmth and optimism. Also I acknowledge cousins and uncles from both the Morín and Tortolero familes for their genealogical research; I am especially indebted to my aunt Ala Gaidasz Salamaja de Tortolero, widow of our mother’s brother Federico Tortolero Rivero, and to her late sister Lina Angelina Gaidasz Salamaja de Pystrak. And finally, I pay my highest respects for the support of my most loyal friend and editor, professor emeritus, Billy Bussell Thompson, Ph.D.
Ricardo Federico Morín Tortolero , Fort Lauderdale, January 20, 2022
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Dedicated to my brothers and sisters
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Chapter 1
The Inexorable Passage of Time
“How can one travel through time on the hands of ancestors? En quelque sorte, one plays the role of their guardian.”
Ricardo F. Morín
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Genetic diversity is innate to the human condition. The figuration that some animals are more diverse than others is both limited and subjective. A more appropriate way would be, as an Andalusian friend described it: “. . .looking for relatives from all over the world.” Certainly, I seek to frame the stories of my parents through their ancestors, so as to develop a biography, which goes beyond a mere listing of dates and places. I want to define links to customs and thinking. Where this narrative leads I know not.
A few years ago, I took a DNA test through Ancestry and 23andme. The results showed 40% of the markers to be of Spanish and Portuguese origin. The remaining 60% were non-Iberian: from Europe, Africa, and the New World.
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Chapter 2
What Is Consciousness?
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Knowing ourselves implies a need to understand the influences that affect our consciousness: Who we are and where we come from. Although we are limited in the short term—in its understanding because we do not have absolute control of our faculties. It is important, more than ever in human history, to know our origins as far as we can. The notion of self-knowledge is an intrinsic and unavoidable need. How else can we reflect on our human spirit, both on our imperfections and our aspirations, if we do not distinguish between variability and changing nature?
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Chapter 3
Etymologies and Toponymies
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Modern scientific etymological study is based on the methods and findings of historical and comparative linguistics, the basic principles of which were established by linguists during the 19th century.
Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021.
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Understanding the etymology of proper names and their geographical locations derives from comparative linguistics, as a way to sort people into groups–by occupation, place of origin, clan, parentage, adoption, and physical characteristics.
The surname Morín derives from the Old French Moré, sobriquet of the ‘Moor’ or moret. In diminutive forms it means ‘black’ or ‘dark brown’, or a Bereber from Northwest Africa. The term was used by Christian Europeans to designate the Islamic inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages: The term moro was applied indiscriminately to Arabs, Berbers, and Arabized Iberians. The surname Morín was associated with the moors of Spain. In the 8th century Arabs entered the Iberian Peninsula and remained a political force in some fashion until 1492, with the fall of Granada. The surname Morín was found mainly in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and to a lesser extent in Madrid and Salamanca.
The surname Tortolero comes from Lombardy. The term derives from the name given to pigeons of the genus Columbina, “dove” or “tortolita”, which comes from the Latin turtur, probably an onomatopoeia. Since its origins in ancient times, the name Tortolero was associated with divinatory mythology, because of its ability to send messages, among other qualities, and was designated for those who raised turtledoves by trade. A tortolero was also a mystic. In Spain the main locus of the surname is Andalusia; it originated from Écija. The Tortoleros spread throughout the New World, especially Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico.
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Chapter 4
Origins
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Like many Creole families, both surnames, Morín and Tortolero, find documentation from the Inquisition onward. In 2015 the Spanish government offered to restore citizenship to families who had lost it through mandatory expulsion. [1]
The Morín family, merchants from the Canaries, took up residence in Caracas in 1745. During the colonial period, their descendants worked as ranchers, and then after Independence (1821), they served in the Federalist army fighting various caudillos.
In contrast, the Tortoleros, according to María Teresa Tortolero Rivero, go back to 19th-century Toledo. The Morín surname can be traced through documentation in the National Library of Venezuela and from ecclesiastical records in both the state of Guárico and the Capital District of Venezuela. Before their arrival in Venezuela, the occupation of the Tortolero family is unknown, but afterwards, they worked as cane growers and coffee farmers in Altos de Reyes.
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Chapter 5
The Morín Family
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In 1813 the fourth paternal great-grandfather, bachiller José Calixto Morín Fuentes was the parish priest in Lezama de Orituco (founded in 1688), today known as Altagracia de Orituco [2]. His slave María de Los Santos was the fourth great-grandmother of our family. She gave José Calixto two children, whom, according to baptismal records, were emancipated by him. One of her children was our third great-grandfather, Críspulo Morín. From the union between Narcisa Landaeta and him was born Venancio Antonio (1843-1929), known as El Tuerto. Great-grandfather Venancio Morín Landaeta became a Federalist general in the Azul regime.
Venancio Antonio Morín Landaeta married his first cousin Andrea Fuentes Ramírez in 1870. This union bore seven children: Luis Ramón, Críspulo, Jesús Antonio, Venancio, Sofía, Catalina, and José Calixto. Save our grandfather José Calixto Morín Fuentes, all of his brothers were lawyers. José Calixto studied music. served as the director of a band in Altagracia de Orituco, and was a composer of waltzes and other popular genres.
Later, from the union of José Calixto Morín Fuentes (1892-1967) and Domitila Infante Hernández (1892-1985), nine children were born: Calixto Eduardo (pharmacologist and philologist), José Galdino (lawyer and Doctor of Political Science), Jesús María–nicknamed Chucho–(educator and government official), Sofía del Carmen (assistant to the director of the National Library of Venezuela), Venancio Enrique (merchant), María Josefina–nicknamed Pipina–(housewife), Luis Eduardo (lawyer), María de Lourdes–nicknamed Malula–(school secretary), and Isaura Inés (housewife).
The Morín Infante family lived in Altagracia de Orituco until 1944. In that year, José Calixto Morín Fuentes was appointed to the staff of the Caracas Military Band. Two years earlier, the oldest son Calixto Eduardo (1917-2000) and José Galdino (04/18/1921-08/04/1997) were students at the Central University of Venezuela. Calixto Eduardo became responsible for his brother at the request of José Calixto, who worried about how difficult it was to discipline him. José Galdino and Calixto Eduardo stayed with their uncle Luis Ramón Morín Fuentes, the older brother of their father José Calixto. During this time José Galdino seduced the housekeeper, who gave birth to a child of his. Our cousin Luis Morín Loreto, son of Luis Ramón, adopted the boy and named him César Morín Padrón. José Galdino studied law graduating summa cum laude in the Central University of Venezuela, July 26, 1947. His doctoral thesis, entitled “Human Capital,” studied the basic principles of human rights first elucidated by Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850). Thereafter, José Galdino excelled as a trial lawyer in both civil and criminal cases. He never became involved in Venezuelan politics.
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Chapter 6
The Tortolero Family
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The maternal great-grandparents were Elogio Tortolero Cabrera and Paula Ojeda. The second surname of the maternal great-grandmother is still unknown, as is the existence of her brothers and sisters. It is known that the great-grand-father Elogio had four brothers and sisters: José Antonio (who died in Ezequiel Zamora’s guerrillas), Tobías, Rosa Manuela, and María José. It is believed that they were farmers.
The Tortolero Cabreras owned a plantation in the state of Carabobo, called “el fundo de Marta López,” in Altos de Reyes. From the union of Elogio Tortolero Cabrera and Paula Ojeda was born Rafael Eusebio Tortolero Ojeda (1893-1938). Rafael Eusebio married Marcolina Rivero (1898-1937). They inherited the ranch. They had five children: Lucía (housewife), Leopoldo (grocer), Rafael Eusebio (contractor), María Teresa (lawyer), and Federico (pharmaceutical representative). Grandfather Rafael Eusebio, however, led a double life supporting six illegitimate children, who were never involved with his legitimate ones.
Grandmother Marcolina Rivero died at the age of 39 from eclampsia, and a year later our grandfather Rafael Eusebio Tortolero Ojeda died at the age of 49 from pneumonia.
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Chapter 7
María Teresa Tortolero Rivero
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María Teresa (08/11/1927-06/18/2010) at the age of 11 years was orphaned. From 1938 to 1944 she attended the Colegio de Lourdes in Valencia. The priest Francisco Martínez made possible her admission, and she boarded there for six years. She then studied for 2 years at the Liceo Pedro Gual and, then, she began working as a hygienist in Valencia. Subsequently she qualified as a secretary in Los Teques, state of Miranda. Here she met and married a Russian emigrant Aleksander Sarayeff in 1949. A few days after their marriage, he disappeared.
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Chapter 8
María Teresa and José Galdino
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In 1950, María Teresa Tortolero Rivero moved to Tacarigua where she met José Galdino Morín Infante, the head of employees at the Tacarigua Sugar Mill. On his advice, María Teresa filed for divorce. Sarayeff reappears with threats against her, and José Galdino, as her lawyer, has an injunction preventing his contacting her. Then, in 1951, owing to a lack of medical resources and neonatal incubators, José Galdino and María Teresa lose their first born child, two months prematurely (Carlos Alberto). The boy lived only a few days. A year later (February 17, 1952), María Teresa, at the age of 24, marries José Galdino, 31.
José Galdino bought a house on a 30-acre piece of land in the outskirts of Guacara. The land, framed between the road to Guacara and the highway to Caracas, had a house with an enclosed swimming pool. There three children were born: Alberto José (lawyer) in 1953, Ricardo Federico (author and visual artist) in 1954, and Andreína Teresa (lawyer) in 1955. The parents’ families often visited them. Then the Morín Tortoleros moved to the town of Naguanagua. In Naguanagua the fourth child was born: María Teresa, called Bonnie by the family (playwright, director, and teacher) in 1958. In 1959, the Morín Tortolero family moved, for the last time, to the urbanizaciónCarabobo in Valencia. In Valencia the fifth child was born: José Galdino (import/export merchant) in 1960.
After fifteen years of marriage, María Teresa, at the urgency of the reverend Dr. Simón Salvatierra [3], became a candidate for the State Assembly of Carabobo and subsequently was elected thereto. Her husband José Galdino forced her to resign the post because of the history of the party leader Marcos Pérez Jiménez’ persecution of the Morin family. Then she opened a boutique and, once again, her husband disapproves of her status as a shopkeeper.
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Chapter 9
The Allure of Superstition
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María Teresa held herself to be clairvoyant. People referred by close friends often came to her for spiritual advice. Inspired by Theosophism and the Rosicrucian order, she delved into metaphysical studies. Seeking council for her own enlightenment she frequented séances. José Galdino questioned her sanity. He, on the other hand, practiced his own rituals of magic. His clients and friends gave him advice on how to keep enemies at bay, the roots of his own fate, and the principles of casting spells.
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Chapter 10
Separation and Divorce
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Marriages remain intact out of mutual understanding. Such a union is possible as long as there are shared stories. But without trust relationships fall apart.
José Galdino and María Teresa were unable to deal with their differences. After 16 years of marriage, José Galdino remained an inveterate womanizer, and María Teresa, feeling unreciprocated, grew tired of him and his affairs. In a sense, they knew not their own emotions and deficiencies.
For José Galdino, divorce was out of the question: a threat to his status and finances. By Venezuelan law, divorce meant divided property, something which he was unwilling to do. When notified in 1975 of his wife’s petition for divorce, his fury became uncontrollable.
Knowing how he maneuvered in divorce cases, María Teresa blocked any possible transfer of marital property. As a result he attempted to throw his wife’s lawyer (Padrino Príncipe) down the stairs of the courthouse.
The divorce decree was issued in 1979, just a year before José Galdino remarried (Piedad Urán Cardona: a dentistry student, who was 25 years his junior). The division of assets between José Galdino and María Teresa did not conclude until 1985. Despite the court’s ruling in her favor, María Teresa fired her lawyer and took on representation by her son Alberto José! In so doing, she had to renounce large parts of her own rights. She now felt exhausted and lacking any sense of justice. From there on she concentrated only on her own future.
Between 1975-85, María Teresa dedicated herself to becoming a lawyer (perhaps to revenge her feelings of having been treated unfairly by the legal system). In preparation for law school, she fell in love with her tutor of mathematics, José Espirilión Valecillos Carrillo (Piri). He was a high school teacher in Valencia and fifteen years her junior. As she prepared for admission at the law school of the University of Carabobo, he too decided to apply as well. Before finishing their legal studies, they married and took their degree in 1992: She was 64 and he was 49.
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Chapter 11
Irony of Ironies
*
Inexplicably, María Teresa and Piri worked in the same office as that of her ex-husband José Galdino and her son. María Teresa believed her previous sacrifices had given her the privilege of becoming part of that firm. Her practice focused on protecting the legal rights of minors. Her second marriage, however, was as disappointing to her as the first and was dissolved after only two years. Then in 1996, she announced that her divorce from Jose Galdino had been a mistake. She was now mentally and emotionally defeated and began to manifest a kind of cognitive disassociation (was this simply depression or the beginnings of Alzheimer’s?).
At the same time José Galdino’s marriage to Piedad Urán was in turmoil. Since 1993, she had been asking for the abrogation of their prenuptial agreement–thus forcing her to relinquish any property rights accumulated during the marriage. José Galdino denied the request. Within three years, however, fortune handed Piedad freedom.
Between 1994 and 1995, José Galdino developed symptoms of Pick’s Neurological Syndrome, leaving him unable to walk, talk, and reason. Although, I sought treatment for him, his wife’s interference was a major obstacle. On November 1996, following the suggestion of my father, I returned to the United States to treat my own health problems. A few months later, José Galdino was operated on a cerebral hemorrhage. José Galdino died from pneumonia August 4, 1997.
By 1998, María Teresa could no longer continue practicing law. To fill her time her daughter Bonnie urged her to return to writing poetry. María Teresa alleged José Galdino had burned what she had written before. Between 2004-05 she reconstructed some 15 poems, which were later distributed to members of the family under the title Magia Azul.
Chapter 12
The Last Years of María Teresa
*
In 1999 at the age of 72, María Terersa, fulfilling a life long dream, and I traveled to Europe. We visited Madrid, Paris, Venice, and Rome. On the trip, María Teresa remembered when five years before she had stumbled on her way to court: For her it was my consolation of her that amounted to the sharing of memories. At the airport days later, she watched our reflection in a mirror in the airline’s private club and said: “I hope to keep this moment forever in my memory.”
In 2004, I invited her to celebrate her seventy-seventh birthday in New York City. On this last trip, she met David, my husband of nine years, and his mother, Eva, who was four years her senior. María Teresa admired Eva’s vitality. The following year, María Teresa was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
In 2009, she languished in the advanced stages of the disease, and we knew that her treatment had to be continued in a clinic. It was no longer possible for her daughter Andreina to assume sole responsibility for her care. Likewise her son José Galdino spared no effort in the care of his mother. His dedication and conduct were exemplary.
At the age of 84 María Teresa died, June 18, 2010.
*
Epilogue
*
A Journey Through Time
*
In writing this story, I acknowledge my own limitations in trying to understand lives I thought I knew intimately. My family and I do not know who they were, any more than we can really know ourselves. This highlights an evanescence that seeks to define our relationships, which barely touch the edges of our existence. There’s so much we can’t say. Our own regrets, feelings of shame, or recklessness can only be censors to our understanding.
The recognition that life is imperfect is the definition of dignity. It should be noted that a sentimental essay is not the goal dishonoring our existence; it is rather an incongruity covering up our imperfections. Our lives are celebrated for their differences. Whether we nurture each other or inflict pain on each other, it’s a matter of tolerance. What would be most remarkable would be forgiveness.
[2] Ref: http://lavozdeoritucohistorialocal.blogspot.com/2015/08/casa-amarilla-de-lezama.html?m=1 This link mentions that in 1813 the “Bachiller” José Calixto Morín reported to the Archbishop of Venezuela on the administrative state and advancement of Lezama. By decree, the lands belonged to the native Guarino Indians of the region, who had cultivated them until they were displaced at the end of the 19th century.
[3] Ref: https://issuu.com/academiahistoriacarabobo/docs/la_hora_de_las_tinienblas_homenaje_ This link belongs to the publication of the Digital Library: The Hour of Darkness commemorating in 2010 the birth of the parish priest Simón Salvatierra. The reverend Dr. Simón Salvatierra (1910-69) was a native of Bejuma: a priest of the Archdiocese of the city of Valencia, who broke with the norms of the church by being a senator affiliated to a controversial political party: El Indio, also known as Cruzada Cívica Nacionalista (the Nationalist Civic Crusade), founded by followers of the former president, military dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. In the mid-sixties María Teresa kept his advice and close friendship. The Reverend Salvatierra was instrumental in María Teresa’s being elected to the Carabobo State Assembly as a representative of said party. María Teresa felt especially honored to be the first woman assembly member of her state.
*
María Teresa Tortolero Rivero through her life. From left to right: 1. In 1945 with the Pedro Gual Liceo uniform. 2. In 1954, during her third pregnancy, accompanied by her husband José Galdino Morín Infante, and followed by her brother-in-law Chucho Morín Infante. 3. In 1992 becoming a lawyer, wearing cap and gown with diploma and medal. 4. In 2004 at the age of 77 in front of her son-in-law David Lowenberger and holding to his mother’s arm, my mother-in-law, Eva Lowenberger.
*
Poetry of María Teresa
Blue Magic (Magia Azul)
(Dedicated to my Children)
i
WHEN IT BLOOMS IN SPRING
(June 15 1974)
*
When it blooms in spring
beautiful flowers from my garden
I offer you my whole life
because suddenly …
it is finally going away.
I take care of your soil, I water your plants,
and sweet fruits I would like to give to you
from my fields of gold and silver
when it blooms in spring.
Beautiful flowers from my garden
crossed the valleys, deep seas
with their cherub wings.
I leave your soil and beloved hearths.
For the sap no longer gives nourishment
nor does it till the fields of their songs.
trailing their aroma until they fade away.
In yon green valleys
in which I dreamt
and that is the goal of my stroll
towards the plants I loved so much.
ii
WINGS BLOWN AWAY
(June 15 1974)
(Bonnie Morín Tortolero’s poem, added to our mother’s collection)
*
We were born free
like red poppies with falling wings
with an innate unease
shedding petals up and down gullies and hills.
and in the blinking of an eye
they flew away …
In what bitter nest
will they shed their yearnings
if a veil covered their sight
over the glint of their hearts
facing the world
as if it were a promised land?
*
(Poem by Maria Teresa in response to her daughter’s)
*
... Follow its swift flight as time passes by for wide and long is its course and if at its first chance it falls, badly wounded sparrow raise your eyes beyond the clouds, fear your lot no more lest cowardly the flight might be for love is divine.
iii
COME TO ME
(June 30, 2004)
*
My beloved, come to me
if you loved me
for I’m waiting for you.
Do not make me beg
for I love you
and I suffer not knowing of you.
Starving of light
of your gaze
so that I may live.
For you crossed
my path
to be loved
for eternity.
Life seems absurd
in some instances!
If a match cannot exist
with room for hope.
Letting things go
to nothing more than the draw of luck.
Leave everything in its place
for oblivion is imposed
and so be it.
iv
TO LIVE FOR THEM IS MY VIRTUE
(April 9, 2004)
*
From the narrowness of form
the principle of virtue arises,
the virtue of my loves,
the virtue of loving.
Feeling how much I love them
I exist for them.
It’s all I have.
It’s all I am.
Without them I would be nothing,
to live for them is my virtue.
I love them, I love them …
Thanks to my maker,
Love is life.
v
I REFUSE ACCEPTANCE
(April 14, 2004)
*
I don’t want to force barriers.
I don’t want to have chimeras in my dreams.
Nor to encourage the illusions of a false hope.
As fragile as a straw in the wind.
thus, I wish to erase
all ungrateful memory of its existence
So much that I wish
with the very force of love,
which I carry indelibly within,
in opposition to chance,
to that one toying with us
as if we were ignorant.
vi
DO NOT FORSAKE ME
(May 11, 2004)
*
Instill in me your creative force
to praise you with rapture,
all that my soul longs for.
Eager for your compassion
I implore your presence.
Fill my soul with your divine love
and do not forsake me.
vii
I DREAMT
(May 11, 2004)
*
I dreamt that I was a diva
of the Bel canto
that with devotion
I sang to my father
while daydreaming,
my companion since infancy
with a sweet melody
within myself,
which I still sing not knowing why.
viii
WHEN A DREAM BECOMES REALITY
(January 26, 2004)
*
What may have been audacious for me
for others may have been presumptive.
To judge deed rather than intentions,
Man has no dominion.
He may dream
as a way to spend time
by limiting himself to dream.
No one may be hurt.
He may be just with his dreams alone.
But while dreaming as a way of life
his dreams may also be fulfilled.
ix
MOST BEAUTIFUL OF ALL
(September 11 2004)
*
She was beautiful, the most beautiful among the beautiful
with an upturned and fine nose
with thin and expressive lips
with huge heavenly eyes
with a smiling gaze.
And with a sweet voice inviting to sing alone.
I sang with her
In the shadow of a picture window
And as I sang
Mocking birds joined in
and they began to sing
The song they heard.
Morning birds
that came to her window
singing at dawn
awakening the day
Mama smiled
and between songs she told me:
“You are one another sparrow
my good girl, my smart girl
an insight I shall provide
so that between flight and flight
your dreams may be realized,
so that between dream and dream
you may also learn to fly.”
x
ABSENCE
(June 13, 2005)
*
How much does absence contain
distresses and troubles of the heart
for whom awaits the absent one
never to return, leaving doubts
for whom awaits in suspension,
for not hearing from her beloved one,
whatever happened to him?
One cannot be filled in quiescence,
empty without his love,
and to know best how to await
until his return
with the loving sameness of before.
xi
AN ANGEL FROM ABOVE
(June 30, 2004)
*
An Angel descended from above
teeming with light
and his eyes like the splendor of two stars
reflected upon my soul,
conquering me.
Yet to be left unrequited
not knowing how to live without.
Where has my beloved angel gone?
Where did he go?
Who may reflect upon him
as much as I did?
Waiting for you.
One has to learn.
For you will return to me
to be made happy
as I always did.
xii
AFTER LOVING HIM FIRST
(March 1978)
*
Why did I meet him for love?
Why did I love him
having to live with his absence?
What a cruel chance!
to have poured my love
not knowing if corresponded
to end having to endure his distance
beyond my comprehension.
Whatever happened to that love?
to his falling in love?
The one I saw shinning in his eyes?
xiii
IF ONLY I COULD SEE
(March 1978)
*
I transit like a wanderer among shadows
and though stone blind I wish to see,
looking and seeking among things
where daylight does not enter;
looking between all things
until I find a kindred spirit.
I ask My Lord in his infinite mercy
to take compassion of my vexing pains
if I suffer for deluding myself God like
I also suffer from feeling desolate:
The pain that steals my soul
and all the grace of its glory.
xiv
GREATNESS YOU BESTOWED UPON MY SPIRIT
(July 1979)
*
Greatness you bestowed upon my spirit
for the whole world rests upon my bosom
though in sadness I stray
in vain attempts to redeem my heart.
As pariah in a desert
in my migrant existence
I feel the prick of painful thorns.
and the corrosive doubt of uncertainty.
My home’s encumbered by the punching of loneliness
only absence occupies it.
Why have you forsaken me?
Why so much cruelty?
If born to love
when for love’s sake
I wish to be faithful.
xv
BLUE MAGIC
(July 9, 2004)
*
You shall see how
the golden eagle in swift flight
will reach to infinity.
You shall see all we love
turns Blue by magic.
It will come to you.
And you shall see how the magic of love
transforms your heart,
and empowers the joys of life,
our dream so long awaited,
to love and being loved!
In the summer of 1975 I took a painting-studio workshop under Herta’s instruction at the University at Buffalo: from that time evolved the bonds of our friendship. Herta’s wisdom came from her own vibrancy; her curiosity seemed boundless. She would explore various new subjects, from computer art to Japanese calligraphy. All this enhanced her as an artist. As a teacher dealing with students, she had little patience, and many of them felt intimidated by her demands. Most memorably, she taught me that an artist had to evoke the meaning lurking behind every image. Art was not a progressive evolution; nothing was new: everything had already been done; the imperative was to make something of significance.
Herta identified with the stories I shared about my family, and especially about my mother. She also told me stories about her own parents, particularly about how much she admired her father. Through the years, Herta’s loyalty was constant. She was as nurturing as a mother. Being 26 years older than I, she wondered why I wanted to spend so much time with her. I responded people of my age bored me.
The last semester of my junior year, Herta invited me to lunch with her husband Ernest, a cardiologist at the Veteran Administration Hospital next to the university. That morning, some students had set a fire outside my door. I called the university police but I accused no one. Later I told Herta what had happened. She and her husband assured me every thing would be fine. That afternoon we listened to the music of Handel and Brahms, talked about the poetry of mathematics, and discussed the polemics of anthropology of art. That night I did not return to my dormitory room, but stayed with a Polish graduate student of architecture: Jurek Pystrak invited me to stay with him until things were sorted out. Little did I know how significant Herta and Jurek were to become.
While studying for finals, someone I didn’t know introduced himself to me. It seemed he had been my bodyguard since the time of the fire in the dorm. I never found out why he was surveilling me. Later Herta commented: “… the university must have taken stock of how lax its security system was.”
After I went off to Yale for graduate studies and Jurek had moved to Berlin, Herta and I stayed in touch. Sometimes we met in Manhattan and would go to museums and galleries. After having finished my studies at Yale, I worked as a stage designer in Manhattan. In 1988 I visited Herta in Buffalo. Her husband Ernest had died two years prior. Herta and I went to the opening performance of Abingdon Square by María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) at the Studio Arena Theater. That night Herta and I had the opportunity to speak with her (I had executed stage-designs for three of her plays, which had premiered in New York City). Again in 1989, I visited Herta in Buffalo; there we attended a retrospective by the painter Seymour Drumlevitch, who had been both of ours academic advisor, artistic mentor, and friend.
In 1992, Herta came to my first one-man show of paintings in Manhattan. Though I did not see her then, we kept in touch by phone. Jurek’s partner Karl in Berlin told Herta that Jurek had died of AIDS in 1984. This came to both of us as a shock; it explained why we had not heard from Jurek for eight years. Herta was instrumental in connecting us to Jurek’s past. Karl then visited my painting studio in Tribeca. Afterwards, he invited Herta to a river cruise for a night on the Rhine to commemorate his impending death (he had dismissed my optimism about antiretroviral treatments as a missionary sentimentality). I had told Herta his outlook was totally fatalistic.
When I first met Herta, I intuited that she was struggling with depression. I learned later much of her search for affection had been uncorresponded. Her husband was also battling depression, having attempted suicide had it not been for his wife. Herta then looked after him through a long period of illness. After his death her circle of friends shrank. She thought herself unwelcome by other couples. In those years Herta was alone and riddled with guilt. Bewildered, she would knock at my door late at night, long past midnight, asking for support. Now in the 1990’s our roles were reversed: she was coming to my aid. Herta fed my optimism and helped me recover from the suicide of my partner of three years.
Then, in the spring of 2005, Herta met David, my partner of five years. As I walked to the avenue to help her catch a taxi, she told me that she only wished she had met some one like David for herself. Her statement did not surprise me, though we were touching each other’s past just on the edges. I understood that David reminded her of her desire to have met, during her lifetime, someone as sensitive as he.
In May 2008 David and I attended Herta’s 80th birthday party in Philadelphia. We met the entire family, including her grandchildren. Prior to that, Herta had often confided to me her insecurities about being a grandmother. She doubted how her grandchildren and son-in-law perceived her; whether she was accepted by them. She was self-conscious of her German accent, though she would glorify it as an appealing distinction. Although, these were significant years for Herta, the burden of a new life weighted heavily on her mind.
In 2011 my mother died from Alzheimer’s at age 84. During the preceding years I had mentioned to Herta that I used to call my mother in Venezuela to read to her “Don Quixote.” From time to time my mother would react with guttural sounds, which I took for affirmations of laughter. During these conversations, I began to become aware of Herta’s own difficulties in her perception of reality. She became easily agitated. She often felt misunderstood. She repeated past events, as if they were taking place now. I listened quietly, hoping she could regain her calm. I tried to interest her in other matters. Was this why she told me that it was important for us to be in contact? Thereafter I tried to call her until it was no longer feasible. After what seemed to be a long period of silence, her daughter Vivien called to let me know that Herta needed 24-hour a day care. David and I drove from Manhattan to visit her in Pennsylvania. In 2016 she was still able to talk. I thought she remembered me until our parting, when she said how nice it had been to meet me.
During our visit, Herta appeared alert. After we had shown her pictures of our place in Fort Lauderdale, she had made several whimsical remarks. Brashly, she criticized cushions that looked like doughnuts, and were completely out of place. Her wit was as sharp as ever. She even recounted her recommendations for graduate school, in which—to my horror—she had called me of the caliber of Leonardo da Vinci. The point is she relished being controversial.
The summer before her death, Herta was much more limited in movement and speech; she seemed listless, though she smiled often in what appeared to be simple resignation. In our banter with each other, she scowled and rolled her eyes mischievously glancing at everyone. We grinned at each other and she gasped with glee. Following this, Herta gestured, her hands around her mouth, as if asking why did I need a mustache. Then I showed her one of my geometric paintings. She looked at it, raised her brows, opening her eyes wide, and said “GOOD!" I was moved by her approval. She looked to be in command. As she continued savoring vanilla ice cream, she played aimlessly with her spoon, but she refused to let anyone help. When we said good-bye, we mentioned we would return in the spring, and she vouchsafed with the same facial expression, “GOOD!"
Memories about the loss of a loved one are painful, precisely because we have loved them. Accepting their past with humility is the one and only choice for their loss. It is an absolute; we embrace our existence through their memories. Grief is the time to endure suffering with forbearance.
1998
Written by Ricardo Morin and edited by Billy Bussell Thompson
Herta Lager Kane (1928-2021) was born in Vienna. With her family, she came to New York City in 1941–via Switzerland–fleeing Nazi persecution.
Herta began her education at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, School of Art and Architecture, before obtaining a B.F.A. in Graphic Design and an M.F.A. in Painting from the University at Buffalo.
Photo provided by Herta’s daughter Vivien Kane
Herta began her career as an adjunct professor of Painting in the University at Buffalo, and then spent most of her life as an associate professor of graphic design in the State University College at Buffalo. Herta’s paintings on the plasticity of geometric abstractions as well as her refined constructivist drawings have been exhibited at Buffalo’s Albright Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and various alternative local cooperatives dedicated to video research and development for theater and television.
In her work Herta searched for a new direction in the depiction of pictorial space, resulting from the great legacy of our mentor Seymour Drumlevitch. In her own words, Herta aspired to arrive at the power “… of a mystical ambiguity and elusiveness.”
________________________________________
***
An Elegy
*
Herta always had a generous warmth for and a profound insight into humanity. Even when we were most fragile, in our moments of trouble, we did not have to say much to assure each other that everything would be fine; even in silence, we supported one another with a sense of wonderment, at times even with great humor.
From the time when I first met Herta in 1975, as a painting instructor in the University at Buffalo, she shared her wealth of knowledge and always provided encouragement. She looked after my well-being until she was no longer able. Our friendship attested to the fact that no one has control over his destiny, though our love persisted beyond such boundaries.
Herta’s confidence—in the labors of becoming a visual artist and surviving the myriad uncertainties of a professional career—enabled my finding answers to managing whatever fate provided.
Her humanity, dignity, and intelligence were a fountain of inspiration for all of us, who had the good fortune of knowing her. More than a mentor Herta became a loving and loyal friend. No one else could fill her place in my heart.
Herta and I had strong bonds. I owe her my standing, not only emotional maturity but also my intellectual development. Without her, I would be different; to her I owe the inspiration of authenticity and thoughtfulness.
R.F.M.
*
___________________________________________
*
In Memoriam Herta Lager Kane
***
Destiny
*
Fate and chance drew out of our tears a smile
and brought solace to our failures;
then we looked up after we'd sunk
with the confidence
of climbing back.
In loneliness
we found for ourselves company,
and in helping others, we were helped.
In our pursuit of the impossible good,
we came to know our failures.
In the brevity of each moment,
nothing seemed to fit for being possessed;
when we marveled at the great arc of time,
this never died,
even in the absence of hope.
The ups and downs from the goddesses, the three Moirai and Tyche,
in their dispensation of favors and troubles,
couldn’t keep us from moving on,
even if we met each other and were
hopelessly aware of our imperfections.
***
Ricardo F Morin, December 29, 2021, coauthored by Billy Bussell Thompson
Herta Kane, American artist born in Austria (1928-2021), work on paper entitled “Untitled”, Acrylic and collage on paper, 10 1/2″ x 10 1/2″. Gift of the Arts Development Services, Inc., 1978 to the Burchfield Penny Arts Center Collection, 1978. https://burchfieldpenney.org/art-and-artists/people/profile:herta-kane/
Words are symbols not necessarily truthful. We endow them with meaning in order to appease our bewilderment before aspects of reality we cannot fully comprehend. Perhaps writing is found in an effort for our conscience to overcome its fragility.
Anonymous
Wisława Szymborska was born July 2, 1923 in Bnin [now part of Kórnik], Poland; died February 1, 2012 in Krakow. She was a poet, whose intelligent and empathetic explorations of philosophical, moral, and ethical questions earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/szymborska-wislawa
We have a soul from time to time.
Nobody has her all the time,
nor possesses her forever.
Day after day,
year after year,
may go by without her.
Sometimes she nests in us for a while,
in the fears and raptures of childhood,
and sometimes at our surprise of being old.
Rarely does she lend us a hand
with routine tasks,
moving furniture,
or baggage,
or walking miles in shoes that don't fit.
She runs away
when meat is to be ground,
and hopes are to be met.
Out of every thousand talks
she'll take part in one,
if at that.
She likes silence.
When one’s entrails go from dull to intense pain
she gives up.
She is choosy:
she doesn't like us in crowds.
Our desires to get ahead and
hustling for advantage make her sick.
For her, joy and sorrow
are not opposites.
She is within us
in the union of both.
We count on her
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
The things she likes are
mirrored clocks with pendulums
working all the while,
even when no one looks at them.
She doesn't say whence she comes
nor when she'll leave again,
even tough she is waiting for these questions.
For some reason
we need her,
and she needs us just as well.
Footnote:
1: Poem written by Wislawa Szymborska: published July 1, 2000, original translation from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh in 2006, transposed into Spanish and English by Ricardo Morin and Billy Bussell Thompson, December 2021.
Book of Changes is a new departure from my life as a visual artist into a recent collaboration with Billy Bussell Thompson, who is a Ph.D. in Linguistics, Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University. Our relation is unlike that of an independent author and an editor. As friends with a shared history of experiences and distinctly different influences, our relation defines us beyond simply one providing feedback and constructive advice to the other.
I see myself without any pretense of wanting to become a professional writer, or of emulating a particular literary style, just as I have never considered myself a professional artist of any particular tendency. Yet I am a life long inquirer of these two distinctly different disciplines. As I have mentioned it to Billy, “I come to be who I am in writing because of him”: in learning how to order my perceptions into concrete events, which is a difficult task for a visual artist without a full ownership of the English language. Billy’s specialty and his particular knowledge of Romance languages enable him to bridge the differences between their semantic fields. Without presumption, I believe our relation defines us both in unique ways, not possible if we were fully independent of one another. I am as much a work in progress for him, as I am for myself.
As with any given artistic expression, the process itself of Book of Changes arose from exorcizing a variety of memories in the act of writing. The writing process informed the direction and nature of the story as an object of artistic pursuit.
Real memories as well as random, and chance events were combined, including the daily changes of every emerging moment. The effort that Billy and I made was to find unity in all these events, despite their multiple possibilities. All of it was brought to bear in a complex collage, stripped away of superficiality, and into its own realism.
Inauthenticity was as easily dismissed, just as excessive information had to be eliminated, and in the process we discovered how the story had to be directed. Yet, I am aware of the absence of what was cancelled, which left an indelible mark on the nature of the story.
For me, it was the same as creating an abstract painting, except that in working together, Billy and I channeled each other to arrive at the piece itself. The process felt different from the ways in which a painting takes place in the intimacy of one’s studio, constructing and deconstructing, building and rebuilding, what may have turned into a fluid geometric abstraction. In our story, every word, as a brushstroke or a line in a painting, became essential to the harmony of the narrative: as the illusive depth of spatial relations in visual art, language and feeling, undifferentiated and congruent, came about like the regenerative portrayal of an abstract painting.
Book of Changes strives to formulate my memories and the changes in perception, which occur from time to time. The nuances of this particular book of histories attempt to illustrate the character of personal truth, of what is imponderable and evanescent in one’s sense of humanity. Though the story is based on real life experiences, the personal and particular, however, do not constitute the principal objective, rather it is the constantly evolving character of one’s truth.
Ignis Fatuus: the whole world could collapse; to live we need false hopes.
Chapter 2
Your paternal grandfather hardly ever spoke; lying next to him, you suffered his snores. One Sunday morning you sat quietly on the bench with him; he was playing the organ at the Church of Bella Vista in Caracas. One Sunday afternoon, he took you to feed pigeons at the “plaza mayor” in Puerto La Guaira. One early Monday, he sat at a carved desk and sipped hot coffee from a demitasse’s saucer. For a time, he twiddled his thumbs and whistled a tune. Suddenly he chased you from the house in belief that you had broken something of his. Fearfully you ran across the street and were almost hit by a car. You joined older eight-year-olds playing marbles.
Chapter 3
There is so much that we ignore that humility becomes a necessity, not a choice. Nothing can be conclusive at any time.
Chapter 4
Your maternal grandmother never engaged in small talk. To dissuade you from sucking your thumb, before bedtime, she applied hot sauce to your left hand. You simply switched to your right thumb.
Chapter 5
Man does not control who he is, nor how he thinks, or even how he perceives himself. You do not control who you are, how you think, or how you perceive yourself. Asking why one exists or observing how one changes from time to time, only appears to suggest lack of control.
Chapter 6
In his cell, Father Manuel, the math teacher, talked to himself. His murmurs were barely audible. Often he chastised us on the differences between a big man and the little man. The principal Father Lisandro replied there’s no explanation for evil in the world.
Chapter 7
One cannot debunk fears about the existence of God and the devil. It is a wild goose chase. Culture, similar to tradition and belief, comes from the imagination.
Chapter 8
As a friend, Rogelio was considerate and attentive. Your mother heeded not to grow too close to him: he was poor, black. Angrily you countered: poverty was not shameful and, besides, your father’s skin was only slightly lighter.
Chapter 9
Do you find meaning in imaginative worlds and daydreams?
Chapter 10
During lunch, Uncle Calixto sat across at the end of the table. Casually he announced the suicide of a couple he’d introduced you to, only a month before. Your consternation was obvious; Uncle Calixto insisted you were to inquire no further. Years later, with the same tone of anger he accused you of evil thoughts: you have the devil in you, for being gay.
Chapter 11
You asked how moral can a person be: someone who believes in the devil, hell, and eternal damnation! For you this morality was defective. For you, religion is no different from astrology.
Chapter 12
Fifteen years ago Francis died of cancer. His brother grieved as if a limb had been amputated. He set his home ablaze before drinking antifreeze. The family was not surprised. Neighbors blamed you for not having expunged his pain. The building’s manager called the next day alarmed that you had exposed 45 stories to conflagration.
Chapter 13
Suicide is no different from murder. Killing yourself is no less moral than killing another. Both are cowardly. Consciousness pertains just to the living. Killing oneself is to defile one’s nature. Accounting for madness cannot absolve agony. Memory of love is the only consolation.
Chapter 14
Just before first Communion, your father brought up death. You replied it was inevitable. Later you heard him telling your mother that your answer was quite unexpected. At Christmas time, you announced to your father you knew all about Santa. He answered “what do you plan to do about it?” You just shrugged your shoulders and asked for his blessings before going off to bed.
Chapter 15
Are you suffering for not being an innocent?
Chapter 16
The grocer said he knew your family, so you asked him for a ride home on the back of his pick-up. Arriving there you found your father in a state of panic. You had disappeared to him, and you thought he had forgotten you. Thereafter, you did not go to your art classes for ten years. Then, as a teenager, you wandered around your neighborhood. One day, in the early evening you found an older boy studying. He was memorizing something when you interrupted him. He asked why you were offering him candy, and you said: “why not? Aren’t we neighbors?” When you got home late, your parents were leaving to report you missing.
Chapter 17
Can anyone measure consciousness?
Chapter 18
Each time you came through the gate to your friend’s house, his German Shepard would lurch forward until he recognized your voice and scent. Your friend had stayed out of school that day, not feeling well. Without preamble, he volunteered he was being sent off to military school. Then he said he was terribly upset and had to get rid off his stress. You sat quietly at the foot of his bed. The two of you exchanged monosyllables, while he masturbated beneath the blanket. He told you he had to beat and to come. These words were meaningless to you. With a friendly glance you left, never to see him again.
Chapter 19
You did not ward off fears, so much as you needed to reckon with their fleeting existence, just like when waking up from a dream.
Chapter 20
Vacationing with a classmate, your attentions were on his older brother Francisco. Each time your bodies touched you trembled. You feared becoming overwhelmed. Long after his death, his appeal rushes after you.
Chapter 21
From early childhood innocence had already been lost to ache. You had long been fair game.
Chapter 22
At 18 years you met Ennio Lombana, after having crossed to the neighbors’ house. You became his sexual victim. Perhaps this explains going to university four thousand miles away.
Chapter 23
You tried never to think of fear, yet it became an obsession.
Charter 24
Your father and your art tutor both encouraged education in North America, yet fearing its implications. Their memories stand in silence.
Chapter 25
Ignorance is the essential condition of our existence, despite one’s arrogance to aspire knowledge or its authority. For you that is the real obstruction preventing a clear perception of anxiety, the pain of loneliness, fear, and lack of love. You cannot achieve rationality in your life with the rigidity of belief or the absurdity of dogma. In vain you may try to reject doubt, fearing uncertainty and thus denying the very depth of your ignorance.
Chapter 26
La Nena Pérez was a golden rebel for José Luis. Her beauty bewitched all who saw her. For his wife Antonieta, however, she was an interloper. Decades later, a letter of his arrived from Andalucía. In it Antonieta was praised as toda una señora. Self deprecatingly, he lauded your father. You had mentioned that La Nena did not recognize you at a chance encounter in Caracas. He was beside himself learning your voice was no longer familiar to her. Seemingly, she had forgotten canoeing across the Tucacas Bay.
Chapter 27
How can there be love, if one is empty? Ennui uncovers it. Self importance aspires to enlightenment just as yearning does to sanctity and humility. It is luck to find pure love.
Chapter 28
Before entering the university you enrolled in a course in English as a second language. The professor made learning exciting. His patience disarmed you. At mealtime, you spoke on and on, forgetting to eat, and he would smile tenderly.
Chapter 29
Desperation cannot assuage sufferance.
Chapter 30
Three Marys flew from South America to Niagara Falls for a visit. They rode the Ferris Wheel at the amusement park on the shores of Lake Ontario. Their visit was a complete mystery, except they believed they were in contact with extraterrestrials. One of them realized she wasn’t the object of Ennio Lombana’s affections. Your mother’s resulting breakdown was immediate.
Chapter 31
In 1977, hungry and destitute, you came close to dying. You distracted yourself in discos. You met Donald Bossak and Paul Barret: the former insecure and the latter suicidal. You moved into the university dorms to face a group of rioters, who had been egged on by a room-mate. Away with the foreigner, they shouted, setting fire to your door. At graduation you found out the university had assigned you a bodyguard. By then you had come to know a student. This Polish dissident, Jurek Pystrak comforted your misery. The summer before graduation you studied together in Austria, and after graduation he went on to continue his studies at the University of Pennsylvania and you went on to Yale for the MFA. Jurek died in the mid 80’s in Berlin. Only later did you hear it was AIDS.
Chapter 32
Technology has extended our lives into preconceived worlds. Algorithmic archetypes impose an order over bias, by which it controls, sells, and manipulates you.
Chapter 33
Every weekend, you and Jurek traveled between New Haven and Philadelphia. Before taking his Fulbright, he suggested it was okay dating another during his absence. You took this to be a lack of loyalty. From Berlin he wrote he had met a film historian. After Jurek’s death, Karl visited your art studio. He found your geometrical canvases oddly formal. Was his conversation an echo of his own influence on Jurek and, of his own vision of the freedom of artistic expression? He later wrote from Berlin he was dying. In his letter he said your quests regarding treatments were futile missionary pretenses.
Chapter 34
But it was not a mission, it was compassion for him as it could have been for Jurek. Karl was filled with his own memories; you begged him to keep up hope.
Chapter 35
Never have you cried for someone as when you did when Benjamin Ivry left to work in Paris in 1984. After he left, your old friend Carol Magar helped you negotiate the pass to the American Citizenship. Eighteen years later, she died of cervical cancer, and five years earlier, Benjamin had returned from France. Was it his stance of irony that broke you apart as friends? You last spoke to him at a bookstore on Park Avenue and 57th Street. There, on the occasion of promoting his book “Maurice Ravel: His Life,” you introduced him to your husband David. Benjamin excused himself and left abruptly to meet his agent. Later that year, Benjamin moved to Thailand. He became a biographer and translator of well-known 20th-century figures in the arts. Only thanks to the World Wide Web can you see his image, and his prose continues to provide you with his particular métier. He remains your provocateur.
Chapter 36
In 1987 you were diagnosed with AIDS. Before the diagnosis you came to know an Episcopal clergyman and a TV-soap’s actor. Both fought for your attention. For years one disapproved of the other. The actor was ironic and the clergyman was a libertine. The clergyman died of a heart attack in 2008. The actor is in his late 80’s. His husband derided you.
Chapter 37
During the years of AIDS’s hysteria, your friends Philip Jung and Tom Bunny were not scared of death. You comforted them when they lay quietly on your lap.
Chapter 38
Nearly blind, Lyda saw herself as a patron of Latino culture in the United States. She enjoyed curating art shows in Midtown Manhattan. A provincial teacher, turned diplomat, enforced the idea in her they had the opportunity to open up the American art establishment. Then a pseudo progressive revolution strengthened them as potential populists.
Chapter 39
You listened to grand stories. Their aspirations, akin to religious fervor, never materialized. They seemed like grafters unable to give up their desires to dominate.
Chapter 40
Painting kept you sane, said a friend, who had come to your loft. Your paintings were developing an abstract vocabulary. You painted at night and worked as a commercial designer during the day. When your health failed you renounced everything and chose refuge with your family in South America.
Chapter 41
One learns to live with fear.
Chapter 42
You became a seesaw in your native land. You ran into repugnance both from the medical establishment as well as from family.
Chapter 43
In 1994 the Venezuelan medical institutions were collapsing. A few doctors and several thousand businesses asked you to write a mission statement for Fundación Metaguardia. It had been registered as a program for people with terminal diseases, The proposal went to the Venezuelan commissions of Health, Education and Culture, and to the United Nations. It failed. The Venezuelan Ministry of the Family tried to turn the program into activities for the feebleminded. Nothing happened.
Chapter 44
In November 1995, you flew from Caracas to Los Angeles. You had been nominated for an Emmy for your work on In Search of Dr. Seuss. The morning after you awoke to a fever of 108 degrees, from a hospital bed, you hallucinated making love to an angel descending upon you. To your nurse, you explained that death was an illusion. In your mind you spoke of Egyptian gods and goddesses, of Germans meandering inside your room, of Zapata fighting for Mexico’s freedom, and even of an intergalactic journey on a spaceship hovering over the hospital. A nurse asked you to open your eyes. Your body had begun to slow down; your eyesight had become magnified. Pulling the intravenous line out of your arm, you wanted to flee. You could not walk but somehow, you danced to music played by the nurses’ radio. You felt yourself in a different time. You saw your home in Venezuela as you crawled on its floor. The grouts were like rivers. Then you opened your eyes to an ocean. Your heart pulsated. You climbed to your home’s roof and stared at the cloudless sky. Fractals of light pulsated like thousands of rainbows. Now you were awake; your ankles were weak. You stood up. You turned to the doctor and said: “What does dignity mean to you? Are you a human being?”
Chapter 45
Nine months later, you were in your mother’s house. Your father came every week to visit. As you become stronger, he says you should return to the U.S.
Chapter 46
In November 1996, you fly from Caracas to New York. Your nine months stay in Venezuela violated your residence’s status. “I believe I was dying and unable to return” you answered. Sir, you may proceed“, the agent finally said.
Chapter 47
Some weeks later, your father falls at home and suffers a concoction. After surgery, he dies in the hospital. Your stepmother had locked him away as if he were a wild beast. In grief you paint again. With no more success than before, rejections from galleries continued to abound. With your mother you traveled to Europe. She talks incessantly and then nine years later she loses her voice to Alzheimer’s. Without parents, you had no bridge to your brothers and sisters. Throughout the years of Chavez and Maduro you have helped the family.
Chapter 48
In 2012, you stopped painting at your art-studio in Jersey City, only to return to art through digital technologies … By chance you have regained your confidence.
Chapter 49
In 1997 you met Nelson. Together you hiked the Amazonian Rainforest all the way to Angel Falls. You swam together in Los Roques. With you he showed himself vulnerable. Was his suicide the venting of his dejection over his brother’s death?
Chapter 50
In August of 1999, you confessed to a Nicaraguan priest in the Vatican. He tells you to measure your responsibilities. You sobbed inconsolably over Nelson’s death. The priest’s response, ” this is not the place.” From the Vatican you returned to the hotel, where you locked yourself up. Upon returning to the United states you seek therapy. There you discussed a relationship with a married English teacher with children, who tells you, “you have killed me as well.” Then you fell into a relationship with an alcoholic. It too was unsuccessful.
Chapter 51
Therapy became a crutch and strangled freedom. Leaving it, the therapist was disappointed. He had become accustomed to directing your thinking and actions. It was his empowerment and, much to his chagrin, you left him.
Chapter 52
When you and David meet, he fills a void in you and you in him. Respite in an imperfect world is found.
Chapter 53
He awoke to an itching jaw with stubble. You rubbed your cheeks carelessly against his face and musky scent. His eyes had the expression of a loving child.
Chapter 54
His glowing eyes evince a timid sense of wonder.
Chapter 55
Together you have traveled the world: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the South China Sea, the Mediterranean, and the NorthSea.
Chapter 56
On December 27, 2000, police reported that a 39-year-old man apparently jumped to his death from a Manhattan apartment building on Sunday morning. The suspected suicide leap occurred in Hell’s Kitchen, a short distance away from your home. He was your primary doctor, who had plummeted from the sixth floor. The week before, you had explained to him that the medication he last prescribed had caused you to be sleep deprived for eight consecutive days.
Chapter 57
A few friends from my childhood remain in touch today. At 94, Herta is my oldest friend. I have known her for 46 years. She was my mentor and Platonic friend since college. She lost her memories to Alzheimer’s. From Yale graduate school, there is Angiolina Melchiori , who is now an Italian News Director at RAI TV in Rome; Ariel Fernández, who is an American-Argentinian physical chemist and pharmaceutical researcher; and Maider Dravasa, who is a French Basque with Ph.D. in Linguistics living in Paris. All three have been my friends for the past forty years. As with all of my friends, we have traversed life’s forests through thicket and thin. Then there is my good friend Billy Bussell Thompson, who has a Ph.D. in Linguistics, Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University. I believe Billy has suffered what Job did not. I have known Billy for 34 years since 1987. My true education began when I met him. Over the years, we have coauthored in many occasions, and nearly in every one of my WordPress blogs. When I wrote other short stories in Spanish, Italian, or French, Billy was there to guide me ordering my thoughts into the Romance languages. Book of Changes evolved from a collage of reflections coming from memoirs, my interest and aversion to social sciences, my love of history, an interest in meter, its rise and fall in American poetry, suicide prevention, and self healing. Billy brings to my prose a desire to be precise and to unburden those nagging, vague, and scattered allusions of mine, and overcoming my limitations of fluency as a bilingual writer. Most importantly, there is my husband of over 20 years: David Lowenberger, who has exerted perhaps the most significant influence over who I am. His friends and relatives have also been major contributors. Much to my good fortune, his mother, my mother-in-law, Eva, gifted me 20 years of memorable friendship. Dignified in every respect, she was an inspiration as a mother and a friend. She recently died nearly five weeks before turning 98.I dedicate these short stories in her memory.
I share with the reader my utmost sincere gratitude to Billy Bussell Thompson, PhD in Linguistics, Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University, who has been a lifelong mentor, editor, and closest friend. I also express my deep appreciation for the nuance of sensitive and perceptive editing contributed by both, my perspicacious sister Bonnie Morín, playwright, producer and director of the Madrid Method Workshop in Spain (https://www.metodomadrid.es/), and by her daughter, the talented niece Natalia Velarde (@nix.conbotas), graphic artist and fanzine author who has earned many acolytes. I also give thanks for a much awaited reunion with her other daughter, the unequaled niece Camila Velarde, Lic. in philosophy and choreography. Last, I thank my dear husband David Lowenberger, whom I consider to be the most influential in every aspect of my life. Their perception and wisdom served as inspiration and guide for the realization of this short story.
Ricardo F. Morin T., 21 February 2021
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PREFACE:
Choking On One’s Own Saliva
My father once said how dismal his life would be were his identity lost to the orthodoxy of religion. It was no coincidence that, in reaction to the pieties of five generations, my father was to become a criminologist. For most of his life, he thought that the traditional stories about complementary retribution, binary belief in reward and condemnation, were fantasies, harmless until they became radicalized as replacements for inquiry. As a young man he based his own doctoral dissertation on such principles. Unfortunately, those convictions he deemed delusional were ultimately his own at the end of his life.
I think that, except for the instigation of violence through the search for meaning and its attachment to fiction, whether the violence arises from retribution or self-preservation, a person has no reason to become fearful or destructive. The only remedy to violence is knowing the difference between fantasy and reality.
As I reflected on my own father’s contradictions, I remembered what he had told me when I was a child, that lying was a survival skill. It enabled a person to hide himself in secrecy, not necessarily out of moral incompetence. It arose either from charity or from the fear of being judged. For him lying was part of becoming a competent adult. It was a way to hide imperfections and vulnerabilities. However, if sincerity or honesty were to threaten my father’s survival, it would be because he wanted rather to invent a story instead of looking into his ignorance and diminished understanding of his own importance. Was it natural for him to hide behind lies, or was it his own hubris? Perhaps he was choking on his own saliva during his entire life. He suffered from the delusion that he could avoid truth, or that he could control not facing up to it. Was this a fear of loosing control? Was that a reason why he could not find self-understanding? The mystery was centered not in his self-questioning, but in his fictionalizing his own life, no differently from our forebears.
__________________________
Gangs of West Harlem
1
The Process
For the third time I was serving on jury duty. As on previous occasions, I introduced myself as a visual artist during the voir dire. This time the defense lawyer inquired if I was a portraitist. I reasoned to myself the question was intended to probe the degrees of observation a painter aspired to. I replied that my interest as a visual artist was in the conceptual processes of abstract art, no different from that of a portraitist or any other representational painter, seeking to observe and interpret the essence of a subject. What I chose to represent through abstraction or conception was just as concrete as that of a sitter for a portraitist.
2
The Rules
The trial concerned the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy, and I was selected juror number 12. Previously, I served in civil cases. In civil cases, the preponderance of the evidence is the determining principle. In a criminal trial, the ruling principle is the measure of reasonable doubt. The rules were cautionary and aimed to avoid bias on the part of the jury. In their deliberations jurors were to concentrate on the evidence presented and not on background. Also, jurors were not to share information with other people outside of their own forum. I did not know how my participation in a murder trial would affect me. The day after the trial began, juror number 11 was replaced by an alternate.
Testimony lasted 17 days. During that time our electronic devices, cell phones, laptops, and tablets were allowed. On the 18th day, when jury’s deliberations started, these devices were taken away from us. Before this, we had been permitted to speak on matters not related to the trial. We were a diverse group and had very little in common. During court hearings, we had been allowed to take notes while we sat in the jury box. After the days’ proceedings, our note pads were left on our respective seats. When deliberations began, we could take our pads back and forth between the jury box and the jury room. Only then, were we able to study our notes and refer to our observations. Only then could we begin to talk about the case with each other.
3
The Jurors
The foreman of the jury was an office manager, who felt comfortable in his role as moderator. His communication skills were excellent; even when he disagreed, his manner never expressed condescension. Some jurors were reticent and never voiced a judgment one way or the other. The youngest member of the jury did not find the witness of the crime unreliable. Other jurors were open minded. A teacher remained calm throughout; she listened to others before expressing her own views. Another juror was impatient about the length of the trial. She complained that she had a toddler to care for at home. Aside from myself, there were two other retirees, one of whom was a corporate lawyer, who reminded us of the distinction between civil and criminal cases. Reasonable doubt existed in varying degrees for every member of the jury, save for the youngest one.
4
The Defendant: In dubio pro reo
The defense lawyer had her client plead the fifth amendment. The accused gazed solicitously, with a kind of clawing eagerness. He looked seven years younger in his freshly starched white shirt and tie. His hair was a cropped Afro, and he had across his upper lip a straight mustache. His dress was conceived obviously to attest to his wholesomeness. Since the time of the murder, he has been a detainee at Rikers Island. Sitting barely 30 feet away from the jury, the accused bore a grin across his face whenever he looked towards the jurors. Some members of the jury interpreted his countenance as gloating. Others saw his expression as self-pity or abjection, even an attempt at winning us over. His grin, a kind of twisted grimace, was unflappable and even disturbing to us. By the end, however, we dismissed our apprehensions. It was impossible to know whether the accused was remorseful or just trying to beguile us. More important was the question of consistency. If doubt was to play a part in the case, it had to arise from the evidence. Key was whether the accused was a lone assailant or whether there might have been others involved. Certainty had to come from the assessment of facts, and not be based on appearances.
5
The Prosecution
The prosecution charged the defendant with “first degree” murder. This implied premeditation with malice aforethought. The prosecution added two other charges: murder in the “second degree,” suggesting lack of premeditation. The third charge was for felony murder: death caused during the commission of a felony using an illegal weapon and with extreme indifference to human life. Rendering judgment on these charges rested on intent. Each member of the jury would have to reach an approximation of the truth, and no other reasonable explanation could explain the evidence presented at the trial. The verdict, of course, would have to be unanimous. Proof of the direct involvement of the accused was paramount. The evidence had to show the accused had committed the crime. Was the victim’s death the result of self-defense or was it deliberate? The question before the jury was whether there were circumstances outside the control of the accused. How did his instincts and fears come into play with his own actions. Could the jurors differentiate all of these aspects?
6
Testimonies
I
July’s weather was overbearingly hot. The air conditioning in the jury room was old and as inefficient as it was in the court room; the jury room was even more stifling than the courtroom, particularly between the long intervals of each day’s proceedings. The room was barely large enough for the long table and its 12 uncomfortable chairs. In this tight space it was almost impossible for the jurors to walk around, to go to the water-fountain, or even to the single restroom available. Lunch breaks were much appreciated. On the few days when there was a breeze, we could open the windows, but had to put up with street noise. In the court room, no such liberties were permitted
II
By the third week of the proceedings, the judge began standing with his arms folded against his hips. With a baffled face, he would turn around and stand behind his chair, his black robe half unfurled, and his necktie loosened. At times, he assumed what seemed to be a meditative expression with both arms folded over the back of the chair. Other times, he supported himself with one of his elbows over the back of the chair. One of his hands was placed against his chin, giving him a certain look of abandon. For me, this informality broke up the monotony of the case, as if it were helping him stay awake, and mollified the stultifying heat.
III
The aspects of this case had been under investigation for seven years. We, the jurors, were astonished at the lack of cohesion to the accusations. The statements by the witnesses in no way corresponded to the arguments made by the prosecutor. In fact, the prosecution’s case was stale. One wondered if there was any justification for this trial. The only merit to the case seemingly was using the authority of a jury trial to render a verdict, either for exoneration or conviction.
IV
According to testimony given by the police, the crime resulted from two rival gangs. The gang members’ ages ranged from 12 to 40. The defendant’s lawyer provided their pictures to the jury. The pictures showed them in expensive clothing. Both groups seemed to be showing off, as if they were the source of the neighborhood’s pride. Each group had its own hand signs as mottoes. According to the police, on the night of the murder the two gangs fought over their territory for the peddling of drugs. The defendant became the prime suspect two years into the investigation. According to one of the detectives, the defendant sought to intimidate younger members of the opposing gang, as a means of establishing his own authority over them. The defendant’s motive was said to be an attempt to sooth his own anger for being “dissed.” The jury found these to be speculative. For us the only facts credible were those of the struggle between them.
V
The first eyewitness, aged 13 years at the time of the murder, was the centerpin of the prosecution’s defense. He had been a close friend of the victim, and his proximity to the deed made him valuable. During the course of several days of testimony, two officers escorted him in dressed in an orange jumpsuit, both hands and ankles shackled. They removed only his handcuffs when he sat down on the stand. From the defendant’s attorney, we learned that he had been in custody for two years on a different murder charge. The defendant’s attorney asked him: Are you here today in exchange for lenience for the indictment you face? He thrust his arms and shoulders forward. His answers seemed evasive while the prosecution objected. The question was withdrawn, but the jury would not forget it. His hand partly covered his face, especially his eyes and nose. His head shifted from side to side. He pointed to the defendant, rubbed his chin, and accused him of being the killer. Yet, his deportment was indiscernible and seemed manipulative. Obviously, he had not seen from where the bullet had come. His allegations sounded implausible, as if they had been rehearsed. He had an air of entitlement, exuding hatred. During the prosecution’s examination, he revealed his conversion to Islam, and stated he had become a better person by the teachings of the Prophet. For the jury, however, his demeanor was that of an unrepentant malefactor. His lack of doubt hinted at a life of crime, without a sense of any morality.
VI
The prosecutor’s second witness spoke softly, yet his testimony seemed tentative. By his own account, he had been at the edges of the riotous horde. A circle had formed around the hooded individual and the victim. When questioned by the defense, he hesitated before admitting having seeing another armed buddy. But at the end, he relented. He recalled that other gang members had shot into the sky. He acknowledged that other guns had been used, thus accounting for multiple shells found by the police. The bullet, however, that pierced the victim’s heart was a mystery. The jury was at a loss as to what had gone on. Was it retaliation? Was it the shooter egging on accomplices? No answer was forthcoming, neither from this witness nor from the previous one.
VII
Even though the defense attorney tried to unravel the credibility of the prosecutor’s two eyewitnesses, she tripped over her own words. Not unnoticed was her assertion that the gunman might have carried a gun inside the pocket of his hoodie. Since no one had yet claimed to having seen him draw a gun, her attention to this matter seemed out of place. Was she trying to negate the hooded man’s innocence, while at the same time admitting to her client’s involvement? Jurors never understood her purpose, since the identity of the person in the hood had never been made clear. For the defendant her digression was inconsequential. But not for the jury because it augmented our doubts. Nevertheless, the defense attorney rebutted the evidence gathered by the police.
VIII
On the night of the murder, a pedestrian called the neighborhood foot patrol’s attention to a commotion on the street. The patrol did nothing until the police arrived in their cars and found the body of someone killed. The crowd around the victim had already dispersed and none of the neighbors willingly spoke of what they had seen. The jury was dismayed that the arrest warrant was issued two years after the event. The defense lawyer emphasized that, in the course of those two years, any witnesses’ recollection surely must have faded. She argued: “… just to be pointing a finger at an alleged culprit, out of a desire to seek closure, should not be deemed evidentiary in and of itself.”
7
The Evidence
We asked to see the video evidence before and after the shooting. Witnesses had stated that the defendant on the night of the murder had gone to a tenement looking for a gun, which was shared by all members of his gang. There were two cameras, both of which had restrictive angles of vision. The video was grainy: the product of low resolution security cameras. There was no sound and the imagery was choppy. The lobby camera showed someone descending the stairs to exit, wearing a baseball cap underneath a hoodie. Only his lips and chin were visible. The jury’s dilemma was how to identify the person. The woman with the child at home emphasized “…those features could have been any member of either gang.”
The crime took place at midnight. There was no traffic and the street was poorly lighted. For a second time, we examined the tape from the outside camera. We concentrated on the footage just before the shooting. It was murky and it showed the person in the hoodie stepping outside the building. The victim’s back was visible and his friend was behind him. There were several flashes of gun fire with one of them coming from next to the victim. A person in the hoodie faced the camera wielding a gun.
Ballistic evidence showed that the trajectory of the bullet came from a short distance before it entered the body of the victim. Maybe the shot came from the position of the hooded man but this was only a guess. More importantly, no guns were ever recovered and we still did not know who the gunman was. In summary, the testimonies, the analysis, and the written accounts were all useless to us.
8
The Community
Jurors were in agreement that the accounts given by the two gangs and the community were not to be trusted. The two gangs lived in two adjacent blocks. Drug infested, the community had become their victim. Solidarity showed itself as hostility. Assault not only on the street but at home was rife. Mothers, brothers, and sisters were commonly attacked. The death rate was high, which, in and of itself, was evidence that this community was sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Teenagers commonly stole and murdered. Only the rare adolescent was exempt. No social program could help. We, as jurors, were we only agents of retribution?
9
Blindness
From the first days of deliberation, the jurors were uncertain if the accused had taken any part at all. On our fourth day, the young woman who had been most adamant about the guilt of the accused began to waver. Most jurors still thought him to be innocent, but four remained unconvinced. The more jurors accepted their own limitations, the more difficult it became to form an opinion. The phrase blind justice turned piercingly poignant.
10
Unanimity
The majority argued with the four hold outs. Tensions rose with the thermometer. The heat of midday, the humidity, and the noise from the street became increasingly unbearable. With the windows closed, we turned on the anemic air conditioner and became more fearful than ever of not measuring up to the task. Our disagreements put us on edge and were nerve racking. Slowly we moved towards common ground. One by one, concessions were made. By the time of the third vote, the foreman hesitantly voted against conviction. There were still three jurors holding strongly for conviction. We gave ourselves a minute of silence before voting again. The decision was unanimous innocent. Surprisingly, had we presented a wrongful conviction, or had we derailed the case?
11
Announcing the Verdict
Jurors summoned the guard and handed him a yellow manila envelope with the verdict. After we had returned to the court room, the judge polled us individually. Indelibly imprinted on us was the murdered child’s mother’s face. From the start she had sat alone on the back left corner of the court room. Her sorrow contrasted sharply with the defendant’s family. I felt wary of these families’ reactions. I was deflated, even felt inadequate, indeed insignificant. Knowledge here was slippery.
An uproar reigned in the courtroom. The cries of the murdered child’s mother collided with the joy of the defendant’s family. Repeatedly, the judge admonished the room to be silent. He closed by thanking the jurors for their service, who were in a state of shock. Were we right or were we wrong?, I asked myself.
12
The Randomness of Truth
Chance dominated the jury’s participation. I recalled with fear my father’s imperative about hiding behind fiction as an instrument of self reliance.
The jury broke up. The judge stared at us with a smile as we climbed down to the exit. We walked to where we had deliberated and collected our belongings. We moved to an elevator at the opposite end of the courthouse. Below, the family of the acquitted man awaited us and, as we approached, they shouted their deafening thanks. The corruption was now complete.
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Epilogue
Ended the theater of misalliance, jurors, the lawyers, and witnesses became actors in the absurd. Our verdict was uncertain: Loss of life and life was foremost. Society seems predetermined: Advantage and disadvantage are in confrontation. What a role do abandonment and darkness play in the human condition? I pondered. It just seems as if indifference inflicts itself on destiny.
Series F Medium: Oil On Linen Size: 14 by 18 by 3/4 inches 2009
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Acknowledgments:
David Lowenberger,
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986),
Carlo Giuseppe Soarés (1892–1976).
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Introduction
An artist’s Manifesto by Ricardo Morin: Viewing of his Jersey City art-studio where he engages with his paintings [2005-10]; some artworks are in progress and some are part of a recently finished hanging scroll series, entitled Metaphors of Silence. http://www.ricardomorin.com/
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Metaphors of Silence (2005–2010)
Studio Videography Transcript (Edited in Prose)
From 2005 to 2010, the work expands on questions dealing with perspective, synthesizing concepts of pictorial space and infinity that have been present over the years. Painterly abstraction and plasticity are allowed to express, both in form and in content, a kind of art that moves beyond a material world of signs.
The paintings reach toward the infinite, toward mystery, and toward the poetry present in each individual drama. Although situated within twentieth-century aesthetics, the work does not align itself with a specific historical movement or with a postmodernist agenda. Making art is approached as a fleshy product of human experiencing, a result of the maker’s own passion.
The idiosyncrasy of the individual, indivisible in nature and blind to causality, is held within an aesthetic frame that embraces all essences. The image appears as a residue: non-objective, timeless, and at times existential. It does not seek to explain experience. Rather, it manifests itself and invites interpretation from the observer.
The finished work stands on its own. The viewer may come away with the sense of a generative completeness, as if a universe were making and remaking itself.
“Metaphors of Silence” suggests that the verbalization of aesthetic reality implies its own ending. No matter how precise, words resist the magnitude of that reality. The actuality of art may remain unseen if it arises within a fragmented spirit, shaped by formulas, gratification, or condemnation.
Art is not sustained by the prejudices of the observer, nor by the need to attract attention through eccentric stimuli. It is found instead in the open space of silence, in the stillness of meditative contemplation, and in the freedom to observe without the control of the observer.
In that state of heightened attention, questions become unnecessary and responses diminish the act of observation. This aesthetic is not derived from accumulated experience, from association with the past, from the search for an audience, or from the demands of a prevailing market.
These currents are not governed by awareness or unawareness. They do not pursue fulfillment, nor do they arise from vanity or choice. They are manifestations common to all, defining what exists beyond ideas and words. They operate creatively without dependence on the noise of knowledge and remain outside measurement and classification.
Within that obscurity, a vital energy unfolds, moving beyond limitation and isolation. Creation appears as a process of awakening and renewal within every relation. To participate in the movement of life requires a continuous release from conditioning.
The creative act is not an accumulation of knowledge. The figure of the “creative genius” marks only a stage within the process of deconditioning, and it cannot become knowledge if confined to individuality. The eye, bound to duration, may seek moments of inspiration, but those moments do not constitute creation itself.
Creation occurs in that which reaches beyond the moment toward continuity.
In this relation to art, the aim is not self-fulfillment, but the expression of an underlying interconnectedness.
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Metaphors of Silence (2005–2010) by Ricardo F. Morín
Studio Videography Raw Transcript
0:07
From 2005 to 2010, my work expands on questions dealing with perspective,
0:14
synthesizing concepts of pictorial space and infinity, something I have worked on over the years.
0:23
I have allowed painterly abstraction and plasticity to express, both in form and in content,
0:29
a kind of art that goes beyond a material world of signs.
0:38
My paintings reach for the infinite, the mystery, and the poetry in every man’s individual drama.
0:44
Though immersed in twentieth-century aesthetics,
0:52
I neither strive for a specific historical movement nor for the postmodernist agenda.
1:01
Simply, I look at making art as a fleshy product of human experiencing,
1:08
a resultant of the maker’s own passion.
1:15
Just as the idiosyncrasy of an individual, indivisible in nature, is blind to causality,
1:25
an aesthetic frame embraces all essences,
1:32
and the image is only the result or residue non-objective, timeless, or even existential.
1:40
In this sense, the image seeks not to explain what the meaning of experience is;
1:48
rather, the image manifests itself, provoking interpretation from the observer.
1:56
The finished work stands on its own.
2:06
The viewer comes away, I hope, with the sense of the work’s generative completeness,
2:15
of a universe making and remaking itself.
2:23
Metaphors of Silence.
2:31
The verbalization of an aesthetic reality implies its own death.
2:38
No matter how precise, the very accuracy of words resists the magnitude of that reality.
2:46
Seeing the actuality of art may never take place
2:53
if born in a spirit fragmented by the illusion of formulas,
3:01
immured by gratification or condemnation.
3:08
Art is not sustained by the avarice of a prejudiced observer,
3:16
nor is it derived from eccentric stimuli meant to draw attention to itself.
3:23
It is found in the open space of silence,
3:32
in the stillness of meditative contemplation,
3:40
in the freedom to observe without the control of the observer.
3:48
With heightened attention, questions become unnecessary,
3:56
and responses trivialize the act of observation.
4:03
This aesthetic is not the product of experience,
4:11
nor the association with the past,
4:19
nor the search for an audience,
4:27
nor the product of a prevailing market.
4:34
These currents are not aware or unaware;
4:43
they do not propagate fulfillment,
4:50
nor are they the product of egotistic or vain ritual.
4:57
They are manifestations common to all of us,
5:06
that which defines us beyond ideas and words,
5:14
that which operates creatively without dependence on the noise of knowledge,
5:23
that which is not suited to measurement or labels.
5:45
Within obscurity, a vital energy unfolds beyond isolation.
Creation is the awakening and renewal present in every relation.
If we are to join in the movement of life,
freeing ourselves from conditioning is a continuous creative process.
The creative genius is only a stage in the deconditioning of the self,
which cannot become true knowledge if confined within individuality.
The eye, bound to duration, may seek moments of inspiration,
but such moments are not part of the act of creation.
Creation belongs to that which reaches beyond the moment toward continuity.
In this relation to art, I do not seek self-fulfillment,
Triangulation Scroll Series Nº 225, 49 x 68 inches; oil on canvas; 2008
Origins of Modern Western Aesthetics
The concept of Aesthetics comes to us out of a wide variety of different traditions: from those of the West, the Chinese, the Japanese, the African, the Polynesian, and so forth. The Western traditions, of course, have different qualities from the others with regards to origins, to evaluative criteria, either in opposing or defending approaches to the making of art.
From its beginnings Western aesthetic theory has developed in parallel with art criticism. The concept, however, of Aesthetics, but not the word, was first talked about by Joseph Addison (1672–1719), in a series of essays in The Spectator in 1712, as a “pleasure that is derived from the imagination.” Thus, pleasure forms the basis that will serve as the foundation of modern aesthetics. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62) most likely read Addison, and he sought to define Aesthetics as a science of that which is sensed or imagined in his master’s thesis Aesthetica, 2 Vol. (1750-58) at the Royal Prussian University in Halle. He coined the word for the German language; Aesthetics is derived from the New Latin aesthetica (the feminine adjective), and it is related to the Greek aesthetikos/aestheta (perceptible things) and related to the verb aesthetai (to perceive). Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), however, took issue with aesthetics as a science. [1] Nonetheless, the term remained controversial, and it was not until much later in the 19th century when it was finally accepted in academic circles.
Aesthetics is a specific valuation theory, or a distinct convention of what beauty is. It is an individualizing characteristic or a particular taste for, or an approach to, what is of interest to the intellect or pleasing to the senses: both visual or auditory (as in literature, the plastic arts, architecture, and music). By extension, the term Aesthetics may be applied to many varieties of human behavior—toilette, cosmetology, interior design, and so forth.
For the avant-garde Aesthetics and Originality can be at odds with established social or political norms. Aesthetics, as valuation, is normative. Art criticism is the way in which the norms are established. Art criticism is transmitted both to collectors and to institutions (e.g., museums, in the case of the plastic arts and the marketplace, in the case of music and architecture).
Although art criticism dates from antiquity, analyses of visual aesthetics or the plastic arts began as a journalistic effort. The art critic and the artist became mutually dependent, and what had once been new and refreshing by the closing of the 20th century, became academic, routine, and repetitive. Contemporarily, Harold Bloom (1930–2019) expressed that art criticism had become confused with questions of social justice and politics, and was no longer about the art product itself.[2]
Nothing, however, is really new; the concept of Aesthetics itself, as a means of expression, may be said to be a dominant force dating as far back to the origins of human cave paintings. At the turn of the 21st century, there no longer seems to exist an adherence to one current aesthetic or approach; art criticism now appears to evoke a wide variety of tendencies of the formal, moral, social, and spiritual.
In the following excerpt, “Confessions of an ever emerging visual artist” from a YouTube and WordPress-audio-visual Manifesto entitled “Metaphors of Silence” (2010), I have given my own point of view:
The usage which the visual arts serve is a complex demonstration of varying dimensions whose expression seeks not to explain meaning but to express its intent; to bring about a clearly independent act of interpretation, over which the artist exerts no control as creator. From this, arises the sublimity of the psychological condition that is partly visual delight and partly passion that renews and nourishes a spirit of partnership with the medium. The intent expresses one is what one perceives: i.e., it is a quality of energy and a temperament independent of the intellect, separate from the craft itself, and apart from the residue of the images.[3][4]
Endnotes
[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), Introduction, §§1–5.(Kant does not reject “aesthetics” outright; rather, he rejects Baumgarten’s project of establishing aesthetics as a science: scientia).
[2] Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 17–35.(Bloom argues that literary—and by extension artistic—criticism has shifted toward ideological frameworks—Marxism, feminism, historicism, etc—and that these approaches prioritize social and political concerns over aesthetic value; as a result, the evaluation of the work itself is displaced.)
A harmful but enticing, state of affairs develops in the visual arts when the ethnocentric-artists align themselves with the adjuncts to commerce and their proxies (commercial institutions and art dealers on the one hand, and foundations and curators on the other), all of whom serve as instruments of indoctrination and publicity for the dictation of style, theme, and content, and in giving markets: The entertaining ‘circus’ of mass culture.
The Zeitgeist of multidisciplinarity and the crossing of frontiers seek to justify the relevance of the visual arts—in its sales and resales—through their contortions of its contextualization and validation of its avant-gardism. The study of the methodological principles of aesthetic interpretation gauges the importance of the arts and its place in the world of gimmickry and fashion, which are far removed from the dynamics of its origins. As such the visual arts find themselves in approximation with the modalities of narrative but expressed in the language of commerce. The artist now is succumbing to an ethos of expanding academic sophistry (the parcels-for-sale of commercial art history and the critics from the mass media). The result is not so much a lack of insight but a desperate impulse to cultivate greed and to strive for status; this indication of a bourgeois, sentimental enlightenment and authority avert any negation notions of a therapeutic or hobby genre: as anything other than menial and disenfranchised dilettantism for dabblers of artistic pursuit.
And so it is that the ensuing adaptation of analytic discourses into politics, philosophies, semiotics, linguistics, psychologies, and mathematics outline the obvious while absorbing the seeds of self-destruction. In other words, the universal urge of a visual necessity finds itself transmogrified into commercial success. Self-expression compares to commodification: Personal fulfillment is to be equated with making money. Can we suppose this mercantilism arises out of the Genre paintings of the 17th century (petit genre: still-life, flora and fauna, landscape, and scenes from the lives of the middle-class) with the emerging power of the bourgeoisie being able to decorate their homes with this style of painting? With a still bleaker legacy, these merchants of taste and consumerism seem to have missed the point that one’s perception of an image cannot be replaced by its description. To do so is to replace a jargon—piece of gossip with the visual intent. As visual meaning derives from internal intent, an encoded tag for a work of art can never replace the joy of experiencing it. Art is a manifestation of observation; as such, it is basically immeasurable. Passion and quality of energy need not require explanation, or, in particular, its manifestation should not be interpreted either for its worth or for its valuation—or enrichment—of a given elite. [1]
Ultimately, there is a tendency on the part of any artist in his/her approach to consolidate the supremacy of their egos and minds, with the verbal and the visual in a hieratic creative process; at this very moment this rationalization extinguishes both probability and logic (in other words, it becomes dead!). The lame allusions to the Conceptual, self-aggrandizing conceits, or to the simplistic Kitsch of popular iconographies—biases turned into cliché—to the orientation of Gender or Identity—affirmations of self-discovery—, or to the flaunting of Geo-Environmental Installations—with their fixed dimensional constants, all fall short of their promise to deliver something new or important: Declarations of approval, however, abound.
Many of today’s mainstream artists mythologize uprooted specimens derived from the trivial and the prosaic. Coming from a world we know about and live in, instead of a world we don’t know yet; these agents celebrate derivatives of tyrannical forms of erudition. Rather than enhancing our sense of perception, they extend an alienation that comes out of ambition and ownership, and make ubiquitous the desire for the object, which surrounds our ordinary lives. This gregariousness and massive consumerism disconnects and puts us to sleep in a technological era of purveyors of everything except sensitivity and human interconnectivity.
Collectors, museums, and galleries—today’s greedy usurpers of culture—welcome the glitz by which they turn art into a commodity and their power as plutocrats to satisfy the ignorance created by their Circensian parade of market indices. By definition the mythomania of stardom promotes only the few; every selection of one is a rejection of many [The Rise of the Meritocracy]. [2] The result of complacency fuels the alienation of 90% of active artists and creates therein an artificial shortage of resources, thus giving value to those market indices which ultimately result in the excessive struggle for survival. Rather than art giving strength to the collective unity, a sense of sectarianism separates everyone into a race of competing ideologies over commerce. The truth of art is left to search among competing opinions over what is relevant. These unstable times of ours, of victimizers and victims, of plunderers and the exploited repeat themselves in the annals of history.
Conformity, indifference, defining ourselves by the supremacy of personal success obscure inquiry on the disadvantaged. It is an empty gesture for one to defend the free market progress in the arts of today, or of any other given period. There have been innumerable artists whose accomplishments did not depend on a resplendent financial support or an irrefutable explication of competing narratives; sometimes, their ultimate measure of accomplishment came about despite the obstacles they had to endure—as well as the mores and instability of cultural vanities which opposed them. Their works may have come to have a great deal of recognition either towards the end of their lives (as in the case of a Paul Cézanne, who preempted 20th-century Modernity throughout his first forty years of obscure labor before landing a first one-man-show); or after their deaths (as in the case of Vincent Van Gogh, recognized for his sublimely “outsider” creations): When the capricious dictates of fashion made them relevant. And then, there are those who lose or regain their relevance, as in the case of François Boucher during the French Revolution, whose reformulation waited 100 years later until the end of the 19th century. In the same way, we have the banal chasing after the new in the late 20th century. And finally, there are those in 21st century who are first praised only to be soon forgotten.
The answer could be found by the rejection of a collector’s system of greed, or by the recognition that the quality of artistic creations cannot be pursued as a commodity. The answer cannot be found by their taxonomy. The answer is to be found in the recognition that any form of exploitation is undesirable and destructive to our collective being. The answer is to be found in the cultivation of all the arts, not as a commercial testimony of our sense of humanity.
If support for the arts were to be sought after, would we not need to assess the irrationality of our system of valuation, perhaps even our own cultural rationality?
[1] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). Extract: It is hard to recognize nascent art forms when they are on the rise, and by the time they are widely appreciated their best days are behind them—pp 400-410
[2] Michael Young, Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution (New York: Random House, 1959), p.12 [London: Thames & Hudson, 1958]. Young’s pejorative conception, set in a dehumanized [dystopian] future is based on the existence of a meritocratic class that monopolizes access to merit and the symbols and markers of merit, and thereby perpetuates its own power, social status, and privilege.
Triangulation Scroll Series Nº 555; 49 x 33 inches, oil on canvas, 2008
Picture of myself taken by my husband at Beechwood Point, Santuit Pond State, in Mashpee, Mass
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.
The aesthetic beauty and symmetry of the Platonic Solids have made them a favorite subject of geometers for thousands of years. They are named for the ancient Greek philosopher Plato who theorized that the classical elements were constructed from five regular solids: the dodecahedron, icosahedron, octahedron, hexahedron and tetrahedron–there are no other possible regular polyhedrons. The 92 Johnson Solids are irregular polyhedrons which, as the Platonic Solids, are also made out of triangles, squares and pentagons.
The Platonic Scroll Series serve as analogy to our inter-connectivity and the imponderable quality of harmony that unify us. It is to be noticed that there is no set manner as to how these manifestations may be perceived by any observer. Our reality is ever so much more interesting than any image representing it or anything that can be explicated.
MN> The film My Dinner with Andre was recently canceled in Caracas.
RM> This is coincidentally one of my favorite movies of all times.
MN> There is also “Wings of Desire” (Der Himmel über Berlin), one may see them apart but with some connection…
RM> Having a profound impact during the Eighties, I came to own DVD’s for both of these films; you have just reminded me to view them again, like re-reading a good book. These days I seek a better understanding by reading J. Krishnamurti’s innumerable publications [Krishnamurti Foundation of America].
MN> Have you read through Osho Rajneesh? or traditional G.I. Gurdjieff? There is another movie kind of interesting Meeting with Remarkable Men by Peter Brook…
RM> I understand that in either instance leadership and methodology overshadow search for truth.
MN> That is right but the info is all about the same methods for increasing your consciousness…Sufi and new Indian…Interesting comments found on Powels book Gurdjieff. Also a very interesting approach to the knowledge in Ouspensky’s Fragments of an Unknown Teaching…
RM> I am mostly leery of anyone who pretends the attainment of truth through a technique, a method or a system, a belief or a dogma, for in doing so he/she succumbs to divisiveness. As much as I admire Krishnamurti, I don’t follow anyone’s authority: neither Jesus’, nor Muhammad’s, nor Buddha’s and much less any ashram’s or famous guru’s. I find it useful to recall a quote from J.K. which is very much apropos: “Beauty (truth) is in experiencing, not in experience. Reality has no resting place.” The understanding I take is that our collective past does not belong to anyone, though knowledge of it may be useful to establish its limits.
MN>Yes, the path is the one taken by a mind alone; I do share the same perspective about freedom. I used to say to my friends that I was a man of no land and no heroes.. or maybe not only was I mentally ill but, perhaps, socially disabled. It is very pleasant to communicate with you. In rare occasions does one truly have a dialogue.
RM> You meant not inclined to gregariousness, as opposed to socially disabled or unsociable. Though disability in terms of sociability is tantamount to the inability of compassion, I do see you as a most compassionate human being.
I choose the golden ratio 1 = 1618 as a consistent format which is clearly inherent of the infinite, to breakdown a dialogue on the fluidity of the vehicle of painting and its geometry. At the same time, I establish a triangulation of the bare plane of the canvas which reaffirms its paradoxical nature as an object: where the fictitious flatness of the plane plays in suspension with the illusory spatial depth of forms expressed on it.
Digital Image created with Maya and Combustion Softwares
It’s like a goat tied to a post, who can wander only the length of its tether
Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1986
Anyone who aspires towards a career as a visual artist understands that the constraints for survival are questionable and that destiny often is one of the many factors that determines recognition. One’s mission is not about seeking recognition or even permanence, but about maturing and sharing one’s talent through exploration and inquiry. Congruency with one’s ancestry, identity, and oeuvre is not a matter of commercial interest for any given national identification. These elements are irreducible aspects of signification, undefined against perspectives concerning conventional pieties–imponderable manifestations of one’s existence: neither up to meeting others’ expectations, nor up to appointed entities and their economic models used as marketing ploys.
Let me begin by addressing the frustration of visual-artists with dual nationalities, who sometimes suffer in the corral of Latin-American fundamentalism. Let me also question why their resulting frustrations are an order of business imposed by contemporary Medicis who seek to buy a parcel of history in the parochial institutionalization taking place inside these artists’ countries of origin. These merchants promote their wares by controlling, by and large, markets located abroad.
Certain philanthropic foundations—I speak especially of the Phelps-Cisneros—sell themselves to museums as influential and often Darwinian laboratories with their claims of heralding innovative programs focusing on Latin American issues and fostering its cultural heritage. The above cited institution takes its leadership from a wealthy socialite, and boasts about its founder, as an amalgamation of bourgeois society and contemporary scholarly erudition. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, anthropologist amateuse and founder–deeply attached to her own ideas–, sees herself as neoembodiment of the 19-c. bio-geographer, Alexander von Humboldt: a man whom the contemporary Simón Bolívar (the Latin-American revolutionary and freedom fighter) cited as the real discoverer of South America.
Such portrayals, however, never yield balanced visions of pluralism. Only by peeling through layers of hubristic poshness, can one expose the foundation’s wish to create a dialogue about contemporary art with an historic nucleus set in Venezuela. But this desire simply reflects an aberrant fundamentalism; a rigidity whose aims are the preservation of certain regional traditions, which coincide with the institution’s own acquisitions. Undeniably, the preponderance of these cultural investments represents past meaningful movements, i.e., Kinetic, Op, and other neo-geometric derivatives. These movements, needless to say, are complaisantly popular, relatively noncontroversial artifacts among the political élites in Venezuela–from outright dictatorships, to feeble democracies, up to the presently evolving kleptocracy of the Bolivarian State of Hugo Chavez. They define as well the reoccurring themes coming out of this base which have found worldwide exhibitions and critiques. Contemporary art within this context exemplifies, nevertheless, exclusively the demagoguery of the ruling class’ claiming a national identity as stimulating and not one of imposed, antiquated historicism. This marketing ploy impoverishes both spontaneity and the local culture itself!
Succumbing to or courting this scheme is dangerous to artists and leads to alienation. Giving in promotes stagnation arising from these very institutionalized dictates. Such fashions segregate artists into a kind of regionalism and ideology, totally out of flux with the global community. Let me reflect on the raison d’être of any artist or, for that matter, of any human being; it must consist in a universal respect for dignity and freedom that cannot be sold, only shared. Let me underline that philanthropic societies that today yearn for an enforced authority through their wealth and through an enforced false sense of nationality and/or political or religious affiliation(s) are not only out of step with the transformative spirit of our times, but also with the globalized revolution taking placed in our culture, where the despotism of conventional borders and preconceived identities are lacking. This revolution is neither political nor economical; it is occurring within our very being, and it is the result of the change within ourselves of what is really important. We are dispensing with creative communities subjugated to a poisonous market place[1]. We have a new sensitivity and perception that will embrace cultural societies and producers alike. No simple answers arise; but we are growing in responsibility and self knowledge: we move to freedom and away from subjugation.
[1] The mythomania of stardom by definition examines only the few. Complacency fuels scarcity of resources while alienating 90% of active artists and assigning value to market indices, thus staggering self-sustenance.
Mavericks!
Look for renewals departing from Life.
Let us defile institutional theory mongering,
a corrosive taxonomy at the service of petulance,
Marketing anachronistic slogans of nonsense.
Subservient to infamy,
Cohorts of Dilettantes,
Not lack delimitation as handmaiden to ignorance.
Who promotes the edge of a new fugitive survival?
Fleshing out servitude as style,
Replacing intellect with mordacious rapacity,
Parading unclothed, bareness of duplicitous souls,
With a gashing defiance of insatiable desire to own,
Clandestine culture of misbegotten?
Board of museums and CEO’s glowing and bursting forth,
Grotesquerie of gulosity, take-over of corporate predators!
Mavericks!
Let us not jibe and succumb to chauvinism,
Emasculated by oppression
Take heed that Freedom is not for sale!
Would the web revolution lead artistic endeavors to a political revolution,
By replacing galleries, museums and the collector’s system of ownership?
Would the internal calling of an artist overcome the external demands of market survival?
Would such a calling already exist in a natural state, without the intervening forces of manipulative trends?
Would such a calling be subscribed to the exchange of exhibitionism and voyeurism for sales, acquisitions, commodities, as well as to the will of managing agents?
Would we face a new reality, one free of stardom and economic maneuvers?
Would participation and isolation not make any difference if such a calling serves no other purpose but its own needs?
Would history become both irrelevant and important at once: irrelevant as to how one may fit in and important as to how one may understand its limits?
Would knowledge not always be intertwined with some burdensome measure of superstition?
Would we repel a paradox on an arrogantly moral ground or tend unabashedly to our primordial instincts?
Ricardo F. Morín Triangulation Series Nº 25 37″ x 60″ x 2″ Oil on linen 2007
My work Triangulation Series 2006-08 expands on questions dealing with perspectives synthesizing concepts of pictorial space and infinity: something I have worked on over the years. I have allowed painterly abstraction/plasticity to express both in form and content a kind of art that goes beyond a material world of signs; my paintings reach for the infinite—the mystery and the poetry in every man’s individual drama. I choose the golden ratio 1 = 1618 as a consistent format for nonobjective abstraction which is clearly inherent of infinite congruency [a manifestation common to all known perspective methodologies], to breakdown a dialogue on the fluidity of the vehicle of painting and its geometry. At the same time, I establish a triangulation of the bare plane of the canvas which reaffirms its paradoxical nature as an object: where the fictitious flatness of the plane plays in suspension with the illusory spatial depth of forms expressed on it. Though immersed in 20th-century aesthetics, I neither strive for a specific historical movement nor for the postmodernist agenda. Simply, I look at making art as a “fleshy” product of human experiencing, a resultant of the maker’s own passion. Just as the idiosyncrasy of an individual, indivisible in nature, is blind to causality, an aesthetic frame embraces all its senses and the image is only the result or residue.
Non-objective, timeless, or even existential—in this sense—the image or Kunstgegenstand proposes not to explain what the meaning of experience is; rather, the image manifests itself, provoking interpretation from the observer.
There are no outside sources nor preconceived notions of the final composition. Gesturally and intuitively, I use the plane of the canvas as an active platform (in other words, a conversation, so to speak, takes place among the paint, the canvas and me as I apply paint onto the canvas.) In variegated densities, layer after layer—transparent or textural—the work transforms itself gradually by spectral accruement. In continuous dialogue, I work on several pieces at the same time so all are able to inform the other. An inner rhythm from each composition thus unfolds and guides the shifts and the construction of forms: burials, resurrections, exaltations, veilings, reattainments—all thanks to the gritty and sumptuous nature of the medium; a moodiness arises from the interlocutors with its acrid qualities of dissonance and complementary transparency. Indeed, it is color, as texture that establishes the emotional landscape of each piece. The finished work stands on its own as a concentration of multiple layers; each of the numerous strata is essential to the completeness. There is a sense of multidirectional movement in each of the works that acts on the viewer’s eye as he/she glances over the delineated shapes and peers through the entanglements of strokes and arabesques. The viewer comes away, I hope, with the sense of the works’ generative completeness of a universe making and remaking itself.
As I said at the beginning, I embrace in my love of art a sense of universality; I do this not for my own self-fulfillment, but for the cosmic order and interconnectedness in our own awareness of humanity, the unifying mode from all masters. As such, I am perennially emerging as I wander around in my space of today’s uncertain and leaderless being, where authority is seemingly derived from conflicting, and confusing powers of disbelief. Freedom has come to us but its ethers and incongruities make us stagger.
“Geometric Allegory” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)
Ricardo F. Morín
December 26, 2025
Oakland Park, Fl
Author’s Note
This installment continues Chapter XII, “The Fourth Sign,” following the initial discussion of Autocracy (§§ 1–9). It focuses on Venezuela, examining §§ 10–25 in which the earlier framework is applied to a specific national case. The chapter concludes in a separate installment devoted to The Asymmetry of Sanctions (§§ 26–34).
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Chapter XII: Part 2
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Venezuela
*
10
To grasp the practical implications of autocracy and its concentration of power, I defer to Rafael Arráiz Lucca’s book, Venezuela:1830 a nuestros días:Breve historia política [2016]. Here, Arráiz Lucca provides a comprehensive history of Venezuela from independence to today.[1]He covers political, economic, and social changes that have shaped the nation. He explores early struggles and the rise of military strongmen, and has treated Hugo Chávez’s rise to power, his ideology, and the effects of his policies on society. He has also examined the continuing influence of Chávez under Nicolás Maduro. In his view, both Chávez and Maduro have exemplified regimes that have centralized power and suppressed dissent.
11
The country’s political trajectory has been profoundly shaped by its enduring history of military rule. Since independence in 1811, twenty-fivemilitary officers have held the presidency, presided over 172 years of governance, and entrenched the military’s influence in the nation’s political fabric. [2] The transition to representative democracy in 1961 marked a significant shift, which ushered in thirty-eight-years of civilian-led stability under the Punto Fijo Pact (see Chapter XI). This civilian era, however, was not free from upheaval. The 1989 Caracazo riots, coupled with the failed coup attempt by Hugo Chávez in 1992, revealed the fragility of civilian democracy and the lingering appeal of military leadership in moments of crisis. [3][4]
12
The Caracazo riots and the subsequent repression had laid bare deep societal fractures that undermined confidence in civilian governance. For many, the chaos and disillusionment rekindled the perception of the military as a force of order and stability, a perception rooted in the nation’s long history of caudillo leadership. Chávez’s rise can be understood as a direct outgrowth of this historical legacy: a charismatic military figure presenting himself as the answer to the failures of civilian politics. The violent repression following the riots, coupled with the systemic inability to address the economic and social inequities they symbolized, paved the way for a return to autocratic tendencies, cloaked in populist rhetoric. This marked the beginning of a new authoritarian era, shaped not only by the fractures of the present but also by the shadows of the past.
13
The presidency of Hugo Chávez continued the tradition of authoritarianism that had been seen earlier during the regime of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.[5] As in the era of Pérez Jiménez, Chávez relied on oil to finance his policies. [6]
14
For Hugo Chávez, “participatory democracy” aimed at empowering marginalized groups. He created community councils and social missions, which became instruments of his political control—the so-called Bolivarian ideology. Participation therein hinged on one’s loyalty to Chávez, which ultimately led to the marginalization of people opposed to his policies. His blend of populism and authoritarianism framed dissent as being unpatriotic and thus hindered national progress. This approach enabled him to undervalue the power of law; the legislative and judicial branches of government became dependent on the executive.
15
With the endorsement of Nicolás Maduro by Hugo Chávez in 2012, the country slid further into authoritarianism. [7] Opposition parties such as Vente Venezuela, Primero de Justicia, Un Nuevo Tiempo, and Voluntad Popular accused Chávez and Maduro of manipulating the Consejo Nacional Electoral. [8][9][10][11][12]
16
After the death of Chávez, Maduro faced similar accusations in the 2013 and 2018 elections. The Organization of American States, the Lima Group, the International Contact Group, and the Group of Seven concurred.[13][14][15] Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also questioned his legitimacy. [16][17] One exception is the United Nations’ Security Council debate (press release SC/13719), which urged Venezuelans to resolve their crisis internally. [18][19]
17
Following Venezuela’s 2016 suspension from Mercosur, Latin American responses varied and then changed as political administrations changed. [20][21] Initially, Argentina favored the measures by the Organization of American States to apply diplomatic pressure on Venezuela and sought to address the political and humanitarian crises there. [22] It also recognized Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president, though in 2019, it changed and became an advocate for mediation. At first, Brazil recognized Guaidó and was for sanctions against the Venezuelan government, and then in 2023 asked for mediation. [23] Between 2018–22, Colombia accused the Maduro regime of drug trafficking and of giving support to the guerrilla groups, the National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces; Colombia broke diplomatic relations. [24] Later, in 2022, a new administration reopened diplomatic ties and promoted non-intervention. Chile has consistently urged sanctions against Maduro’s government, and even referred Venezuela to the International Criminal Court (ICC). [25][26] Peru expelled Venezuela’s ambassador: The immediate trigger for the expulsion was Venezuela’s Tribunal Supremo de Justicia’s move to dissolve the opposition-controlled Asamblea Nacional, which Peru saw as a step toward authoritarian control. [27] As all other members of the Lima Group did, Peru regularized the status of Venezuelan migrants. In the beginning, Mexico condemned the human rights abuses in Venezuela and called for the release of all political prisoners, but, in 2018, it shifted to a non-interventional approach and in 2022 offered mediation as the only recourse. [28][29][30]
18
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, opposition leader María Corina Machado was disqualified after having won her coalition’s primary. [31] The Tribunal Supremo de Justicia based its decision on her alleged support of U.S. sanctions, supposed corruption, and accusations holding her responsible for losses related to the American subsidiary Citgo of the Venezuelan State-owned oil and natural gas company: Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). Machado’s denial of access to the allegations against her was a blatant violation of due process. Her disqualification left Edmundo González Urrutiaas the unified opposition candidate. [32]
19
Both campaigns engaged in tactics of intimidation. González’s coalition deployed 200,000 observers across 16,000 voting centers and Maduro’s administration intensified media censorship and repression. After Maduro declared victory, protests resulted in extrajudicial killings, arrests, and crackdowns on independent media. [33]
20
González’s coalition collaborated with international observers, including the Organization of American States, the European Union Electoral Observation Mission, the Carter Center, and the United States Mission to the United Nations, to monitor irregularities. [34][35][36][37] The government, however, withheld disaggregated voting data critical for audits—supposedly because the data had been hacked—and imposed travel restrictions on foreign observers. [38] The Carter Center criticized the elections for failing to meet international standards of transparency, fairness, and impartiality. [39]
21
Maduro accused both Machado and González of having incited unrest and announced investigations into the crimes of “usurpation of functions” and “military insurrection,” each carrying thirty-year prison sentences. On August 8, 2024, González left for Spain after the government had granted him safe passage.
22
To understand Venezuela’s political and institutional landscape, one must examine how global indices assess the state of its democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index, and the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index all provide distinct metrics illuminating Venezuela’s democratic decline under Nicolás Maduro.
23
The Democracy Index ranks countries with higher scores as more democratic. Freedom House and Transparency International diverge from this by using lower scores to indicate worse outcomes, with lower numbers signifying less freedom and higher corruption.
24
In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, Venezuela ranked as the least democratic country in South America in 2008; in 2022, it ranked 147th out of a total of 167 countries. [40] Likewise, in 2023, Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index finds that Venezuela scored low both as a democracy and high corruption, while in its CorruptionPerceptions Index Venezuela scored 13 out of 100 and was positioned as one of the most corrupt nations globally. [41]
25
Additionally, a report by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for the period from 2012 to 2023 has highlighted the severe corruption to be found in Venezuela. [42] In its 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index, out of 180 countries, Venezuela received a score of 13 out of 100, ranking 177th. These indicators present a clear picture of Venezuelan authoritarianism and of the deterioration of its political landscape in recent years.
~
Endnotes
§ 10
[1]Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Venezuela: 1830 a nuestros días: Breve historia política. (Caracas: Editorial Alfa, 2016), 15-151, 212-37.
[3]The Punto Fijo Pact was a political agreement signed by the three predominant political parties—Acción Democrática (AD), Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI), and Unión Republicana Democrática (URD)—at the residence of Rafael Caldera (COPEI): Punto Fijo. The pact aimed to stabilize the country after the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez [1952-1958] by ensuring democratic alternation of power, institutional continuity, and preventing single-party rule. While it contributed to political stability and a peaceful transition to democracy, critics argue that it also entrenched elite dominance, marginalized smaller parties, and fostered systemic corruption. As a foundational element in Venezuela’s post-dictatorship political landscape, the agreement shaped the nation’s governance for decades. Its legacy, however, is marked by political divisions, as the pact’s structure increasingly excluded some groups and led to dissatisfaction among factions. This period reflects both the challenges and achievements of Venezuela’s efforts to establish a stable and inclusive democracy.
[5]Fredy Rincón Noriega,El Nuevo Ideal Nacional y los planes Económicos- Militares de Pérez Jiménez 1952-1957(Caracas: Ediciones Centauro, 1981)–Kindle Edition
Judith Ewell,The Indictment of a Dictator: The Extradition and Trial of Marcos Perez (College Station: A&M University Press, 1981).
[6] Both leaders have employed centralized power and state control over resources, though their approaches differed. Pérez Jiménez emphasized technocratic and infrastructural development. His policies, as outlined in the Nuevo Ideal Nacional, focused on large-scale construction projects and urban modernization. These initiatives promoted economic growth, but their benefit was directed towards the middle and upper classes. Chávez, on the other hand, pursued a blend of populism and socialism aimed at redistributing oil wealth through extensive social programs for the poor. These policies increased the State’s dependence on oil revenues and left the country vulnerable to market fluctuations.
§ 15
[7]Margarita López Maya, “The Venezuelan Caracazo of 1989 : Popular
Javier Corrales, “Chapter 12: Venezuela’s Autocratization, 1999-2021: Variations in Temporalities, Party Systems, and Institutional Controls.”PDF extracted from Archon Fung, et al, When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse,from Ancient Athens to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). https://tobinproject.org/sites/default/files/assets/Chapter%2012%20-%20Venezuela%20-%20Corrales.pdf
[12] The Consejo Nacional Electoral, responsible for overseeing elections in Venezuela, has faced long-standing accusations of partisanship and favoritism. Opposition groups (Vente Venezuela, Primero de Justicia, Un Nuevo Tiempo, Voluntad Popular) have alleged that Chávez and Maduro appointed to it only members who favored the ruling party. For an analysis of the Consejo Nacional Electoral’s role in reinforcing authoritarianism, see Javier Corrales: Autocracy Rising:How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2023), 3, 28. Also see Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers, The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 276-80, 293-96.
§ 16
[13] The Lima Group, formed in August 2017, includes: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Guyana, and St. Lucia.
[14] The International Contact Group (the European Union, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Uruguay) advocates for credible elections and have voiced concerns about the Consejo Nacional Electoral’s impartiality.
[15]Group of Seven (G7)–Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States–has condemned electoral irregularities in Venezuela and called for independent oversight. Allegations of voter registration manipulation by the Consejo Nacional Electoral, has heightened suspicions of vote tampering.
[18]“Venezuelans Must Resolve Crisis Themselves, Security Council Delegates Agree while Differing over Legitimacy of Contending Parties. Briefing on Weekend Incidents Biased, Says Foreign Minister as Speakers for United States, Russian Federation Exchange Barbs,” United Nations: Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, 8472nd Meeting, SC/13719, February 26, 2019. https://press.un.org/en/2019/sc13719.doc.htm
[19] In February 2019, a United Nations Security Council Report debated whether to supervise elections or mediate between Maduro’s government and the opposition. Ultimately, the Council upheld a non-interventionist approach while offering to mediate.
[21]Mercosur (acronym for the Mercado Común del Sur or the Southern Common Market) is a regional trade bloc founded in 1991 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay (it later included Chile). Mercosur’s mission is to promote economic integration and free trade.
[30].- Mexico has mediated between Nicolás Maduro’s government and the opposition after the July 28, 2024 presidential election results, with support from Brazil and Colombia.
[38].- Disaggregated election results enhance transparency by enabling cross-checking against aggregated totals. This method reveals potential errors, facilitates audits, and highlights regional irregularities, strengthening the legitimacy of electoral outcomes.
Modern societies describe progress through a vocabulary of invention and expansion. Yet the consequences often observed in economic life arise from institutional arrangements that precede the innovations themselves.
New technologies appear as discoveries; markets appear as opportunities; growth appears as the natural result of human ingenuity. This language creates an image of development that emphasizes creativity while it conceals a more durable structure beneath it. Governments, legal authorities, and commercial institutions rarely begin systems of economic growth with invention alone. They begin when institutions convert conditions that once belonged to shared human life into resources that can be owned, measured, and exchanged.
Land becomes property; labor becomes wage labor; knowledge becomes data. Rivers that once supplied water freely to surrounding communities now appear in financial markets as tradable assets. Each transformation enlarges the field of economic activity because it reorganizes what was previously common. The narrative of progress celebrates the innovation that follows this conversion; yet the expansion often depends first on the extraction that made the innovation possible. Economic development therefore unfolds through a recurring institutional act: the conversion of shared conditions into organized systems of ownership.
2
The first large transformation occurred when land and labor entered modern economic systems as commodities. Earlier societies cultivated land and organized work through local obligations, customary rights, and communal practices. Modern economies introduced a different arrangement. Legal systems defined land as transferable property; this definition allowed estates, plantations, and industrial sites to circulate within markets.
Industrial production also required a stable supply of labor that could be measured and compensated in monetary terms. Wage contracts fulfilled that requirement. Workers exchanged hours of effort for income; employers calculated production through predictable units of labor.
This institutional reorganization created the foundation of industrial growth. Factories and commercial agriculture did not rely only on machinery; they relied on legal and economic systems that converted land and labor into inputs capable of sustaining continuous production. The Industrial Revolution therefore expanded not only through invention but also through the systematic reorganization of human and natural resources into economic instruments.
3
Industrial expansion soon demanded resources that extended beyond land and labor alone. Factories required concentrated sources of power capable of sustaining mechanical production on a large scale. Coal supplied the first solution; petroleum followed with even greater efficiency.
Extraction industries emerged to supply these fuels. Mining companies developed technologies that could remove coal from deep geological layers; oil firms drilled wells that reached reservoirs beneath land and sea. Railways, pipelines, and shipping routes connected these extraction sites to industrial centers.
Governments and corporations secured access to these resources through territorial agreements, drilling concessions, and strategic alliances that protected shipping routes and energy infrastructure. Industrial powers negotiated drilling rights and controlled shipping corridors that carried fuel across oceans to factories and cities. These arrangements tied distant territories to the energy demands of expanding industrial societies. Energy became the substance that sustained industrial economies; control of energy flows became a measure of geopolitical influence. Economic expansion therefore depended not only on technical invention but also on the ability of States to organize and protect systems of resource extraction across national boundaries.
4
The late twentieth century introduced a transformation that appeared to depart from this material pattern. Digital networks created environments where human activity could be recorded, stored, and analyzed. Companies that operated these networks soon recognized that the information generated through everyday interaction possessed economic value.
Search queries, online purchases, social exchanges, location signals, and browsing histories formed detailed records of behavior. Digital platforms developed algorithms that could process these records and identify patterns within them. Advertising systems used those patterns to match products with likely consumers; businesses purchased access to those predictions because they sought to increase sales.
Individuals who search for information, communicate with friends, or move through cities rarely perceive that these ordinary actions generate the data streams that sustain digital markets. These systems appear impersonal, yet they remain human constructions. Engineers design the platforms, legislators authorize the legal frameworks that permit data collection, and investors finance the infrastructure that organizes this information into profit. The authority of the system therefore rests on decisions made by identifiable actors who participate in its operation. Human behavior becomes a measurable resource within the digital economy, and everyday activity enters systems of calculation that transform ordinary experience into economic input.
5
Artificial intelligence extends this informational system into a new domain. Machine learning systems require vast collections of language, images, and recorded activity. Developers assemble these materials through large data sets that gather written expression, visual material, and behavioral traces from many sources.
Newspapers, books, photographs, academic research, and online conversations become training material for these systems. Computational processes analyze these materials and adjust internal parameters until recognizable patterns of language or perception emerge. The resulting models appear to generate knowledge independently; yet their structure depends on the human expressions that formed the training material.
Collective intellectual activity therefore becomes the substance from which artificial intelligence systems derive their capabilities. Firms that control these systems own the architecture through which this knowledge becomes computational intelligence. Human creativity remains the origin; proprietary systems govern access to the resulting capabilities.
6
The apparent immateriality of this digital environment conceals a substantial physical foundation. Computation requires hardware that conducts electricity, stores information, and performs complex calculations. These devices depend on minerals extracted from the earth.
Copper carries electrical current through circuits and transmission lines. Lithium and cobalt stabilize batteries that power portable systems. Rare earth elements create magnets that operate within turbines and electronic components. Silicon forms the basis of semiconductor fabrication.
Mining operations extract these materials from geological deposits; refining facilities separate and process them into usable forms; manufacturing plants assemble them into processors, memory systems, and data centers. The digital economy therefore rests on a chain of material production that extends from mineral extraction to computational infrastructure.
States compete intensely within this system because control of mineral supply chains influences technological capacity. Countries rich in copper, lithium, and rare earth elements negotiate new partnerships with industrial powers that require these materials. Technological development therefore reconnects digital innovation with the geopolitical realities of resource extraction.
7
Systems built on extraction rarely present themselves through that language. Advocates of each technological era often describe development as an inevitable progression that no society can alter. Industrialization carried that description; petroleum dependence carried it as well; digital expansion repeated the same claim. Phrases such as “the digital future cannot be stopped” or “artificial intelligence will transform everything” present technological systems as unavoidable outcomes.
This description performs an important function. When a system appears inevitable, criticism of its structure loses urgency. Public discussion shifts from examining how institutions organize resources toward adjusting to the system those institutions have already created.
Citizens repeat these expressions in public discussion and private conversation; by doing so they reinforce the appearance that technological systems operate beyond human choice. This repetition relieves individuals of the burden of questioning the structures that govern economic life and allows systems of extraction to continue without sustained scrutiny. Yet technological systems do not arise independently of political decision. Governments establish property rights, regulate industries, and authorize investment structures. Firms design platforms, infrastructure, and markets that channel resources into systems of production. The narrative of inevitability obscures these arrangements. It encourages societies to accept technological systems as natural developments rather than as institutions shaped by deliberate choices.
8
The historical sequence reveals a recurring pattern. Each stage of modern growth identifies conditions of life that institutions can reorganize into economic resources. Land, labor, energy, information, and knowledge have entered this sequence in successive eras.
These resources originate within the shared environment of human society and the natural world. Communities cultivate land; workers apply skill and effort; generations contribute knowledge and expression. Economic institutions establish mechanisms that reorganize these shared conditions into systems of ownership. Property law assigns control over land; industrial infrastructure organizes labor and energy; digital platforms collect behavioral information; computational systems assemble human knowledge into proprietary models.
The tension within this process becomes visible when the resource cannot plausibly be described as private in origin. Water offers the clearest example. No individual produces it, and every society depends on it. Yet financial and legal systems increasingly treat access to water as an asset that can be owned, traded, or controlled through investment structures. When institutions transform a resource so obviously common into a vehicle of ownership, the separation between origin and control becomes unmistakable.
Economic institutions do not operate apart from political authority. States establish the legal frameworks that transform common resources into systems of ownership and production. Through those frameworks, governments grant access to land, energy, information, and technological infrastructure. These arrangements generate wealth for firms and investors who operate within them; they also strengthen the strategic position of the States that oversee those systems.
Political communities therefore confront a difficult responsibility. They must decide whether the resources that sustain collective life remain subject to public authority or become instruments of concentrated ownership.
Governments often treat common resources not only as foundations of economic activity but also as instruments of geopolitical advantage. Rival States compete to secure control over these resources and the industries that depend on them. Ideological disputes accompany this competition; yet the underlying structure remains similar across competing systems. Prosperity and influence arise from institutions that convert common resources into concentrated forms of wealth and authority.
Modern societies continue to pursue innovation and expansion; the history of their development shows that growth has repeatedly depended on this conversion. Progress expands production and knowledge; yet it often detaches ownership from the common resources that made that expansion possible. The enduring question is whether societies can pursue advancement while maintaining alignment between the resources that belong to all and the systems that govern their use.
Ricardo Morin Untitled #5: The Paradigm of Extraction 10″x12″ Watercolor 2003
By Ricardo F. Morín
Oct. 2025
Oakland Park, Fl
*
The story of artificial intelligence is usually told as one of endless promise—a technology meant to transform economies and redefine human potential. Yet beneath the optimism lies an older reality: the conversion of human creativity into concentrated wealth. What is presented as progress often repeats the oldest economic pattern of all—the extraction of value from the many for the benefit of the few. The language surrounding AI hides this continuity. It turns innovation into a spectacle of inevitability, a vision of boundless gain that distracts from its unequal foundations.
The spectacle depends on persuasion. Words like manifested intelligence, the next trillion-dollar frontier, and inevitable transformation are not descriptions; they are marketing. They frame profit as destiny and invite participation not in discovery but in speculation. Numbers such as “$80 trillion” and “25,000 percent returns” echo through news cycles like prophecies, and turn investment forecasts into moral certainty. This rhetoric reshapes public imagination. AI stops being a tool for solving human problems and becomes a financial phenomenon—a story about wealth rather than understanding.
These promises do not mark a new beginning. They repeat the same cycle that accompanied every major invention. The Industrial Revolution produced machines that changed work but deepened social divides. The digital revolution spread information but concentrated ownership. AI now enters that history as its newest expression. Its power to expand knowledge and serve the public good is real, but its first allegiance remains to profit. Within existing systems, it accelerates the accumulation of capital instead of correcting its imbalance.
The mechanisms of this concentration are easy to see. Proprietary models fence off knowledge behind paywalls and patents. Data collected from the public becomes private property. The cost of computing power and specialized expertise limits who can participate. The outcome is predictable: the majority will experience AI not as empowerment but as dependency. Far from leveling inequality, it builds it into the infrastructure of tomorrow.
This direction grows more troubling when placed beside the world’s most urgent needs. Billions of people still live without reliable food, healthcare, or education—conditions technology could transform but rarely does. The most profitable uses of AI instead optimize advertising, influence behavior, and extend surveillance. These are not accidents. They are the logical results of a system that values profit over human welfare. When progress is measured only in shareholder value, technology loses its moral compass and society loses its claim to wisdom.
A newer and equally dangerous use of these systems has emerged in the political sphere. The same tools that target consumers now target citizens. Governments with autocratic tendencies have begun using generative models to flood public discourse with persuasive content, to blur the boundary between truth and fabrication, and to cultivate obedience through simulation. Recent reporting shows how executive offices deploy AI to craft political messages, to amplify loyal media, and to drown out dissenting voices. Such practices transform intelligence into propaganda and data into domination. When a state can algorithmically manage perception, democracy becomes performance. The concentration of wealth and the concentration of an engineered belief reinforce each other, both materially and mentally.
We have seen this pattern before. In every technological era, wealth has turned into political power and then used that power to protect itself. Railroad barons shaped monopolies in the nineteenth century. Oil empires steered foreign policy in the twentieth. Today, digital conglomerates write the rules that sustain their dominance. AI follows the same gravitational pull, guided less by human vision than by financial gravity.
In the present order, the union of technological power and financial speculation no longer produces discovery but dependence. Wealth circulates within an enclosed economy of influence and rewards those who design the mechanisms of access rather than those who expand the reach of knowledge. What appears as innovation is often a rehearsal of privilege:an exchange of capital between the same centers of authority, each validating the other while society absorbs the cost. When creativity becomes collateral and intelligence a lease, progress ceases to serve the public and begins to serve itself.
The most seductive illusion sustaining this order is the myth of inevitability—the belief that technological advance must produce inequality, and that no one is responsible for the outcome. It is a useful fiction. It spares those in power from moral scrutiny by turning exploitation into fate. Yet inevitability is a choice disguised as nature. Societies have always shaped the use of technology through their laws, values, and courage to intervene. To accept inequality as destiny is to abandon that responsibility.
Rejecting inevitability means reclaiming the idea of progress itself. Innovation is not progress unless it expands the freedom and security of human life. That requires intentional direction—through public investment, fair taxation, transparent standards, and strong international cooperation. These are not barriers to growth; they are the conditions that make genuine progress possible. Markets alone cannot guarantee justice, and technology without ethics is not advancement but acceleration without direction.
Measuring progress differently would change what we celebrate. If an AI system reduces medical errors in poor communities, strengthens education where resources are scarce, or helps citizens participate more fully in democracy, its worth exceeds that of one that merely increases profit margins. The true measure of intelligence—artificial or human—is the good it brings into the world. Profit is only one form of value; human dignity is another.
At the center of this order lies a quiet hypocrisy. Wealth is praised as the reward of discipline and intelligence, yet it depends on the continuous extraction of value from others—the worker, the consumer, the environment. What appears as merit often rests on inequality disguised as efficiency. The same pattern defines artificial intelligence. Built from shared human knowledge and creativity, it is enclosed within systems that sell access to what was freely given. Both forms of accumulation—financial and technological—draw their power from the very resources they diminish: human labor, attention, and imagination. In claiming to advance society, they reproduce the inequity that turns vitality into stagnation—the inversion of what progress is meant to be.
The fevered talk of trillion-dollar opportunities belongs to an old vocabulary—the language of extraction mistaken for evolution. The real question is whether intelligence will continue to serve wealth or begin to serve humanity. Artificial intelligence offers that choice: to repeat the logic that has long confused accumulation with advancement, or to build a future where knowledge and prosperity are shared. That decision will not emerge by itself. It depends on what societies demand, what governments regulate, and what values define success. The window to decide remains open, though it narrows each time profit is allowed to speak louder than conscience.
The preceding observations concern the consequences of extraction. The institutional logic that produces these consequences belongs to a wider historical pattern in modern economic development. That pattern is examined separately in “The Logic of Extraction.”
The documentary “Melania” unfolds within the ceremonial landscape surrounding Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Melania Trump’s voice carries the narrative thread. She begins with an account of inheritance. She credits her mother’s strength and devotion to family with shaping the person she has become. She presents that inheritance as the ground of her public role.
That account of her origin is set within settings that unfold its meaning. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral a priest offers his blessing. The moment enters the language of national ceremony. Melania declares that she will use her influence and power to defend those in need. She links that promise to the discipline that guided her earlier career in Paris and Milan, where high personal standards first shaped her ambitions.
From the cathedral the narrative moves to the transfer of authority. President Joe Biden and Jill Biden escort Donald Trump and Melania Trump toward the White House. The procession advances through the familiar choreography of inauguration.
At that moment a reporter breaks through the press line and shouts a question: “Will America survive the next president?” Its resonance lends the sequence an unexpected candor.
The narrative then returns to Melania’s voice as she enters the Capitol’s Rotunda. She describes the moment as the meeting point between national history and her own journey as an immigrant. She speaks of rights that must be protected and of a humanity shared across different origins.
As the ceremony moves toward the swearing of the presidential oath to the Constitution, Jill Biden remains centered in the camera’s view until Trump’s daughter Tiffany steps forward and blocks her from sight.
Donald Trump then takes the oath. He announces that a golden age begins immediately. He promises national flourishing, international respect, and the restoration of impartial justice under constitutional rule. He names peace and unity as the marks of his future legacy.
Although the production bears Melania’s name, the material before the camera consists of ceremony, prepared language, and public display. Under such conditions a portrait cannot reveal a private figure. It records the symbolic role assigned to her within the spectacle surrounding Trump’s return to power.
Donald Trump tells her that she looks like a movie star. The camera returns to her face. The attempt to soften her beauty does not succeed. Her eyes narrow. The line of her mouth tightens into a strain that refuses the ease of a ceremonial smile.
The recurring presence of stiletto shoes of approximately twelve centimeters becomes part of the visual composition. The effect suggests an effort to augment physical presence in a setting where stature is already symbolically constructed.
Seen in the second year of Trump’s second term, the promises heard throughout the documentary: constitutional fidelity, respect for rights, pride in the immigrant’s contribution to national life, and the assurance that plurality remains united within one civic community, stand in contrast with the conduct of governance that followed.
The montage preserves more than a portrait of Melania Trump. Ceremony frames power with language drawn from inheritance, constitutional duty, and civic unity. When events test the promises attached to that language, the ceremony remains while the substance weakens.
Beauty, piety, and patriotic symbolism stand in the foreground of the ceremony and lend the moment dignity and continuity. When the record of governing enters the frame, those same elements remain after the promises attached to them have failed. The documentary leaves the image of the surface on which those promises were written.
*
Epilogue
*
The documentary does not construct a language capable of recognizing its own artifice. The ceremony remains at the level of presentation. It does not become conscious representation.
Artistic precedents in the documentary genre and in the exercise of governmental power have shown that power can be exposed through its own theatricality. When that language is established, the spectacle becomes legible as construction. Artifice no longer conceals itself and becomes part of the meaning.
Here the opposite occurs. The staging, the wardrobe, the choreography, and the discourse are presented without distance. There is no register that allows them to be observed as construction. The result is not an interpretation of power, but its reiteration.
The very condition of the the work contributes to this result. It is a commissioned production. Its cost, at approximately forty eight million dollars, intensifies the presentation of the surface without expanding the field of language.
That condition alters the meaning of what is seen. The ceremony retains its forms, but loses the capacity to produce awareness of itself. Language continues to assert legitimacy, but does not reach the point of examining it.
The production, without intending to do so, exposes this limitation. It does not reveal the artifice of power. It shows, instead, a form of power that lacks the language necessary to recognize itself as artifice.
This installment of Unmasking Disappointment presents the first part of Chapter XII, “The Fourth Sign.” It covers §§ 1–9 under the heading Autocracy and lays out the conceptual and institutional framework necessary for the sections that follow. The chapter continues in subsequent installments, which address Venezuela (§§ 10–25) and The Asymmetry of Sanctions (§§ 26–34).
*
Chapter XII-Part 1
*
The Fourth Sign
~
Autocracy
*
1
The justification for a discussion of autocracy and democracy arose from ideas that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, which provided insights into the foundations of contemporary governance. John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government [1689] argued that legitimate political authority derived from the consent of the governed. Locke’s emphasis on natural rights (life, liberty, and property) and his concept of a social contract—in which government’s primary role is the protection of those rights—laid the groundwork for modern democratic governance. He offered a contrast with autocracy in his advocacy of the rule of law. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract [1762] contributed to democratic theory with his concept of the general will, in which he posited that sovereignty resided with the people and that governments should be accountable to their general will, understood as civic responsibility. By contrast, Rousseau analyzed autocracy as a kind of tyranny that violated the principles of popular sovereignty. Thus, he anticipated the move from monarchical rule to participatory democracy.
2
Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws [1748] asserted that democratic governments were based on popular sovereignty, whereas autocratic governments were founded on fear and obedience. Montesquieu introduced the idea of the separation of powers, which became a foundational principle of democracy. Montesquieu’s emphasis on checks and balances, within a tripartite structure (executive, legislative, and judicial), contrasted with autocratic regimes in which power was concentrated in a single ruler or institution. His work influenced later constitutional designs, particularly in the United States and France.
3
The 19th century was marked by political revolutions, the rise of nationalism, and the spread of constitutional monarchies. While important developments occurred, such as the expansion of suffrage and the evolution of representative government, the philosophical groundwork had largely been set in the previous century. The 19th century was more focused on the application of these principles rather than their theoretical development. Thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx have provided critical insights, but their focus on practical analysis (democracy in America or class struggle in general) has been built on earlier theories rather than proposing a new understanding of governance.
4
It has been said that in some instances benevolent despots serve the common good, though John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty [1859] (Chapter 1, Introductory, 4-5) has clarified for us that it was only true in the context of civil liberties when benevolence was in favor of participatory democracy:
By Liberty was meant protection against the tyranny of political rulers. . . . Their power was regarded as necessary but also as highly dangerous. . . . The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.
Mill argued that from antiquity civic liberty has been defended to prevent the tyranny of the majority, or the abuse of power. Thus, he believed that autocracy was flawed because of its concentrated power without responsibility.
5
In the 20th century, Robert A. Dahl’s Polyarchy [1971] introduced the concept of polyarchy to describe systems of government that, though imperfect, have provided higher levels of citizen participation. For Dahl, democracy was not just the presence of elections; it also required pluralism that allows citizens to participate. This feature distinguishes democracy from authoritarianism. Dahl’s analysis examines the functioning of democracies and introduces measurable elements that distinguish democratic governance from autocracy.
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In the 21st century, Juan J. Linz and Larry Diamond have continued this lineage by exploring the conditions under which democracies fail and autocracies rise. Linz’s work, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes [2000], has focused on the breakdown of democratic regimes and the concept of “authoritarianism.” He has explained how this antagonism is fundamental in understanding the fragility of democracies and how democracy can devolve into autocratic rule under a single leader. Similarly, Larry Diamond’s The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World [2008] and In Search of Democracy [2015] have focused on “democratic backsliding,” where democracies have been in decline and given rise to authoritarianism. Both Linz and Diamond emphasized the importance of institutions, civil society, and the rule of law in maintaining democracy.
The constitutional principles outlined in the preceding discussion establish a framework in which authority is distributed, constrained, and made accountable. Yet the operation of that framework introduces a different question: how systems designed to limit power adapt when confronted with conditions that require decisive action. The transition from monarchical rule to representative government did not eliminate the need for decision. It relocated that necessity within a structure intended to contain it. The tension between rule and decision therefore persists, not as a defect, but as a condition inherent to governance itself.
This tension becomes visible in moments of crisis, when the pace of events exceeds the capacity of procedure. In Venezuela, states of emergency and economic exception have been repeatedly invoked in response to political and economic instability, granting the executive expanded authority to act without ordinary legislative mediation. These measures have been justified by reference to external threats, internal disorder, and the preservation of national stability. In such instances, decisiveness does not stand outside the constitutional order; it operates within it, but under altered conditions. The exception begins as a response to necessity.
What begins as a response to necessity can, through repetition, assume a different character. Measures introduced under conditions of urgency do not always recede when those conditions stabilize. In Venezuela, the repeated use of enabling laws and emergency decrees has allowed governance to proceed through executive decision in the absence of sustained legislative agreement. Over time, the exception has shifted from a temporary response to an available instrument. The language of necessity extends beyond its original scope, and the exception becomes a method through which governance proceeds.
This shift does not require the formal suspension of law. Institutions remain in place, and procedures continue to operate. Yet their function begins to change. Administrative and judicial bodies participate in this reorientation, as interpretations of constitutional authority permit the continuation of exceptional measures beyond their initial scope. The law persists, but its application becomes increasingly contingent on executive direction. What emerges is not the disappearance of legality, but its reconfiguration, in which the distinction between formal authority and practical implementation grows less stable.
The extension of the exception as a governing method introduces a limit that arises through use. The distinction between the ordinary and the exceptional gives the exception its meaning. When the language of necessity is invoked repeatedly across domains, that distinction begins to lose its clarity. Measures once justified as temporary responses appear with increasing frequency, and their recurrence alters the framework within which they are understood. What was introduced to address interruption becomes part of regular practice. Discretion expands, but its criteria become less discernible. The exception diminishes through extension, as the condition it was meant to identify becomes indistinguishable from ordinary governance.
This internal limit carries implications that extend beyond institutional design. When the exception ceases to be temporary, the constraints that once governed its use begin to weaken. Decisions justified in the language of necessity no longer refer back to a stable framework capable of evaluating them. In such conditions, practices introduced under claims of urgency—such as the restriction of civil society, the expansion of security measures, or the concentration of administrative authority—can persist without clear criteria for limitation. What follows is not an immediate transformation, but a gradual reorientation in which the concentration of decision becomes easier to justify and more difficult to resist.
7
Another thinker, Timothy Snyder, has emphasized the role of trust and transparency in the functioning of democracy. In The Road to Unfreedom [2018] and On Tyranny [2017], Snyder has argued that the waning of institutional trust, both in the judiciary and the media, is a tactic common in authoritarianism. He explains how autocratic leaders manipulate societal institutions by turning them into instruments of propaganda with merely a façade of governance.
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The relationship between an autocratic ruler and the people can be described as transactional: the autocrat provides security and stability in exchange for the people’s loyalty and their freedoms. Citizens become instruments for the maintenance of power. The leader cultivates an image that invites devotion and reinforces dependence, often in the language of protection and national necessity. What begins as reassurance in moments of uncertainty gradually diminishes accountability, as the concentration of decision is accepted as the condition for order.
9
A democracy remains viable only when the State is capable of constraining itself from taking advantage of its own power and privilege. This brings us to the topic at hand, which is the challenge faced by countries such as Venezuela, where political leaders have diminished the authority of the law by exempting themselves from its strictures. The framework designed to contain power is not formally abandoned. It is gradually reinterpreted, until the distinction between rule and exception no longer operates as a limit, but as a justification.
Ricardo F. Morín Infinity 32 13 “ x 15 ¾” Oil on linen 2009
Ricardo F. Morín
February 16, 2026
Oakland Park, Fl.
Religious belief and democratic life often meet within diverse societies where traditions, rituals, and outward identities differ, even as individuals share deeper ethical concerns. People turn to religion for meaning and conscience, while democratic life asks them to live alongside others whose practices and expressions vary. Tension becomes visible when superficial distinctions shape perception more than shared ethical ground, and when claims of moral authority seek to govern the shared civic space of others.
Plurality is a constant feature of democratic life. Individuals speak, listen, and respond in public meetings, civic gatherings, online exchanges, and everyday encounters where limits and freedom of expression meet. Expression that invites response, allows disagreement, or makes room for reconsideration can sustain coexistence, while expression framed as accusation, exclusion, or moral finality can narrow it. Political life adjusts to shifting advantage and immediate circumstance, while religious conscience often draws individuals toward standards held to endure across conflicts. Individuals move between these two demands, rarely able to resolve the tension between them. Religious and political judgment can align while remaining open to disagreement, even as individuals draw from moral frameworks that shape their conduct and traditions.
Religious expression often appears in public life through appeals to fairness, responsibility, and the dignity of persons. Such expressions shape how individuals frame their claims without requiring agreement on doctrine. When religious language enters public conversation as part of a shared ethical vocabulary, it can widen recognition without demanding uniform belief. People may not agree on belief, yet they may recognize common ground in the use of moral language. At times, religious communities identify ethical similarities across traditions, allowing plurality to remain workable within that recognition. When partisan pressures reframe difference as threat, markers such as creed, race, or culture become dividing lines, and shared ground recedes from view.
Difficulty emerges when religious identity becomes inseparable from partisan alignment and when public language becomes structured around accusation rather than mutual examination of ideas. Under such conditions, freedom of expression is interpreted less as civic difference and more as personal rejection. Expression itself is treated as evidence of allegiance rather than as an invitation to examination.
Another condition appears when citizens continue to recognize one another as legitimate participants despite differences that remain unresolved. Religious conviction shapes conscience, while democratic life maintains a space in which competing claims can exist without coercion. Individuals move between these spheres, sometimes comfortably and sometimes with strain, as they adjust boundaries, widen or narrow participation, and renegotiate coexistence over time.
People continue to move between religious conviction and democratic participation without resolving the tension between them. Some draw boundaries more firmly; others widen the space for coexistence, and many shift between both over time. The tension remains visible not as a problem to eliminate, but as part of how individuals understand themselves, claim authority, and live alongside others within a shared civic world.
Ricardo Morin Silence III 22’ x 30” Watercolor, graphite, gesso, acrylic on paper 2010
Ricardo F. Morín
February 15, 2026
Oakland Park, Fl
Rethinking Identity and Entitlement in Civic Life
The phrase “my people” draws lines. It signals allegiance before argument begins. It may express familiarity, shared memory, or recognition. Yet the same words separate one group from another. A boundary forms, often without intention. Those inside feel affirmed; those outside may feel unseen.
Such moments rarely begin as acts of exclusion. They arise from ordinary human impulses: the desire to protect what feels familiar, to defend what has been wounded, or to claim space where one has felt overlooked. But when identity becomes the primary language through which claims are made, conversations change. Disagreement becomes personal. Listening becomes strategic. The space where people meet as equals contracts.
Group identity has long provided people with strength and protection. It helps individuals recover dignity when they feel ignored or misunderstood, and it offers language through which shared experiences can be recognized. Yet the same force can also narrow perception. When group identity becomes the main lens through which people judge one another, ideas are weighed less on their merit and more on the speaker’s affiliation.
When ideas begin to be judged primarily through identity rather than merit, the change is often subtle. An exchange that begins openly can become defensive as participants look for signs of alignment or opposition. Words are weighed for allegiance. Questions are interpreted as challenges rather than invitations to examine ideas together. Over time, dialogue shifts from exploration toward defense of positions. Judgment shifts from the merit of an idea to the standing of the speaker.
Many people carry an expectation into public life that they will be treated consistently. Uneven rules are recognized quickly. When identity determines whose voice counts before ideas are heard, trust weakens not only among those excluded, but also among those unsure whether they are seen as individuals or as representatives of a category.
Problems deepen when identity stops being one part of a person’s experience and begins to overshadow all others. Public debate narrows. Arguments are interpreted as attacks on identity rather than disagreements over ideas. People feel compelled to defend positions not because they are persuaded by them, but because reconsidering publicly may be treated as betrayal. The result is not stronger community, but increasing rigidity, where listening carries risk and reconsideration feels unsafe.
People turn toward simplification and absolutism to reduce uncertainty and relieve the strain of complexity. This tendency does not permanently define human interaction; it marks moments when ambiguity feels intolerable and certainty appears easier to sustain. Certainty offers relief, but it reduces the space in which plurality can endure. The tension itself does not disappear; only the way people attempt to manage it changes.
Contemporary communication technologies accelerate the circulation and visibility of opinion. Expressions that promise certainty or provoke fear travel farther and faster; expressions that sustain ambiguity move more slowly. This circulation amplifies tendencies toward simplification, reinforcing what attracts attention rather than what withstands examination.
When identity becomes the basis for deciding who others are before dialogue takes shape, examination gives way to labeling. Nuance is set aside. Individuals become symbols of larger struggles, and ordinary encounters carry the weight of broader conflicts. Under these conditions, disagreement resembles confrontation even when intentions remain sincere.
Public life rests on an expectation that the same rules apply to all. Uneven application becomes visible when some voices are heard more readily than others or when identity determines credibility before ideas are considered. Under these conditions, conversation shifts from exchange toward competition for recognition, and the possibility of shared judgment becomes more difficult to sustain.
The tension does not belong to one group alone; this situation affects everyone who participates in public life. Each person seeks recognition while fearing misinterpretation. Attempts to resolve disagreement through persuasion alone often reach limits beyond individual control. Listening, under these conditions, does not erase distance but allows interaction to continue despite it.
Differences remain, and disagreement persists. The lines that divide do not disappear; they shift, harden, or soften as people respond to one another in ordinary encounters. Living together does not remove tension; living together reveals tension. No shared answer resolves the matter. Each person must decide how to respond and how to live alongside others within limits no one fully controls.
Ricardo F Morín Window I 8” x 10” Watercolor and ink on paper 2003
Ricardo F. Morín
February 18, 2026
Oakland Park, Fl
1 Most people first recognize vulnerability not through abstract reflection but when ordinary functions change. Sleep becomes fragmented. Movement requires calculation. Attention shifts toward signals that once remained unnoticed. Human life begins not from stability but from exposure. The body exists within conditions it does not fully control and must continuously adapt to forces that exceed intention. Vulnerability is not an exception. It is a structural condition of being alive. Wellbeing does not remove this condition. It reorganizes how one lives within it.
2 Attempts to explain healing often rely on simplified narratives of control, positivity, or emotional purification. Such narratives overlook the complexity through which biological systems regulate themselves. Hormones, neural pathways, immune responses, and behavioral patterns operate through feedback rather than command. The organism adjusts through interaction, not through absolute mastery. Understanding this distinction allows healing to be viewed less as conquest over illness and more as participation in an ongoing process of regulation.
3 Mental practices such as meditation, visualization, or structured breathing may influence physiological states. Their value lies not in eliminating difficulty but in altering how perception interacts with bodily response. Attention can change tension, breathing patterns can modify autonomic responses, and emotional framing can influence how stress signals are interpreted. These practices do not replace biological realities. They operate within existing physiological processes.
4 Many discussions of emotional life rely on familiar language about resentment or anger without examining how such patterns function in practice. Emotional fixation narrows perception because it reduces the range of possible interpretations available to the mind. When attention becomes rigid, the body often reflects that rigidity through muscular contraction, altered breathing, or disrupted sleep. Recognizing this does not deny legitimate grievances. It clarifies how sustained cognitive patterns shape physiological experience. What appears biologically as regulation appears conceptually as participation.
5 Healing must also acknowledge limits. Not all illness can be traced to emotional origin, and not all suffering yields explanation. Biological variability, environmental exposure, and genetic inheritance create outcomes that cannot be reduced to intention or belief. Humility recognizes that the absence of explanation neither invalidates the search for meaning nor guarantees it.
6 Contemporary medical technology introduces a further dimension into this landscape. Adaptive systems capable of measuring neural activity and adjusting stimulation in real time demonstrate that regulation is inherently dynamic. The nervous system functions through continuous feedback loops. Closed loop neuromodulation technologies reveal this principle by making adjustment visible and measurable. Rather than blocking pain entirely, such systems alter how signals are transmitted and interpreted, and allow the body to reorganize patterns that have become fixed through chronic strain.
7 Technology in this context does not replace the organism. It participates alongside it. The device measures electrical responses, modifies stimulation within clinical parameters, and supports gradual adaptation rather than immediate elimination of discomfort. This reflects a shift in how regulation is understood. Healing increasingly involves collaboration between biological systems and external adaptive tools. The boundary between internal regulation and technological assistance becomes relational rather than oppositional.
8 Because of this shift, improvement may appear indirectly. Functional changes such as more consistent sleep, increased movement, or reduced hesitation in daily tasks often emerge before subjective perception of pain changes significantly. The nervous system learns through repetition across time rather than through instant resolution. Observing patterns over days or weeks becomes more meaningful than evaluating isolated moments.
9 The language of self healing therefore requires revision. Healing does not imply independence from vulnerability. It involves learning to inhabit vulnerability with greater precision, supported by practices, relationships, and technologies that expand the range of possible responses. Faith, meditation, medical science, and personal discipline may each contribute, not as competing explanations but as complementary modes of engagement with the unknown.
10 Experience itself does not provide ultimate meaning. Meaning arises from how experience is integrated into awareness. When experience is treated as proof of certainty, rigidity follows. When experience is held as information rather than identity, adaptation remains possible. The aim is not to silence the mind or eliminate difficulty, but to allow perception to remain flexible enough to respond to change.
11 Healing, then, is neither purely psychological nor purely technological. It is the ongoing negotiation between organism and environment, perception and physiology, vulnerability and adaptation. Modern tools may refine this negotiation by providing new forms of feedback, yet the underlying condition remains unchanged. Human beings continue to live within limits while developing new ways to respond to them. The task is not to escape vulnerability but to regulate within it.
Pragmatism is often introduced as realism. It presents itself as sobriety, maturity, and an aversion to illusion. It speaks in the language of what is workable rather than what is desirable. In doing so, pragmatism claims distance from ideology while it reproduces those outcomes.
Over time, pragmatism ceases to describe a method and begins to function as a posture. It becomes a way of signaling seriousness. Principles are reframed as luxuries, and conviction is recoded as rigidity. Ethical limits are not rejected outright. They are treated as impractical.
Following resilience, pragmatism completes the turn from endurance to acceptance. Where resilience asks subjects to adapt, pragmatism asks them to agree that adaptation is reasonable. Acceptance is praised as intelligence rather than surrender. To object is to misunderstand how the world works.
As pragmatism takes hold, alternatives begin to narrow. Choices are reduced to what can be implemented immediately. The possible gives way to the manageable. What cannot be implemented within existing constraints is dismissed as irrelevant.
Pragmatism does not deny ethics. It postpones them. At the level of justification, it becomes a way of saying not now. Delay substitutes for refusal. Deferral replaces judgment. Both shift limits from decision into timing.
The consequences of this posture are unevenly distributed. Those insulated from outcomes are most often positioned to define what counts as pragmatic. Those exposed to the effects are asked to live with the decision. Pragmatism travels downward, while consequence does not travel upward.
Pragmatism governs by tone rather than by argument. It favors calm over urgency and composure over insistence. Passion is treated as disqualifying, while restraint is taken as evidence of reason. In this way, pragmatism closes debate without explicitly doing so.
What pragmatism is, then, is a method for choosing among constrained options. It is a response to limitation. It is a tool.
What pragmatism is not is an ethic. It is not a justification for abandoning limits. It is not evidence that what is available is sufficient.
Observations On Perception 