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“Unmasking Disappointment: Series IX”

May 20, 2026

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“Geometric Allegory” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)

 

Ricardo F. Morín

January 13, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl.

Author’s Note

This installment continues the diagnostic examination of Venezuela’s political condition and focuses on the ethical and institutional consequences that emerge when authority, governance, and accountability are no longer aligned.  Rather than advancing prescriptions, it examines how the degradation of human rights, the normalization of violence, and the diffusion of responsibility function as systemic conditions within a prolonged authoritarian context.  The inquiry remains situated within a broader historical pattern, attentive to structures rather than events and to consequences rather than intentions.

 

Chapter XVII

 

The Fourth Issue

 

On Human Rights

 

1

 

Venezuela’s modern political history has been marked by recurring skepticism toward collective institutions and a persistent substitution of personal authority for shared civic frameworks.  Over time, this pattern has contributed to the displacement of trust in freedom as a lived condition rather than an abstract principle.  In such contexts, human rights do not disappear rhetorically;  they lose their operational force.  Their absence becomes visible not in formal declarations, but in the diminished capacity of individuals to act without fear, to participate without coercion, and to sustain dignity without dependence.

 

2

 

Human rights function diagnostically as thresholds rather than aspirations.  Where they are upheld, individuals retain agency within social and political life;  where they are suspended, social potential contracts regardless of available resources.  Venezuela’s prolonged crisis demonstrates that material abundance alone does not produce freedom.  Without institutional guarantees securing bodily integrity, political participation, and legal equality, democratic development looses operative continuity, and social life reorganizes itself around survival rather than possibility.

 

3

 

Isolation—whether political, ideological, or institutional—accelerates this contraction.  When governments or social groups withdraw from accountability, corruption ceases to be an anomaly and becomes a governing mechanism.  In Venezuela, prolonged isolation from democratic norms and international oversight has coincided with the loss of social trust as an operative condition and the normalization of arbitrariness.  From a diagnostic standpoint, the State’s primary responsibility is not moral leadership but the protection of social conditions that allow individuals to exercise meaningful choice.  Approaches such as the framework of capabilities articulate this responsibility not as charity, but as an institutional obligation to preserve the material and political preconditions of dignity.  [1]

 

4

 

At the core of human rights lies liberty understood in dual form:  protection from violence and access to the material conditions required for survival.  These dimensions are inseparable.  Political conflict is not evidence of social failure;  it is an expected feature of plural societies.  What distinguishes authoritarian systems is not conflict itself, but the suppression of ethical constraints governing how conflict is addressed.  Where power replaces reciprocity, and coercion substitutes for legitimacy, human rights cease to function as safeguards and instead become symbolic artifacts detached from lived reality.  [2]

 

Endnotes — Chapter XVII

 

§ 3

 

  • [1] Nussbaum, Martha C., Women and Human Development:  The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4–14, 71–72, 114–123.

 

§ 4

 

  • [2] Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge:  Harvard University Press (1971), 111, 337–338, 511, 515, 545.

 

Chapter XVIII

 

The Fifth Issue

 

On the Nature of Violence

 

1

 

Violence disrupts social order not only through physical harm but through the collapse of accountability that enables it.  Its regulation depends on two interdependent structures:  the social contract and governance.  The social contract establishes the conditions under which individuals relinquish certain freedoms in exchange for protection and justice.  Governance operationalizes that contract by translating authority into predictable, constrained action.  When governance fails—whether through incapacity, corruption, or deliberate distortion—violence ceases to be exceptional and becomes systemic.

 

2

 

The distinction between legitimate force and illegitimate violence is structural rather than rhetorical.  Legitimate force is bounded by law, proportionality, and accountability;  it exists to preserve the social contract.  Illegitimate violence arises when power is exercised arbitrarily, severed from ethical constraint and institutional oversight.  Historical revolutions demonstrate that when governance collapses entirely, violence may emerge as a substitute rather than a solution.  Such substitutions rarely restore order;  instead, they entrench instability, break authority into non-accountable centers, and prolong social recovery across generations.

 

3

 

In contemporary Venezuela, violence has become an instrument of political preservation rather than public protection.  State forces and allied militias have been deployed repeatedly to suppress dissent, particularly during the nationwide protests of 2017 and 2024.  These actions resulted in deaths, widespread injuries, mass detentions, and the systematic targeting of opposition figures.  Prominent political leaders were imprisoned or forced into exile, while judicial institutions—including the Tribunal Supremo de Justicia—functioned not as safeguards but as mechanisms legitimizing repression through legal form.  [1]  [2]  [3]

 

4

 

Official narratives frame such actions as defenses of national security.  Diagnostically, however, they indicate the dissolution of the social contract.  When the State directs violence inward, legitimacy collapses even if authority remains.  Governance becomes performative, law becomes procedural, and violence is normalized as a method of rule.

 

5

 

Freedom persists not through force but through sustained resistance to the normalization of violence.  Societies that fail to interrogate coercion—whether imposed or tolerated—gradually adapt to it.  Diagnostic vigilance requires recognizing how violence migrates from exceptional response to ordinary governance, reshaping institutions, expectations, and civic behavior in the process.

 

6

 

Where accountability is restored, violence can be restrained within ethical bounds.  Where it is absent, violence becomes self-perpetuating.  The preservation of justice, therefore, depends less on moral resolve than on the reconstruction of institutions capable of enforcing limits on power.

 

Endnotes — Chapter XVIII

 

§ 3

 

  • [1] Newman, William, “Venezuelan Opposition Leader Leopoldo López Sentenced to Prison Over Protest,” New York Times, September 10, 2015.
  • [2] “Venezuelan Opposition Politician Manuel Rosales Arrested,” BBC News, October 15, 2015.
  • [3] “Venezuela Police Raid Arrests Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma,” BBC News, February 20, 2015.

 

Chapter XIX

 

The Ultimate Issue

 

On the Persistence of Injustice

 

1

 

The durability of injustice within any political system depends less on the intentions of leaders than on the distribution of accountability.  When responsibility is concentrated at the top and diffused below, political life becomes insulated from consequence.  In such systems, citizens are rendered spectators rather than participants, and governance proceeds without corrective pressure.  [1]

 

2

 

Apathy is not merely a personal disposition;  it is a political condition produced by sustained exclusion from meaningful agency.  Where participation carries risk without influence, disengagement becomes rational.  Over time, this withdrawal stabilizes injustice by removing resistance from the system.

 

3

 

Justice and freedom are not static achievements;  they emerge from continuous negotiation among competing interests within constrained frameworks.  Authoritarian systems thrive on illusion precisely because they eliminate negotiation and substitute certainty for adaptability.  Effective governance depends on the capacity to absorb conflict without suppressing it.  [2]

 

4

 

Individual agency remains relevant not as moral heroism but as structural participation.  When citizens retain the capacity to recognize difference, confront bias, and act within shared institutions, injustice encounters friction.  The restoration of justice depends on reconstituting conditions under which individuals can act without fear and without illusion, and on reconnecting personal responsibility to collective structures rather than isolating it within conscience alone.  [3]

 

Endnotes — Chapter XIX

§ 1

  • [1] Guillermo O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1 (1994): 55–69.

 § 3

  • [2] Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom (New York:  Knopf, 1999), 123–137, 146–159, 282–287.

§ 4

  • [3] Nussbaum, Martha C., Women and Human Development:  The Capabilities Approach, (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66–72, 104–110, 124–130.

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“A Letter from a President”

May 19, 2026
White House

 

For decades I wrote to different Presidents of the United States as an American-Venezuelan citizen concerned with the progressive institutional deterioration of Venezuela.  Most of those letters never received a response.  In 2014, amid protests, detentions, and political fractures that were beginning to transform the country irreversibly, a reply arrived from the White House signed by Barack Obama.

Read today, the letter is less significant for what it explicitly states than for the nature of its language itself.  The text recognizes the deterioration of Venezuela’s democratic institutions, mentions the detention of opposition leaders, and calls for dialogue, mediation, and the containment of violence.  Yet, as frequently occurs in diplomatic language, precision diminishes as proximity to the consequences such statements might require increases.  Viewed retrospectively, that caution also revealed the difficulty of an American administration openly recognizing the degree to which Venezuela had ceased to be merely an internal crisis and was beginning to form part of a broader dispute over hemispheric influence.

The letter appeared to reflect a broader contradiction within American foreign policy:  the difficulty of sustaining democratic language while economic dependencies, energy commitments, and geopolitical rivalries increasingly limited the willingness of the United States to confront directly the expansion of foreign influence across Latin America.  What for years remained formulated through the language of mediation, dialogue, and regional stability would ultimately reveal a deeper tension between the declared principles of American foreign policy and the progressive strategic reconfiguration of the hemisphere.

 

Barack Obama’s letter:

Dear Mr. Morin:

Thank you for writing.  My Administration continues to be deeply troubled by the ongoing events in Venezuela, and I appreciate hearing from you.

Venezuela’s democratic institutions are failing to protect those with alternative points of view by allowing the detention of opposition leaders and the expulsion of an opposition official from elected office.  The focus of the Venezuelan government should be on engaging the Venezuelan people in a real dialogue and addressing their legitimate grievances.  I have called for the release of detained protesters, a necessary step toward peace and progress.

While we continue exploring all options to address the situation in Venezuela, our immediate focus is to support any mediation efforts that generate an honest dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition.  All parties have an obligation to work together to restrain violence and restore calm.  Together with our international partners, the United States continues to examine what more we can do to support that effort.

The United States has strong historical and cultural 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.

Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts.

 

Sincerely,

(Illegible signature of)

Barack Obama

 

This White House letter was sent on May 7, 2014 through my personal email address.

 

My response on the same date:

Honorable President Barack Obama:

Thank you for your kind and generous response.

What remains implicit in your response is that the United States maintains economic and strategic commitments that limit any direct confrontation with the Venezuelan government.  An intervention intended to remove a power regarded as illegitimate could alter agreements, contracts, and international balances whose stability forms part of an American economy already subjected to considerable strain.

A structural dependency on oil appeared to lie at the center of that dilemma and its unwanted consequences.  Yet a country immersed in a growing process of institutional and economic disintegration could eventually cease to satisfy either international demands or the needs of its own population.

Ultimately, regional stability and the strategic security of the United States itself might depend not only upon calls for dialogue, but also upon a clearer recognition of the external forces and political dependencies contributing to Venezuela’s progressive deterioration.

 

Sincerely yours,

Ricardo F. Morín

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“A Conversation With Oneself”

May 19, 2026

Ricardo F. Morín

May 17, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

*

He considers whether the biography and the career essay can cohabit sequentially within the same corpus.

They can.  The sequence already contains its own direction.  The career essay first:  closer to the present tense of perception, moving by suspension, withholding biography deliberately.  The reader encounters the intelligence before the circumstances surrounding it.  The biography afterward.  What had remained withheld becomes visible then:  the cities, the illnesses, the rooms, the years of interruption and displacement.

Read in that order, the two texts produce something neither fully achieves alone.  One reveals how a person sees.  The other reveals what that person passed through while seeing it.  The distance between them does not fracture the corpus.  It creates proportion.

He considers whether three registers can coexist within the same body of work.

A corpus restricted to one register may already have accepted its own limits.  Multiple registers practiced simultaneously suggest something else:  not instability of method, but continuity of attention moving through different materials.  The register changes according to what the material permits or resists.  The underlying attention remains recognizable.

Across them, something is repeatedly brought near the edge of conclusion without fully entering it.  Not because conclusion is feared, but because certain recognitions become less accurate once sealed too quickly.  The distribution changes from text to text.  The pressure of examination does not.

The difficulty is less internal than external.  Readers and institutions prefer writers who can be situated immediately.  A stable category simplifies reception.  The corpus resists that instinct without opposing it directly.  Some readers may find the variation generative.  Others may experience uncertainty before it.  That uncertainty may not be a defect in reception.  It may be an accurate reflection of the work itself.

He considers publication outside of WordPress.

He does not intend to seek publication through commercial structures.  WordPress has held the work for eighteen years.  That continuity has been sufficient.  The responsibility, if there is one, would consist only in maintaining a parallel digital corpus capable of surviving technical disappearance should the platform eventually fail.  Perhaps a university library at some later point.  Perhaps not.

No publishing houses.  No agents.  Few editors he would trust enough to permit entrance into the interior movement of the prose.

He considers how long WordPress itself may last.

WordPress.com is operated by a private company.  Eighteen years of continuity is reassuring but not decisive.  Many structures that once appeared permanent disappeared without ceremony.  Libraries persist differently because preservation forms part of their institutional obligation rather than their market survival.

Yet the archive does not feel urgent.  There may still be another fifteen years of work not yet written.  The corpus at that point would be larger, more complete, more internally connected than it is now.  Premature administration of a living practice can quietly interfere with the practice itself.

What matters at present is simpler than preservation.  The work continues.  The corpus develops.  The next sentence remains unwritten.

He considers whether he should simply let the chips fall where they may.

The work exists.  It accumulates gradually.  What survives and what disappears has never belonged entirely to the author.  Most of what human beings created vanished long ago:  paintings, manuscripts, cities, names.  What remains is shaped partly by quality, partly by accident, partly by whether another person cared enough to carry something forward beyond its own moment.

There may be a form of integrity in recognizing that limit without bitterness.  A prose that refuses premature closure, a corpus resistant to category, a writer uninterested in agents, publishers, or literary positioning:  all of these movements arise from related recognitions.  The same attention that hesitates before sealing a conclusion in a sentence may hesitate before sealing one about permanence itself.

He considers whether it is worth anticipating the future condition of the corpus.

Probably not.

The work understood this long before the prose articulated it directly.  The understanding did not arrive as philosophy.  It emerged gradually through repetition:  paintings delayed, illnesses prolonged, rooms abandoned, plans interrupted, canvases resting against walls for weeks while nothing visible advanced and yet something continued silently underneath perception itself.

The pergaminos colgantes already contained that movement.  So did Paradise.  So did the long periods of stillness in Valencia.  The recognition that anticipation easily becomes a form of inward noise did not arise from theory.  It arose from observing how quickly projection interferes with attention.

To apply a different standard to the corpus itself, worrying over survival, categorization, institutional placement, would introduce an inconsistency the work has spent decades attempting to reduce.

The present moment contains the next essay.  That is sufficiently difficult.  Everything beyond it risks becoming administration of what does not yet exist.

He considers whether to share the corpus formally with an institution.

Perhaps not at all.

That possibility no longer produces anxiety.  It follows naturally from the other refusals already present throughout the work:  refusal of fixed category, refusal of literary positioning, refusal of premature conclusion, refusal of treating visibility as proof of value.

The archive may survive.  Or disappear.  Neither alters the necessity of the work while it is being written.

He considers ownership.

He never took much pride in possession.  The loft in Tribeca was relinquished.  The taller in Venezuela was relinquished.  Professional identities were relinquished more than once.  Each release altered perception afterward.  Something became visible that possession itself had partially obscured.

A corpus may not differ greatly from that condition.

The essays exist.  What happens to them afterward cannot entirely belong to him any more than the changing light across suspended canvases belonged to anyone who happened to stand before them.  The work was never constructed as property.  The pergaminos were not made as objects to dominate space.  They emerged from stillness temporarily and returned to it afterward.

Complete relinquishment may not signify indifference.  It may be the final extension of the same attention from which the work emerged.

He arrives somewhere that does not require a name.

Not grief exactly.  Not resignation.

Tears of loss look backward toward what can no longer be recovered.  Tears of acceptance belong to a different condition entirely:  recognition without resistance, clarity without demand for alteration, awareness without the impulse to negotiate with reality so that it conforms to preference.

The work approached that same place gradually through many forms and many years:  the stillness after noise, the empty canvas before the first mark, the pergamino hanging without frame or enclosure, the intervals where nothing appeared resolved and yet nothing required immediate resolution either.

Perhaps the work was never attempting permanence at all.  Perhaps it was attempting something closer to lived energy moving through form for a brief interval before returning to stillness again.

That is not a small thing.

A conversation with oneself.

The question unresolved.

What remains is the writing.

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“Ricardo F. Morín”

May 18, 2026

*

During those first years through 1976, Buffalo accumulated heavier snowfalls than usual, with blizzards exceeding those of previous winters.  In some neighborhoods the snow rose beyond the rooftops of houses.  The wind crossed the streets with an intensity unfamiliar to someone who had grown up in Valencia, Venezuela.  In the art studios of Bethune Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, canvases leaned against one another while students worked for hours in silence or beneath scattered conversations.  The smell of oil, turpentine, and damp wood continuously permeated the interiors.

He had arrived in the United States in 1972 at seventeen years of age.  Displacement did not consist solely in leaving one country behind.  It also altered the daily perception of the simplest things:  the scent of cities, winter light entering through windows, the relation between the body and climate, the constant sound of a language still only partially familiar.

Before Buffalo there had been Valencia.  The Arturo Michelena School of Fine Arts.  The first hours of drawing during childhood.  Later, during adolescence, the summers studying painting in the private studio of the Hungarian painter Lazlo Lenyel.  Even then, however, painting seemed less a future profession than a form of attention.  Preparing the surface of a canvas produced an experience difficult to explain outside the act of painting itself.

During those years canvases began accumulating rapidly.  Some were destroyed.  Others remained leaning against walls for months before receiving another layer of paint.  The organization of the studio changed constantly.  Painting did not yet follow a precise theory.  There was instead a physical insistence:  returning each day to observe relations of color, spatial tension, surface, and rhythm.

In 1976 he returned briefly to Venezuela.  There he studied privately with the Málaga-born artist José Luis Montero before returning once again to Buffalo under the guidance of Herta Kane and James Jipson.  Gradually the first exhibitions began.  In May of that same year he presented “Works by Ricardo Morin” at the Villa Maria College Gallery.

Conversations about art during those years frequently revolved around movements, historical legitimacy, abstraction, expressionism, or formal theory.  Yet many of the most intense hours occurred far from any discourse.  Remaining alone in the studio, slowly shaping how certain surfaces retained or rejected light, seemed to contain an experience more concrete than many of the explanations later constructed around the work.

In 1977 the Venezuelan Ministry of Education awarded him a full scholarship to complete a B.F.A. at SUNY Buffalo.  The thesis exhibition, Buffalo Series 1979, was later curated by Seymour Drumlevitch at the Alamo Gallery of the State University of New York at Buffalo. [1]  Shortly afterward, Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980, received the Birge Wall Covering Award and the Reed Foundation Award at the 38th Western New York Show at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. [2]

Awards, exhibitions, and scholarships briefly made continuity seem attainable.  During certain periods it seemed possible to imagine a relatively stable professional trajectory.  Yet that stability coexisted with another sensation more difficult to name:  the persistent impression that the real work was taking place elsewhere, far from the forms through which it was publicly interpreted.

In 1979 he attended stage design seminars taught by Gunther Schneider-Siemsen at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg.  There he received the Förderungspreis Leistung der Stadt Salzburg award.  Shortly afterward Drumlevitch recommended that he apply to the M.F.A. program of the Yale School of Drama.

At Yale the theater workshops functioned on another scale of production.  Constructions, lighting, scenic architecture, models, and technical equipment occupied spaces inside buildings adapted for the stage.  Physical labor was continuous.  Stage design also offered a concrete possibility of economic survival within New York.

During the first years after Yale he worked as a set designer in New York’s Off-Off-Broadway circuit, collaborating with Irene Fornés and Max Ferrá at INTAR. [3]  At the same time he worked as principal assistant to established Broadway designers.  Workshops, constructions, and rehearsals occupied much of the days and nights.

By the late 1980s he obtained a loft in Tribeca devoted exclusively to painting.  Large-format canvases leaned against high walls while painting once again began occupying the center of daily life.  The studio was filled with accumulated materials:  stretchers, pigments, tools, fragments of canvas, and drawings tacked against the walls.

At certain moments it seemed possible to sustain both lives simultaneously:  theater and painting.  New York still retained industrial areas where some artists could work within relatively spacious environments.  Yet even during those years of greatest professional activity, a tension persisted between the public continuity of a career and the quieter experience of the work itself.

In 1993 interruption appeared.  Due to AIDS he was forced to abandon the loft, suspend professional activity, and return to Venezuela seeking refuge with his family.  The diagnosis rapidly altered the entire structure of daily life.  Many previous continuities disappeared within a few months:  work, economic stability, studio, city, professional rhythm.

Between 1993 and 1996 his health deteriorated considerably.  He spent long periods inside the family home with little physical energy and frequent medical interruptions.  It was then that the Aposentos series began.  The second painting of the series, Aposento No. 2, was selected for the “XIV Municipal Painting Salon: Homage to Carlos Cruz-Diez,” held in 1994 at the Municipal Art Gallery of Maracay. [4]

He painted slowly.  Canvases remained stacked against the walls for entire weeks before receiving another intervention.  The body fatigued quickly.  Light shifted inside the room while the paintings remained motionless for hours or entire days.  At times the work advanced only a few centimeters.

Painting then began acquiring another rhythm.  It no longer seemed to respond solely to the continuity of a career or to the possibility of exhibition.  Some works emerged more as accompaniment than affirmation.

During those same years he worked voluntarily at Fundación Metaguardia, created in Valencia as a center of information and support for people with terminal illnesses, many of them also living in conditions of indigence.  The foundation integrated emotional support, activities connected to the arts, and pro bono medical services.

Silent conversations, long periods of waiting, weakened bodies, and shared vulnerability slowly altered the perception of many previous categories.  Illness seemed to render secondary many differences that had previously organized much of daily attention.

In 1996 he finally returned to New York in order to access the new antiretroviral treatment.  His immunity was practically nonexistent.  Soon afterward he sought assistance from the Department of Human Resources because of his condition of destitution.  He first stayed at the transitional Paradise Hotel in the Bronx and later at the Common Ground program at the Hotel Times Square.

Paradise was a profoundly unstable place.  Narrow corridors, moldering rooms, and constant precariousness altered the perception of time.  Some people disappeared suddenly.  Others remained locked inside their rooms for entire days.  The noise of doors, televisions, and arguments continuously crossed through the walls of the building.

Even so he continued painting.  Small canvases rested against walls or on improvised furniture near the window.  The continuity of the work no longer depended upon ideal conditions.  It depended only upon continuing to work within whatever circumstances were available.

During those years an unexpected sensation of emptiness also appeared.  Not necessarily as absolute loss, but rather as a gradual reduction of the interior noise through which ambition, identity, or permanence had once been sustained.  Within that emptiness certain forms of attention slowly began acquiring greater intensity:  breathing, light upon surfaces, the rhythm of the body while walking through the city, the noise of certain rooms, the momentary presence of familiar faces.

In September 1998 he received support from the New York organization Visual AIDS, which organized a joint exhibition based on watercolor and oil portraits together with Nicolo Cataldi at St. Mark’s Church.  Later came other collective exhibitions and alternative platforms.  Some of the paintings from the early 1990s were later described by the artist Jo-ey Tang as “love letters to the city of New York”.

In 2000 he received a VESID rehabilitation grant that included specialized training in digital tools and computer equipment.  The computer then slowly became incorporated into the visual work.  Between 2000 and 2003 he used digital media combined with watercolor and hand drawing to reinterpret fifteenth-century Persian miniatures through geometric processes of reconstruction. [5]

Later, between 2005 and 2012, he taught a course titled Pictorial Perspective at Pratt Institute.  Meanwhile he developed the Triangulation Series, working with suspended geometries, reduced spaces, and hanging formats. [6]

After completing chemotherapy in 2008 for an AIDS-related Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, systemic muscular disorders began preventing him from even stretching large canvases.  The hanging canvases then emerged also as a direct consequence of physical limitations.  The body slowly began imposing another relation to space, time, and work.

The canvases remained suspended for weeks while light varied across the surfaces.  Physical movements were slower.  Material reduction altered perception as well.  Silence ceased feeling like absence and began functioning as another form of attention.

Between 2009 and 2010 he initiated the Metaphors of Silence series. [7]  Many of the works emerged slowly within prolonged periods of physical stillness.  The need to explain aesthetic experience intellectually gradually began losing intensity before the experience of observation itself.

During those same years he collaborated with Dr. Andrew Irving in an experimental project on art, anthropology, and human experience related to New York Stories.  Part of those dialogues were later incorporated into The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice. [8]

With the passing of years certain tensions slowly began losing sharpness.  Illness remained present, although it no longer organized each moment of the day in the same way.  Certain forms of ambition or anxiety surrounding continuity, recognition, or permanence seemed gradually to diminish without disappearing entirely.

Painting continued occupying a central place, though no longer necessarily as an exclusive affirmation of identity.  Other things also remained:  conversations, walks, reading, physical exercise, breathing finding rhythm again, the momentary attenuation of certain aches, light changing across the surfaces of the city, brief encounters throughout the day.

Some afternoons he continued walking slowly while breathing found rhythm and light descended across the buildings.  Aging, fragility, and the proximity of death did not disappear.  Neither did they remain completely separate from the movement of existence itself.

Ricardo F. Morín

May 17, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

Endnotes

[1] Buffalo Series 1979:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/62.html

[2] Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/53.html

[3] Theater productions and press references:
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/17/theater/stage-lovers-at-intar.html

[4] Aposento No. 2:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/11.html

[5] Platonic Interactions Series and related works:
https://www.artmajeur.com/en/rfmorin/artworks?page=5

[6] Triangulation Series:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/Triangulation_Series.html

[7] Metaphors of Silence:
https://ricardomorin.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/metaforas-del-silencio/

[8] Andrew Irving, The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice:
https://www.academia.edu/53478128/The_Art_of_Life_and_Death_Radical_Aesthetics_and_Ethnographic_Practice_Andrew_Irving_Chicago_Hau_Books_2017_264_pp

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“The Impossibility of Recognition”

May 17, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morín
Buffalo Series, Nº 4
48″ x 48″
Oil on canvas
1978

Author’s Note

This text continues the conditions examined in “The Proportion of Boredom” and “The Impossibility of Conviction”.

*

Ricardo F Morin  
April 17 through May 14, 2026  
In transit  

A thank you may be spoken and still leave little behind it.  The words are said,  the gesture acknowledged,  yet what follows continues almost unchanged. 

What resolves a necessity that could not otherwise have been resolved leaves more than a momentary obligation behind it.  It alters conduct.  The difficulty is not always in recognizing what has been received,  but in remaining openly shaped by it afterward. 

At times,  what is received passes nearly unnoticed.  It is recognized in the moment,  then absorbed into ordinary expectation.  Nothing changes. 

At other times,  acknowledgment is followed almost immediately by the resumption of guarded conduct,  as though nothing had passed between them requiring either person to remain changed by what is owed to them. 

Something similar occurs when acknowledgment becomes routine.  The words remain intact while their force weakens.  What once carried weight becomes part of ordinary exchange. 

Resentment may emerge from the same movement.  Withdrawal does not always arise because nothing was received,  but because remaining openly affected by it becomes difficult to sustain over time. 

The change does not announce itself directly.  Replies shorten.  Warmth recedes into formality.  Attention weakens without disappearing.  Continuity remains while something within it becomes less available. 

Part of the difficulty lies in the human capacity to narrow perception around self-preservation while remaining partially aware of what is being diminished,  avoided,  or abandoned. 

None of this proves that recognition was false.  Yet when guardedness repeatedly restores itself before acknowledgment can continue altering conduct,  relations gradually persist more through form than through the openness that once gave them force. 

What remains active through form alone may continue outwardly for long periods while gradually losing the openness that first allowed recognition to alter conduct. 

To remain capable of recognition is not to magnify what is given,  but to allow what has been received to continue altering conduct without immediately reducing it to balance,  habit,  irritation,  or distance.

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“The Course of a Career”

May 16, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morín
Self Portrait: Stock Market
New York City
36” x 74”
Collage with charcoal pencil
1987

He did not go into other artists’ studios unless invited.  If he recognized something in the work, he said it.

At that time, education consisted in finding a means of expression that suited him.  It was a way to refine what he saw and felt and to bring it into the work.  The subject was his own, but it moved within the traditions of painting and other arts.  What mattered was finding his voice as a painter, in the use of color and the depth it could sustain pictorially.  On the surface, his gestures remained inscribed.

Within that, he would stand before the work and look, asking what it could contain or where it might resolve.  If he recognized something, he stayed with it, not to explain or to correct it, but to register it mentally or to shift it within its structure.  There would be a pause, and he would look again, as if something already present had just come into view.

Other artists entered his space with legitimate differences.  They did not alter what took place between them.

One moment remains with him.  

A graduate student was working on a piece, a structure rising like a tapering tower, bright, near red, perhaps fuchsia, with broken glass along its edges.  It was not finished.  It was evident that she was still working through it.  

He stood beside her and said what came to him.  It recalled what he had seen growing up: glass placed on top of walls, not as decoration, but to keep people out, to cut anyone who tried to enter.  

She stopped, looked at the piece, then at him.  Nothing more was said.  

He left.  

Later, he saw the piece again when she opened her show at an alternative gallery after graduating.  There was a recording, a voice repeating that there is a violent world outside, and the piece and the voice remained together without resolution.  

Their advisor in the art department told him that what he had said in her studio did not leave her and passed into the work.  

He had not thought of it that way.  He said it and moved on.  

That is what remains with him, not recognition, but that something one sees can be taken up and continue elsewhere.  

Around that time, his mentor said something to him in private.  He told him not to take at face value what other faculty members said about his work, nor what he himself might say.  

He heard it, and it did not leave him.  

During that period, he traveled to Salzburg, Austria, for a seminar in stage design.  He had not planned it.  It just happened.  

The work there required interpretation, and he found himself imposing his own way of seeing so that it would hold.  It was not just something one looked at.  It generated a mood that people entered and responded to.  

He worked from what he saw, though it did not work as expected.  

He continued with it.  

After that, he entered a selective graduate program.  It followed from what he had already started.  

There, things took shape within a director’s limits of interpretation.  He finished the program, but the way he had been working before did not continue in the same way.  

Outside academia, he was received as an outsider; it did not extend beyond distrust.  The work remained within that frame.  He could see where the attention was directed; it did not include him, whatever he did.  In New York City, visibility opened to the same names, not to him.

While he worked in stage design to support himself, he continued to produce paintings.  

Opportunities did not present themselves for either.  

He worked on what others would present, and it advanced without him.  

The hours and the demands occupied the day and extended into the night, and when they ended, nothing was left for his own work.  What had advanced before ceased to advance and it was no longer received in the same way.  Expectations were in place, ways of doing things, and he saw them clearly enough to know where he stood.  

Nothing came of that situation, but he persisted.  

He kept working.  

When he writes, he perceives what he has just thought and observes it once more without turning it into an answer.

At times, a thought comes with more weight than the rest.  Where facts do not admit of equivalence and distinctions become inconvenient, they tend to be blurred; and where they are blurred, judgment loses its basis.  

He leaves it there.  

He asks whether anything is missing, not that something is missing, but whether.  

Almost immediately, what he says begins to take form as an answer.  

He stops.  

Because that is not what he is asking.  

He asked whether anything is missing, not what is missing, and left it there.  

It occurs again.  What he sees begins to take form as something he could think through.  

He suspends that as well.

In the act of working, what he sees and thinks begins to take form as an answer.  At times, what appears is not his, yet it comes as if it were.  He sees it and does not complete it.  It remains and returns without resolving.  His attention does not leave him.

He remains within the situation as it presents itself.  

There are relations in his life, some close, some not, and they arrive as they arrive.  In those moments he responds, not because he decides to, but because the situation calls for it.  He responds and confronts what derives from it.  

He does not go beyond that act.  

That stays there, not as something to return to, but as something that does not dissolve.

He sees himself acting and, at the same time, sees the movement that follows that action.  

He does not resolve that movement.  

He notices the inclination to fix a conclusion and does not follow it.

What appears presents itself with the weight of certainty for a moment and then recedes.  

He does not accept it.  

That movement loses force.  

He remains intact.  

The question is unresolved.  

Is anything missing?  

He does not answer.

*

Ricardo F. Morín

May 5, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

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“The Proportion of Boredom”

May 15, 2026

 

Ricardo F. Morín
Buffalo Series, Nº 5
48″ x 48″
Oil on canvas
1979

*

Author’s Note

The conditions that pass through this text continue in “The Impossibility of Conviction” and “The Impossibility of Recognition.”

*

Ricardo F. Morín
April 17 through May 14, 2026
In transit

A conversation,  a concern,  a loss or a moment of joy begin to take shape when they remain present long enough to demand attention,  alter our conduct or affect our relation with others.  Our lives do not acquire form through intensity or through the scarcity of what occurs.

There are days that pass leaving almost no trace.  Conversations are forgotten.  One concern gives way to another before it can alter what follows.

At other times,  everything demands attention at once.  Attention passes from one incident to another before anything acquires consequence.  What is immediate displaces what needed to remain present.  Priorities begin to blur into one another,  and nothing retains enough presence to awaken interest.

An empty day disappears without resistance;  a day in which everything demands attention dissolves in much the same way.  In both cases,  a conversation,  a concern or a loss cease affecting the way a person responds to what unfolds around them.

Either nothing succeeds in awakening interest,  or what does awaken it loses force among too many competing demands upon attention.  Boredom may appear even when nothing seems to be missing.

Proportion allows a conversation,  a loss,  a concern or a moment of joy to remain present long enough to acquire consequence alongside one another.  Without proportion,  conversations,  concerns and responsibilities begin to disperse before they can remain related to one another.  With proportion,  a conversation,  a loss or a responsibility may preserve enough presence to continue affecting the way a person attends or responds.

When that relation weakens,  judgment begins to weaken with it.  What is trivial acquires urgency,  while a loss,  a responsibility or an important relation recede without drawing attention.  Public life eventually reflects the same condition:  noise makes it difficult to distinguish what truly demands our attention,  and people begin reacting more through accumulation than through understanding.

What is near may impose itself until it occupies everything.  What is distant may withdraw until it loses presence.  Between those extremes,  conversations,  concerns and relations still manage to remain separate.

Proportion changes with the demands of life,  with attention,  fatigue,  pressure and the capacity to remain affected by what occurs.  It does not remain static.  A person may come to no longer recognize what once mattered to them,  not because they decided to abandon it,  but because the relation to a loss,  a responsibility or another person also changes under certain conditions.

Boredom appears when a conversation,  a concern,  a responsibility or a relation cease remaining present long enough to continue affecting the way a person attends,  remembers or responds.  For this reason,  boredom does not depend upon how much happens or how little does.

Dissatisfaction and skepticism emerge when a conversation,  a loss or a responsibility no longer preserve sufficient relation to what continues occurring around them.  Dissatisfaction and skepticism are not the origin of this condition.

At times,  a person continues speaking,  working or responding without knowing what still preserves relation to their life.  Even under those conditions,  another person’s affection,  a remembered conversation or someone’s presence may remain active while many concerns begin losing consequence.  At times,  they are the only things still preserving relation to what continues.

Proportion exists in allowing a conversation,  a loss,  a responsibility or a relation to preserve enough presence to continue affecting the way we attend,  remember or respond to what occurs.  Maintaining proportion does not consist in reducing life.

 

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“The Impossibility of Conviction”

May 14, 2026

 

Ricardo F. Morín
Buffalo Series, Nº 5
48″ x 56″
Oil on canvas
1979

*

Author’s Note

The conditions examined in this text continue those explored in “The Proportion of Boredom” and “The Impossibility of Recognition.”

+

Ricardo F. Morín
April 17 through May 14, 2026
In transit

1.  There are people who aspire to live as individuals of conviction because conviction appears inseparable from dignity, seriousness, or moral substance.  To remain faithful to certain principles despite uncertainty, pressure, or consequence may seem necessary for self-respect itself.  A person capable of conviction may appear less vulnerable to confusion, fear, or circumstance than someone who changes too easily with events or opinion.

2.  Under certain conditions, conviction permits endurance.  A person may continue acting despite danger, exhaustion, or sacrifice because something appears more important than comfort, approval, or self-preservation.  Communities may also remain bound together through convictions strong enough to survive hardship, loss, or instability.

3.  Yet convictions do not remain private for long.  They shape how people judge conduct, loyalty, responsibility, and trust.  What appears principled to one person may appear rigid, dangerous, or intolerant to another.  The same conviction capable of sustaining courage may also narrow the conditions under which people continue recognizing one another outside allegiance alone.

4.  At times, uncertainty becomes difficult to bear.  A person may seek convictions not only because they appear true, but because they provide continuity when circumstances no longer seem stable enough to endure without certainty.

5.  A conviction does not remain merely an opinion once a person begins to depend on it for self-respect.  It enters conduct.  It shapes what can be admitted without humiliation and what must be resisted so the person can remain coherent before himself.  At that point, disagreement no longer arrives only as difference.  It may also arrive as exposure.

6.  Under such conditions, a person may defend not only certain principles, but the self organized around them.  Contradiction becomes difficult to tolerate because uncertainty no longer threatens a single idea alone.  It threatens the sense that one’s life still holds together, belonging, judgment, and the sense that one’s conduct remains justified before others and before oneself.

7.  Yet convictions are not sustained only through conflict.  They also persist through familiarity.  Families, friendships, religious communities, political movements, and nations may remain bound together through convictions strong enough to survive sacrifice, hardship, or historical change.  A person may inherit convictions long before examining them fully, just as another person may remain unable to abandon certain convictions despite prolonged doubt or disappointment.

8.  Convictions cannot be understood through logic alone.  People may continue defending ideas that no longer correspond fully with circumstance because conviction does not depend only upon evidence.  It may also depend upon memory, loyalty, fear, gratitude, suffering, or the need to preserve continuity with those through whom life first acquired meaning.

9.  At times, conviction permits a person to resist conditions that would otherwise reduce conduct to convenience or fear.  Someone may continue defending another person despite public hostility, remain faithful to a responsibility despite exhaustion, or refuse participation in what appears degrading even when conformity would be safer.  Under such conditions, conviction may preserve dignity because it resists adaptation to circumstance alone.

10.  Yet the same conviction capable of sustaining courage may also narrow perception without announcing the change.  A person may begin judging conduct through allegiance before attending to the singularity of those involved.  What confirms conviction appears trustworthy more easily; what unsettles it begins requiring justification before it can even be considered fairly.

11.  This change does not always emerge through fanaticism.  It may appear through ordinary habits of interpretation.  Certain words begin carrying fixed meanings before conversations fully unfold.  Certain people appear predictable before they have spoken long enough to become recognizable outside inherited assumptions.  Conviction then ceases remaining only a way of judging what should be trusted, defended or refused.  It begins organizing perception itself.

12.  Under those conditions, plurality becomes difficult to sustain.  Not because difference disappears, but because difference no longer appears as something through which judgment may widen.  It begins appearing instead as instability, confusion, or moral weakness.

13.  A person may still believe himself fair under such conditions.  He may continue listening, speaking calmly, or permitting disagreement while the boundaries of what appears acceptable have already narrowed inwardly.  Conviction does not always announce the moment in which judgment begins organizing itself around allegiance.  The change may remain gradual enough to appear compatible with the image a person preserves of himself as reasonable, principled, or humane.

14.  At times, convictions survive less because they remain unquestioned than because abandoning them would require a person to reinterpret too much of his own life.  Friendships, sacrifices, loyalties, humiliations, and hopes may remain bound to convictions that helped organize the meaning of earlier experience.  Under such conditions, doubt no longer threatens a single conclusion alone.  It threatens continuity with the self that endured through those experiences.

15.  People may therefore defend convictions that no longer correspond fully with what they privately perceive.  Public allegiance and inward uncertainty may coexist for long periods without reconciling themselves.  A person may continue repeating certain beliefs because abandoning them appears more disorienting than preserving them despite contradiction.

16.  Yet uncertainty carries dangers of its own.  A person incapable of conviction may become vulnerable to every immediate pressure, every shifting opinion, or every promise of acceptance.  Conduct begins adapting too easily to circumstance because nothing remains stable enough to resist convenience, fear, or belonging.  Under such conditions, openness itself may lose coherence.

17.  Human beings therefore remain exposed to opposing dangers that do not resolve one another.  Conviction may preserve dignity while narrowing plurality; uncertainty may preserve openness while weakening conduct.  The difficulty does not disappear by choosing one condition entirely over the other, because both arise from needs inseparable from human life.

18.  This tension becomes visible during periods of instability.  Under fear, humiliation, rapid social change, or prolonged uncertainty, people often seek convictions capable of restoring continuity quickly.  A movement, a nation, a faith, an ideology, or a leader may then appear not merely persuasive, but necessary for preserving coherence against conditions that no longer seem bearable without certainty.

19.  Under such circumstances, plurality may begin appearing less as a condition of civic life than as an obstacle to stability itself.  Disagreement becomes associated with fragmentation; hesitation with weakness; ambiguity with danger.  What once appeared compatible with coexistence may begin appearing incompatible with order, belonging, or survival.

20.  Yet even under those conditions, convictions do not become complete.  Contradictions continue appearing within every system of certainty because human experience exceeds the structures through which people attempt to hold experience together.  A person may defend convictions publicly while remaining inwardly confronted by experiences that resist full reconciliation with them.

21.  Convictions can preserve and disrupt human relations at the same time.  They allow people to sacrifice, endure, remain faithful, and act decisively under uncertainty.  Yet they may also separate human beings before they have encountered one another outside inherited loyalties, beliefs, or fears.  The same convictions capable of sustaining responsibility may also prevent people from perceiving one another except through the boundaries conviction has already established.

22.  Convictions do not disappear because people cannot live long without believing that certain things must be defended, preserved, or remained faithful to despite uncertainty.  Under those conditions, conviction may permit courage, sacrifice, or endurance where fear alone would otherwise prevail.  Yet the same convictions may also separate human beings before they have fully encountered one another outside inherited loyalties, beliefs, or fears.

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“Institutional Constraints”

May 13, 2026
Ricardo F. Morín
Restrictions
Watercolor, oil sticks, Sumi ink, and correction fluid on paper.
14″ x 20″
2005

*

Ricardo F. Morín

January 12, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl.

This analysis addresses the operation of institutional constraint once electoral recalibration occurs; a separate diagnostic, “Temporal Asymmetry,” examines what can allow executive action to outrun institutional response prior to that point.

The United States congressional midterm elections scheduled for November 3, 2026 will determine control of all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 seats in the Senate.  These elections function as institutional recalibration points designed to test whether executive authority remains subject to legislative constraint, as outlined in Ballotpedia’s overview of the 2026 U.S. congressional elections.

Historical analysis indicates that midterm elections frequently reduce the governing president’s congressional support, restoring oversight capacity through changes in committee leadership, subpoena authority, and budgetary control, as documented in Congressional Research Service analyses of midterm congressional turnover and oversight authority: a pattern also observed in summaries published by the Brookings Institution’s review of midterm patterns.

Executive governance relying on unilateral action through executive orders, discretionary enforcement, and loyalty-based appointments encounters constitutional counterweight through congressional oversight, which conditions authority rather than removing it.

 

Legislative control enables investigations, compels records, and slows executive initiatives through procedural review rather than unilateral momentum, reflecting constitutional design rather than personal intent.

 

Impeachment functions as a constitutional accountability mechanism rather than a criminal process.  The House of Representatives holds exclusive authority to initiate impeachment in response to abuse of power or sustained impairment of constitutional governance, as clarified in the Congressional Research Service overview of impeachment.

The principal risk associated with the November 2026 midterms concerns normalization of executive action absent effective legislative oversight rather than suspension of elections or formal abolition of constitutional order.

 

Diminished oversight produces selective enforcement, institutional protection of incumbency, and substitution of political loyalty for procedural accountability, altering governance orientation while formal structures remain intact.

 

Prolonged absence of constraint reshapes party structure, shifting emphasis from policy formation toward incumbency protection, internal discipline, and defensive alignment.

 

International credibility of constitutional governance depends on visible operation of checks and balances, particularly legislative oversight of executive authority, as discussed in State Court Report’s analysis of American electoral administration.

Constitutional systems rarely fail abruptly.  Institutional weakening advances through tolerance of exception and declining expectations.  The November 2026 congressional midterm elections determine whether institutional correction resumes or executive insulation persists.

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“Democracy and the Governance of Plurality”

May 13, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morin
Platonico 4
CGI
2005

Political systems are often judged by the ideals they proclaim.  Yet endurance rarely depends upon the elegance of principle alone.  It depends upon whether ordinary disputes can be carried, day after day, through institutions that keep public life intelligible even when citizens do not agree.

Among critics across the political spectrum, democracy is often treated as an ideology.  In that interpretation, democratic language appears indistinguishable from other doctrines that claim moral authority through appeals to equality, popular sovereignty, or the will of the people.  Yet political thought has not understood democracy in a single way.  At different moments it has been conceived as a doctrine expressing normative ideals, as a set of institutional procedures regulating the exercise of power, and as a political framework capable of sustaining plurality within a shared order.  Each interpretation captures a dimension of democratic life.  The difficulty arises when one of these dimensions is mistaken for the whole.  Democracy does not endure because it advances a doctrine or perfects a mechanism.  Its difficulty lies in the persistent effort to hold these dimensions together without reducing democratic governance to any single interpretation.

The interpretation of democracy as ideology arises from the language through which democratic ideals have historically been expressed.  Appeals to equality, popular sovereignty, and the authority of the people carry a moral force that resembles the claims made by political doctrines.  In public discourse these principles are frequently invoked to justify particular programs or to confer legitimacy upon political movements.  A platform speech can borrow the vocabulary of rights while demanding uniformity.  A banner can invoke the people while treating dissent as treachery.  When democratic language is used in this manner it can appear indistinguishable from ideological persuasion.  Critics therefore conclude that democracy itself functions as a doctrine competing with other systems of belief.  Yet this interpretation rests upon a confusion between the ideals invoked in democratic rhetoric and the institutional structure through which democratic governance actually operates.

A second interpretation approaches democracy not as doctrine but as institutional procedure.  In this view the defining features of democratic governance are the mechanisms through which authority is organized and restrained:  representation, periodic elections, constitutional limits, and the possibility of peaceful political alternation.  Democracy becomes identifiable less by the ideals it proclaims than by the procedures through which power is exercised and transferred.  The most ordinary scenes illustrate this procedural character:  a contested ballot is reviewed, a recount is ordered, a hearing is scheduled, and a ruling is issued that is binding even on those who dislike it.  These arrangements establish a framework within which political conflict can occur without dissolving the continuity of the state.  By emphasizing procedure rather than doctrine, this interpretation clarifies an essential dimension of democratic life.  Yet procedural definitions alone do not fully explain why democratic systems remain difficult to sustain.

Institutional mechanisms describe how democratic systems operate, but they do not fully explain the conditions that allow those mechanisms to function.  Elections and constitutions may persist even where the distribution of authority gradually narrows.  Formal institutions can remain visible while their capacity to regulate power weakens.  The change is often incremental and practical rather than dramatic:  rules remain in print, but exceptions multiply;  oversight exists, but deadlines slip;  inquiries open, but findings are withheld;  the vocabulary of accountability persists, but the public learns to expect delay.  In such circumstances democratic procedure survives in appearance while democratic practice becomes increasingly constrained.  The endurance of democratic institutions therefore depends on more than the existence of rules.  It depends on a political environment capable of sustaining the disagreements those institutions were designed to manage.

A third interpretation approaches democracy from a different perspective.  Rather than defining democracy through doctrine or institutional procedure alone, it understands democratic governance as a framework capable of sustaining plurality.  Within democratic societies individuals and groups hold competing convictions about justice, authority, and the direction of public life.  These differences are not temporary disagreements awaiting resolution.  They represent enduring features of political life.  Plurality in this sense is not simply the presence of diversity but a condition in which individuals appear to one another as distinct participants within a shared political world.  The everyday evidence is familiar:  a city council meeting where residents argue over zoning and taxes, a school board hearing where parents disagree about curriculum, a courtroom where opposing counsel present incompatible claims and still accept the same judgment as final for that case.  Democratic institutions therefore do not eliminate conflict;  they regulate its expression.  They establish conditions under which diverse claims can coexist within a common political order.  The difficulty of democracy lies precisely in this task of maintaining institutional continuity while allowing disagreement to persist.

Plurality introduces a persistent tension within democratic governance.  A political system must preserve legal continuity while accommodating competing interpretations of public life.  Institutions must remain stable enough to sustain authority, yet flexible enough to permit disagreement and political change.  The balance required to maintain this equilibrium is inherently fragile.  Democratic systems often appear unsettled not because they are failing, but because they operate within a field of claims that cannot be fully reconciled.  The signs of health and strain can look similar from a distance:  noisy debate, contested outcomes, changing majorities, and continuous scrutiny.  The difference becomes visible in whether contestation remains inside shared procedures, and whether losing parties retain a credible path back into public life.  This structural tension also clarifies why political systems organized around centralized authority encounter greater difficulty accommodating plurality.

Political systems organized around centralized authority approach plurality differently.  Authoritarian forms of governance rely upon a final source of decision capable of resolving conflict through directive power.  While such systems may tolerate limited diversity of opinion, their stability depends upon the presence of an authority able to determine the boundaries of acceptable disagreement.  In practical terms the boundaries are enforced not only by decree but by predictable signals:  which topics may be discussed without consequence, which questions are treated as disloyal, which associations are permitted to assemble, and which public claims are allowed to circulate.  The persistence of open and competing claims therefore represents a structural challenge to authoritarian order.  Where democratic systems attempt to regulate disagreement through institutional balance, authoritarian systems seek to contain or resolve disagreement through concentration of authority.

Despite this structural difference, authoritarian systems frequently adopt the vocabulary of democracy.  References to the people, representation, and popular legitimacy appear even within political orders that do not sustain genuine plurality.  Democratic language functions in these contexts as a source of symbolic legitimacy.  The vocabulary signals participation and consent, even when the institutional conditions necessary to support those principles remain absent.  Ambiguity in democratic language can itself become a form of accommodation.  Citizens across the ideological spectrum may adopt expansive definitions of democratic ideals because such language allows their own convictions to appear universally justified while leaving competing interpretations unresolved.  The pattern is recognizable:  elections occur without credible competition;  legislatures convene to affirm decisions already made;  courts exist yet rarely contradict executive preference;  newspapers publish, but certain subjects disappear from print.  Democratic terminology may therefore coexist with political practices that limit or direct the scope of public disagreement.

The coexistence of democratic language with constrained political practice produces a recurring tension between institutional form and political function.  Legal codes may continue to affirm representative authority and constitutional order while their application becomes selective, deferred, or postponed.  Institutions remain formally intact, yet their capacity to regulate power gradually diminishes.  This is often experienced by citizens as a change in expectation:  procedures still exist, but outcomes become predictable;  rules still apply, but not to everyone;  hearings still occur, but decisions appear settled in advance.  In such circumstances the outward architecture of democracy persists while the conditions necessary for sustaining plurality become increasingly limited.

Plurality therefore does more than describe the diversity of democratic societies.  It explains why authority in democratic government cannot remain concentrated in a single locus but must instead be distributed across institutions capable of mediating competing claims.

Unlike earlier political forms organized around a single source of authority, democratic government distributes legitimacy across institutions capable of mediating competing claims.

The recurring tendency to treat democracy as an ideology arises from the prominence of its language and ideals.  Yet democratic governance cannot be reduced either to doctrine or to institutional procedure alone.  Its defining feature lies in sustaining a political order in which plurality remains visible and active within a shared world.  Democratic institutions endure not because they eliminate disagreement, but because they preserve the space in which individuals can continue to appear to one another as participants in public life.  Democracy therefore remains less a doctrine to be asserted than a political discipline sustained through institutions capable of regulating plurality without extinguishing it.

In an era in which human survival increasingly depends upon cooperation across societies, cultures, and political traditions, the capacity to mediate competing claims becomes more than a domestic institutional question.  It becomes a condition for the stability of a shared world.  Political systems that suppress plurality may impose temporary order, but they remain structurally limited in their ability to adapt to the scale and diversity of contemporary global challenges.  Systems capable of sustaining plurality, by contrast, possess a greater capacity to integrate difference into a durable framework of cooperation.  In this respect the institutional discipline of democratic governance corresponds not only to a political preference but to a practical requirement for sustaining a shared world.

*

Ricardo F. Morín, March 5, 2026, Oakland Park, Florida

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