Observations On Perception

Ricardo  F.  Morín

January21, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl. 

The  freedom  most  easily  lost  is  not  political.  It  is  cognitive.  

Long  before  rights  are  suspended  or  institutions  degrade,  a  more  fragile  liberty  begins  to  disappear:  the  capacity  to  organize  experience  through  language  and  to  sustain  judgment  without  distortion.  It  is  here,  in  the  continuity  between  experience,  language,  and  judgment,  that  freedom  of  conscience  is  first  formed.  And  it  is  here,  more  often  than  in  law  or  violence,  that  it  quietly  dissolves.  

Freedom  does  not  begin  in  choice.  It  begins  in  perception.  What  one  is  able  to  see,  to  name,  and  to  distinguish  determines  in  advance  what  one  will  later  be  able  to  judge.  Before  any  decision  is  made,  the  world  has  already  been  organized  by  language:  some  facts  emphasized,  others  obscured;  some  distinctions  sharpened,  others  dissolved.  Where  perception  is  deformed,  judgment  cannot  remain  intact.  And  where  judgment  is  compromised,  freedom  becomes  procedural  rather  than  real.  For  this  reason,  no  political  liberty  can  long  survive  the  degradation  of  cognitive  liberty.  The  first  captivity  is  not  imposed  by  force.  It  is  accepted  through  language.  

Language  is  not  a  neutral  instrument.  It  is  the  medium  through  which  conscience  acquires  structure.  Through  language,  experience  is  ordered  into  relevance  and  irrelevance,  into  the  central  and  the  marginal,  into  the  tolerable  and  the  intolerable.  Through  language,  responsibility  is  assigned  or  displaced,  intention  clarified  or  blurred,  accountability  preserved  or  diluted.  What  cannot  be  named  with  precision  cannot  be  judged  with  clarity.  And  what  cannot  be  judged  with  clarity  is  soon  no  longer  judged  at  all.  In  this  way,  the  corruption  of  language  precedes  the  corruption  of  institutions.  Before  an  injustice  is  executed,  it  has  already  been  rendered  thinkable.  Before  a  servitude  is  imposed,  it  has  already  been  described  as  necessary.  The  decisive  transformations  of  a  society  occur  not  first  in  law,  but  in  vocabulary.  

Modern  societies  rarely  suppress  speech  outright.  They  do  something  more  efficient:  they  reorganize  it.  Language  is  compressed  into  formulas,  slogans,  classifications,  and  protocols  that  circulate  faster  than  reflection  can  follow,  reducing  complex  experience  to  recognizable  patterns.  Judgment  is  replaced  by  adhesion.  Under  such  conditions,  conscience  is  not  silenced.  It  is  standardized.  Individuals  continue  to  speak,  to  choose,  and  to  express  opinion,  yet  the  space  in  which  judgment  might  form  independently  narrows  almost  imperceptibly.  What  appears  as  fluency  becomes  substitution.  What  appears  as  coherence  becomes  conformity.  Freedom  remains  visible.  Autonomy  does  not.  

The  problem,  therefore,  is  not  the  abundance  of  language.  It  is  the  rupture  between  language  and  judgment.  One  may  speak  endlessly  and  yet  no  longer  think.  One  may  express  conviction  and  yet  no  longer  perceive.  One  may  defend  causes  and  yet  no  longer  judge.  When  this  rupture  stabilizes,  conscience  is  no  longer  guided  by  experience  but  by  narratives  prepared  elsewhere.  Responsibility  is  displaced  into  systems.  Error  becomes  statistical.  Guilt  dissolves  into  structure.  At  this  point,  servitude  no  longer  requires  coercion.  It  requires  only  maintenance.  

The  preservation  of  freedom  cannot  be  entrusted  primarily  to  institutions,  procedures,  or  rights.  These  remain  necessary,  but  they  are  secondary.  The  primary  task  is  more  fragile  and  more  demanding:  to  preserve  the  continuity  between  perception,  language,  and  judgment  within  the  individual  conscience.  This  continuity  is  what  allows  perception  to  remain  honest,  language  to  remain  accountable,  and  action  to  remain  proportionate.  Where  it  holds,  freedom  remains  possible  even  under  constraint.  Where  it  breaks,  no  formal  liberty  can  prevent  interior  abdication.  

Ethics,  in  this  sense,  does  not  begin  with  norms  or  prohibitions.  It  begins  with  attention.  With  the  discipline  of  observing  without  distortion.  With  the  refusal  to  select  facts  according  to  convenience.  With  the  patience  to  resist  premature  coherence.  Before  an  action  becomes  unjust,  perception  has  already  been  simplified.  Before  a  judgment  becomes  cruel,  relevance  has  already  been  manipulated.  The  moral  life  is  therefore  sustained  less  by  rules  than  by  the  integrity  of  the  perceptual  field  in  which  rules  are  later  applied.  To  corrupt  perception  is  to  corrupt  ethics  at  its  source.  

From  this  follows  a  demanding  conception  of  intellectual  responsibility.  The  task  of  thought  is  not  primarily  to  persuade,  to  mobilize,  or  to  console.  It  is  to  preserve  the  conditions  under  which  judgment  remains  sovereign.  This  requires  a  particular  discipline  of  language:  precision  without  pedantry,  clarity  without  simplification,  sobriety  without  neutrality,  and  complexity  without  obscurity.  Such  language  does  not  aim  to  dominate  interpretation.  It  aims  to  keep  interpretation  open.  It  does  not  impose  conclusions.  It  preserves  the  space  in  which  conclusions  may  still  be  responsibly  formed.  

The  freedom  sought  here  is  not  expansive  or  heroic.  It  does  not  aspire  to  mastery,  originality,  or  influence.  It  is  a  freedom  of  coherence:  the  capacity  to  sustain  a  judgment  without  deforming  experience,  to  name  without  manipulating,  to  belong  without  delegating  conscience,  to  act  without  betraying  perception.  This  freedom  does  not  announce  itself.  It  reveals  itself  negatively,  in  what  it  refuses:  to  simplify  what  remains  complex,  to  excuse  what  must  be  judged,  to  adopt  languages  that  absolve  responsibility.  It  produces  no  triumph.  It  produces  something  rarer:  interior  stability.  

In  times  of  symbolic  degradation,  the  intellectual  task  acquires  a  custodial  dimension.  Not  to  found  systems,  not  to  conquer  discourses,  but  to  preserve  small  zones  in  which  clarity  remains  possible.  Zones  where  language  has  not  yet  been  separated  from  judgment,  where  experience  has  not  yet  been  confiscated  by  narrative,  where  responsibility  has  not  yet  been  dissolved  into  structure.  This  task  is  modest  in  scale  and  immense  in  consequence.  For  civilizations  do  not  collapse  first  by  violence.  They  collapse  when  conscience  loses  the  grammar  with  which  to  judge.  

What  finally  remains  is  neither  doctrine  nor  method,  but  posture.  A  sustained  attention  to  the  point  where  language  organizes  experience.  A  vigilance  toward  every  substitution  that  precedes  thought.  A  refusal  to  allow  coherence  to  replace  truth  or  fluency  to  replace  judgment.  If  this  posture  is  preserved,  freedom  endures  even  in  adverse  conditions.  If  it  is  lost,  no  abundance  of  rights  can  restore  what  has  already  been  surrendered.  The  first  liberty  is  not  to  choose.  It  is  to  judge.  And  the  last  responsibility  of  thought  is  to  ensure  that  this  capacity  does  not  quietly  disappear.