In the post-truth landscape of Latin American media, where outrage has become currency, few figures illustrate the fusion of ideology and marketing as clearly as Inna Afinogenova. She has become the most recognizable voice of authoritarian suspicion in the Spanish-speaking sphere. From platforms such as Canal Red Latinoamérica, her discourse forms part of a vast network of disinformation spreading across the region, cloaked in the rhetoric of critical thinking and popular emancipation. These networks—spanning Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and several Latin American governments—follow a single script: to dismantle trust in liberal democracy, to weaken institutions, and to turn permanent doubt into a substitute for conscience. In the name of informational sovereignty, they replace debate with discredit, analysis with suspicion, and truth with narrative. Their power lies not in blatant falsehoods but in the emotional manipulation that transforms confusion into conviction. Within this context, Afinogenova stands not as an isolated commentator but as the emblem of a sophisticated propaganda apparatus—one that disguises obedience to twenty-first-century autocracies beneath the costume of dissent.
Inna Afinogenova, born in Dagestan in 1989, is a Russian journalist who worked as deputy director of RT en Español until May 2022. She resigned citing her disagreement with the war in Ukraine and the imposition of a state-sanctioned narrative of aggression. Since then, she has collaborated with geopolitical and Latin American media such as LaBase, produced by the Spanish newspaper Público, and participates in Canal Red, an audiovisual project led by Pablo Iglesias (former vice-president of Spain and founder of the left-wing party Podemos, now active in political media). There she directs and hosts programs like CaféInna and contributes to political analysis, particularly on Latin America. Her audience is broad and her reach on digital platforms considerable, which makes her an influential figure in the political and informational debates of the Spanish-speaking world.
Her trajectory, however, has not escaped controversy. During her tenure at RT en Español, she was one of the network’s most visible faces in Latin America, amplifying narratives that portrayed Western powers as inherently deceitful and predatory. An opinion column in The Washington Post described her as “the Spanish voice of Russian propaganda,” citing her recurring defense of positions favorable to the Kremlin. In December 2021, two months before the invasion of Ukraine, she used her program Ahí les vato mock Western intelligence warnings of an imminent attack and predicted that “January will come, then February, and still no invasion,” implying that the media hysteria served the interests of NATO. Such episodes, though later overtaken by events, exemplify her rhetorical method: to transform skepticism into disbelief and disbelief into persuasion.
Following her departure from RT, Afinogenova has continued to operate in media circles ideologically aligned with the Latin American left, reinforcing a discourse that equates the Western press with manipulation and imperialism. Outlets such as Expediente Público have noted her role in shaping narratives within partisan campaigns, often echoing state-sponsored or geopolitically motivated lines from Russia, China, or Iran. Through Canal Red and Diario Red, both associated with Pablo Iglesias, she participates in content ecosystems that frequently recycle material from international broadcasters like CGTN. In countries such as Honduras, she has been accused of contributing to media strategies that favor left-wing candidates under the guise of “sovereign communication.” While the evidence does not show a direct chain of command linking her to a specific regime, the pattern of thematic consistency reveals a coherent ideological alignment rather than independent journalism.
This alignment has provoked renewed debate since the release of her recent video, “¿Premio Nobel de la Paz… o de la Guerra?”, where she presents the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to María Corina Machado as a maneuver of geopolitical design rather than a moral recognition. The video does not examine facts so much as it interprets intentions, suggesting that the award serves Western influence instead of honoring civic courage. The argument, though rhetorically effective, confuses correlation with causality. It is possible to acknowledge the imperfections of international institutions without denying the ethical weight of public bravery. The Nobel Prize, like every human institution, reflects judgments; but in this case, it distinguishes a life of civic risk undertaken without weapons, privileges, or access to the coercive power of the State.
Questioning motives is legitimate; insinuating conspiracies without evidence is not. Every critical voice bears responsibility, for truth demands proportion, not projection. The struggle of María Corina Machado cannot be reduced to the rhetoric of “Western intervention” or dismissed as “fabricated dissent.” It belongs to the conscience of a people seeking self-determination through legitimate means after decades of dispossession. Respecting pluralism requires granting others the same intellectual good faith one demands for oneself. Debate ennobles democracy only when grounded in verifiable facts and moral clarity, not when suspicion itself becomes the argument. Between necessary skepticism and systematic suspicion lies a moral frontier: crossing it is to pass from thinking freely to serving without knowing it.
There are lives that seem to recapitulate the destiny of a nation, as if history, in search of renewal, gathers its scattered promises into one mortal form. María Corina Machado stands within that rare order of beings in whom blood, memory, and conviction converge—not as privilege, but as burden. She was not merely born into Venezuela’s republican lineage; she was summoned by it. The call that first thundered through the assembly halls of Caracas in 1811—when its independence was declared and its first republican constitution conceived—still vibrates beneath her name.
Her ancestry reaches into the first pulse of the Republic. From the Rodríguez del Toros, who set their signatures beneath the Act of Independence, to the Zuloaga engineers who electrified a nation, hers is a genealogy woven into the civic arteries of Venezuela. It is a lineage that chose service over title, innovation over indulgence, and fidelity to the law over the ease of silence. In that tradition, the notion of freedom is not an abstraction—it is inheritance, obligation, and vocation. It is the thread that binds a people to their conscience.
When the institutions that once defined Venezuela began to crumble, when legality became theater and words lost their weight, Machado stepped into the void with the gravity of someone aware that retreat was impossible. Her defiance was not theatrical—it was ancestral. Every gesture, every refusal to submit, bore the quiet authority of history fulfilled. She spoke as one who understood that to preserve dignity in times of humiliation is the purest form of resistance. There is, in her manner of being, that rare synthesis of intellect and steadfastness that defines the moral personality of a nation at its best—lucid, unbending, and human.
Yet today, her adversary is not one but many. Before her stands not only a narco-state that has hollowed out Venezuela’s sovereignty, but a fractured opposition—an archipelago of parties and personalities bound less by principle than by convenience. Factionalized, transient, and transactional, these groups have transformed plurality into pretext and compromise into commerce. Many have learned to live off the dictatorship they denounce. They negotiate freedoms for themselves even as the country sinks deeper into captivity. Against that duplicity, Machado’s presence has become a moral indictment: her clarity exposes their corruption; her endurance, their opportunism.
Around this internal disarray, the world circles in watchful appetite. Venezuela’s vast natural wealth—its oil, gas, gold, and rare minerals—has become the prize of criminal networks and multinational investors alike. Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, each cloaked in rhetoric of salvation, compete not to free the country but to secure a share of its exhaustion. Behind the diplomatic masks of assistance lies the same calculation: that chaos can be profitable, that a nation weakened by hunger and fear can be managed more easily than one restored to its sovereignty. This, for twenty-five years, has been Venezuela’s condition—a field of material, moral, and human extraction; its people scattered, its institutions despoiled, its memory pawned to the highest bidder.
In such a landscape, María Corina Machado stands as both witness and counterpoint. Her struggle has never been for power but for coherence—for the recovery of a civic language capable of naming what has been lost. To speak of law, truth, and justice amid pervasive corruption is to resurrect meaning itself. Her voice has become the thread that gathers the nation’s scattered conscience, reminding Venezuelans that dignity cannot be negotiated, and that no foreign savior will restore what only citizens can redeem.
To see her walk through the streets, welcomed not by luxury but by faith, is to glimpse a country remembering itself. She has become, willingly or not, the mirror through which Venezuelans rediscover their own moral architecture: decency, courage, compassion, and an unextinguished appetite for truth. In her endurance, the long-interrupted dialogue between people and Republic resumes.
The Nobel Peace Prize, bestowed upon her, is therefore not a coronation but a recognition—an acknowledgment that her struggle transcends the moment and becomes emblematic of the human spirit’s refusal to yield to despair. In awarding her, the world affirms that Venezuela’s republican dream—born in fire, preserved in conscience—still breathes through one of its daughters. It is the dream of a nation that believes peace must be built not upon submission, but upon moral clarity; not upon silence, but upon the unwavering voice of the citizen.
What María Corina Machado represents is more than opposition to tyranny. She is the embodiment of continuity—of the idea that a Republic, like a soul, survives so long as there remains one person willing to bear its weight with dignity. Her ascent is not accidental—it is the return of an ancient promise. In her composure, Venezuela recognizes itself once more: wounded yet unbroken, luminous in defiance, faithful to the destiny inscribed in its first act of freedom.
Although the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize (2025) to María Corina Machado brings joy and honor to those who still believe in the possibility of a democratic Venezuela, it also reveals a far more complex reality; one that demands reflection.
The international press has yet to grasp the dream surrounding the supposed liberation of Venezuela from a narco-state. Venezuelans continue to wait indefinitely for liberation. Beneath this hope lies a deeper bondage: the nation’s territory continues to be bound to multinational interests (Chinese, Russian, American, and others) driven not by ideology but by competition between investors and criminal networks. For all of them, a prolonged conflict in Venezuela is convenient; it serves as a bridge to a regional metamorphosis and justifies the expropriation of the natural resources of the country; it aims at consolidating hemispheric dominance by the multinational interests. The situation in Venezuela is therefore not only political but also structural; it is an experiment in which sovereignty is traded for access and resistance itself becomes a form of captivity.
The crisis in Venezuela reveals a moral conflict in modern politics: how suffering can both be exploited and perpetuated when comprehension yields to fantasy. The dream of liberation has become one of the nation’s most persistent fantasies. Behind the language of emancipation lies a silent convergence of global interests; each one sustains the very conflict it claims to oppose. In Venezuela, disorder legitimizes intervention and chaos provides the pretext for extraction. In this sense, Venezuela is not merely a nation in distress but also a stage upon which the grammar of domination continues to be enacted through the vocabulary of deliverance
The challenge is no longer to imagine freedom as an external rescue but to comprehend how dependence disguises itself as salvation. Only comprehension (the act of seeing beyond grievance and beyond consolation) can pierce the veil of liberation and restore meaning to the very idea of freedom.
Ricardo F. Morín Untitled #2 Watercolor 10”x12” 2003
By Ricardo F. Morín
Oct. 9, 2025
Bala Cynwyd, Pa
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Abstract
Conflict endures not only because of the grievances that ignite it, but also because of the internal logic that sustains it. Hatred, victimhood, hypocrisy, tribalism, and violence do not operate as separate forces; they form an interdependent system that is justified at every turn. This essay examines a system of conflict as a grammar—a set of rules and patterns through which antagonism shapes thought, legitimizes action, and perpetuates itself across generations. The objective is not to judge but to expose how conflict becomes self-sustaining, how violence evolves from an instrument into a ritual, and how contradiction becomes the very foundation upon which societies act in ways that betray their own professed values.
1
Conflict, when stripped down to its structure, is less an event than a language. Conflict is learned, repeated, and transmitted—not as instinct alone but as a structured framework through which people interpret events and justify actions. Violence is only one expression of conflict; beneath the act lies a sequence of ideas and reactions that not only precede violence but also weave hostility deliberately into a fabric of continuity. Understanding this grammar of conflict is essential, because it shows how human beings can remain locked in cycles of harm long after the original reasons have disappeared—not by accident, but because the rhetoric sustaining conflict extends the original violence far beyond its initial cause. What appears spontaneous is often scripted, and what seems inevitable is, more often than not, the cumulative result of choices that have hardened into reflex.
2
Hatred is the first syntax of this grammar. Conflict does not erupt suddenly but accumulates over time, layer upon layer, through memory, myth, and selective narration. Conflict is presented as a defense against a perceived threat or subordination; yet its deeper function is preservation. Hatred sustains identity by defining itself against what it is not. Conflict, once entrenched, ceases to depend on immediate threat. Conflict becomes self-justifying. It becomes a lens that reinterprets evidence in conformity with its narrative and expectations. Conflict prepares the ground on which it thrives and provides ready-made explanations for future disputes.
3
Victimhood gives hatred an enduring vocabulary. It converts the suffering from a past event into a permanent political and social resource. Suffering is a condition we all inhabit. Yet to make suffering the core of collective identity is strategic. Suffering allows communities to claim moral authority and to legitimize otherwise illegitimate actions. The story of injury becomes a foundation for retaliation. Herein, however, lies a trap: identity anchored in victimhood threatens the cessation of its narrative. Without the presence of an adversary, legitimacy loses potency. The original wound remains open—remembered and weaponized for all that follows. Each new act of aggression is framed as a defense of dignity and as a reaffirmation of suffering.
4
Hypocrisy is the structure holding this system together. Hypocrisy enables simultaneous denunciation and deployment of violence. It is a proclamation of ideals systematically violated. Hypocrisy not only conceals contradiction; it embodies it. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to invoke justice, to speak of universal rights, and to decry cruelty. The resulting duplicity is essential. Hypocrisy presents violence as a legitimate principle, domination as protection, and exclusion as necessity.
5
Once hatred, victimhood, and hypocrisy have aligned, violence becomes a ritual—not a reaction. This ritual can claim instrumental goals:the recovery of lost territory, the righting of past wrongs, or the assurance of safety. But over time, the purpose fades and the pattern remains. Each act tries to confirm the legitimacy of the last and to prepare a justification for the next. The cycle no longer requires triggers; conflict sustains itself through momentum. Violence becomes a means through which the collective is used to consolidate identity and to institutionalize memory.
6
Tribalism is a ritual of emotional power. Conflict reduces the complexity of human experience to affiliation and exclusion. Within this framework, radically different standards judge shifting actions according to who commits them. What outsiders called terrorism becomes a defensive force within the tribe. The tyranny of an enemy becomes the tribe’s strength. Tribalism turns contradiction into coherence; it makes hypocrisy acceptable; it transforms violence into allegiance and reprisal into obligation. The more deeply divisions define a society, the more indispensable conflict becomes to its sense of purpose.
7
Violence is no longer a response; it is a condition. Violence persists not because it serves immediate goals, but because it affirms permanence. Ending a cycle means dismantling its sustaining narratives; it means acknowledging an enemy is not immutable; victimhood is no longer unique; ideals no longer coexist with betrayals.
8
The illusion of inevitability is insidious. If conflict frames destiny, accountability dissolves. Reaction explains every action as defensive. Herein, recognition diminishes agency; violence becomes not a choice but a forced external condition, an illusion allowing the cycle to continue.
9
Breaking the continuation is neither difficult nor mysterious. Hatred as an explanation simplifies and legitimizes the narrative; it offers ideological reassurance; it sustains a false sense of control. Together they form a system that seems natural, but familiarity is not fate. The grammar of conflict is learned;what is learned can be unlearned. The first step is to elucidate and to recognize what seems inevitable is only a choice disguised as a reaction. Thus societies can construct new grammars, without enmity, without vengeance, and without domination.
10
To diagnose conflict is not to diminish suffering or to excuse violence. An understanding of how suffering and violence endure reveals that each helps to sustain the other. Profound injuries are not those inflicted once but are those kept alive by stories repeated about them. The cycle endures because unreason has its own reason; it preserves the stories that keep us injured and persuades us of their necessity. It is not that people act without reason, but that they rationalize the irrational until irrationality itself becomes the organizing principle of their behavior. Exposing their grammar is not a solution, but it is a beginning: a way to make visible the architecture of antagonism and, perhaps, to imagine forms of coexistence that no longer depend on perpetual conflict for their justification.
Edited by Billy Bussell Thompson, Oct. 9, 2025, NYC, NY
Nothing human begins from nothing. Institutions, languages, belief systems, and works of art all arise from what preceded them. Creation is not the rejection of inheritance but the transformation of it. Every act of making draws upon accumulated perception, memory, and experience. This insight is crucial to understanding contemporary culture, where claims of unprecedented change often conceal deep continuities beneath the surface of novelty. Human beings, bound by temporality, cannot detach themselves from what has been; they can only reorder and reinterpret the materials already available to them.
The notion of invention is often described as a break with the past, a leap into the unknown. Yet even the most radical departures are shaped by what came before. The ideals of modern democracy, for example, did not emerge spontaneously. They were built upon classical Greek ideas of citizenship as a shared civic responsibility, rooted in isonomia—equality before the law—and in the belief that legitimate authority derives from the deliberation and participation of free citizens. They also drew deeply on Roman conceptions of law as a universal and rational order capable of binding diverse peoples into a common political framework, and on the Roman principle of res publica, which conceived the State as a public entity oriented toward the common good rather than the will of a single ruler. These foundational ideas, adapted and reinterpreted over centuries, provided the intellectual architecture on which modern democratic institutions were constructed. Perception frames invention. It provides the vocabulary, assumptions, and conceptual tools that make new ideas possible. What seems entirely new still carries the imprint of what it sought to move beyond. On closer examination, the products of creativity are not isolated acts of originality but reconfigurations of existing structures. Evolution, rather than spontaneous emergence, governs how ideas, institutions, and cultures take shape.
Memory underlies this process. It is not a passive record of events but an active medium through which possibilities are conceived and action becomes intelligible. Imagination draws its material from memory; it combines and redirects memory toward conditions not yet realized. This is nowhere more evident than in the idea of freedom, a concept that resists simple definition yet has long carried two complementary meanings. The first, articulated most clearly in the classical Greek tradition, understands freedom as eleutheria—the condition of living without domination or external constraint, a state in which individuals are not subject to arbitrary power. The second, rooted in the Roman legal and civic tradition, conceives freedom as libertas—the capacity to participate actively in the governance of a political community and to shape its laws and institutions. Both meanings reveal how deeply freedom depends on historical precedent: it requires language to articulate its claims, institutions to guarantee its exercise, and collective memory to frame its significance. Far from existing apart from what has been, freedom is shaped and enabled by what has already been conceived, argued, and enacted. Prior experience supplies the references and alternatives against which choices acquire meaning. Without that reservoir of knowledge, novelty would lack coherence and direction, and the exercise of freedom would collapse into arbitrary impulse. Human beings do not invent in a void; they work within the continuity of time and adapt what has been lived and learned into forms suited to what is yet to come.
This same dynamic defines the formation of identity. Selfhood is not an isolated act of invention but a continuous negotiation with what has been received. The very idea of the self has itself evolved through history: in classical philosophy, it was often conceived as a psyche—an inner essence shaped by reason and virtue and embedded within a larger cosmic order. Christian thought reinterpreted this understanding through the notion of the soul as a unique bearer of moral responsibility, oriented toward salvation and defined by its relationship to God. Early modern thinkers such as John Locke then transformed this inheritance by grounding personal identity in memory and consciousness — a conception that would later inform modern ideas of individual autonomy. Even the impulse to define oneself against the past relies on categories inherited from it. Identity is therefore neither static nor wholly self-created; it is a process of reinterpretation through which the individual positions what is given in relation to what is chosen. Human beings exist in the tension between inheritance and aspiration, between the weight of memory and the desire for renewal. That tension is not an obstacle to authenticity but its condition, for without the framework provided by the past there would be nothing from which to depart.Continuity and change are not opposing forces. Without continuity, there is no ground on which to become. Without change, continuity hardens into mere repetition. The act of becoming depends on the dynamic between the two.
Viewed from this perspective, the human condition is defined less by pure invention than by the capacity to transform. What is called “new” is the familiar reorganized with new intentions, the established redirected toward new purposes. Recognizing this does not diminish creativity. It clarifies its nature. Humanity’s most significant achievements—in politics, art, science, and thought—are not escapes from what has been. They are deliberate reinterpretations of what has been, shaped to answer new questions and confront new circumstances. In the sciences, paradigmatic shifts often described as revolutions still follow this pattern. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not erase Newtonian mechanics; it incorporated and extended its principles, a revision that revealed their limits while preserving their usefulness within a broader understanding of space, time, and motion. This same principle governs artistic innovation. The Renaissance revival of classical forms did not merely reproduce antiquity; it reinterpreted ancient visual languages to express the spiritual and humanistic concerns of a new era. The evolution of digital communication and artificial intelligence reflects a comparable continuity. The internet did not replace human interaction; it expanded its reach and scale, a transformation that altered how language circulates, how memory is archived, and how collective knowledge is formed. Similarly, artificial intelligence—often portrayed as autonomous or unprecedented—rests on centuries of linguistic, mathematical, and conceptual developments. These systems extend rather than supersede the cognitive inheritance from which they originate. The future is built in this way: not in its rejection of the past but in its continuous interaction with it.
Resistance to this understanding persists wherever the idea of evolution is denied. Such resistance is rarely a matter of evidence alone. It reflects a desire for permanence—for a beginning that is untouched by change and a truth that stands apart from time. It offers certainty where process allows none and promises stability in place of adaptation. Yet even this resistance is shaped by the forces it seeks to escape. Languages evolve, beliefs adjust, and traditions adapt, even as they proclaim their immutability. Those who defend what is fixed do so with concepts and arguments that themselves have been shaped by historical change. The very doctrines that claim timeless authority — such as the medieval conception of divine sovereignty, once invoked to legitimize monarchies and later transformed into the principle of popular sovereignty in modern constitutional systems—reveal this dependence: they persist not by remaining unchanged but by being continually reinterpreted to meet new contexts. The contrast, therefore, is not between evolution and its absence, but between recognition and refusal. The reality remains: existence unfolds through transformation, and humanity, whether consciously or not, participates in that unfolding—a truth with profound implications for how societies remember their past, shape their present, and imagine their future.
Further Reading:
Arendt, Hannah: Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press, 1961.
Kuhn, Thomas S.: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Floridi, Luciano: The Philosophy of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Koselleck, Reinhart: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Ricardo Morín New York Series, Nº 5 54″ x 84″ Oil on canvas 1992
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Preface
This essay seeks to define rituals without reliance on metaphors, abstractions, or moral judgments. The method of this essay begins with etymology, then traces its biological foundation, and follows the extension of ritual into human conduct. Ritual is treated as repetition with form, carried out by necessity to contain forces uncontrollable by command or intention.
The analysis will distinguish ritual from belief and superstition. Belief attributes power beyond immediate function. Superstition arises when belief assigns causality where none exists. Ritual is not a belief, but only a procedure. Its function is to regulate life through ordered repetition.
The chapters that follow address the principal domains in which ritual operates. In sexuality, ritual prevents destabilization by giving desire a form through which it can move without collapse. In distrust, friendship, enmity, and love, ritual contains states that resist control and makes them livable. In governance, ritual holds ideological differences within limits that preserve continuity of community.
Ritual is necessary for existence. It does not eliminate instinct, emotion, or conflict. It gives them form and allows life to continue without disintegration. This necessity is not external, but generated by life itself. Where forces exceed control, ritual provides order.
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Ricardo Morin. September 12, 2025, Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
I
The word ritual comes from the Latin ritus (a prescribed act performed in an ordered manner). Its essence is repetition. To speak of ritual is not to speak of tradition or abstraction, but of a necessity carried out for primal longing.
The biological basis of ritual is clear. In many species, conflictive instinctive drives are contained by repeated actions which reduce uncertainty. Birds perform dances before mating. Wolves display submission to prevent attack. Primates groom one another to ease tension. These actions do not alter the external world. They do not ensure mating, nor prevent danger, nor eliminate aggression. They work by regulating behavior in ways preventing destabilization. They arise from necessity: without them, reproduction, survival, or cohesion could be placed at risk.
Human conduct extends this biological principle. The handshake is a repeated act signaling non-aggression between strangers. A funeral orders grief into sequence and allows the bereaved to endure loss. A meal shared among people affirms cooperation and reduces the possibility of conflict. Not one of these actions are effective because of a belief in causality. They are effective because they are the product of repetition and recognition within the group. They are necessary because without them, mistrust, grief, or rivalry would remain uncontained.
Instinct and emotion generate uncontrolled command or intention. Repetition gives them form without elimination. Herein lies the necessity: life produces forces beyond control, and ritual provides their procedure without collapse. Thus further inquiry rests here.
II
Belief begins where an act or event is taken to hold power beyond its immediate function. To believe is to attribute meaning not evident in the act itself. Belief provides orientation, but also creates vulnerability.
From belief grows superstition. Superstition occurs when a gesture, a sign, or an accident is taken to determine good or bad luck. Breaking glass is said to bring harm. A number is said to bring luck. The act or sign is given power it does not possess. Superstition is belief that’s misdirected. It relies on the conviction that external hidden forces govern external events and become accessible through signs and gestures.
Ritual does not depend on belief that an act can change fate or invoke hidden power. Its effectiveness does not rest on what is imagined but on what is enacted. A handshake obviates mistrust because it is repetition and recognition, not because of its magic. A funeral allows provides ordered sequence and allows grief, but it does not alter death. A meal shares cooperation through its mutuality, not because it calls luck.
The distinction is exact. If ritual is the form, desire is the current that moves within it. Religious traditions have often cast desire as a deficit, a disorder, or a temptation to be repressed. But desire is neither deficit nor disorder; it is vitality itself: an energy that presses toward expression. Ritual does not restrict this force; restriction belongs to fear and suffering. Ritual contains fear and keeps excess within the limits of endurance and necessity. Fasting, for example, does not abolish hunger but holds it in rhythm; it makes appetite a measure rather than a punishment. By contrast, a prohibition that denies the legitimacy of desire transforms vitality into anxiety altogether. In this way, ritual and desire are not opposed but interdependent: the former is the channel, the latter the stream.
III
Sexual drive is pervasive in human life. Left without form, it destabilizes both the individual and the community. Its power lies in persistence. Command cannot dismiss desire. Desire presses for expression. Every culture has developed rituals to contain and to regulate it.
Yet the grounds of sexual ritual are not repression but replication. Nurture marks the human condition from birth: in lactation, nurture consists in being fed, held, and sustained through another’s body. In this original state, intimacy secures survival. Later, desire repeats the structure. The quest for union is both a return to that first condition of dependence and a transformation of it into adulthood. Sexual ritual prolongs that first experience: it carries within it the imprint of nurture. It is not a matter of shame or judgment, but of continuity.
Courtship is the model. Repeated gestures mark the approach to intimacy. Ceremonies (words, gifts, dances) structure the encounter. Desire is not eliminated, but gives form to sexuality and allows it to proceed without immediate conflict. Marriage extends the process and establishes rules for its conduct within a recognizable frame. Ritual transforms a disruptive force into a relation that can be carried within order.
Different cultural examples exemplify the variety of this process. In Japan, tea ceremonies and formal visits have structured the first stages of marital negotiation. In Victorian England, the presence of chaperones functioned as a mode of surveillance and set boundaries for courtship. Among the Navajo in North America, the Kinaaldá ceremony marks a girl’s transition into womanhood and links individual desire and fertility with the continuation of the community. In each case, ritual does not extinguish instinct but channels it into social life.
When desire cannot be enacted without risk, individuals turn to patterned acts that provide release without collapse. Monastic traditions across cultures developed rituals of celibacy, which are supported by prayer, fasting, and other disciplines, containing sexual force. In everyday life, other people turn to imagery (fantasy, dream, or artistic representation) and stage symbolically acts they long for but cannot realize. Still others establish habits (exercise, meditation, or creative work) that redirect sexual energy into manageable outlets. Longing, however, is not erased. Its structure makes sure that desire moves within set limits without becoming overwhelming.
Obsession arises when desire remains unresolved and intrudes upon thought; it repeats itself without relief and it threatens stability. Ritual is a way to contain obsession. Through repetition, it acknowledges the force and gives it shape. Though not eliminated, it has boundaries.
Ritual in the sphere of sexuality is not an option but a necessity. It provides form where instinct would exceed measure.
IV
Reason alone does not govern human beings. Emotional states persist in ways that resist control. Distrust, friendship, enmity, and love cannot be removed by decree or maintained by thought. Each requires ritual to provide continuity and containment.
Words alone cannot erase suspicion. Distrust is one of the most persistent of these states. Suspicion cannot be erased by emotion. Suspicion lingers and destabilizes interaction. Ritual reduces its scope. A greeting, an oath, or a contract are ceremonial acts repeated across encounters; they establish a minimum ground on which cooperation can occur. These acts do not eliminate suspicion, but they allow engagement to proceed in spite of it.
Friendship depends on feelings, but feelings without form fade. Ritual gives duration to friendship. Shared meals, recurring visits, exchanges of favors, and so forth, are patterned acts that affirm a relation. By themselves, they do not create friendship, but without them friendship weakens. Rituals sustain that which cannot be commanded—the persistence of trust and attachment across time.
Enmity is no less powerful. Unbounded hostility escalates until destruction follows. Rituals channel hostility into limited form: a duel, a contest, a formal debate—each provides a frame in which enmity can be expressed without collapse. Even in war, treaties operate as ritual forms that restrict violence to recognizable limits. Without them, conflict loses proportion.
Love in itself is unstable. It begins in impulse and only lasts with repetition. Daily gestures, renewed promises, anniversaries, and continuous acts of care provide a form to sustain it. These rituals do not guarantee permanence, but they give a structure to love within which it can endure. Without these rituals, love dissipates.
In all these states, ritual serves the same function. It gives order where the force cannot be controlled directly. It does not remove distrust, friendship, sexuality, enmity, or love. It makes them livable.
V
Governance is the state where human forces are amplified by scale. Distrust, enmity, and competing loyalties appear not only among individuals but among groups. Ideological differences cannot be eliminated; they can be managed. Ritual provides the procedure by which this is done.
One example is Parliamentary procedure. Debate, order of speaking, and voting are repeated acts that permit conflict to be expressed without dissolution. The forms themselves do not create agreement. They provide limits within which disagreement can persist.
Civic ceremonies perform a related function. Inaugurations, public oaths, and national commemorations do not change political conditions in of themselves. Their repetition affirms the continuity of authority and gives recognition to transitions of power. The acts are symbolic only in appearance; their real function is procedural stability.
Elections are more direct. They do not remove ideological division. They provide a repeated method for channeling conflict into outcomes recognizable by opposing sides. Without elections, or when their results are not acknowledged, division tends toward rupture.
Ritual is necessity. Governance depends on it. Across species, ritual arises from the need to manage forces that exceed direct control. Human conduct continues this principle.
In ancient Athens, the assembly and the use of the lot allowed opposition to be expressed without dissolving civic order. Later, parliaments and councils provided ritual structures for negotiation between absolute monarchs and subjects. In modern democracies, constitutions and electoral cycles maintain continuity by repeating forms that regulate the transfer of power. When such rituals fail, the outcome is predictable.Governance is a ritual that makes ideological differences livable. Without ritual, politics reduces itself to domination and resistance, a cycle that cannot sustain order.
Annotated Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah: On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963. (Arendt emphasizes the role of civic procedures in sustaining governance; this underlies Chapter V’s claim that ritual makes ideological difference livable.)
Douglas, Mary: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. (Douglas’s work on ritual boundaries informs Chapter IV’s discussion of distrust, enmity, and the management of instability through repeated acts.)
Durkheim, Émile: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995. (Durkheim argues that ritual is the foundation of social cohesion, an idea reflected in Chapter I’s claim that rituals regulate behavior and prevent destabilization.)
Freud, Sigmund: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. (Freud’s psychoanalytic discussion of sexual drive and obsession parallels Chapter III’s treatment of private rituals and the containment of unresolved desire.)
Geertz, Clifford: The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. (Geertz treats ritual as “models of” and “models for” reality; his ethnographic analysis supports the essay’s extension of ritual from sexuality to governance in Chapters IV and V.)
Habermas, Jürgen: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. (Habermas shows how ritualized procedures in discourse and law preserve governance under conflict; his thesis supports the essay’s treatment of parliamentary debate and elections.)
Jung, Carl Gustav: Symbols of Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. (Jung traces how instinctual drives, especially sexuality, become ritualized in both individual psychology and collective culture; his analysis complements Chapter III.)
Turner, Victor: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. (Turner’s analysis of liminality informs Chapter III and IV, where sexuality, friendship, and enmity are shown to require ritual frames to carry disruptive forces without collapse.)
Written years apart, Intervals and Memories reflect different moments of reckoning. Each stands on its own.
Ricardo Morín
September 14, 2016
New York City.
Memories
We are mirrors of the people in our lives, and through them we come to know ourselves. When I see you, I see myself also. To be vulnerable is to admit our fears and limitations. To grow is to accept them and other things as well—even that we are moving to the rhythm of a diverse and chaotic universe. Infinity is vast and varying time loses its hold.
Aging is part of the cycle that gives us birth and death. These are expressions of life. At every moment we end and begin anew. We let go of our ambitions so that we can live in the present. Our mind resists this and clings to the idea of independence, that it can re-create even itself.
Yet, the universe is a whole and we are part of it. We are free as persons, but never apart from that around us. Loneliness may be built into us and the mind may be in exile, but no barrier separates from the whole.
Observations On Perception 