Buffalo Series, Nº 5
48″ x 56″
Oil on canvas
1979
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Author’s Note
The conditions examined in this text continue those explored in “The Proportion of Boredom” and “The Impossibility of Recognition.”
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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.
Observations On Perception 