Observations On Perception

Laws are written in the language of peace, but peace does not follow from them alone. A statute specifies the conduct it requires: it forbids violence, protects the vulnerable, and assigns duties to those who govern. Sanctions can restrain conduct where ethical conviction is absent, and the law can give the injured a means of redress. Yet the application of the law depends on people who obey, evade, or manipulate it. Where its administration serves the interests it was meant to restrain, the distance between what is written and what is done widens.

The same distance appears among nations. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted in 1948, and genocide has been committed since. Slavery and forced labor are prohibited under international law, yet both persist throughout the world. In the United Nations Security Council, the five permanent members hold veto power, which has been used to block draft resolutions concerning mass atrocities. The institution’s procedures follow their regular course: sessions are held, reports are submitted, and resolutions are numbered. What those procedures were established to prevent continues alongside them. Where economic or strategic interests prevail, the obligation to act yields, and that capitulation is recorded in the same orderly form as everything else.

Political doctrines can conceal this distance and justify arrangements that cause harm. A democracy proclaims the equality of its citizens and tolerates their exclusion. Capitalism invokes the promise of reward for effort as its justification, while ownership confers advantages that effort alone cannot secure. Communism promises the abolition of classes and installs a class that administers the rest of society. Fascism promises national unity and greatness; submission to its rulers is demanded as proof of loyalty to the nation. The doctrines differ, as does the worth of what they profess. A promise may be betrayed, or it may make subordination acceptable. Left, center, and right accuse one another and seldom examine the loyalties that govern their own judgment. When accusation replaces examination, political debate is caught in a vortex of accusation and counteraccusation: the exchange continues, but the loyalties governing judgment remain fixed.

Silence in the face of injustice has different sources. A person worn down by the demands of survival may recognize injustice yet lack the strength or means to oppose it. A person with the means to act may be so absorbed in entertainment that unease at injustice is dulled before it gives rise to judgment. Exhaustion and indifference can produce the same public silence, though they entail different responsibilities. Those who benefit from that silence have no need to distinguish its causes.

Meanwhile, common goods pass into private hands, and some cell lines developed from human tissue are patented and sold. A patent does not establish that the person whose tissue made the research possible understood or consented to the commercial use of that material. Where consent is bypassed, appropriation extends to the substance of the body itself. Here, the law both limits conduct and assigns control. Compliance with a rule does not establish the ethical legitimacy of what it authorizes.

Each person acquires attachments before the capacity to judge them has developed: a nation, a region, a sect, a sacred text, a party, the loyalties an institution cultivates through its propaganda. These attachments give a person a place to stand and others to stand with. When loyalty overrides judgment, belonging to the group serves as a measure of another person’s worth. The outsider then appears as a rival, an inferior, or someone whose fate is of no concern. The sense of superiority that follows does not feel like an affront to another person’s humanity. It feels like belonging. Reformers and leaders may remain bound by the same loyalties as those they lead, and exploitation persists when fidelity to an institution excuses its conduct.

The division within the person and the division among nations are connected through the institutions people sustain. The fear a person carries into a negotiation, the greed that weighs a contract against a life, the envy that measures one nation by another’s wealth: these enter public life through decisions, contracts, and policies. An institution can restrain these dispositions or give them enduring force. Its rules can preserve an advantage beyond the lifetimes of those who secured it. The power to sustain or alter those rules is unevenly distributed, and responsibility varies accordingly. The impasse sustained by this vortex of political accusation recurs in the person whose judgment remains bound by loyalty.

To recognize this correspondence is to lose the assurance that the disorder belongs entirely elsewhere. Recognition offers no guarantee of repair. It locates the division in both the institution and the person and reveals how each sustains that division in the other. The deadlock in the Council is present in you, and yours is present there.

Ricardo F. Morín
October 12, 2026. In transit.