Posts Tagged ‘Belonging’

“The Impossibility of Conviction”

May 14, 2026

 

Ricardo F. Morín
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.

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“Memories”

September 16, 2025

Author’s Note

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.

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“The Delusion of Authority: …

July 21, 2025

… Power, Storytelling, and the Fear of Losing Significance“

By Ricardo Morin, July 2025

Ricardo Morin
The Stilobato of Zeus Underwater
CGI
2003

Abstract

This essay examines the human mind’s compulsion to invent stories—not merely to understand reality, but to replace it. It explores how narrative becomes a refuge from the void, a form of self-authorship that seeks both meaning and control. The tension between rational observation and imaginative projection is not a flaw in human reason, but a clue to our instability: we invent to matter, to belong, and to assert that we are more than we fear we might be. At its core, this is a reflection on the seductive authority of story—the way it offers not just identity but grandeur, not just comfort but a fragile illusion of power. Beneath every myth may lie the terror of nothingness—and the quiet hope that imagination might rescue us from the fear of a diminished understanding of our own importance.

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The Delusion of Authority: Power, Storytelling, and the Fear of Losing Significance

We tell stories to make sense of life. That much seems obvious. But if we look a little deeper, we may find that the stories we tell—about ourselves, our beliefs, our traditions, even our suffering—aren’t just about sense-making. They’re about power. Not always power over others, but something more private and often more dangerous: the power to feel central, secure, and superior in a world that rarely offers those guarantees.

This need shows up in ways that often appear noble: tradition, loyalty, virtue, cultural pride, spiritual clarity. But beneath many of these lies a hunger to be more than we are. To matter more than we fear we do. To fix the feeling that we are not quite enough on our own.

We don’t like to think of this as a thirst for power. It sounds selfish. But in its quieter form, it’s not selfishness—it’s survival. It’s the need to look in the mirror and see someone real. To look at the world and feel part of a story that means something. And when we don’t feel that, we make one up.

Sometimes it takes the shape of tradition: the rituals, the mottos, the flags. These things give us the illusion that we are part of something lasting, something sacred. But often, what they really do is offer us borrowed certainty. We repeat what others have repeated before us, and in that repetition we feel safe. We mistake performance for truth. This is how belonging becomes obedience—and how ritual becomes a mask that hides the absence of real thought.

Sometimes it takes the shape of insight. We adopt the language of spiritual clarity or mystical knowing. We speak in riddles, or listen to those who do. But often, this too is about authority: the idea that we can bypass doubt and land in a place of higher understanding. When we hear phrases such as “listen with all your being,” or “intellectual understanding isn’t real understanding,” we are being invited to give up reason in exchange for what feels like truth. But the feeling of truth is not the same as the hard work of clarity.

And sometimes, this hunger for centrality shows up in identity. We claim pain, pride, or history as a kind of moral capital. We say “my people” as if that phrase explains everything. And maybe sometimes it does. But when identity becomes a shield against criticism or a weapon against others, it stops being about belonging and starts being about authority—about who gets to speak, who gets to be right, who gets to be seen.

Even reason itself is not immune. We use logic, not only to understand, but to protect ourselves from uncertainty. We argue not only to clarify, but also to win. And slowly, without noticing, we turn the pursuit of truth into a performance of control.

All of this is understandable. The world is confusing. The self is fragile. And deep down, most of us are terrified of being insignificant. We fear being one more nameless voice in the crowd. One more moment in time. One more life that ends and disappears.

So we reach for authority. If we can’t control life, maybe we can control meaning. If we can’t escape time, maybe we can tell a story that lasts. But this, too, is a delusion—one that leads to suffering, to isolation, and to conflict.

Because when everyone is the center of their own story, when every group insists on its own truth, when every insight claims to stand above question—no one listens. No one changes. And no one grows.

But what if we gave up the need to be right, to be central, to be superior?

What if we didn’t need to be grand in order to be real?

What if we could tell stories not to control reality, but to share it?

That would require something more difficult than intelligence. It would require humility. The willingness to be small. To be uncertain. To live without authority and still live meaningfully.

This isn’t easy. Everything in us pushes against it. But perhaps this is the only path that leads us out of performance and into presence. Out of delusion and into clarity. Not the clarity of slogans or doctrine, but the clarity of attention—of seeing without needing to rule over what is seen.

We don’t need to be gods. We don’t need to be heroes. We just need to be human—and to stop pretending that being human isn’t already enough.

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Annotated Bibliography

  • Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951. (A foundational study on how ideological certainty and group identity can undermine thought, clearing the way for emotional conformity and mass control.)
  • Beard, Mary: Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. (Explores how images and stories of rulers are crafted to sustain the illusion of divine or inherited authority.)
  • Frankl, Viktor E.: Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. (Reflects on the will to meaning as a basic human drive, particularly under extreme suffering, showing how narrative can sustain dignity and life.)
  • Kermode, Frank: The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. (Examines how people impose beginnings, middles, and ends on chaotic experience, seeking structure through storytelling.)
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich: On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (Argues that moral systems often arise from resentment and masked power struggles rather than pure virtue or reason.)
  • Oakeshott, Michael: Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991. (Critiques the rationalist impulse to systematize human life, warning against overconfidence in reason’s ability to master reality.)
  • Todorov, Tzvetan: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Translated by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996. (Offers insight into how identity and morality hold—or collapse—under conditions that strip away illusion, highlighting the limits of narrative.)
  • Wallace, David Foster: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. (A short meditation on how default thinking shapes our perception and how awareness—not authority—offers a path to freedom.)

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“A Table Between Us”

February 16, 2025

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Silent Diptych
by Ricardo Morín
Medium: Oil On Linen
Size: 18 by 28 by 3/4 inches
Year: 2010

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Prologue

Silent Diptych is not an illustration but a resonance—a meditation on silence, not as emptiness, but as a state of receptivity.     It is the space where judgment dissolves, where human connection lingers between words, where meaning is felt rather than spoken.     In its stillness, it holds what remains unresolved.     Some silences are quiet.     Others are filled with history.

RFMT

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Our early dinner followed a matinee of “Parade”, a musical steeped in history, in indignity, in the weight of a life taken and a verdict that still hung unresolved.     At the table, we spoke of Leo Frank, the Jewish man lynched in Georgia a century ago–pardoned decades later but never absolved.     His true killer never pursued.

Three of us were Jewish.     They understood, in ways the rest of us could only acknowledge but never quite embody, the particular pain of being made a scapegoat.     The others sympathized but could not feel the same alienation—not in the marrow, not in the inherited way history imprints itself on some more than others.

It was a conversation of weight, but not of sorrow.     We spoke with the clarity that comes when facts are long settled but their reverberations remain.

Then came the interruption.

The woman at the next table turned to us with a question, her voice cutting easily through our discussion.

“Where are the girls?”

I glanced at my companions, the six of us settled comfortably into the familiarity of one another.

“What girls?” I asked, not unkindly.

She blinked, as if expecting the answer to be self-evident.

“We’re already married to each other,” I said.

She turned away without another word.

There was no need to dwell on it.     The moment was familiar.     A minor encounter, the sort that barely registered after years of knowing exactly how the world could tilt in response to our presence.

To shift the conversation, I said, “Freud might say that all relationships are attempts to resolve unfinished business with our parents.”

Someone smirked. A fork was set down.     A momentary silence, not of discomfort, but of consideration.

“Men with their fathers, women with their mothers,” I continued.

The responses were mixed.     Agreement.     Deflection.     A shift in tone.     Some spoke of failing to meet their fathers’ expectations.     Some spoke of hatred.     Some of detachment.     Some of nothing at all.

I mentioned my father.     His certainty that we, his children, would not know how to survive without him.     He meant economically, of course.     His generation had its own understanding of what it meant to endure.

“How many siblings do you have?” someone asked.

“Five,” I said.     “Including my younger sister, who just passed away.”    A pause.    “She was angelic.”    “Sixty-nine.”        

There was sympathy, warm and immediate.    A moment held just long enough.

And then, as if on cue, the conversation shifted—easily, instinctively.     To theater.     To Tony Awards.     To the life and talent of voices long gone but forever recorded.

At the next table, the woman was laughing now, the moment between us already forgotten on her end.

And we, too, were laughing—at something lighter, something that did not ask to be examined too closely.

The moment stayed, unnoticed, but not forgotten.

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Epilogue

Like the painting, the moment lingered—not demanding resolution, but waiting, quietly, to be understood.   The weight of history, the subtleties of belonging, the pauses in conversation where truth is felt but not spoken.   Silence, in the end, is never empty.   It is the space where everything remains.

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Ricardo F. Morín Tortolero

February 16, 2025; Oakland Park, Florida

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