Posts Tagged ‘ideology’

“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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“Unmasking Disappointment: Series VII”

April 22, 2026

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“Geometric Allegory” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)

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Author’s Note

This installment examines how ideological labels, liberal, socialist, democratic, are deployed as instruments of alignment rather than as enforceable commitments.  Venezuela is approached not as an exception, but as a case in which administrative practice, international positioning, and partisan abstraction converge to obscure responsibility.  What follows traces how power is exercised through method rather than doctrine, how ideological language displaces accountability, and how clarity, rather than consensus, emerges as the first condition for recovery.

Ricardo F. Morín, January 12, 2026, Oakland Park, FL.

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Chapter XIII

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The Fifth Sign

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The Pawned Republic

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The Venezuelan economic crisis developed within a political environment in which control over foreign currency, public spending, and state revenues became increasingly concentrated in state-controlled allocation systems and off-budget fiscal mechanisms.  After exchange controls were established in 2003, access to foreign currency was centrally allocated through state mechanisms such as CADIVI, and by 2013 even government authorities were publicly acknowledging fraud in the assignment of preferential currency, including allocations to shell companies.  At the fiscal level, parallel funds such as FONDEN handled large sums outside meaningful parliamentary scrutiny, while public information on state spending and parafiscal funds became increasingly unavailable.  Under these conditions, the diversion of public resources did not appear as isolated misconduct but as a recurring feature of governance in which formal procedures governing budget approval and reporting remained nominally in place while independent verification and public disclosure diminished.  What emerged was not the failure of a declared doctrine, but the consolidation of an administrative method in which access to public resources depended less on transparent procedure than on the concentration of discretionary control.

Debates that frame socialism and capitalism as opposing economic systems mistake ideological language for operational reality.  These terms describe beliefs about ownership and social purpose, not the concrete methods through which economies are administered.  Economic stability arises instead from institutional practice:  whether taxation is predictable, contracts are enforced without eDebates that oppose socialism to capitalism misidentify the operative field.  These terms describe beliefs about ownership and social purpose; they do not describe how economies are administered.  Economic stability does not follow from declared purpose but from enforceable limits on taxation, spending, and contract execution.  It depends on whether taxation follows rule, whether contracts are enforced without exception, whether budgets are bounded by procedure, and whether authority is exercised within limits enforced through budget law, contract enforcement, and institutional oversight.  Where these conditions are absent, ideological designation does not fail; it becomes irrelevant.xception, budgets are constrained by rule rather than urgency, and authority is exercised through procedure rather than discretion.  A polity may describe itself as capitalist while permitting economic decisions to be redirected by political convenience, just as another may invoke socialist aims while maintaining disciplined fiscal administration and enforceable limits on power.  The divergence in outcomes reflects not ideological virtue or failure, but the presence or absence of methodological constraint—a distinction that, once obscured, allows ideology to substitute for responsibility rather than to inform it.

As state procurement in sectors such as oil, infrastructure, and food imports became subject to political discretion, auditing functions weakened and oversight bodies lost operational independence.  State-controlled revenues and contracts were increasingly used to redirect resources through discretionary allocation.  Public authority ceased to function as a mediating structure and became an object of appropriation.  The result was not episodic corruption but a stable arrangement in which diversion operated as an expected outcome of governance. 

The mechanism did not explain action; it displaced its examination.  Ideological language did not clarify operations; it rendered them inaccessible.  Official discourse invoking class struggle and anti-imperialism shifted public attention away from currency allocation, public spending, and procurement practices toward symbolic political conflict.  These appeals replaced the examination of procedures with narratives of opposition that carried no capacity for control. 

This substitution extended beyond the national sphere.  Governments identifying with liberal or democratic traditions supported sanctions presented as instruments of pressure.  In practice, these measures intensified economic hardship without altering the internal configuration of power. [1] At the same time, states maintaining political and economic alignment with the Venezuelan government, including China, Russia, and Cuba, tolerated the weakening of electoral oversight, judicial independence, and legislative authority and framed inaction as fidelity to principle. [2] Across these positions, ideological designation did not guide action.  It concealed a convergence:  measures that weakened society without altering authority, and positions that preserved authority without regard to how it was exercised. 

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What is presented as a divide between opposing systems resolves, in operation, into a convergence of practices.  External pressure that weakens a population without altering authority, and external tolerance that preserves authority without regard to institutional dismantling, produce the same condition:  the isolation of society from judicial, electoral, and legislative means of contesting authority. 

Within that condition, the population is not situated between competing models of governance.  It is rendered instrumental to positions that do not operate upon the mechanisms that sustain or constrain power.  The language of alignment, whether in the form of solidarity, neutrality, or caution, does not alter this configuration when it remains detached from the procedures through which authority is exercised. [3] 

Where accountability is not enforced, other forms of organization take hold.  Criminal and informal economic networks operating without judicial or regulatory enforcement expand into the space left unregulated.  Their growth does not require ideological justification; it follows from the absence of enforceable limits. [4] What is described as crisis does not begin with collapse.  It begins when constraint is withdrawn from the exercise of power and remains withdrawn without consequence.

 

Endnotes on Chapter XIII

[1] Francisco Rodríguez and Jeffrey Sachs, “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment:  The Case of Venezuela,” The Lancet 393, no.  10178 (2019):  2584–2591; Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Sanctions in Venezuela:  Economic and Humanitarian Impacts,” 2019.

[2] R.  Evan Ellis, “The Maduro Regime’s Foreign Backers:  China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), November 6, 2020; United Nations Human Rights Council, “Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” 2022.

[3] Javier Corrales, “Democratic Backsliding Through Electoral Irregularities:  The Case of Venezuela,” Perspectives on Politics 18, no.  2 (2020):  311–327.

[4] Insight Crime, “Venezuela’s Criminal Landscape:  A Country of Collusion,” 2021; Transparency International, “Venezuela:  Corruption Perceptions Index,” 2022.

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Chapter XIV

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The First Issue

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Resisting Partisan Control:   Civil Society’s Stance in Venezuela

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Democratic life is not secured by a single principle but by the interaction of distinct forms:  pluralism, partisanship, nonpartisanship, and antipartisanship.  These forms do not resolve into unity.  They define how authority is organized, contested, and limited within institutions such as parties, courts, and legislatures. 

Pluralism establishes the condition under which difference can appear without being suppressed.  Its function is to ensure that multiple positions can enter public space without requiring prior alignment.  Where institutions fail to protect participation through electoral access and legal safeguards, participation contracts and representation narrows. 

Partisanship organizes competition through structured alignment.  Its function depends on a limit:  that allegiance to a party does not supersede adherence to the rules governing the contest itself.  When that limit dissolves, competition persists in form while its constraints disappear. 

Nonpartisanship suspends alignment in order to preserve procedure.  Its role is not neutrality in the abstract, but the maintenance of conditions under which decisions remain accountable to rule rather than to affiliation. 

Antipartisanship emerges when these arrangements fail.  It rejects parties as vehicles of representation, but in doing so it removes the structures through which accountability is exercised.  Where this rejection becomes programmatic, it does not remove power.  It removes the structures that limit it, leaving power to concentrate without opposition. 

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In Venezuela, antipartisanship became a governing strategy through the delegitimization of established parties and the centralization of authority in the executive.  Public disillusionment with established parties enabled the rise of a singular political alternative that did not operate outside institutions but reorganized them.  Institutional limits were recast as impediments, and their removal was presented as restoration.  What was removed, however, was not obstruction but constraint. [1] 

Under Chávez, this method extended through the redirection of state resources.  Oil revenues were deployed to secure political alignment across sectors.  Access to state-distributed resources increasingly depended on political alignment, particularly through government programs and public employment, establishing dependence in place of institutional trust.  Under Maduro, this structure persisted under contraction:  as resources diminished, the requirement of alignment intensified while preserving the same operational logic. 

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Clientelist practices were not introduced but expanded and centralized.  What had been dispersed became systemic.  Programs such as the Misiones Bolivarianas, funded through oil revenues and administered through state-aligned structures, illustrate this transformation.  Their stated function was social provision; their operation linked access to political identification.  In programs such as Barrio Adentro, healthcare delivery was administered through structures coordinated with the governing apparatus. [2] Benefits did not follow need alone, but alignment. 

Policies of expropriation and currency control further restricted independent economic activity.  By reallocating assets through administrative decision, these measures reduced the space within which alternative forms of organization could emerge.  Economic contraction followed as a consequence of constrained operation. 

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The weakening of institutional structures displaced rather than eliminated organized activity.  Civil society organizations assumed roles in legal defense, human rights documentation, and service provision where State institutions failed to operate consistently. 

Organizations such as Provea, Foro Penal, and Transparencia Venezuela document violations, provide legal defense, and maintain records of administrative conduct.  Electoral observation organizations document voting conditions and irregularities despite legal and operational restrictions.  Community-based structures such as Mesas Técnicas de Agua coordinate access to basic services such as water supply in the absence of reliable State provision.  These activities maintain a verifiable link between documented actions and their consequences, between public claims and records, and between authority and its legal limits.  Where institutions no longer secure these relations, they are sustained through practice. 

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These formations do not constitute an alternative system of governance.  They operate within limits imposed upon them, and their continuity remains contingent.  Legislative measures increasing oversight of non-governmental organizations have further reduced their operational space. 

What persists is not a program but a set of practices that maintain a verifiable link between action and consequence, authority and limit, and decision and verification.  Where these relations are sustained, even in restricted form, the possibility of reconstruction remains. 

Democratic recovery does not begin with alignment or design.  It begins with the reestablishment of constraint upon power and the restoration of procedures through which actions can be examined and limited.  Where these conditions are absent, declarations of principle do not fail; they do not operate.

Endnotes on Chapter XIV

[1] Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics:  Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (Washington:  Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 19–24, 30–34.

[2] “Barrio Adentro:  Complementariedad entre Cuba y Venezuela,” YouTube video, https://youtu.be/y8GXPozsSWQ.

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“Who Feeds Hatred?”

April 15, 2026

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Ricardo F. Morín
Triangulation II
22″ x 30″
Body color, sanguine, sepia, and white out on paper
2008

 

Societies rarely recognize when language begins to prepare the conditions for hatred.  Long before violence appears, speech has already changed how people see what is in front of them.  A group is no longer described by what it does, but by what it is made to stand for:  a “threat,” an “invasion,” a “corruption.”  Description yields to designation. 

In “Language, Judgment, and Freedom of Conscience:  On the Architecture of an Intellectual Position,” I examined how freedom of conscience depends on a steady link between what is seen, what is said, and how it is judged.  That link is not sustained by itself.  Seeing something does not ensure naming it precisely, and naming it does not ensure judging it clearly.  When that link breaks, language stops following experience and begins to direct it.  Words no longer come after what happens; they tell people in advance what they are supposed to see, think, or conclude.  In that shift, the ability to judge for oneself begins to weaken, long before courts are bypassed or rights are set aside.

 Once perception is shaped in advance, judgment no longer moves on its own.  Hostility no longer appears as a break but as something already contained in the way things are said.  A neighbor becomes “one of them.”  A disagreement becomes “an attack.”

Societies speak easily about hatred, yet rarely ask where it begins.  When violence becomes visible, the instinct is to find someone to blame.  The tyrant appears sufficient.  Yet this explanation soothes more than it explains.  It confines wrongdoing to individuals while leaving intact what made it possible:  repeated phrases, accepted labels, words no longer questioned.

It is easier for the Castros, Putins, and Maduros of the world to incite hatred against imaginary enemies than to confront the state of shame and confusion they themselves generate.

A distinction is required.  To see clearly is not to hate.  To name brutality is not resentment but clarity.  To say “this act destroys a life” remains a description.  Hatred begins when the person is reduced to what must be removed.  Whoever speaks in that way adopts the same language he claims to reject.

Ideologies that organize hostility do not arise in isolation.  They differ in name but share a simple rule:  people define who they are by pushing others out.  Where this rule governs how people define themselves, human worth no longer serves as a shared measure.  Public life divides between those who belong and those who do not.  Nazism in Europe, Chavismo in Venezuela, the MAGA movement in the United States, and forms of theocracy show how entire populations come to speak of others as enemies and to treat that division as necessary for order or purity.

What appears in Trump is not new.  It is what no longer needs to disguise itself.

Once this way of speaking is taken up and repeated, it does not remain confined to leaders or doctrine.  It spreads.  Some repeat it because they believe it.  Others repeat it to avoid trouble, to fit in, or to protect themselves.  Language changes.  Words stop pointing to people and begin to assign them a place.  The adversary becomes a threat; the threat becomes someone to despise.  A person is no longer called by name but by a label:  “illegal,” “traitor,” “infidel,” “enemy.”

Another confusion follows.  In the name of understanding, some begin to describe those who defend such ideas as misunderstood or wounded.  This posture appears balanced, yet it shifts attention toward those who exercise power and away from those who live under it.

This confusion rests on a deeper habit of thought.  Violence is often explained by pointing to personal wounds or exclusion.  There is truth in this.  Yet when applied everywhere, it removes responsibility.  Everyone is vulnerable.  Not everyone participates in organized harm.  That requires decisions, repeated words, and people willing to act on them.

The difference between ethics and moralizing appears here.  Moralizing sorts people into good and bad.  Ethics looks at what allows certain actions to take place and spread.  It does not turn the adversary into a monster, but it does not excuse what is done.

Those who suffer the consequences rarely appear in these arguments.  They do not belong to factions or slogans.  They are those who must live with what others decide:  the family forced to move, the worker shut out, the person who learns to remain silent.

The question, then, cannot be answered by pointing to a tyrant.  Hatred is fed when people accept the lowering of language, treat humiliation as normal, and allow their judgment to be replaced by ready-made explanations.

At that point, hatred no longer appears exceptional.  It becomes a habit.  It repeats itself in ordinary speech:  “that is how things work,” “everyone does it,” “we have no choice,” “we were forced,” “it is for the nation.”  It appears in the language of order and protection:  “to restore order,” “for your safety,” and in the steady stirring of fear:  fear of losing place, fear of difference, fear of those seen as outsiders, even in societies shaped by mixture.

These expressions do not simply describe what is happening.  They shape how it is understood.  They make exclusion seem reasonable.  What once required justification begins to sound like common sense.

When this way of speaking settles in, hostility no longer needs to be defended.  It becomes expected, repeated, routine.  Responsibility does not vanish through denial; it fades through repetition:  through explanations that excuse and fears no one stops to question.

This is how hatred continues:  not only through those who declare it, but through those who repeat it, accept it, or let it pass without objection. 

The question remains. 

Who feeds hatred?

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Ricardo F. Morín, March 16, 2026, Oakland Park, Florida.

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“CIVIC AGENCY”

December 9, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
Teratological Topographies Series One: CIVIC AGENCY
Oil On Linen
Quadtych: Each panel: 14 by 18 by 3/4 inches
2009

Ricardo F. Morín

November, 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Billy Bussell Thompson, Editor, NY, NY

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

This essay examines conditions frequently distorted by ideology, moral inheritance, or historical narrative.   Questions of sovereignty, occupation, revolution, exile, and national identity are often debated through claims that appeal to absolutes—religious entitlement, historical grievance, or revolutionary legitimacy.   These claims differ in language but share the same structure:   they place a single idea over civic realities of people whose lives are structured by such narratives.

To address what is obscured by these narratives, the essay turns to a structural factor that cuts across these differences:   civic agency, understood as the capacity of people to shape the conditions of civic life through their participation, representation, and lawful processes.   When civic agency is removed—whether through external control, internal authoritarianism, or deterrence directed at displaced populations; the form of the constraint may change, but the civic effect remains constant.

This essay does not compare political histories.   It examines how State power, in its various configurations, regulates civic life.   It considers how ideology obscures this regulation and how populations experience the consequences of decisions in which they have little or no role.   The goal is not to reduce political conflict but to call attention to the structures that determine whether freedom is possible or remains beyond reach.

ABSTRACT

This essay will argue that the most reliable way to understand situations that appear politically incompatible—such as Palestinian statelessness and Cuban authoritarian sovereignty—is to examine the structural absence of the civic agency that defines both.   Although the forms of constraint differ, the civic condition comes together:   the State, whether external or internal, restricts the capacity of the population to shape its own civic life.   By analyzing how State regulation limits participation, suppresses representation, or fragments jurisdiction, this essay will show how civic agency becomes the central measure of freedom.   It will further examine how ideological narratives, policies of deterrence, and migratory pressures hide this structural reality.   The aim is not to adjudicate political claims but to bring to light the conditions under which civic life can be formed, protected, or denied.

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Every attempt to understand political life must begin with the recognition that populations do not experience freedom as an abstraction; they experience it through the structures regulating their civic existence.   These structures determine how decisions are made, how authority is exercised, and whether or not people can participate in shaping the conditions for their own lives.   Civic agency is therefore not an ideal but a condition that either exists or not.   When it is absent, freedom appears as a formal claim rather than a lived condition.

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Civic agency consists of three components:   participation, representation, and lawful process.   Participation allows individuals and communities to influence public decisions.   Representation provides continuity between the governed and the governing body.   Lawful processes ensure that authority is exercised within defined limits.   When any of these components is removed, the people lose their capacity to shape the civic environment they inhabit.   This loss may occur by external regulation, internal authoritarianism, or policies reducing civic life to a set of restrictions that diminishes a shared domain.

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The absence of civic agency can take different forms.   A population may be governed by institutions that do not recognize the communities’ sovereignty and thus leave civic agency subject to regulations that the people have no significant role in its shaping.   Alternatively, a people may inhabit a sovereign State that suppresses political pluralism, restricts lawful dissent, and monopolizes institutional authority.   In both cases, the civic condition is suppressed:   the people are without the ability to influence the rules that govern them.

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The Palestinian case illustrates the first form.   Multiple authorities regulate movement, territory, and public life without providing unified jurisdiction or sovereign protection.   Decisions made by external States define daily existence and leave the population without consistent civic rights or a stable institutional framework.   The absence of sovereignty is not only territorial but civic; this absence takes away the mechanisms by which participation and representation are possible.

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The situation with Cuba represents the second form.   Although the State possesses sovereignty, it concentrates political authority within a single institutional apparatus and restricts lawful avenues for dissent, competition, or structural reform.   Citizens live under a system that maintains political continuity by restricting avenues for participation.   Sovereignty prevails; civic agency is limited.

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Palestine and Cuba differ, of course, in history, structure, and origin; yet they align in one respect:   the State, whether external or internal, restricts participation in ways that make civic agency unattainable.   The absence of agency is the common element that marks the civic condition beneath political narratives.   This absence also provides a framework through which populations that experience different forms of constraint are to be understood without conflation.

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Ideological narratives frequently align with existing distributions of power.   Religious entitlement asserts that land is secured by divine mandate rather than civic protection.   Revolutionary rhetoric proclaims that political authority is justified by historical struggle rather than accountability.   Both forms of narrative elevate an absolute over the civic realities of the population.   They replace agency with allegiance, and they interpret restriction as necessity, and not as a failure of representation.

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Migration provides a third lens through which the limits of civic agency become visible.  People leave their countries when the structures regulating their lives collapse or become uninhabitable.  They seek stability, protection, and the ability to rebuild civic participation in new surroundings.   Yet policies of deterrence in host States often mirror the pressures that displaced them.   The new States restrict the migrants’ movements, their access to social institutions, and narrow the possibilities of belonging to a civic order.   These policies do not reproduce the original dilemma, but host States reintroduce the experience of living under rules that they cannot influence.

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For many asylum seekers, these restrictive measures narrow the distance between the pressures that forced their departure and the pressures they encounter upon their arrival, a shift that makes stability hard to distinguish from exclusion.  European examples such as Denmark and the United Kingdom reveal how deterrence is used to discourage asylum without acknowledging the civic vacancy it creates.  The United States employs similar policies at its borders and presents deterrence as an instrument of order, which leaves migrants suspended between exclusion and unresolved civic status.

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The structural argument is not that these situations are equivalent, but that the absence of civic agency creates a civic condition transcending political differences.   Populations ruled without participation, governed without representation, or confined within systems that restrict lawful processes experience freedom as external to their civic environment.   This condition cannot be explained by ideology because ideology addresses identity, justification, or legitimacy—not agency.

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Understanding civic agency clarifies the difference between political claims and civic realities.   Sovereignty does not guarantee freedom; revolution does not guarantee participation; religious entitlement does not guarantee protection.   Civic agency exists only when people can shape the conditions that guide them.   When this becomes impossible, the people do not inhabit a civic order but a regulated space.

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When civic agency becomes the measure through which political life is understood, ideological narratives lose their authority, and the structure of constraint becomes visible.  This visibility does not resolve conflict but reveals the conditions under which freedom can either emerge or remain unapproachable.   Civic agency is where the possibility of civic life begins and where its absence becomes structurally apparent.

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“The Grammar of Conflict”

October 9, 2025
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.

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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

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“Echoes of a Decanter”

March 5, 2025

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This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 0005.jpg Decantation [2003], CGI by Ricardo Morín
Decantation [2003], CGI by Ricardo Morín

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I. The Speech

The air inside the old factory was thick with dust and conviction.      They had scrubbed the floors, repainted the walls, and reclaimed the space from its past, but the scent of rust and oil still lingered.      It smelled like work—like history.

Emil stood on a makeshift stage, elevated by wooden pallets stacked two high.      His voice carried across the room, each word striking with certainty.

“This is not another failed experiment.      This is not a return to old mistakes.      We are forging a new path—beyond capitalism, beyond the betrayals of so-called socialism.      This time, we get it right.”

Applause.      Nods of approval.      They had heard these words before, but this time, they believed them.

Isolde sat at the back, arms crossed, expression unreadable.      She had stood in this same room decades ago, listening to a different voice, hearing the same promise.      The factory, reborn each time, looked different, yet the space was always the same—a decanter of sorts, enclosing the same history, slowly pouring out its essence, again and again.

After the speech, as people gathered in small circles of animated discussion, Emil approached her.

“You don’t look convinced.”

“I don’t mistake passion for direction,” she said.

Emil smiled, as if indulging an elder.      “This time is different, Isolde.      We’ve studied history.      We won’t repeat their mistakes.”

She exhaled, looking past him to the crowd.      The factory hummed quietly behind them, a machine just starting to remember its old rhythms.      “You misunderstand history.      It’s not something you repeat.      It’s something that returns to you, whether you invite it or not.”

He shook his head.      He didn’t believe in ghosts.      But the air, thick with the weight of their past, seemed to hum with the same unspoken inevitability.      It reminded Isolde of something trapped within glass—preserved, yet futile in its attempts to remain unbroken. . .

II. The Experiment

The first weeks were golden.

Decisions were made by assembly.      Every worker had an equal say, an equal share, an equal stake.      The old machinery roared to life under new hands.      They printed new posters, declaring the rebirth of labor, the death of the boss.

For the first time, they worked for themselves.

But cracks, barely visible at first, began to form.

Meetings dragged for hours, circular debates with no resolution.      Some tasks were more desirable than others—some avoided the heavy lifting, citing ideological objections.      “Why should one person labor while another coordinates?”

“Because someone must,” Isolde murmured to herself.      Unheard.

Then came the first real crisis: a large order, a deadline, a need for efficiency.      The factory moved too slowly.      The assembly stalled.      Arguments flared.

“We need someone to oversee production,” Emil admitted.      “Just temporarily.”

A vote was cast.      A mediator was appointed.      He wasn’t a manager, they told themselves, just a guide.      But the balance had shifted.      The factory, like a vessel caught in an unrelenting tide, began to carry more than it could manage.

Isolde watched, saying nothing.

III. The Cracks

The mediator, needing to keep things moving, made quick decisions.      The assembly approved them after the fact.      The difference was subtle, but it grew.

Some workers were better at certain tasks, so roles solidified.      Someone had to negotiate with suppliers.      Someone had to ensure deadlines were met.      The mediator took on these roles, because it was easier.

“We need structure,” he explained.      “Not hierarchy, just order.”

Emil, exhausted, nodded.      The structure, which had once felt so free, began to settle into something heavier.      Something permanent.      Like the decanter that holds liquid—only to release it back into the world, though it never truly escapes its confines.

One evening, alone in his office—the office that wasn’t supposed to exist—he flipped through old books.      The words were familiar, but they read differently now.      He found a passage from an old revolutionary text, underlined by his own hand years ago:

“The first illusion of power is that it does not exist.”

He closed the book.      His fingers lingered on the edge of the paper, as though searching for something that had slipped away, like water escaping through a crack.

IV. The Collapse

The next crisis arrived without warning.      A strike—among themselves.      Some demanded higher pay.      “Shouldn’t work be compensated by effort?”      They were equals, but some were more equal in labor than others.

Emil tried to reason with them.      “That’s not how this works.      We’re breaking that cycle.”

“Then why do you sit in the office while we sweat on the floor?”

He had no answer.

Another vote.      A restructuring.      A new proposal:      an oversight committee.      The committee became a board.      Outside investors offered financial stability.      A small compromise.      A necessary evil.

By the end of the year, the factory had become what it swore it never would.

Emil found Isolde in the break room, sipping tea.

“We tried,” he said.      “So did we,” she replied.

Silence.

“Why does it always end this way?” he asked.

Isolde set her cup down.      Her eyes met his, trapped in exhaustion, as though each glance carried the gravity of countless broken promises, like a fractured decanter.

“Because we are human.”

V. The Next Generation

Years later, Emil walked past the factory.      It was thriving.      Not revolutionary.      Not a failure.      Just another business.

Inside, a new group of young activists had gathered.      Their leader, no older than he had been, stood on stacked wooden pallets, speaking with fire.

“We are not repeating the past.      We are forging a new path.      This time, we get it right.”

Emil did not stop to listen.

From the distance, Isolde watched.

“And so it begins again,” she whispered.

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Ricardo Federico Morín Tortolero

March 5, 2025; Oakland Park, Florida

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