Ricardo F. Morín My Nest 24′”x30″ Oil on linen 1999
Ricardo F. Morín
January 1, 2026
Oakland Park, Fl
Help was not offered casually. It was offered over time, shaped by history, familiarity, and a belief that loyalty required staying present when circumstances were unsettled. Unclear commitments were accepted with the expectation that steadiness might compensate for instability, and that patience would allow clarity to arrive where it had not yet appeared.
As time passed, those commitments became harder to anticipate. Plans shifted after they were accepted. Expectations changed without being stated. What had been agreed to one week was revised the next. Each adjustment was absorbed rather than challenged. Meetings no longer produced decisions. Agreements no longer survived the week. The effort to remain fair became an effort to remain adaptable. What was not confronted was carried.
There was hesitation in naming what was occurring. Doing so felt severe. It risked appearing uncharitable or impatient. Silence often seemed preferable to objection, not because nothing was seen, but because what was seen resisted easy articulation. Silence, once a form of restraint, had ceased to clarify anything. Endurance appeared safer than judgment.
Gradually, the effects of that endurance became visible. Loyalty did not stabilize the situation. It prolonged it. The more uncertainty was accommodated, the more it became the organizing condition. Commitments lost their edges. Responsibility dispersed. Care, extended without limit, ceased to correct anything and instead made instability easier to sustain.
At one point, a friend chose a different posture. He remained attentive, but at a distance. He did not intervene repeatedly or attempt to steady what showed no sign of holding. At the time, that distance was easy to misread. Commitment, as it was then understood, appeared to require proximity. Restraint looked like withdrawal.
Only later did the significance of that posture become clear. What had appeared passive was a form of orientation. Limits had been recognized earlier, and conduct adjusted accordingly. Distance had not signaled indifference, but an understanding that presence, under unstable conditions, does not always improve outcomes. The difference lay not in intention, but in timing.
This recognition unsettled earlier assumptions. Proximity had been mistaken for responsibility. Endurance had been treated as virtue without asking whether it was sustaining anything beyond the appearance of care. What felt like loyalty had, in part, become permission. The most difficult admission was not about the actions of others, but about the role played in allowing those actions to continue without consequence.
Distance did not follow immediately. It came after repeated attempts to restore proportion, after explanations failed to hold, and after silence ceased to clarify anything. Withdrawing was not a rejection of concern. It was the only remaining way to prevent concern from being consumed by unpredictability. It was a way of preserving judgment, preventing concern from being consumed by unpredictability, and leaving open the possibility that conditions might yet change
Refusal, understood in this way, is not dramatic. It does not accuse or announce itself. It does not seek recognition. It withdraws consent quietly and allows arrangements either to stabilize or to reveal their own limits. What ends is not care, but participation in conditions that require self-deception to endure.
This form of refusal is not moral superiority. It is responsibility turned inward. It begins when remaining present requires abandoning one’s own judgment, and when loyalty, left unchecked, undermines what it was meant to protect. Silence, at that point, does not evade obligation. It restores coherence.
The act is restrained. Its consequences are durable. By stepping back, one ceases to supply the energy on which instability depends. What remains intact is judgment without foreclosing the possibility of renewal should proportion be restored. What is relinquished is the belief that endurance is always ethical—and refusal becomes the means by which clarity, rather than rupture, is maintained.
Ricardo F. Morín Irrationality, Propaganda, and Tribalism CGI 2026
Ricardo F. Morín
January21, 2026
Oakland Park, Fl.
1. A political claim ordinarily enters public life through institutions. A law is debated, enacted, interpreted, contested. A speech is delivered from a known office, before a defined audience, subject to reply and record. Authority, in these cases, arises from responsibility and constraint.
2. The text examined here satisfies none of these conditions.
3. The text attributes to an unnamed broadcast the power to alter legal status. The text presents a speaker not as a citizen who speaks, but as a conscience that pronounces. The text declares effects that no statute, no executive order, and no court possesses the authority to produce. The text announces national assent in the absence of any forum capable of granting assent.
4. No enactment appears. No interpretation occurs. No review is possible.
5. Nothing in this sequence is argued. Nothing in this sequence is demonstrated. Nothing in this sequence is capable of verification.
6. Authority is not derived from office, law, or responsibility. Authority is assigned by narrative arrangement.
7. The speaker is granted moral standing by recognition alone. The law is displaced by spectacle. The audience is positioned as witness to a verdict that precedes deliberation. Silence is treated as confirmation. Stillness is treated as consent.
8. What appears as denunciation functions as substitution.
9. The place of institutions is occupied by a voice. The place of argument is occupied by proclamation. The place of judgment is occupied by reaction.
10. The result is not persuasion. The result is conversion.
11. Citizens are not addressed as agents capable of contesting claims. Citizens are addressed as spectators invited to receive a moral scene whose meaning has been fixed in advance.
12. When invented testimony is received as political record, the boundary between event and wish disappears. When spectacle is treated as verdict, correction loses authority. When conscience is produced as performance, no institution remains capable of constraining conscience.
13. This is not misinformation in the ordinary sense.
14. This phenomenon is the replacement of judgment by fabricated authority.
15. Authority ordinarily attaches to an office before authority attaches to a voice, because office supplies the limits under which speech can claim consequence. A court exists, so a judge speaks. A chamber exists, so a legislator speaks. An administration exists, so an executive speaks. In each case standing precedes utterance, and the public can locate responsibility by locating the forum in which the claim is made.
16. The text examined here reverses that order. The text presents a voice whose standing is not grounded in any office that can be named, any jurisdiction that can be defined, or any forum that can be recognized. No delegation is stated. No mandate is visible. No responsibility is assumed. Yet the voice speaks as if entitled to pronounce on matters whose force depends, in ordinary civic life, on enactment, interpretation, and review.
17. This reversal matters because office establishes the scope under which a claim may operate, jurisdiction fixes the reach of effects, and procedure subjects both scope and reach to contest and record. A claim that arises through these constraints can be challenged because standing can be challenged. The claim here does not arise through constraint; the claim arises through reception. Standing depends on recognition rather than jurisdiction, and recognition is not a civic category that admits examination.
18. One can dispute a mandate. One can deny a court’s jurisdiction. One can invoke procedure and require reply. Recognition offers no equivalent instrument. Recognition confers authority without specifying scope, and recognition allows a voice to present itself as conscience without accepting the obligations that make conscience accountable in public life.
19. The effect is not merely that a voice speaks outside office. The effect is that the role of office is replaced. In a system where standing precedes speech, speech can be limited because the forum can be limited. In a system where standing follows speech, speech expands until something external imposes a boundary.
20. The text relies on no such boundary. The text presents moral standing as complete at the moment of utterance, and the text treats reception as confirmation. The audience is positioned less as a public capable of contest than as a witness to a pronouncement whose authority is presumed rather than earned.
21. In that arrangement the claim to speak carries consequence without jurisdiction, and authority appears where no institution can be identified as a source of authority.
22. Authority that does not arise from office cannot rely on procedure. Procedure requires forum. Forum requires jurisdiction. Jurisdiction requires mandate. None is present here.
23. The claim therefore does not proceed by sequence. The claim proceeds without premises, without grounds, and without anticipation of reply. The statement does not argue. The statement announces.
24. What would ordinarily require enactment is declared complete. What would ordinarily require interpretation is pronounced settled. What would ordinarily require review is presented as final. Verdict precedes forum.
25. This reversal alters the function of speech itself. Speech no longer seeks assent through reasoning. Speech produces assent by declaration. Judgment no longer follows deliberation. Judgment is installed before deliberation can occur.
26. Once proclamation is received as verdict, proof becomes irrelevant.
27. Once argument is removed from the sequence, assent no longer arises from judgment. Assent arises from recognition. The claim does not ask to be examined. The claim asks to be received. The force of the claim depends less on what the claim establishes than on whom the claim addresses.
28. The audience is not invited to consider whether the verdict follows from law, or whether the authority invoked possesses standing to pronounce. The audience is invited to recognize the audience in the verdict.
29. This shift alters the function of agreement. In deliberative settings, assent follows contest. One accepts a conclusion because one has weighed a claim against alternatives. Here, assent precedes any such weighing. The verdict arrives already formed, and reception supplies confirmation.
30. Agreement no longer signals conviction, but affiliation, a posture defined less by conviction than by position.
31. Recognition, in this arrangement, performs the work that argument once performed. To accept the claim is to affirm membership in a moral position already defined. The verdict does not bind because the verdict is correct. The verdict binds because the verdict identifies.
32. Those who receive the verdict do not do so as judges of coherence, but as participants in the posture the verdict confers. The claim succeeds not by persuading opponents, but by consolidating those already disposed to accept the claim.
33. This function explains the absence of procedure. Deliberation would introduce fracture. Contest would introduce differentiation. Review would expose divergence. None serves the purpose at hand.
34. The claim therefore bypasses every stage at which disagreement could appear. The claim offers instead a completed judgment whose primary effect is to sort recognition from refusal.
35. The result is not belief in the ordinary sense, but affiliation, a posture defined less by conviction than by position. To assent is to take position within a moral alignment whose boundaries are drawn by reception itself. Those who accept are confirmed. Those who hesitate are marked.
36. Authority, in this form, does not govern through law. Authority governs through identification.
37. Once standing is conferred by reception, the remaining limits cannot hold.
38. Once authority is produced in this manner, substitution becomes unavoidable. In this arrangement office yields to presence, jurisdiction yields to recognition, procedure yields to proclamation, and judgment yields to reaction, until no limit remains capable of arresting the expansion that follows.
39. Each replacement removes a limit. Each replacement widens scope. Each replacement dissolves responsibility.
40. What remains is a form of authority that cannot be contested because no forum remains in which contest can occur.
41. The consequence for citizenship follows directly. A citizen ordinarily participates in judgment by weighing claims, contesting standing, and invoking procedure. Here, that role disappears. The citizen is no longer positioned as a participant in deliberation. The citizen is positioned as a recipient of verdict.
42. Agency yields to reception, judgment yields to alignment, and responsibility yields to loyalty, until disagreement itself can no longer appear as a civic act.
43. In this posture disagreement ceases to be a civic act. Disagreement becomes a breach of affiliation. Hesitation becomes disloyalty. Correction becomes defection.
44. Once judgment is displaced in this way, repair becomes impossible. Correction presupposes a forum. Review presupposes jurisdiction. Reply presupposes standing. None remains available.
45. A verdict that arrives without forum cannot be recalled to contest. An authority that arises without office cannot be subjected to review. A claim that governs through recognition alone cannot be corrected without threatening membership itself.
46. The persistence of fabrication follows not from confusion, but from function. Fabrication endures because fabrication stabilizes alignment. Fabrication circulates because fabrication confirms position. Fabrication resists correction because correction would dissolve the posture fabrication sustains.
47. Authority, once detached from office and constraint, does not disappear. Authority reappears in altered form. Verdict is separated from forum. Conscience is separated from responsibility. Assent is separated from deliberation.
48. What remains is a claim to govern without jurisdiction.
49. This is not the corruption of judgment. This is displacement.
50. Judgment is no longer exercised. Judgment is produced.
A diagnostic study of how public life continues to function when judgment is limited and conditions remain unsettled
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Mantra: Domains of Action 21” x 28.5” Watercolor, graphite, wax crayons, ink and gesso on paper 2003
Note:
Nothing I say belongs to the painting.
The painting does not need words.
It already speaks in its own medium, to which language has no equivalent.
By Ricardo F. Morín
December 18, 2025
Oakland Park, Fl
Preface
This work was not written to advance a position or to resolve a debate. It emerged from sustained attention to conditions that could not be ignored without distortion. Writing, in this sense, is not an expression of purpose, but a consequence of awareness.
The pages that follow do not claim authority through expertise or urgency. They proceed from the recognition that judgment must often act under incomplete conditions, and that clarity, when it appears, does so gradually and without assurance. What is offered here is not a conclusion, but a continuation: an effort to remain faithful to what can be observed when attention is sustained.
This study does not proceed from constitutional expertise, institutional authority, or professional proximity to governance. It proceeds from observation. Its claims arise from sustained attention to how public life continues to function under conditions in which judgment is constrained, information remains incomplete, and decisions must nonetheless be made.
In fields where credentialed knowledge often determines legitimacy, writing from outside formal authority can invite dismissal before engagement. That risk is real. Yet the conditions examined here are not confined to technical domains. They are encountered daily by citizens, officials, institutions, and systems alike. Judgment under uncertainty is not a specialized activity; it is a shared condition.
The absence of formal expertise does not exempt this work from rigor. It requires a different discipline: restraint in assertion, precision in description, and fidelity to what can be observed without presuming mastery. The analysis does not claim to resolve constitutional questions or prescribe institutional remedies. It examines how governance persists when clarity is partial, when authority operates through multiple domains, and when continuity depends less on certainty than on adjustment.
If this work holds value, it will not be because it speaks from authority, but because it attends carefully to how authority functions when no position—expert or otherwise—can claim full command of the conditions it confronts.
Author’s Note
This work clarifies a confusion that appears across many political cultures: the tendency to treat “republic” and “democracy” as interchangeable ideals rather than as distinct components of governance. The chapters observe how political arrangements continue to operate when inherited categories no longer clarify what is taking place.
The method is observational. Political life is described as it is experienced: decisions made without full knowledge, terms used out of habit, and institutions that adjust internally while keeping the same outward form. The analysis begins from the limits of judgment as a daily condition: people must act before they fully understand the circumstances in which they act.
What follows does not argue for a model or defend a tradition. It traces how language, institutions, and expectations diverge across different domains of action, and how public life continues to operate under conditions that do not permit full clarity.
Chapter I
The Limits of Judgment in Public Life
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1
Public life depends on forms of judgment that are uneven and often shaped by the pressures people face. Individuals arrive at political questions with different experiences, different levels of knowledge, and different conditions under which they weigh what is put before them. These differences do not prevent collective decisions, but they shape how clearly political terms and arrangements are perceived. Everything that follows—how authority is organized, how participation is structured, and how each is described—develops within this clarity, which is limited and variable.
2
Political terms remain stable even when they are understood to different degrees. Words such as republic and democracy have distinct meanings—one referring to an arrangement of authority, the other to a method of participation—yet are often used interchangeably. The terms carry familiarity, even when the clarity required to keep them separate varies by circumstance. As a result, public discussion may rely on established language without consistently matching it to the arrangements actually in effect.
3
A republic identifies an arrangement in which authority is held by public offices and exercised through institutions rather than personal rule. A democracy identifies the method through which people participate in public decisions, whether directly or through representation. A republic describes how authority is contained; a democracy describes how participation is organized. Because these terms refer to different dimensions of political life—one structural, the other procedural—a single system may combine both. The United States exemplifies this combination: authority is institutional and public, while participation is organized through elections and collective choice.
4
Public discussion often relies on familiar terms to describe political arrangements without tracing how authority and participation are actually organized. Broad references substitute for institutional operation, allowing language to remain continuous even as circumstances shift. The terms persist not because they precisely describe current arrangements, but because they provide a stable vocabulary through which public life can continue to be discussed as it adapts.
5
Patterns of this kind appear across many societies. When circumstances are unstable, authority tends to concentrate; when conditions are steadier, participation often widens. The direction is not uniform across countries or periods, but the pattern is recognizable: authority gathers or disperses in response to conditions rather than to the language used to describe political life. What varies is how clearly a society distinguishes between the structure that contains authority and the method through which participation occurs.
6
This movement between concentrated and dispersed authority appears differently across national contexts. In Venezuela, references to the republic have often accompanied periods of strong executive direction, while appeals to democracy have not consistently been supported by durable procedures of participation.
In the United States, the emphasis sometimes reverses. Democratic language is used to affirm broad popular involvement at the point of election, while republican structure is invoked to justify subsequent limits on participation through institutional filtering—nominee selection, confirmation timing, strategic vacancies, and procedural sequencing. Presidential nominations move from popular mandate into Senate committee review, confirmation votes, and ultimately lifetime tenure, where decision-making authority is consolidated beyond direct public reach.
The terms differ, but the underlying pattern converges: participation expands symbolically at the moment of selection and contracts structurally in the domains where authority is exercised over time.
7
Public life is easier to follow when the distinction between structure and participation remains visible. A republic identifies how authority is arranged through offices and institutions; a democracy identifies how participation is organized through collective procedures. When these terms are used without that distinction, attention shifts from institutional operation to nomenclature. Debate turns toward language rather than process, and the movement of authority becomes harder to trace.
8
No single combination of structure and participation satisfies all the demands placed on public life. Concentrated authority allows for speed but limits inclusion; broad participation expands inclusion but slows coordination. Most governments combine these elements in varying proportions, and those proportions change as conditions change. The relation between authority and participation becomes clearer in some periods and more opaque in others.
9
When this relation is unclear, people orient themselves by what is most visible. Some look to executive action; others to representative bodies; many respond primarily to immediate outcomes. These points of reference shape how the system is experienced even when its formal structure remains unchanged.
10
Public life continues not because its conditions are settled, but because decisions cannot wait for full certainty. Authority acts while circumstances remain incomplete, and participation proceeds without full anticipation of its effects. The system endures through this necessity: decisions are made under partial visibility, terms persist beyond their precision, and institutions adjust internally without losing their outward form. What holds public life together is not clarity, but the need to proceed in its absence.
Chapter II
Executive Action Under Uncertainty
1
Executive action is the domain in which decisions are least postponable. Unlike deliberative bodies, the executive is structured to act before conditions stabilize. Time pressure, incomplete information, and competing signals define its operating environment. This does not make executive judgment exceptional; it renders its limits more visible.
2
Because executive decisions are publicly observable, they often become the primary reference point through which political life is interpreted. Orders, statements, appointments, and enforcement actions are easier to see than the processes that precede or follow them. Visibility creates the impression of control even when outcomes remain uncertain.
3
The authority of the executive is often described as personal, yet it is exercised through institutional mechanisms. Decisions attributed to an individual are carried out through agencies, procedures, and delegated discretion. This layered execution allows action to proceed while responsibility is distributed across structures that remain largely out of view.
4
Periods of uncertainty tend to compress authority toward the executive. When coordination slows elsewhere, executive action fills the gap. This concentration does not require a change in constitutional structure; it occurs within existing forms as responsibilities narrow and timelines shorten.
5
Public judgment frequently focuses on decisiveness rather than conditions. Speed is mistaken for clarity; repetition for resolve. The question of whether a decision could have been otherwise is displaced by whether it was made visibly and without hesitation.
6
This focus alters how accountability is perceived. Because executive action is immediate, it absorbs praise and blame even when outcomes depend on factors beyond executive control. The executive domain becomes symbolically overloaded, functioning as a proxy for the system as a whole.
7
Over time, this dynamic reshapes expectations. Executives are asked to resolve conditions that no single office can manage. When results fall short, dissatisfaction is personalized rather than structural. Judgment narrows toward figures instead of processes.
8
The persistence of executive action under uncertainty does not indicate failure elsewhere. It reflects the necessity of action where delay carries its own costs. The executive does not eliminate uncertainty; it operates within it.
9
As established in Chapter I—The Limits of Judgment in Public Life—the distinction between structure and method remains intact. Executive authority is one structural component of the republic. Its prominence under uncertainty does not convert the system into personal rule, nor does it dissolve other forms of participation. It alters their relative visibility.
10
Executive action continues because decisions cannot wait for conditions to stabilize. What the public observes is not mastery, but motion. The domain appears decisive not because it resolves uncertainty, but because it must act while relevant information remains in flux.
Chapter III
Administrative Displacement and Procedural Substitution
1
Administrative action operates at a distance from public attention, not because it is concealed, but because it unfolds through structures designed for continuity rather than visibility. Rules are applied, procedures adjusted, and priorities reordered within agencies whose work sustains governance without occupying the foreground of political life. These actions rarely present themselves as discrete decisions, yet they shape outcomes as directly as legislative acts or executive orders.
2
Although the executive branch bears the most visible weight of action, it does not act alone. Authority moves through a dense internal structure—departments, offices, and administrative hierarchies—that translates executive direction into practice. Within this structure, different temporal orientations coexist. Some units respond to the immediacy of political mandates; others operate within constitutional and statutory frameworks intended to secure duration, stability, and institutional memory.
3
What appears publicly as a unitary executive act is, in practice, the visible edge of a distributed process. Administrative authorities do not replace the legislative function, nor do they interpret law in the judicial sense. They apply existing statutes, regulations, and precedents to concrete circumstances, exercising discretion only within bounds already defined. Governance continues through this application not because interpretation expands, but because execution must proceed even when direct legislative action is absent or delayed.
4
Procedural substitution occurs when formal decision-making cannot advance at the same pace as events. When legislation stalls, or when executive authority reaches its constitutional limits, administrative processes absorb responsibility by adjusting how existing rules are applied. Guidance is refined, enforcement priorities are reordered, and procedural pathways are recalibrated so that action can continue without altering the legal framework itself.
5
The effect of this adjustment is cumulative rather than declarative. Procedures acquire force through sustained use across cases, offices, and time. What matters is not the announcement of a decision, but the establishment of a practice that becomes operative through repetition. Authority is exercised through continuity of application, not through proclamation or display.
6
Because responsibility is distributed across agencies and routines, public judgment often struggles to locate where change occurs. Outcomes appear without a single moment of decision to which they can be traced. This dispersal does not eliminate accountability, but it complicates it. Effects are experienced before their procedural origins are understood, if they are understood at all.
7
Over time, this mode of governance reshapes public expectations. Citizens may sense that conditions have shifted while remaining uncertain about who acted or how. Dissatisfaction attaches to the system as a whole rather than to identifiable actors, not because authority is absent, but because it operates through channels that do not align with public narratives of decision and responsibility.
8
Administrative displacement does not signal institutional breakdown. It reflects the necessity of maintaining governance under constraint. When formal decisions cannot be taken at the speed required, procedures adapt so that authority continues to function without exceeding its legal bounds. The system does not suspend itself; it adjusts its pathways.
9
This domain illustrates the separation between form and operation established in the opening chapter. The constitutional structure of authority remains intact, while its execution shifts in emphasis and sequence. What changes is not who holds power, but how that power is carried forward under conditions that do not permit explicit resolution.
10
Governance persists through these substitutions because action cannot stop. Authority moves not by abandoning its limits, but by working within them. The continuity of public life depends less on visible decisions than on the capacity of institutions to apply existing frameworks to changing circumstances—imperfectly, and without claiming finality.
Chapter IV
Electoral Ritual and the Persistence of Form
1
Elections are the most recognizable feature of democratic participation. They provide a recurring structure through which public involvement is organized and displayed. Their regularity creates a sense of continuity even as surrounding conditions change.
2
As ritual, elections affirm participation through repetition. Procedures remain familiar—campaigns, voting, certification, transition—and establish a shared sequence that signals order and legitimacy. These outward forms sustain confidence in the process, even when outcomes remain uncertain.
3
Elections endure not because they resolve conflict, but because they organize trust at the point of selection. They do not settle disagreement; they make continued coordination possible by establishing a recognized moment of authorization.
4
Once trust is organized at the point of selection, public attention shifts from the mechanics of participation to the visibility of results. Winning and losing replace examination of how participation translates into policy, administration, or enforcement. The ritual satisfies the expectation of involvement, while attention moves away from the pathways through which authority is exercised after selection.
5
This emphasis on outcome reinforces symbolic stability. As long as elections occur on schedule and results are recognized, the system appears intact. Questions about how decisions are made afterward—how authority is carried forward, distributed, and constrained—receive less sustained attention.
6
Discrepancies between electoral choice and lived experience are often attributed to individuals rather than to institutional pathways. Dissatisfaction becomes personalized, while the structural distance between participation and governance remains largely unexamined.
7
Electoral rituals persist because they serve a stabilizing function. They mark transitions, renew legitimacy, and provide a shared reference point for public life. Their endurance does not depend on their capacity to resolve underlying pressures, but on their ability to preserve coordination in the presence of disagreement.
8
As conditions change, participation may become more expressive than effective. Voting signals presence and alignment, even when it does not materially alter administrative or executive trajectories. Expression remains visible; influence becomes less certain.
9
Democracy, understood as method, remains visible and active. What fluctuates is the degree to which participation reaches into the domains where decisions are continuously adjusted, and where authority continues to operate after the moment of voting.
10
Public life continues through this arrangement because action cannot pause at the point of selection. Decisions proceed while conditions evolve, information accumulates unevenly, and responsibility shifts across domains. What endures is not resolution, but continuity: governance advances through adjustment rather than completion, sustained by institutions that act without claiming finality.
Observations On Perception 