In Front of the Mournfull Walls, Once Again…
‘Our friends came, light dances came
We offered sugar, took the lion’s manes, opened forty doors
Forty doors opened, Bluebeard died
Beautiful lions laughed within forty rooms
You laughed, Asia laughed, light dances arrived
Our friends came, their sturdy marks in the snow
They were well taught about what could be done
And they placed their shadows in strong boxes
If a wrong river emerges from beneath the wrong mountain
If a stone cloud, bringing stones, gets lost among the stones
Mount the striped boat in the bandit’s bag
Bandits are the familiar source of mercy
Forget the thinly distorted knowledge
In front of quiet, deep, endless grieving walls
Sing the most joyous, the one most yours, among all the ballads’
(Sezai Karakoç, The Wooden Horse)
Spiritual “Private Property”
Although Marxism could not find a solid political basis in human history, Marx was right about some essential issues about humanity. Despite, his analysis of capitalism remained in the limits of the Indian caste system, the Aryan-European centered mankind and social perception, Jewish materialism, and the eternal conflict inspired by Zoroastrianism within a framework of progressive historical philosophy, Marx’s critique of capitalism remains unsurpassed. Particularly, the analysis of the more essential human tragedies that young Marx was preoccupied with, such as alienation and the master-slave dialectic, within praxis still makes Marx privilaged in between intellectuals of the political economy field.
As the perceivable reason facilitating the spread of humanity’s inner evil, the inegalitarian developments in production relations and the alienation caused by these relations, provides a concrete explanation for origin of many problems. As humanity becomes alienated from nature, it also becomes alienated from itself, as seen in the form of alienation from one’s own labor and the products of that labor within capitalist production relations. For Marx, this was a primary concern. Analyzing this through the concept of private property emphasized the fundamental aspect of capitalist political economy: “Private property alienates not only the individuality of humanbeings but also of the things. Soil has nothing to do with land renting; machines have nothing to do with profit.”
If we accept that the ownership of the production tools as the humanity’s collective knowledge, the society’s shared values, and the political collective wisdom then we can broaden and deepen this framework and can enable a new consideration of alienation and even exploitation. Because human rights are no longer relevant to the Europe, democracy to the USA, socialism to the Russia or China, Islam to the Iran and to the institutional religiosity, or Jewish identity to the Jews. Likewise, Turkish nationalism is no longer bound to the native Turks, Kurdish nationalism to the native Kurds, leftism to the leftists, or modernity and republicanism to the Kamalists. This new form of alienation emerges where collective values, identities, concepts, and even emotions are staked in a new type of private ownership, which serves certain groups’ cosmic profits. Consequently, these new exploitative relations revert individuals and communities, nations, and all of humanity to the primal, direct forms of master-slave relations. Now every shared value, belief, and identity has its owners, while others as slaves of these property owners, permitted to live in a minimum standard of living. If do not accept servitude there has no rigth to live. Those who have not ownership of these spiritual means of production and those who reject servitude to the owners are subject to every type of agreed-upon, legitimized discrimination, ostracism, oppression, massacre, and eradication. Each affiliation, each membership, every collective property finds its meaning only within the boundaries and constructs defined by its “hosts.” The words they use or the behaviors they show have turned people into house niggers of the owners of the collectivity to which those behaviors and words belong, just like advertising activities that create loyalty and addiction by marketing things such as watches, dresses, drinks, etc. with the feeling of happiness, superiority and specialness. And like classic capitalist alienation, in this new exploitive network, no one owns anything; no one truly connects with the values, concepts, or lifestyles they feel belonging to or even fight for.
The greatest misunderstanding of humanity and its most intimidating attitude that threats the others lies in the behavior of possessing something collectively: the religion, the God, the state, the nation, the leader, the reason, the science, the freedom, the equality, the democracy, the modernity, and so on. These “good” concepts, reconstructed as forms of ownership, continually estrange humanity, each time anew, especially within the context of re-establishing capitalist production relations stripping humanity of its hypostasis—reason, labor, faith and history—leaving it defenseless. “The worst is the misuse of the best.” (Arthur Schopenhauer)
The New Network of Exploitation
In today’s technological era, as the boundaries of the old world dissolve with advancements in communication technologies, much more complex yet individual boundaries are being drawn. While the limits of the old world are being exceeded with the communication oppurtunities of the new technological age that humanity lives in today, much more complex and individual limits are being created. This reaches the point where, just as Marx feared, every individual and societal problem emerges as a symptom of a universal and historical issue, a problem shared by all of humanity.
Poverty is mitigated to an acceptable level with social aid, while being alienated to its root cause of private property under the guise of “income inequality.” Similarly, sub-human behaviors and thoughts—like drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, sexual perversion, racism, hostility towards immigrants, Islamophobia, Zionism, and formalist-vulgar religiousism—are sustained by distorting important, legitimate concepts like diversity, pluralism, and freedom. Such dehumanizing tendencies, despicable lifestyles and ways of thinking that destroy the ancient values of humanity are imposed on mankind in a mobbing style, hiding their connection with the globalized system that perpetuates this mobbing. Poverty and immigration, pornography and hypocritical religiosity, racism and idolatry, Islamophobia and sexual perversion—all are cultivated, encouraged, and interlinked within the demonic network of relationships securing private ownership of production means. All are encouraged, endlessly and universally, as forms of evil within the same global wavelength.
Any assesment that does not fundamentally object to this system entirely or fails to recognize the entire structure is either deluded or distorted, cannot accurately grasp politics, economics, geopolitics, philosophy, or religion. Those who idolize enforced or taught identities and fetishized, sanctified concepts and leaders or fabricated ethnic, religious, sectarian, and ideological identities cannot forge genuine ties with basic human values, historical identities, or collective national affiliations. Because, “The worst is the misuse of the best.”
Each supposedly good concept or identity has become merely a tool within the abovementioned demonic network, a proxy warrior of evil. The idols themselves have become commodities. Worse, people are unaware of this. As Marx observed: “Money lowers all the gods of man and turns them into commodities.” Today, spiritual values, traditions, moral principles, ancient beliefs, socio-political affiliations, and individual identities have all become cheapened commodities.
This situation is no longer an erosion of value, but a serious problem of universal dehumanizing process about human hypostasis.
Oğuz Atay writes in The Disconnected: “We must always remember that what we consider personal values could be false qualities acquired under societal pressure.”
Albert Camus, argued that German despair came from the collapse of the value consensus: “There was no longer any standart of value both common to and superior to all these men, by which they could judge each other” says.
Without a standard of value, chaos and anarchy arise, turning people into cannibalistic zombies, consuming each other.
Pathocracy: Collective Madness
“Shame and justice could not find shelter. Everything good began to deteriorate.” (Hesiodos, Works and Days-Birth of Gods)
The political definition of this state is pathocracy—the governance of society through psychological pathologies. Not only Türkiye, but the entire world, is currently under pathocratic hegemony. The postmodern vortex—with its meaninglessness, aimlessness, and lack of values— that we entered after the cold war, has been replaced by an insatiable greed for money, possessions, profit, and pleasure. At its core, this tendency represents the alienation of humanity from its Adamic hypostasis, an ontological disease. It is normal for a person to strive for meeting basic needs in Maslow pyramid like safety, sheltering, nourishment and then saving money so as not to be dependant on yellow dogs and and then to meeting his/her needs related to aesthetics, philosophy, spirituality, social prestige, entertainment and enjoying the blessings of the world. But what prevails today is that this normality has become a cause of abnormal rampancy, destroying everything in the form of an insatiable appetite and passion, and taking people captive. Lust has never been a fundamental instinc in this form. The main cause of this is capitalism—an endless drive for profit and systematic exploitation.
The privatization of all human, moral, and spiritual values, following the privatization of the means of production, has trapped individuals and societies in a new slaving system that fueled by unrestrained desire. And this is no longer just the offence of the ruling classes, but also the offence of the oppressed. “Stealing a purse is a crime, stealing a fortune is courage, stealing the throne is a sign of greatness. As the crime grows, its intolerability decreases.” (Friedrich Schiller) When crime becomes widespread, its intolerability vanishes. By removing crimes from being faults, millions of people who are competing to commit crimes that have grown and more spread today, met in a common sea of sins and became ‘everyone’. Everyone is the same, everyone is like this and everyone does it. So now evil is normal. ‘Everyone’ is now the motivation and excuse for alienation from the human condition and the process of humanization. Once again, human nature is alienated from the substantia of humanity, this time not as a drama, like in the story of Adam, but as a tragedy.
Aldous Huxley portrayed this era as a deep meaninglessness in Brave New World. Despite Orwell’s 1984, which depicts distopian world where everything is inverted—good becomes evil and evil becomes good—and where people are brought under the frightening rule of Big Brother with transforming threats, Huxley illustrates a world without good or evil, without any value system, where people do not even know such concepts. It is an aphasic, paralyzed era of absurd lust, founded on mindlessness, ignorance, and faithlessness. It is an age of chaos where the feeling of shame is absent, or rather, where there is no standard to feel ashamed of, and android-like masses consume each other. In this world, everyone is an enemy to everyone else. Everyone is a rival and a stranger to each other. There has never been another age in which hostility towards humanity has been so widespread. Misanthropy, the hatred of humanity, is the primary symptom of pathocracy. If you don’t believe in the story of Satan’s envy of Adam, it is impossible to explain this hatred. It is as if Satan has kept his word, proving mankind to be a blood-spilling, chaotic being. (But it just “seems” to be proven. In reality, the devil cannot prove this claim because throughout history, at every hour of destruction, a breath of Adam and an inspiration of prophethood always stand guard.)
Now, this terrifying age of chaos deepens with the digital revolution, artificial intelligence, sophisticated weaponry, and theories of a human-free world like transhumanism. We are now in a truly scary world where the ordinary people are pushed into a parallel world and controlled and reshaped through smartphones, where the many things that have never been seen before are experienced for the first time. It is as if all the parables of destruction, spooky tales, horror stories, apocalyptic narratives, chaos mythologies of history have come back together and in a form of storm blows over humanity. Humanity that experienced its first global testing with the pandemic project which paralyzes human willpower, turns people into passive insects and makes them voluntarily agree to anything, is now expected to show the same voluntary servitude behavior through fear of rumors of climate change and world war and these rumors of war also can be called a political pandemic. Countries, states, societies and individuals, frightened by global climate change and the Third World War, are now ready for a mode of thinking, belief and behavior in which they will accept every instruction given without question and adopt it voluntarily. Voluntary servitude is maintained through techniques that exploit selfishness. Selfishness—an exaggerated sense of individual interest, fear of death, health obsession, anxiety about the future, worship of power, and unrestrained lust—is a symptom of voluntary servitude. This is a form of individual self-colonization.
Chaotic New World: Fictitious Heavens
Humanity, which was paralyzed and tempered by two world wars throughout the 20th century, was intimidated and caged by America’s atomic bomb or Soviet tanks throughout the Cold War theater. Yet, there was still a clear address for good or bad. Asia, Eastern bloc, which was included into the British economic-political system under the guise of state capitalism -socialism-, has sedated half the world with its promises of salvation. (Russia still reaps the benefits of this sedation). Meanwhile, under NATO’s protective umbrella, the West defined itself as the free world, caged by the fear of communism. At least, it was an Orwellian world with clear actors and causes for good and bad and there was a perpetrator and responsible for every incident. It was a world compatible with human perception. But now this familiar physical world has faded. The reasons for wars and invasions have become obscure. There is no perpetrator of the pandemic. Who and why are changing the climate remains unknown. Who will fight in World War III and why is unclear. But anything can happen at any moment. Even films, series, and games lack a clear antagonist, protagonist, good or bad, beginning, or end. Even there is no coherent narrative. Newborns are now enter into a world that has never experienced before in human history. They may learn history as distorted fables. The collective memory of humanity no longer exists. Every nation, religion, community, organization, city, and even individual is presented with a different history. Ethnic, religious, and sectarian concepts, which had distinct meanings a century ago, are now redefined as land mines separating humanity, societies, and individuals.
Up until last century, revolution was the only hope for overcoming the political, economic, social, and cultural policies serving the interests of ruling classes. Yet, in this era of digital and metaverse revolutions, this hope has become an illusion. Capitalism’s new version has now made even the oppressed complicit, like the bourgeoisie. Now, everyone pursues the life of a bourgeois, with minds fixed on nothing else. This fantasy of a fictive paradise, poisoning state resources, the physical economy, and social relations, has become an immediate goal. There is no longer a master-slave conflict but a fictitious paradise where slavery imitates mastery. Alas! even chains have become opium. Communism was ultimately promise of a fictive earthly paradise, and people preferred the ‘right now’ heaven promised by capitalism instead of the earthly paradise that would come with communist revolution or the paradises promised by religions for afterlife. “Perseus wore a magic helmet to remain unseen by the monsters he hunted. We, on the other hand, pull down the magic helmet over our eyes and ears to avoid seeing the existence of monsters.” (K. Marx)
Returning to the True Self Again
Now, we need a comprehensive theoretical perspective to analyze this new systematic order. There is a need for a theory that can discover the connection of the desensitization of youth worldwide, who are drawn to similar lifestyles, typologies, clothing, and hobbies with the ideology behind the child-killing killers in Gaza, that can figure out the connection between the thousands living in Mozambique’s trash mountains and the London stock exchange, that can connect China’s chip-regime to the spread of alcohol and drugs, that can diagnose links between the depopulation of villages and the overcrowding of cities and the rise of purposeless entertainment and the promotion and imposition of Indian dalits’ gypsy lifestyle. Likewise, we must understand connections between the spread of Covid-19 and the Aryan policies that have facilitated Shiite Iran’s devastation of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, and we have to connect the Rio Carnival to India’s calculated growth and we must figure out the links between narco-terrorism and virtual gambling and asymmetric warfare, and we have to understand connection between why the U.S. presidential race was fought between a pedophilic old man and a madman and the abuses of children by priests in the Vatican—we have to understand clearly all these connections just like the connection between the price of bread and the value of labor.
The digital illusion of this new era needs to be reinterpreted through a dialectical understanding, and the systematic methods of analysis need to be updated to examine the age and its projections for the future. However, instead of reducing eco-political conflicts to a class struggle inspired by the Hindu-Aryan caste system, these conflicts should be reexamined on the broader basis of human ontology and dignity, centered on the purpose of being human. We must bury what was once good but has now been corrupted and consider what is to be reborn.
Marx attempted to address human alienation through Jewish universalism and Zoroastrian duality, seeking revenge on Christian Europe, but in doing so, he overlooked the hypostasis of the humanity. What we need now is a new universalism and a fresh dialectic of transformation that summons humanity’s essence against the savagery of human nature. This vision would see the creative cycle of life and death, preventing the exploitation of good for evil, and would uphold justice, wisdom, and virtue as the ultimate law.
“He who desires the rule of law desires nothing other than the rule of God; whereas, he who desires human rule desires a wild beast, for those who lead are subject to the same passions as beasts.” (Aristotle, Politics)
It is time to cut to the root of this world of savagery, driven by animalistic passions, and consider all issues together, down to their deepest roots. If there is a widespread decay at the level of humanity, there must also be a path to redemption at the same level. “O human, I defend you against yourself.” (Nuri Pakdil)
Now, in front of weary, depressed, hopeless and mournful walls of good people, it is time to holding the forelock of time and mount the striped boat in the bandit’s bag.