We take a look at the Turkish habit of losing your shit.
We Turks have a tendency of going ballistic pretty easily. This is because we enjoy it, as an oft-quoted popular expression ‘rage is sweeter than honey’ (öfke baldan tatlıdır) suggests. In fact we enjoy it so much that rage has assumed an acceptable place in our social relations, to the point where it’s generally expected to arise at moments where non-Turks would still conceivably be engaged in calm reasoned argumentation. But to us, calm reasoned argumentation is boring when you could be having fun throwing a tantrum instead. So why do we go ape shit so much?
We often have little choice but to flip out. After all, there aren’t a lot of people with a good basic standard of education out there, people who have at least learnt to raise their hands and wait their turn when they have something to say, people who would at some 10-year point in their formative schooling years have been expected to put together a cogent argument and a capacity for abstract thinking. If nothing else, education teaches one to respect the rights of others and gives you the basic skills to make your case in a reasoned, ‘objective’ manner. And yet, unless you can afford to go to a private school in Turkey, most of us get nothing more than education by rote in public schools where kids only learn to obey authority – and that’s if you even go to school at all. So what does all this mean? It means you often get to see the following ‘argument’ among two grown men in the middle of the street:
“Why are you parking your car there? Is this your dad’s street?”
“Who are you? Who do you think you are?”
“Who do you mean by ‘you’?! Who are YOU? Didn’t your mother teach you manners?”
“You’re talking about my mother? What about YOUR mother? I have to park here.”
“Then park somewhere else, I have to go through. How dare you insult my honor?”
“Then YOU park somewhere else! You’re insulting MY honor!”
“DON’T RAISE YOUR VOICE AT ME!”
“WHO RAISED THEIR VOICE FIRST!?”
Etc… which eventually segues into a fist fight, and maybe a knife fight, perhaps even a shooting, and maybe even a blood feud. The brilliant incoherence of this ‘dialogue’ is further accompanied by expressive hand signals, usually involving variations of the fingers-and-thumb-tips-bunched-together-being-prodded-into-own-chest-while-making-inane-point, along with the open-palm-pleading-with-occasional-back-of-hand-slapping-into-palm-of-other-hand-while-making-tsk-tsk-tsk-sounds to indicate frustration and futility at the opposite person not seeing everything 100% from his own point of view. Add the fact that we’re incapable of abstraction and tend to consider everything from a personal perspective, and you’ll find it no wonder why we waste half our lives in ridiculous conflicts that could easily be resolved with a little mutual respect and cool-headedness.
But how do these situations arise in the first place? Remember that bit about education at least teaching people to pay heed to others’ rights, which teaches kids that forsaking your own immediate short-term interests for the interests of the whole actually serves your purpose better in the long run and leads to a relatively functional social contract in densely populated urban environments? Well, you can scrap that idea in our education system. What we learn instead is that unless there’s an authority figure to impose order and obeisance (father/state/teacher/imam), or unless you’re dealing with family, then all you have is competitive chaos in which you doggedly pursue your own immediate short term interests and try to beat others to it by infringing on everyone else’s rights for the selfish benefit of your own.
That means you try to get your car in a lane first by dangerously blocking off other vehicles and nearly running over pedestrians; that means you cut in a queue where possible; that means you don’t look around you when you walk but just jump out in people’s way and start walking a straight line to your destination while trampling on others’ toes; that means you don’t wait at red lights whether you’re a pedestrian or a driver… and those all mean, of course, lots of people’s interests clashing all the time and leading to quick-tempered arguments in which everyone’s losing their shit at the first indignant retort – all no doubt augmented by poor infrastructure, repressive social norms, copious amounts of caffeine-loaded black tea, and chain-smoking nicotine-fueled vitamin-C-deficient ire.
What we’ve learnt to do as Turks is to normalize this expression of rage, and even expect it. We’ve realized that, all things considered, it actually helps to go completely off the handle instead of letting it all get pent up inside. But what we fail to realize is that all those confrontations actually do sometimes add up to occasionally relieve themselves in the extreme form of ‘cinnet’ (‘jeen-net’, literally meaning ‘demons/djinnie’): a form of temporary insanity, or ‘possession’, when the proverbial poo really hits the proverbial fan. Perhaps the one consolation is that our normalization of instant gratification of anger actually serves a merciful carry-on effect when the ‘cinnet’ strikes, because that also necessitates an instant satisfaction, rather than a seething bottled-up anger which can lead to permanent psychopathy. Instead, what we get with ‘cinnet’ is instant action, usually leading to a sometimes-fatal lashing out at those in one’s immediate vicinity, before the neighbors and/or authorities intervene. So at least we don’t end up with elusive serial killers… just explosive mini-psychopaths who run amok in a single violent spree before being arrested or blowing their own brains out at the end.
I guess that’s one way to put a positive spin on our gratuitous aggrophiliopathy.
