Whatever we do, remember: It’s someone else’s fault.
Owning up to our mistakes is something that we as a nation are not particularly fond of. When a sportsperson tests positive for illegal performance-enhancing substances, it’s always a set-up. When our football team loses, it means your rivals have bribed the referee. When a political party steadily loses ground to their rivals after each and every election or is implicated in illegal activities or even fails to get into parliament, the leader doesn’t resign, he (yes, ‘he’) just lays the blame on everyone except himself. When someone blames your ancestors for crimes in the past, we say that it was everyone else who committed crimes against us. In other words, it’s not our fault. Nothing is. We are pure as lambs. The Turkish minister of justice, Cemil Çiçek, said this just over a year ago: ‘We are the cleanest, purest and most innocent nation on earth.’ Anything unsavory that happens is always the result of a conspiracy on the part of our enemies.
This narcissistic national self-absolution is seen not only in the realm of politics, but even on an individual day-to-day basis. It’s quite common to see people accosting everyone around them for being assholes and morons while they themselves do the exact same thing they blame others for. People will fret about those who cut in front of them in traffic or in a queue or while shopping, and then they themselves – with no apparent sense of self-contradiction – will unabashedly do the same thing. When asked, they will explain ‘If everybody’s doing it to me, should I just let myself be a victimized sucker?’ So instead of taking responsibility for our own actions and setting exemplary standards for others to emulate, we instead expect everybody else to take responsibility for their actions first… and we’re all still waiting.
So what’s with our arrested ethical development? Perhaps it’s that what predominates in our social relations is pride rather than respect. Pride is essentially solipsistic respect, while respect is basically shared pride. The former needs no outside qualification, and is in fact oblivious to it, because it’s self-indulgent. It only needs to be defended from attack, so it’s defensive by nature. Respect, on the other hand, entails a certain conciliatory vulnerability that can be risked because you trust others not to take advantage of that vulnerability. And therein lies the difference: without that essential trust, that give and take, you end up merely a society of aggressively defensive self-seekers who view all around them as either rivals or allies.
You can see this defensive self-serving attitude throughout our society, in our tendency to belittle people, to speak poorly of those around us, to establish a sense of superiority over others, to hang out in cliques and groups, all of which are like preemptive defensive tactics to guard our pride. In restaurants, on the streets, in offices, all around us, we tend to treat others disdainfully with the aim of establishing our own exclusivity. The prime minister of the country will refer to workers as ‘lowly peons’ (‘ayak takımı’); the lady in the brasserie will treat the waiter as a peasant; when a Turkish team competes against a foreign one we will belittle our opponents when victorious; when you ask someone to clean their litter they will take offense that you’re insinuating that they are garbage collectors; ask anyone sitting behind some kind of desk or wearing some kind of uniform a question, and they will give you a smart-ass cocky belittling answer that seems to suggest that you are not worthy of knowing what they (usually don’t) know. With no trust, everyone is terrified of showing any vulnerability, which means everyone is being an asshole to each other to uphold their pride in the absence of mutual respect.
Why are we like this? One factor may be that in Turkey, we have a vertical-exclusive structure of power rather than a horizontal-inclusive one (as seen in modern Western democracies). In other words, for us, power is something applied upon you by those in higher positions above, and applied by you to those in lower positions below. It’s something applied by one agent on another, and thus is synonymous with ‘force’. This martial mentality is instigated in every Turk from an early age: father is master of mother and child, teacher is master of pupil, state is master of populace, imam is master of his flock, state bureaucrat is master of average citizen, elder sibling is master of younger sibling, male is master of female, etc. We are taught to strictly adhere to the words of our superiors, without fail, without criticism, often under threat of corporal punishment in the event of disobedience, at the same time as we are taught to treat our ‘inferiors’ with a high hand. With the resulting undeveloped capacity for critical thinking – bolstered by an education system in which you can graduate from senior high (‘lise’) without ever writing a paper/essay, being graded almost solely on multiple-choice exams – it’s no wonder that this vertical-exclusivity continues to replicate itself at every level.
So what we end up with is a sense that the position of others and ourselves is static, absolute, hierarchically determined, and thus beyond criticism. Pride becomes a guarantee of respect granted by a certain social/economic/political position and that becomes inviolable under any circumstance. Personal integrity takes precedence over others’ integrity and you are used to considering yourself beyond reproach, because those you don’t respect are thus unworthy of reproaching you. Therefore your moral right is determined and safeguarded by your hierarchical might.
And yet, this state of affairs is not absolute or monolithic either. After all, when you do actually treat people respectfully they always respond with admiration and gratitude and a smile, even with wide-eyed surprise, as if it’s something new and refreshing and unheard of. So it is possible to change our ways, and we do understand and appreciate something better than blind megalomaniacal pride. We just have to start taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions first, and teach our kids to do the same. Things can change in as little as two generations.
