If you don’t know the reason of your rage, you will be captured by it. If you cannot read the reason of the other’s rage correctly, then you will be captured by your own reality. In Turkey, we are experiencing an accumulation of rage. What imprisons those ragers and the object of their anger is the tension that captures their minds.

The target of this rage is simply the Prime Minister, the government, and in a wider sense, the conservative community. The ones who are angry are the authorities of the past, status quo supporters, and those whom drag in the past and today, the incoherent and otherizers; that is the opposition.

The designers of rage who convert it into a political opposition force and make it focus on a political target, controllers of the perception management are the power holders in the past.

The authority of the past who consider themselves as the holder of the status quo and the possessor of the system and country as a privileged few now regard themselves as the ‘low authority’.

There are objective reasons for the outbreak of rage, its concrete and real applications. However, there are a few dimensions of these reasons and phenomena that are independent from rational accounts regarding the outbreak of the current rage.

If the transformation of the concrete reality into the perception of an imaginary enemy causes an outbreak of rage instead of fear, it means the situation is more complicated than thought.

While it is comprehensible that rage drives its agent away from the common sense, it is quite interesting that the target of anger avoids a self-question.

There are two sources of rage, or more correctly two groups, which control the politics of rage: the habitual controllers of the political authority or roughly speaking the status quo, and the other is a political authority which includes the former conditions and controls the political and intellectual life.

Since the last 10 years in which Turkey has experienced a transformation process, it’s always been said that in terms of politics, economics and bureaucratic relationships, Turkey’s authority changed hands.

True, the first time in the history of Turkey the conservative community took over the power and does not want to leave it. At the face of this, there is the impression of those who have lost their authority, and their missions ranging from building the plan of how we should think to shaping one’s mindset in order to design what we should believe and who actually have held the political and intellectual authority in their hands since the times of the Second Constitutional Era.

On the way to the Second Constitutional Era, there occurred a paradox process. Regardless of his own daily practices and beliefs, Sultan Abdulhamit himself opened the way of the waters for the sea of rage, which he was going to get drawn into. He realized the most important steps of modernization. He was sacrificed going through the rage of the generation who were raised up in these channels of water.

Now it is as if history were repeating itself. The AK Party authority, especially in its economic sense, is integrating the country into the west and as a matter of fact, the new developed social reaction confronts it as the opposition force. The critical question here is that while AK Party was fostered in its two initial administration terms, what happened so far that it brought such an opposition language style transforming into this huge outbreak of rage?

The liberals who are a western privileged few and regarded themselves obliged to shape the future of Turkey in particular were considering themselves capable of controlling the political progress of the conservative masses and were, sooner or later, expecting to change the route of the transformation to their favor.

While the integration to the global capitalism was being completed and the country was growing with an economic progress, it was not sufficiently questioned as to why the intelligentsia, which almost said nothing about the fact that Anatolia had not taken any share of this economic growth, moved with a sudden outbreak of rage.

As this class of people were expecting to experience the process of transformation that was operated by the western norms in a way that they determined. However, this incorporation process despite its conservative tones and even if it ended with a satisfying result to their content, the copyrights of the project authorship was going to cause trouble.

Liberals, Kemalists, and western opposition forces were expecting to give a course in the process as they were sure that the ‘lowlife rule’ was incapable of determining the country’s new relationship to be set with the west, social norms and political design. However, the fact that they were pushed aside in the process was completely unacceptable even though this process would possibly have ended exactly the way they originally demanded.

I believe that such an outbreak of rage against the conservative authority especially that of the intellectual circles is strictly related to the losing sentiment of initiative. The situation connotes a conceptualization by one of the most significant anthropologists in the 20th century, Clifford Geertz, called ‘deep game’ where the deep authority was deprived of its toys.

It is always quite annoying to become deprived of one’s toys. In fact, westernism both with its aspects of Turkish left and right is simply an intellectual childishness.

One of the most dangerous aspects of the exposed ‘deep game’ that transformed into a bilateral form of rage and captured the whole country is that those who are on target of the rage are blocked from opportunities for self-criticism and feel a need merely for an apologetics and justifications.

On the other side, there are those whose rage raised to the level of obsession and turned into the mindset: ‘after me, the flood’. The real reaction derives from the fact that the current change of the authority is getting out of the control under the new authority’s opposition forces and by letting it know that its enlightening (!) mission is no longer needed, it obtains the self-determining political conscience.

The fact that instead of questioning the system, the opposition’s state of mind overflowing with rage against the political authority for whom it offers no alternative model, portrays the abnormality of its political style. It is also an outcome of the decline in the intellectual influence, which manifests on the media level. The media tutelage’s loss invoking help from the opposition, which is trying to socialize, does not change its abnormal nature, either.

On the other side, a kind of apologetic state of mind, which leads to an erosion of value, is running to delay a self-question of the political authority regarding the corruption in its own body. Both sides as the object and the convicts of rage are becoming blind and values are being eroded.

We have to remember that the transformation in today’s Turkey is majorly a handover of power between the teams. The rage that blocks the debate regarding the fundamentals closes the way for genuine solutions.

Ýlgili YazýlarEnglish