The Sacred and the Profane

Mircea Eliade's aim in his book The Sacred and the Profane / Le Sacré et le Profane (1956), like The Myth of the Eternal Return / Le Mythe de l'Éternel Retour (1949), is to discover the unchangeable essence, structure and persistent archetypes of religious cosmology, beyond the dogmatics of historical religions. Eliade accepts archaism, in which the phenomenon of religion emerges in very different forms from the Judeo-Christian tradition, as a form of traditional society that ensures the continuity of the sacred-profane distinction.

In archaic religion, people feel much more connected and closer to the Cosmos and cosmic rhythms. In a sense, the book confronts the historicity of modern religions with this. The narration of the Cosmos by archaic cosmogonies is also "historical". However, a "profane" design that would make humans the subject of history is far from having completely established its dominance over ancient mythologies and even over the first forms of historical religions. 

The "profane" modern world, which has declared its dominance, has not completely eliminated the archetypes of the sacred and replaced them with completely different symbols. It couldn't be otherwise on the plane Eliade investigated. Sometimes, humans witness that even history as a whole can be sanctified: "Someone without religion has lost the ability to live religion consciously and thus the opportunity to understand and undertake it; but she/he still preserves the memory of it in the depths of her/his being." 

Perhaps, from this point on, the "special mythology" that the "unconscious" owes its complex, demonic existence to the retreat of the religious world since Sigmund Freud made its presence felt. Friedrich Nietzsche says "God is Dead!"; Freud says "God is the Unconscious". Here, in "Sacred and the Profane", by weaving back and forth between these two words, Eliade tries to discover the secrets of how the sacred maintains its irreducible existence, at least in the form of archetypes, symbols and manifestations, away from all kinds of nostalgia.

Modern society flourishes in a desecrated field. In the "secular" world, which is a new discovery, the desire for power of the "traditional" society, which is far from civilization today, and the sacred, which is the way of integration with nature, have entered a constant decline. According to Eliade, the "profane" constitutes this process to the detriment of the sacred. 

Modern society is essentially historical. From India to China, from Mesopotamia to the Kwakiutl natives… The journey that Eliade takes in his book is not far from the anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history and life of modern humans. This society is the society of the man of Marxism or Existentialism, who "makes himself" or has to make himself in time, that is, History, which is not regulated by "archetypes", which is the greatest fear of traditional society.

In a global world, the West's access to China may leave the impression that it shares the same and measurable space with China. However, as Chinese historian Andre Haudricourt said, Chinese civilization does not share the same and equivalent space with the West, for the same reason that it has not "lifted its harvest en masse" for thousands of years – rice, for instance, would not allow this. They did not obtain land from forests, did not graze village animals in flocks, and established their power indirectly, by "deceit" and courtesy. Aristotle's words "No one has an ethical responsibility towards inanimate beings and animals" are not heard from any Chinese philosopher.

Eliade starts the experience of the sacred from the "vertical stance" of homo erectus, from the first look of "Angst": The space this human encounters is not the same. Humans who would start setting up a tent or house from where they stood vertically must have seen and heard the Cosmos appearing to them and must have turned towards it: "In order to live in the world, it was necessary to build it." This experience is very old and must probably be universal.

For traditional humans, myths and religions describe "breakthroughs of the sacred (or the 'supernatural') into the World" —that is, hierophanies. Eliade prefers the word hierophany to the more constrictive word theophany, an appearance of the god(s). In the hierophanies, the sacred/ἱερός (hieros) reveals/φαίνειν (phainein) in the form of ideals (the actions and commandments of deities, heroes, stones etc.). The sacred manifests itself as ideal, ontologically founding the world/earth with value, direction, and purpose. In this perspective, all things need to imitate or conform to the sacred ideals established by hierophanies, in order to have true "reality": things have their reality and identity only to the extent of participation in a transcendent reality.

The ancientness and universality of divinity does not mean that it is remote and transcendent. On the contrary, in Eliade's work, the sacred encompasses the living environment that would never be compatible with holiness in today's daily life: the house, the door, the threshold, the street, the city and the temporal-spatial concepts surrounding all of these. The sacred is the first means, the first form of humans’ "opening to the world", confronting humans with a heterogeneous space and a dynamic time with its infinite diversity. Any sign recorded in time and space or seen by humans is sufficient to distinguish the sacred from the "profane". Humans now entered into the realm of the extraordinary (an eternal repetition, endless repetition).

Eternal return is a theme the world was familiar with before contemporary Western philosophy. It means that culture and the world are “rebuilt” and rejuvenated in stages. God is born, dies and is reborn, an endless repetition creating the immutable order of the cosmos. According to Eliade, the secret of why "primitive" or "traditional" cultures, which brought the sacred to the center of life, are "historyless" lies in this "eternal return". 

The "historicization" of modern society outlines a space that has been wrested from the sacred, made familiar (or knowable), and over which human activity would dominate. This area is the living space of the "profane" person who discusses the "meaning" of existence, who accepts the relativity of "truth" and who could reject all sorts of transcendence without anxiety. A person who rejects transcendence accepts himself/herself as the individual of life. 

For Eliade, however, this "profane" human being is also a descendant of homo religiosus, “made of the conditions of his ancestors". The "secret mythology" and secular ceremonies of the "profane" people are found in almost every moment of daily life. Cinema, literature, music and cultural images constitute religious archetypes of today's world, bearing the trace of the sensations of humanity that used to be "integrated with the sacred".

Greek: An Intensive Course

Love at Sight

In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan once spoke of love in a sublime moment when "love is returned", where love appeared as a feeling that always expects the same in return for the world to be the lover’s world. Even the most advanced understanding of psychoanalysis stops at such a mutual moment: in love, what lovers give to each other is what they do not have and do not demand.

“Love at first sight” is the common cliché called. Walter Benjamin countered this with "love at last sight". Benjamin thought of a field that could be described where the labor of falling in love works. Love is the human experience of joy from outside. Then, humans would connect the images and associate hatred with love that increases existential power: “Nothing concentrates more hatred than where existence lies,” Lacan situated in Encore. Thus, love appears as labor of mutuality and care being at first or at last sight.

Psychoanalytic categories may not be capable of getting into “the deeper" realities of literature and art simply because these "deeper realities" do not exist. Psychoanalysis needs to return to the psyche of the Author as the deity of art by a fraudulent shift, valuing “the love romance" as a “family romance” that would happen "outside the family" and not need psychoanalysis a lot. Because psychoanalysis probably prefers to pour love issues into eroticism and sexuality. 

Adam Phillips once said in Intimacies, "Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex," after Jacques Lacan’s declaration of “There is no sexual relation,” in Encore: “All love is literally a relation of two unconscious knowledges.”

For Spinoza, Amor, love and sexuality are not the same thing like joy and laughter. This does not require Platonist unity at all, because what is called Platonic Love was based on a logic of "unity" and it was only a result of love, not its cause. Spinoza discusses mutual love by never shying away from describing affect in Ethica: “A person who realizes that someone he loves hates him is stuck between hate and love. Because the more he thinks that he is the target of the other’s hatred, he is driven to hate in return; but as per the assumption, he still loves the other. Therefore, this person will oscillate between love and hate.”

The interpersonal nature of love is essentially love for oneself. This is not a singular affect, accompanied by the image of an external cause and is at the source of all human interpersonality. Love and grief are therefore separate – 'jealousy' or 'grief that love is not mutual. These feelings are unstoppable when humans have difficulty in having the free will over affects and passions. Humans cannot love willingly or hate willingly. Hatred is the human pain; and, when its reasons are understood, the feeling of hatred automatically disappears. Let's not forget that hatred is human sorrow.

Vulgarization

Vulgarization initially appears as a word of the 19th century for curiosity and disease. Of course, this is the century of the “victory” of sciences and technical inventions. With the discovery of the cell in biology, the theory of evolution, electromagnetism in physics, and the theories of elements in chemistry were put forward. Technology visuals from this century are not alien to today's world. 

Of course, it cannot be claimed that the pre-19th century was not very lucky in terms of "inventions". However, this century was making its discoveries against the background of brand new mechanisms and institutions, a differently woven scientific-technological world. The birth of the clinic in medicine and the laboratory and observatory in natural sciences in general gives the secret of all these discoveries and inventions that operate in a completely different realm. 

Foundations of the modern techno-scientific world are also the world of realization of the ideal where the "private" scientist is no longer confined to a cell, personal space or laboratory like a priest, and could feel protected from all theological considerations. Towards the end of the 19th century, the reason for the existence of the University as an ideal State apparatus revealed itself, all the steps taken towards the institutionalization of science were revealed in full force.

Academic freedom in itself does not contain any value. At best, it is a prerequisite for making scientific practices questionable and dispersing the superficiality spread by methodological prejudices. In this respect, it is significant that branches of science are called "disciplines".

Violent motivations were not added to scientific practices from outside. It is more accurate to say that they come from a common source. Science's responsibility for "violence" is not so much that the invention, production and management of the means of violence are done "scientifically", but rather that it constitutes the source of a "primary violence", the first inequality, primitive differentiation and division that is at the core of the modern world. 

Just like the invention of writing by priests suddenly created an "ignorant" society, it is possible that a "confidential science", which is always in seed form within scientific practices, continues to exist even in the modern world where openness and democracy is believed. Occult science constituted the exclusive source of power for the caste of priests and palace bureaucrats in the ancient world, where it was never far from magical practices. The famous "hermeneutic" methods preached today to make social sciences more "understanding" took two basic sources from "confidential science": The first was the interpretation and exegesis of the sacred texts, which were the word of God or reduced to the word of God, and the other was, of course, the interpretation of the "words of the law" from God or gods and their representatives on earth.

Vulgarization is not done to “make societies knowledgeable”. Rather, it is the necessary answer to a social demand that the scientist cannot resist, the call to appeal to people's "visions" by reducing scientific findings and calculations. Far from democratizing access to knowledge, it continues to operate in the field of mass communication and creates a wide area of exclusion within the order of discourse.

B. de Spinoza used the word vulgus as self-evidence for humans’ only way of orienting themselves towards the world that is not through "knowledge". Modern education, both militant and Jacobin, used direct violence against ignorance. It was based on the activation of disciplinary mechanisms and the order of things rather than the requirements of science. Question in every field of culture: Is the modern, compulsory education device intended for "disciplining" before "teaching something"? 

Vulgarization, that is, ordinary science, is to use media language and the scientists’ spontaneous philosophy. It can be observed through a simple literature review that today, even ecologist movements, whether directly reopening to Zen pursuits or the "way of reason", have dived into weak thoughts in the pursuit of "no method".

The scientist’s portrait has gone through a transformation in the 20th century. The scientist who was an ascetic nun turned into a "professional intellectual" since the beginning of this century, and now into a career professional with the imposition of a division of scientific labor divided into departments. In the exercise of his profession, the scientist has to lose interest in the Magnum Opuses of science and speak in the language of reports and periodicals, in brief, the language of distorted vulgarization.

Knowledge, which has been transformed into information and even turned into a marketable commodity, is in danger of losing its life-oriented quality and the pluralism in which it will be intertwined with other human feelings, with the emergence of "postmodern" interpretations of relativity. Modes of knowledge, since it lacks "engineering", it is very vulnerable to great confusion, panic, depression and disasters in every aspect of life.

"It is the business of future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." Alfred North Whitehead

S. Freud Quote - Futurity

S. Freud Quote - Instincts

The Orwellian Syndrome: Religious Indoctrinations and False Expertises

https://drive.proton.me/urls/SXH3BJ0XVC#EaVFwfuEBvbr

No Choice: Religion Trouble in Turkey’s ID System

One policy in religious countries or countries where religion is culturally rooted in law even if there is no religious law or there is secular law, is that these laws are interpreted loosely even if there is no strictly written description on the paper. In Turkey, for instance, the religion is registered at birth in the ID system of the state through what the parents’ religions are presumed to be. 

Traditional wisdom is a formerly common, habitual or traditional, predestined way of doing things, and one of the logical fallacies that “bags" the question. There are no more religion sections on the ID card in Turkey. There is, however, a religion section in the system, which is more concerning due to the invisibility issues. This is a logical dead-end, clinging to the past custom of religious choice and conceiving it as the ideal and the true way to make progress in the system, keeping a blind eye to the fact that cultural evolution turns the “traditionally wise” into even inappropriate or harmful.

Although, scientifically, no one is born with the mental capacity to choose a religion or to be a member of a religious community, the creationist presumption is that humans are born by the gift of Allah or God or even pagan deities, depending on the dominant religion in the communities. When official institutions and initiatives distort scientific discourses and facts at the service of religious and ideological causes, they weaken their own credits and that of the sciences.

In time, questions and issues emerge for the difference of the legal from the legitimate. What is delusive is to automatically register a religion at birth, and write it down to the official identity system. In the Turkish case, getting rid of the religious section in the ID altogether would be the way to avoid the dead-ends of these issues. The only option in the religion section is ironically “No Choice” that could also mean “Makes No Choice”. No country for fellow atheists since they need to make a choice and “No Choice” doesn’t sound secular, sounds more like “Homeless” or “Allahless”. All the choices are warious religions, though sects and cults are not included. 

Concealing religious choice behind a veil of secular law is ironic. Another non-secular symptom of legal delusion, even in more democratic countries than Turkey, is to loosely interpret apostasy while strictly registering religion.

Weakening the secular laws and human rights weakens the equality and non-discrimination rights that forms a just civilization, stepping into institutionalized discrimination, where the right to express atheistic views or non-belief would lead to stigmatization. The fact that a procedure has a history of practice does not automatically make it justified, that something was done before is not a sufficient justification on its own.

Virginia Woolf on the Streets

• "Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in." Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
  
  Before driven into suicide by the accelerated depression, Virginia Woolf thought of "A Room of One's Own" as the possibility of a temporary literary comfort. More like an atmosphere "not yet obtained", that is, to be cultivated. Her place is rather the streets and a dog's feelings roaming in the streets. The flow of ideas and images, prodding each other, strengthening or diminishing their power. Virginia Woolf could show how the very "personal" world of a woman could vibrate with all the loci of the city, the metropolis, and the capitals of the world. 

• In her critique of "The Cinema" (1926), Virginia Woolf conceives cinema like a rough band that exploits literature, jumping on it and tearing it to pieces. A "bricolage". While evoking the "roughness" of cinema, Woolf links this to a rather complex "lingual" framework: would there be a moment of anger on the screen? In that case, someone would smash a glass on the ground. Love to be shown? Then a passionate kiss. All of this seems to defend Woolf's protest: Lev Tolstoy's great Anna Karenina could never be reduced to a simple language and gestural features. There was a "depth" of love, and perhaps the theatrical world could have carried this to the audiovisual level, as in Anton Chekhov. Film, however, would remain a mechanical device of reproduction that exploited this "depth." Woolf also speaks of an inherent destiny contained in cinema and the possibility of an artistic expansion caught in a very interesting point: the coincidential, sudden blackout of the screen while watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, that is, a "malfunction" of the cinematographic device (in this case, the projection device or the film). Cinema, in her opinion, did not have to "show", that is, work with the "visibles" or images, make theatre with "abstracting images". Woolf would claim that this is where cinema needed to reveal the artistic possibilities, instead of the hieroglyphization of images for theatrical narrative purposes, using the screen like a painting, as a "cerebral effect" was the undiscovered kernel of cinema. This would be one of the beginnings of the "video theory".

• "The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life... it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer." Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow (1958)

Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970)

“As far as human experience is concerned, death indicates an extreme of loneliness and impotence. But faced collectively and in action, death changes its countenance; now nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity.”

Αποσπάσματα του Ηράκλειτου της Εφέσου 

Aphorisms of Heraclitus of Ephesus

VII

εἰ πάντα τὰ ὄντα καπνὸς γένοιτο, ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν.

If all the things went smoking, the nostrils would know.

VIII

Ἡ. τὸ ἀντίξουν συμφέρον καὶ ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν καὶ πάντα κατ' ἔριν γίνεσθαι.

Every good thing is obtained from the opposite interests and the best harmony of differences.

XII

Ζήνων τὴν ψυχὴν λέγει αἰσθητικὴν ἀναθυμίασιν, καθάπερ Ἡ.· βουλόμενος γὰρ ἐμφανίσαι, ὅτι αἱ ψυχαὶ ἀναθυμιώμεναι νοεραὶ ἀεὶ γίνονται, εἴκασεν αὐτὰς τοῖς ποταμοῖς λέγων οὕτως· ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ· καὶ ψυχαὶ δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν ὑγρῶν ἀναθυμιῶνται.

Zeno called the soul an aesthetic anathema for wishing to show that souls are vaporized, always becoming noetic waters, comparing them to rivers, thus saying: in these rivers, the water flows one after the other; and the souls are refreshed by fluids.

IXX

ἀπίστους εἶναί τινας ἐπιστύφων Ἡ. φησιν· ἀκοῦσαι οὐκ ἐπιστάμενοι οὐδ' εἰπεῖν.

Some atheists know the word. Not how to write, to hear or to speak.

XXX 

κόσμον (τόνδε), τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν, οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ᾽ ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀπο­σϐεννύμενον μέτρα.

This world is the same for all things, not made by gods or humans, but it is an ever-living fire, measures of which sparkle and go out. 

A Note on the Greywolves and Menzils in Turkey and the EU

What if the EU joins the Counter Extremism Project in including the Greywolves in their terrorist list?

In 2020, the EU Parliament proposed to include “Greywolves” in the union’s “Terrorist List” due to shaking their integrity in the long procedure of Turkey’s inclusion. The non-profit Counter Extremism Project already included the Turkey-based organization in their list, helping counter their narratives and online recruitment for regulations and policies.

Significant portions of the coalition administration of the Republic of Turkey today were born from the 1960 coup, illustrating the influence of the army groups in politics via organizations (“ocak”/”teşkilat”) across the lower economic strata both in Turkey and Europe, mainly Germany and France.

Satisfying and channeling “human passions” is not very difficult indeed. All parties in Turkey have equally applicable potentials to use such spirits and passions found in the causes and narratives of this and similar groups’ extreme discourses, such as religious sects (tarikat) — see how the Menzil Tarikat made its way right through the state and the police following the fall of the Gulenist sect as a terror organization. Some rise to coalition accidentally, some intentionally.

All fall inevitably.

The Greywolves in Turkey use a logo with a color pattern almost the same as that of the UN. For this, Deutsche Welle, with its similar color and logo, made an ironic documentary “Why is a ‘death squad’ from Bangladesh allowed to go on UN missions?” in 2024. The head of the organization in Turkey was assassinated following accusations of drug trafficking in Turkey with connections even to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Karl Marx’s infamous motto must be updated for the Turkish experience of the Gulenists, Menzil and Greywolves and the likes: “ideology is the opium of the masses”.

The “banned” in the EU would call for “exclusion” and “oppression” as if they were the “underdog majority” who could simultaneously find an expression in the “Good” deeds, the allowed existence in Turkey. The end of the ideological circles, the contradictions of consciousness that reproduce themselves in reiterative ways.

A famous film that was banned in Turkey during the 1980 coup typifies this governing contradiction. The film version of the Turkish scholar Aziz Nesin’s 1961 hiciv (satire) Zübük, also screened during the Gezi Park Protests in 2013 in the midst of tear-gas. The book was published following the 1960 military coup, where Zübük stands for a common Turkish stereotype in politics: whoever cynically and platonically lies and works in the shadows with an entrenched desire to be entitled.

Nesin’s subtitle to the book, “The Dog in the Shadow of the Oxcart”, has a Freudian reference, the untranslatable word unheimliche, the unusual, the psychocultural Id, the “evolved wolf”. It is the unusual that made its way to ruling Turkey in the 1950s, and was taken down in the 60s, and found another “cause” in politics following the 1960 military coup. Similarly, the 1980 film version of Zübük was set to be released on the same day of the 1980 coup, and banned for a while. Working in the shadows define these stereotypes in politics.

A lot is told about the psychology of their “terrorist stereotype” in literature. In numerous research, terrorist is depicted without an ideology, a consequence away from all ideological designs, a cliché of excuses of the modern world’s despairs and so forth. A life without ideological stance, thought and cause. Sounds like there’d be no terror if the means of “psychic healing” worked adequately.

Allegory doesn’t need to be an error. In the film Chicken Park (Jerry Calà, 1994), the Hollywood parody of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), a Native American gets out of a time-travel capsule and ends up in the film set, wonders if it is the set of Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), and gets back into the time machine.

Allegory, for Fredric Jameson in Allegory and Ideology (2019), is initially “dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis , and the like — a whole materialist zone of that non-materialist collective dimension called language — offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (ideologeme) are constructed.” Notion of ideologeme is the particular unit of ideology that has a “dual structure”: an “opinion” and an “articulation”. Political psychologists could never disentangle that double structure of tyranny today.

For sure, Marxists like Jameson easily accept without questioning the “synthesis of opposites”, the dialectics of “extreme opposites”. This would itself oppose the idea of ”synthesis”, putting a “tension” instead of “synthesis”, reaching the “overturned” points of the duchampian works of tension among “extreme subjectivity” and “extreme objectivity”.

Terror is both a deviation of those without the political sphere of expression and a protest directed to the existing politics. In one way, “protest” is the answer of an individual or community, group or “movement” without reservations. The aim is to be hidden and unnoticed, directly attacking the ethics of “openness” and “transparency” of the modern world. Modern democracies had to recognize these answers without questions and try to domesticate these within their existence in the media.

A “guerilla” action that plays in the areas of urbanism and globality, “Greywolves” isn’t in politics for struggle, it changes or shape-shifts while rendering its danger on the living and the spirits. Furthermore, the organization is affiliated directly with a coalition party, and the Turkish government disregarded the EU call. Instead of addressing a misinterpreted logic of the organization, dealing with the EU’s attitudes in encountering terrorism illuminates the monopolization of the description of “terror”.

The benign Turkish state compromises the “service” to legitimize itself and its actions vis-a-vis the negative terrorist actions, and instead, transfers/outsources the terror to some other parties. For Weberians, the state is the only legitimate heir to violence and to decide what is terror and what is not. Of course, they wouldn’t have thought if the violence was direct or indirect.

What if the EU joins the Counter Extremism Project in including the Greywolves in their terrorist list?

“Terror” doesn’t have a bureaucratic form under the yoke of “complaints and objections”. In the EU, it is clear that sufficient strength cannot be gained with pure objection and complaint. It is closer to the corporeal language of events, rather than the spoken.

A danger that could emerge from anywhere, terror has a virutic domain, finding its platonic or domesticated description in “violence”. Violence is more of the externalization of terror, maybe an unavoidable conclusion, and never a must-condition or postulate. It references a superficial theatre where experiences, desires and slogans play, not the reckoning in the world of opinions and judgements.

The expressions like “shaken integrity” or “attacked lifestyles” are symptoms of the inability to describe. Evidently, the EU and most developed countries understand the inaccuracies of these descriptions.

A Note on the Greywolves and Menzils in Turkey and the EU

What if the EU joins the Counter Extremism Project in including the Greywolves in their terrorist list?

In 2020, the EU Parliament proposed to include “Greywolves” in the union’s “Terrorist List” due to shaking their integrity in the long procedure of Turkey’s inclusion. The non-profit Counter Extremism Project already included the Turkey-based organization in their list, helping counter their narratives and online recruitment for regulations and policies.

Significant portions of the coalition administration of the Republic of Turkey today were born from the 1960 coup, illustrating the influence of the army groups in politics via organizations (“ocak”/”teşkilat”) across the lower economic strata both in Turkey and Europe, mainly Germany and France.

Satisfying and channeling “human passions” is not very difficult indeed. All parties in Turkey have equally applicable potentials to use such spirits and passions found in the causes and narratives of this and similar groups’ extreme discourses, such as religious sects (tarikat) — see how the Menzil Tarikat made its way right through the state and the police following the fall of the Gulenist sect as a terror organization. Some rise to coalition accidentally, some intentionally.

All fall inevitably.

The Greywolves in Turkey use a logo with a color pattern almost the same as that of the UN. For this, Deutsche Welle, with its similar color and logo, made an ironic documentary “Why is a ‘death squad’ from Bangladesh allowed to go on UN missions?” in 2024. The head of the organization in Turkey was assassinated following accusations of drug trafficking in Turkey with connections even to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Karl Marx’s infamous motto must be updated for the Turkish experience of the Gulenists, Menzil and Greywolves and the likes: “ideology is the opium of the masses”.

The “banned” in the EU would call for “exclusion” and “oppression” as if they were the “underdog majority” who could simultaneously find an expression in the “Good” deeds, the allowed existence in Turkey. The end of the ideological circles, the contradictions of consciousness that reproduce themselves in reiterative ways.

A famous film that was banned in Turkey during the 1980 coup typifies this governing contradiction. The film version of the Turkish scholar Aziz Nesin’s 1961 hiciv (satire) Zübük, also screened during the Gezi Park Protests in 2013 in the midst of tear-gas. The book was published following the 1960 military coup, where Zübük stands for a common Turkish stereotype in politics: whoever cynically and platonically lies and works in the shadows with an entrenched desire to be entitled.

Nesin’s subtitle to the book, “The Dog in the Shadow of the Oxcart”, has a Freudian reference, the untranslatable word unheimliche, the unusual, the psychocultural Id, the “evolved wolf”. It is the unusual that made its way to ruling Turkey in the 1950s, and was taken down in the 60s, and found another “cause” in politics following the 1960 military coup. Similarly, the 1980 film version of Zübük was set to be released on the same day of the 1980 coup, and banned for a while. Working in the shadows define these stereotypes in politics.

A lot is told about the psychology of their “terrorist stereotype” in literature. In numerous research, terrorist is depicted without an ideology, a consequence away from all ideological designs, a cliché of excuses of the modern world’s despairs and so forth. A life without ideological stance, thought and cause. Sounds like there’d be no terror if the means of “psychic healing” worked adequately.

Allegory doesn’t need to be an error. In the film Chicken Park (Jerry Calà, 1994), the Hollywood parody of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), a Native American gets out of a time-travel capsule and ends up in the film set, wonders if it is the set of Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), and gets back into the time machine.

Allegory, for Fredric Jameson in Allegory and Ideology (2019), is initially “dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis , and the like — a whole materialist zone of that non-materialist collective dimension called language — offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (ideologeme) are constructed.” Notion of ideologeme is the particular unit of ideology that has a “dual structure”: an “opinion” and an “articulation”. Political psychologists could never disentangle that double structure of tyranny today.

For sure, Marxists like Jameson easily accept without questioning the “synthesis of opposites”, the dialectics of “extreme opposites”. This would itself oppose the idea of ”synthesis”, putting a “tension” instead of “synthesis”, reaching the “overturned” points of the duchampian works of tension among “extreme subjectivity” and “extreme objectivity”.

Terror is both a deviation of those without the political sphere of expression and a protest directed to the existing politics. In one way, “protest” is the answer of an individual or community, group or “movement” without reservations. The aim is to be hidden and unnoticed, directly attacking the ethics of “openness” and “transparency” of the modern world. Modern democracies had to recognize these answers without questions and try to domesticate these within their existence in the media.

A “guerilla” action that plays in the areas of urbanism and globality, “Greywolves” isn’t in politics for struggle, it changes or shape-shifts while rendering its danger on the living and the spirits. Furthermore, the organization is affiliated directly with a coalition party, and the Turkish government disregarded the EU call. Instead of addressing a misinterpreted logic of the organization, dealing with the EU’s attitudes in encountering terrorism illuminates the monopolization of the description of “terror”.

The benign Turkish state compromises the “service” to legitimize itself and its actions vis-a-vis the negative terrorist actions, and instead, transfers/outsources the terror to some other parties. For Weberians, the state is the only legitimate heir to violence and to decide what is terror and what is not. Of course, they wouldn’t have thought if the violence was direct or indirect.

What if the EU joins the Counter Extremism Project in including the Greywolves in their terrorist list?

“Terror” doesn’t have a bureaucratic form under the yoke of “complaints and objections”. In the EU, it is clear that sufficient strength cannot be gained with pure objection and complaint. It is closer to the corporeal language of events, rather than the spoken.

A danger that could emerge from anywhere, terror has a virutic domain, finding its platonic or domesticated description in “violence”. Violence is more of the externalization of terror, maybe an unavoidable conclusion, and never a must-condition or postulate. It references a superficial theatre where experiences, desires and slogans play, not the reckoning in the world of opinions and judgements.

The expressions like “shaken integrity” or “attacked lifestyles” are symptoms of the inability to describe. Evidently, the EU and most developed countries understand the inaccuracies of these descriptions.

Californication (1999) | Red Hot Chili Peppers 

The Monster (2013) | Eminem ft. Rihanna

Though psychoanalysis has been very intimate with “interpreting” dreams since the beginning, it is not helpful to "see our own dreams". Dreams, because of the clinical experience, may well be caught up in the analyst’s own "dreams", within the framework of traumdeutung (leading to the unconscious), of the expression of "personal depths" and surely the "unconscious". It is easier to find “your reality" caught in the “dreams of others”.

Why shouldn’t dreaming and fantasy be a production, an active artistic "happening", a creative process of liberation? Why should dreams be understood as the distortion of unconscious contents within the symbolization process of the "dream thoughts"?

Politics of Star Wars

Why Ordering a New Star Wars was Necessary?

In addition to launching the New Hollywood of blockbusters in the 1970s (with/after Steven Spielber’s Jaws in 1975), George Lucas’ early Star Wars (1977 – ) and the prequels at the end of the millennium have become the ideological myth of the Digital Epokhe of the 2000s –particularly the first two decades, the era of smartphones, the rise and fall of social media. It was therefore necessary to order another pack of Star Wars to see how the ideological function of fantasy in the saga incorporates the capitalist ideology globally.

When it first aired, Apple II was also showcased at a fair in San Francisco, and this was considered the birth of the PC industry. A year later, the Space Invaders game, then Atari’s Asteroids and Pac-Man came, and Nintendo saved the crisis of the eighties. The internetwork of unlimited connection, domains and fields is not far from the Force. The rebound of the neoliberal revolution in the Cold War’s “pissing race”, rather than a mythology. The US President of this period was Ronald Reagan — the co-founder of the global capitalism or neoliberalism — a Star Wars fan who initiated a Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the ‘Star Wars Initiative’.

Special effects are now a part of daily life, in the galactic empire of the internet, among various rebels and tyrannical/oligarch regimes, there are wars and climate crises at every corner where the Sith and the Jedi vary. The belief in the global law needs to be strengthened and maintained. Although no law, no judges, no lawyers, no courtrooms is seen in the saga, it is obvious that there is a law of the universe. The galactic senate, which is at the centre of political turmoil, the tyrannical emperor and the rebels, and the spread of international (intergalactic) trade (trade federations, guilds and galactic routes such as the silk and spice routes).

Western Buddhism has been referenced for having the best complementary ethic for the dominant ideology of the global capital, after the Protestant work ethic. For “the monk” Yoda advises Anakin: “Let your fears go, Anakin (let-it-go)”. Only then one would have the balance of the good and the evil (yin-yang) in the force. The ethical kernel of liberalism: “laissez-faire / let them do.” The core of the “let-go” motto.

The most interesting is rather describing the epokhe: the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. The “Winter is Coming” slogan from the Game of Thrones would be a good fit to caption the spirit. Isabelle Stengers’s response book In Catastrophic Times looked at gaia, the living planet, for which capitalism leads to the barbaric, incomprehensible to describe even with Big Data, the uncontrollable radical alterity of the planet.

It would not be absurd to think of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the UN as efforts to strengthen the belief in law in a way. For sure, humans forget the end of the world because of daily issues. At best, they may look for an “external force”. When a storm floods, the only criticism is limited to understanding the end of the human species through urbanization and profit.

Orwellian Syndrome - Radiation & Microwave, Cancer & Tumor

A Pancake Theory of Intelligent Design

Intelligent design is the buzzword of creationists in the 2000s. It is what might be conceived as a version of superficial vis-à-vis scientific discourses. The mindsets that are superficially concerned in seeing and conceiving technologies fictionalize the machine with a messianic mix- mash. Science at the service of the machinery of religion, selecting the traditional notions of demons and spirits and matching with fuzzy notions of the good and the evil.

For the critique of the prescribed religious allusions and resemblances, the intelligent design debates borrow from the non-corporeal data for projecting fictional incorporations to data. It presumes possible mental forms of similitude, if not exactitude, that might yield a prescribed religious outcome.

These turn out to be allegories of the design theory, which I’d satirize as the “Pancake Theory”, which lacks the analysis that may be hypothesized scientifically, but pretends to be “objective” another messianic miscognition at best. The theoretical vice of the intelligent design mindsets must be renounced due to the cognizance question in these structures.

Allegory, for Fredric Jameson in Allegory and Ideology (2019), is initially “dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis, and the like… offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (ideologeme) are constructed.” Notion of ideologeme, for the design theories, is the particular unit of religion that has a “dual structure”: an “opinion” and an “articulation”.

Political psychologists could never disentangle that double structure. For sure, Jameson would accept the “synthesis of opposites” without reservation. What would his allegory say about the illogically extreme dialectics in the design theories? “Design” theories have macro and micro versions. Micro version concerns the allegory if the primitive human who stumbles upon a ticking watch may not understand its purpose, he may tell that it is not a rock or a vegetable and that it has been manufactured -possibly for a specific purpose. Religious interpretations of the machine’s integrated knowledge serve as the macro version for similar opinions. Fish have fins, and birds have wings because of adaptation and selection, not because they are “avian” according to the technological lexicon. Attributing agencies to the machine and data have a messianic and exorcist span where the original illusions’ forces remain unquestionable. Unlike Al, however, humans are sensitive and mortal, and cannot be saved in portable flash disks, stored in hard drives or kept in remote servers.

Reality is structured upon the function of the Network contrivances, which is not exterior to the ideologies with various symbolizing mechanisms to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patterns or patternize the individual data for desire and need in the culture predominated by consumption and economy-politics.

Double Major Program of Cheap T-Shirts and One-Upmanhood

In my first semester of PhD work at George Mason University, part of my grant was to teach in the Global Affairs Program. The coursework were globalization, market efficiencies, outsourcing, offshoring, cost-minimizing and profit maximizing etc. Students were mostly from the United States and there were a few international students. More or less an American-majority class. The year after the 2016 elections.

In the first weeks, one of the students asked about a textile product that Clinton used after losing the elections. A t-shirt saying “A woman’s place is not the House but the Senate.” My response to the student was that the t-shirt might have been produced with less cost and the slogan was “cheap”, without having any non-economic idea about the cultural meanings of the word. Having caught me saying something “bad”, the student and a few others complained about me to the program director Lisa Breglia. The student was probably there to keep an eye on how I teach.

The American-Vietnamese scholar Kim Hong Nguyen’s 2024 book Mean Girl Feminism, named after the movies, offers a thought-provoking critique of this troubling trend in complaints and requests. Nguyen claims that a strand of modern feminists adopted an exclusionary, elitist, and often downright cruel approach that weakens the core ideals of the movement, and even pretends to be the “racial other” when they are not.

Instead of women’s solidarity and power, Nguyen says, “mean girl” feminists deploy a form of arguably the nietzschean “one-upmanhood”, shaming and belittling those who don’t meet their rigid standards of ideological “righteousness”. She points to the proliferation of online “call-out culture,” where self-appointed feminism “gatekeepers” ruthlessly attack and humiliate those they deem insufficiently woke, even over minor infractions. Nguyen’s critique examines how predominantly white feminism appropriates expressions of resistance from minority groups, especially Black women, to present white women’s aggression as “feminist and inclusive”.

Natalie Portman has been framed as “a pseudo-kaballistic kitten of the Woke” in the “meta-fictions” of alternative media, ending up with curious, unbelievably unreal narratives. A number of fringe media outlets have sought to cast her in fictions propagated by conspiracy-minded sources, which weave a complex tapestry of occult symbolism and esoteric references. Portman, known for her lately low-profiled and nuanced performances and intellectual adverts, is reframed within this conspiratorial worldview as a kind of “New Age Avatar”, a vessel for hidden, arcane knowledge that undoes the mainstream. Her support for progressive causes is interpreted as evidence of her religious indoctrination into a shadowy performance of ideologies with mystical tones. In this way, Portman becomes a kind of lightning rod for the paranoiac fantasies, her career and public personae distorted to fit the fictions of these scientific frauds.

Nguyen’s insight depicts how “white feminists” often ignore their own role in perpetuating injustice while exploiting and erasing the contributions of marginalized groups to social movements.

The other student who was supposed to teach the same course was Landon Wilkins from Canada. He disappeared after the first semester. It turns out that he failed in the teaching method of the course and his students also complained. Prof. Breglia told me that “Landon got an idea of doing a ‘forum’” from me as a “teaching method”. In other words, she blamed Wilkins’ “fault” on me. I didn’t know what he had in mind concerning the method, and never told him to do a forum. It turns out that he made it up before preparing to leaving the program, and both blamed “it” on me. To my mind, I have no further politically correct explanation for the “it” in quotation.

As far as I remember, Wilkins wasn’t that experienced, so making a forum might have been an easier idea than lecturing a curriculum. I was lecturing, and forum and lecture are two of the various ways of teaching a course. A forum is like a seminar, a lecture might include seminar-like sessions in the form of Q&A sessions in the last ten minutes of the course. No, not QAnon sessions, though the spirit of such theories were spreading on the news at that time.

Now, having learned the traditional, cultural and scientific meanings and connotations of the word “cheap,” it still doesn’t sound like a feminist slogan. More like a reversal of feminist slogans. Do you want to be placed in the house? What’s the rhetoric there? Turning feminist spirit upside down is cheaper than the slogan itself. Please read some Écriture Féminine writings from feminists, Mrs. Clinton. Agnès Varda adopted these writings to her films as cinécriture, for instance. Kim Hong Nguyen reads the similar cases of “cheap” as not honest to feminism’s true aims, creating an environment that discourages open dialogue and the exchange of diverse opinions.

Critiques view Agnès Varda like a Greek “goddess”, though she was more a photographer and invested in photographic storytelling in her fictions and non-fictions. Even when she is not even slightly interested in identity politics than feminism and male-female tensions, Greek references are unavoidable in her films and her father was indeed of Anatolian Greek origin, and she also had quite a number of references to the Greek legacies in Turkey.

I mean Hillary Clinton was more or less a candidate for the “male establishment” tradition in the United States. I do not mean her gender identity is confused, though it’s been a while since the traditional understanding of gender as biologically determined was replaced by the concept of “gender identity”. Both Clinton and Trump were not that brightthough they may politically weigh more in the Arctics of sexuality: in the midst of American religiosity, I realized the illusions concealed behind truly breathtaking, prescribed fictions represented as reality. Trans ideology is by no means one of the invisible determinants of these fictions.

Capitol, Washington DC

For the Irish journalist Helen Joyce, the writer of the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021), trans ideology holds that a person’s gender should be defined by how they subjectively feel and what they subjectively declare, rather than their biological sex, where there are no intermediaries of sex binary. For Joyce, the increasing prominence and influence of LGBT activism and obviously identity politics have been a driving force for this transition from an objective, anatomical definition of gender to a more subjective one, prioritizing gender identity over biological sex in law, policy, lobbying and cultural norms. Though there are waves of feminisms that would hold and confirm trans ideology, sex is undeniably binary without intermediates.

Unavoidably, the biological determinants of sex would be variables of what is described as “gender identity”. In my opinion, for instance, when Landon Wilkins blamed his failure on me, that was a lot about the discrepancies of the sexual and the gender identity, not to mention how Prof. Lisa Breglia communicated this to me. On the one hand, a trans individual with what Jacques Lacan would probably frame as “internalized lack” of a fully confirmed “male sex” and the lies and denials built around this lack, on the other hand, a screaming girlboss with an inflated ego of what Kim Hong Nguyen called “one-upmanhood”. Wilkins vs. Breglia. The prevailing “spirit” in the year after the Trump vs. Clinton Election.

*Bonus: “Capercaillie” is a Eurasian bird breed, a member of the grouse family. The females remind the “hen” for their cryptic colouration. “Capparis spinosa”, however, is a plant that bears rounded leaves and purple&white flowers. Scientific research doesn’t show any significant correlation to test the hypothesis if the capercaillie birds feed and grow on caparis plants.

Natalie Portman - Blinded By Love

Tindersticks - Marbles

The Platters - Only You - Lyrics

Authoritarian Liberalism

Living in an Orwellian hell is not an unusual feeling for anyone. In both cultural and individual narratives, it owes to the themes crucial to the issue of authoritarianism. The authoritarian question today is usually traced in the nationalist expressions, which ignores the historicity of fascism. What determines similar debates is always the capitalist world economy, functioning in the form of a "nation-state" (sharing world markets at the beginning of the century, especially bringing "nation-states" with borders drawn with rulers to allocate oil wells). The world economy carries out its operations by nation-states, where the citizens and the state are tied through belief, faith, tribalism, patriotism, etc.

In her influential book, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution (2022), Chantal Mouffe exhausts the leftist conceptualization of third-degree liberalism in the post-covid world. Advocating for a democracy aimed at exclusively defending the interests of ‘true nationals’ to “recover” democracy, for Mouffe, is in fact a call for restricting it with “an exclusive ethno-nationalist discourse that excludes migrants, considered as a threat to national identity and prosperity.” 

Susan Neiman confirms Mouffe's line of thought in Left is Not Woke (2023), stressing that the left diverged from the universalist idea of ethics and justice for progress toward relativistic progress where justice for one could incoherently turn the other’s life into hell. Both voice the fear today that combines a statist absolutism and a digital control of the public conscience. The myth that authoritarian regimes created this fear continue to exist on the level of theses that evoke certain claims with the trouble with "fascism". On this level, human pluralities are tried to be absorbed into an isolation and "fear of the stranger".

The word “post-truth”, in this sense, is incompatible with both democratic debate and anticipation, reaction and adaptation to a physically changing reality, both conditioning and conditioned by the hegemonically prescribed information in the mainstream. Neiman rests the case in her example of the New York Times. A news media outlet that “sets the standards in more than one country” that incorporated the woke demonstrations lately, the discourse still underlines that “ethnic backgrounds” may determine political perspectives. Her comparison is a news title: “Despite Vice President Kamala D. Harris's Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving over Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda”. The caption demands the debate, the fact that it is about India doesn’t show the fact that the harshest Indian critics of the country call it “fascism.” The contrast Neiman drew is the difference of tribalism that flourishes from biological reductionism and the intrusion of tribal politics into the authoritarian discourse of liberal politics in the very similar logics that the woke ideologies function.

Passions that find a chance to exist and find expression in the nationalist forms are neither good nor bad in themselves. Some are motivated by authoritarian interests like fascism, and some by liberating passions like liberalism, socialism. Unsurprisingly to Neiman’s view of “calling out” the woke excesses, the silence of the liberal left has driven these “passions” into the right accounts. 

Donald Trump’s discourses conflict passions with rationality for a space of reconciliation within the nationalist perspective. Instead of a refurbished framework of woke politics on the right, this discourse could find a very deep expression within a fascist tradition of the 19th century by German thinkers who acted with the dream of uniting Kulturnation (cultural nation) and Staatnation(state-nation) that aren’t necessarily dependent on each other.

Neiman’s detailed accounts of the unhappy mergers of the Kulturnation/Staatnation perspectives into the right, the intertwining of the cultural and the tribal dead-ends necessitates the intervention of a territorial sovereignty (national borders) constituted by nation-states. Not a synthesis, but rather the proportioning and subordination of Kulturnation to the state’s fundamental needs. This situation is the inherent fascism of a rationality that defines the nation with the population, far from the naive and symbolic "race struggle" conception of the pre-18th century appropriated into the Woke discourses. 

The discontent expressed by Neiman in her latest book is not a new expression of the liberal eclipse in the post-covid world. The French philosopher Barbara Stiegler describes "the ideology of cognitive biases" in Adapt! (2019) for the constitution of authoritarian liberalism qua biological liberal politics that misappropriate the scientific darwinism into an idea of adapting less with or to the advanced technologies than adapting these into the growing liberal values that themselves have become more authoritarian in their unwritten rules of entrepreneurship, self-sufficient individuation, privatization, speed, deregulation. The idea of adapting Buddhist ethics to liberal ideologies, for example, is seen as an ethical mode and a rejuvenating spirit for the endless distraction of the capitalist economy demands unlimited attention.

Stiegler makes the case for the evolutionary idea of adapting the cognitive sciences and how science and technology could be assimilated into the ideology even when that’s liberalism, an “ideology without an ideology”. She finds Walter Lippmann’s work in the USA as revelatory to refute the adaptation hypotheses in new liberal darwinism to biologist politics that inevitably misappropriate the sciences. The ideas emerged historically at the fin de siecle that paved the way to wars and depressions, and structured in the post-war international laws, treaties and institutions, and incorporated the information available into their prescribed discourses.

For Stiegler, these were the phases of liberal globalization envisioned by Lippmann who later incorporated the “rhythm” of human life to contrast with the pace of the capital mobilization where humans need to be less mobile than the capital. Lippmann’s version of darwinism concerned a comprehensive and realistic study of human nature avoiding any rationalist bias and the exhaustive adaptive activity in the pace of industrialization compared to human life. The ideology of participatory democracies is unproductive due to the alienation and stereotyping involved in the process, which is far from the industrial realities.

Conceptions of delusional constructs, illusions, and the explanation of beliefs in reality debates lead to understanding the discursive regimes relating to the collective productions of the unconscious capable of shaping the cores of psychic truth which are not undisclosed. These reality fictions solicit the unconscious dynamics for those who adhere to them would represent a distorted and displaced way of expressing what does not find a representation in the mainstream discourse.

Stigmata of Disbelief

Humanists International’s worldwide survey of discrimination and persecution the Freedom of Thought Report, continuously ranks Turkey as having “systemic discrimination” where disbelief often leads to cultural alienation. In time, situations of discrimination that create and maintain atmospheres of cultural ills for freedom of belief and expression, lead to individual and cultural harm.

Stigmatization of disbelief is not solely an escalating Turkish issue. According to the American Atheists and the Freedom of Thought surveys from the 2020s, the hegemonic culture in the United States demonizes disbelief.

The right to have or not to have a religion is a basic human right. Ensuring disbelievers have the same and equal rights with all the citizens of the world – with or without a particular religious inclination – would require globalized legal and cultural structures.

Accepting and respecting all beliefs, including non-belief, is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Disbelief, i.e. atheist and  non-religious inclination, is targeted for persecution in various nations, the most severe cases involving the death penalty. Discrimination in general is an issue of superstitions about evil, leading to a general mistreatment of disbelief, breeding anti-scientific notions about what it means to be human, more than a disbeliever.

Religious belief is one of the names attributed to the evolution of the human brain, human intercontextuality and co-activity in the human mind. The name “God”, like those of polytheistic deities, Shiva or Brahma and so forth, concern how these co-active regions of the human brain are communicating in everyday lives, where humans in history had to come up with pseudo-scientific theories.

Religious or irreligious, conservative or liberal? Science shows that the human brain does not activate different regions, but that the brain regions for religious beliefs are comparable with the regions for political beliefs in the brain.

Science is the unconstrained search of truth, the free exchange of ideas, and the thorough inspection of hypotheses and theories through empirical inspection. Scientific research must explore novel concepts, challenge established paradigms, and follow the evidence wherever these may lead, without fear of retribution or suppression for failing to conform to a particular religious or ideological orthodoxy.

In 2009, the cognitive neuroscience program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that, to the human mind, “God” seems to have the same effect as that of any other human. According to this study of religious and irreligious people, sentences like “God is by my side” and “God watches me” lit up the same areas of the brain that humans use to decipher the emotions, thoughts and intentions of other people.

Integrity of science is surely not without challenges. There is potential for bias, possibility of mistakes or misinterpretations, and influence of external factors like funding sources or political agendas. That’s why scientists at NIH continued research for two decades, equipping it to observe the obstacles and remain a steadfast, credible means of expanding the frontiers of knowledge.

Various forms of belief, including religious belief, may be modulated by a set of intermingled brain regions and cultural networks. The researchers look at the studies that use functional neuroimaging or electroencephalography to find religious belief-related brain regions and networks, and studies involving lesion mapping.

The continued research shows the fact that religions and ideologies aren’t scientifically different, and that economy-politics are involved in the process of beliefs. Karl Marx, like Sigmund Freud, did not have the cognitive scientific tools to observe the brain neurons when he made the allegory of “the opium of the masses”, “the unconscious human deeds,” and “false sense of consciousness” in the economy-politics of cultural evolution.

Sigmund Freud discussed this in his 1927 work, The Future of an Illusion. But Freud’s speculations of what was happening inside our brains would be less scientific, considering the technology to understand the neural activity was developed decades later.

Despite the rise of secularism and non-religious affiliations in a lot of countries, to be an open and vocal disbeliever means carrying a heavy social and even professional burden. Disbelievers are often viewed with suspicion, mistrust, and disdain, seen as immoral, untrustworthy, and lacking in ethics or values. This stigma stems from the deeply-rooted cultural and historical associations among religion, morality, and social cohesion – the notion that without belief in a higher power or divine authority, individuals will inherently lack a moral compass and the motivation to be good, upstanding citizens.

Massive Deaths of the Non-Muslims in the Ottoman and Turkey

Though the word genocide has been treated as an interdisciplinary reflection in the humanities and cultural sciences, the psychoanalytic contribution to the symptoms of the Real in describing genocide is unavoidable. Genocides in Turkey have been shrouded in silence and denial in the hegemonic, dominant, official and media narratives, with the traumatic experiences of the civilians dismissed or minimized, or transferred to other questions or the others questions at best. The unconscious psycho-cultural approaches contribute to the construction of fictions and beliefs within human groups. In psychoanalytic concepts of psychic truth, construction and belief, these problematize the comprehension of the real.

The symptoms in the Kültürpark in Izmir, Turkey  reveal the unusual myths encoded in these, genocides, complexes, democratic paradoxes and their connections to the cultural texts in Turkey and beyond. Doubting the tyranny of the dominant truths is the method to reformulate or adjust the truths around the web of realities. There are loci of information in these webs for the conscious and the unconscious symptoms: parks, museums, squares, or monumental places.

Kültürpark in the modern Izmir was built on the site of the final stage of the Greek Genocide, part of the neighborhoods that went on fire in Smyrna, the ancient name of the city, in the final stage of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities in 1913-1922. The Smyrna Fire unfolded in 1922 during the Greco-Turkish War (Halley 2022). Trapping terrified civilians, the fires raged for days, spreading to the neighborhoods in the city center, followed by fires in other neighboring districts (GGRC 2024). Countless Greek and Armenian civilians lost their lives or went missing.

The tragic event that took place enduring the WWII Turkey was the "Wealth Tax" (Varlik Vergisi), orchestrated by the state that sought to systematically and financially stand ready to fight and disempower non-muslims or apostates, mainly Greek and Jewish communities.

The Turkish strategy during the atrocities of the war was to leave the message of “varlik” (“war” or “existence”), literally meaning to-be-alive, to buy for one's life in the form of tax. The Wealth Tax was the continuation of systemic discrimination after the genocides and ethnic purification strategies carried out by the Ottoman government against various minorities, including Armenians and Assyrians, as the new republic, founded by Atatürk, sought to forge a unified Turkish national identity. For sure, the Greek and Armenian Genocides had involved multi-pronged strategies of mass evictions, exile, forced labor, systematic massacres, and other brutal acts of violence to the civilians. The denial of such acts severely weakens the historical reality of these horrific events by Greek, Armenian, and Jewish families.

The informative discourse of the visuals, texts and sound is one of the areas to see the formulation of the fictions of the facts, predominantly constructed through pre-learned and pre-coded affects, genres and stereotypes. The voice and the visible concern the affect of the

symptoms reveal themselves in the informative fictions. Freud questioned the affect in his description of the unheimlich, the unusual, the feeling of otherness that differs from the most common, ordinary, and familiar. The unusual is not the repressed, connected to the symbolic texts. The question for informative discourses would be if there are any ideologies and economy-politics involved in the construction of truths. For there to be a real published debate, factuality like no otherwise, there should not be fiction.

Descriptive Functions and Intuitive Thought

Mathematics is a science that appeals to the fundamental laws of logic, to what constitutes the structure of the human understanding. None diverges from mathematics without ceasing to think. Remaining blind when presented with a light that shines with brilliance would be very prodigious.

Incapability of describing in mathematics, for this matter, is not an acceptable question. For a philosopher or a scientist, a good description applies to all the objects and satisfies logical laws. Understanding the proof of a theorem in math is to understand each syllogism of which it is composed, and noting that it is correct in accordance with logical rules.

Few would say to have understood, and most would be much more demanding to know if all the syllogisms of a demonstration are correct, and why they are correlated in a particular order, rather than in another. For them, these syllogisms would seem not to be generated by caprice, and not by an intelligence constantly conscious of the goal to be obtained. Doubtlessly, they themselves would not really realize what they want and cannot formulate their desire.

The contrast is explained with the allegory of the bookish trajectories of the sciences. A math book written in Ancient Greek or Egypt or early Enlightenment reasoning might seem lacking an exactitude. What was accepted at that time would be, for instance, that a continuous function cannot change its sign without canceling itself. The idea of a continuous function was at first sensitive, a line drawn with chalk on the blackboard or with a stick on the sand, the simplified image of a complex system.

Intuitive Thought

A lot of things in math used to rely on intuition, and were sometimes false. Intuition couldn't suffice for exactitude. For instance, one of the intuitive rules was that every curve has a tangent, that is to say, that every continuous function has a derivative. This intuitive thought proved to be false.

Intuition has to be left for exactitude and facts. Exactitude could not be established in logic without introducing it into the description. Logic sometimes breeds monsters.

Objects that mathematicians dealt with were described poorly with intuitive senses or imagination. A rough image and not an exact idea on which logic could work.

Logicians had to focus their efforts there. For the uncountable.

Philosophers of mathematics had the ambivalent idea of continuity with intuition, resolved into a complicated system of inequalities relating to integers.

All that remains in analysis is whole numbers, or finite or infinite systems of whole numbers, linked by a network of equalities and inequalities. Mathematics has become arithmetic.

In the last millennium, there have been bizarre functions resembling purposeful functions. No continuity, definitive tangents or derivatives, etc. These strange functions are mostly general, appeared as particular cases.

New functions used to be invented with some practical goal. If the logic was the only light of the inventor, it'd include the most general and bizarre functions. Without these, exactitude was presumed only in phases of the function.

Other than logic, there is also a more subtle reality that constitutes lives of mathematical beings. What would it mean to admire the mason's work in the construction if the architect is not comprehensive? It is intuition that must be demanded for an answer. Logic alone cannot conceive the panorama.

A Pancake Theory of Intelligent Design

Intelligent design is the buzzword of creationists in the 2000s. It is what might be conceived as a version of superficial vis-à-vis scientific discourses. The mindsets that are superficially concerned in seeing and conceiving technologies fictionalize the machine with a messianic mix- mash. Science at the service of the machinery of religion, selecting the traditional notions of demons and spirits and matching with fuzzy notions of the good and the evil.

For the critique of the prescribed religious allusions and resemblances, the intelligent design debates borrow from the non-corporeal data for projecting fictional incorporations to data. It presumes possible mental forms of similitude, if not exactitude, that might yield a prescribed religious outcome.

These turn out to be allegories of the design theory, which I’d satirize as the “Pancake Theory”, which lacks the analysis that may be hypothesized scientifically, but pretends to be “objective” another messianic miscognition at best. The theoretical vice of the intelligent design mindsets must be renounced due to the cognizance question in these structures.

Allegory, for Fredric Jameson in Allegory and Ideology (2019), is initially “dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis, and the like… offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (ideologeme) are constructed.” Notion of ideologeme, for the design theories, is the particular unit of religion that has a “dual structure”: an “opinion” and an “articulation”.

Political psychologists could never disentangle that double structure. For sure, Jameson would accept the “synthesis of opposites” without reservation. What would his allegory say about the illogically extreme dialectics in the design theories? “Design” theories have macro and micro versions. Micro version concerns the allegory if the primitive human who stumbles upon a ticking watch may not understand its purpose, he may tell that it is not a rock or a vegetable and that it has been manufactured -possibly for a specific purpose. Religious interpretations of the machine’s integrated knowledge serve as the macro version for similar opinions. Fish have fins, and birds have wings because of adaptation and selection, not because they are “avian” according to the technological lexicon. Attributing agencies to the machine and data have a messianic and exorcist span where the original illusions’ forces remain unquestionable. Unlike Al, however, humans are sensitive and mortal, and cannot be saved in portable flash disks, stored in hard drives or kept in remote servers.

Reality is structured upon the function of the Network contrivances, which is not exterior to the ideologies with various symbolizing mechanisms to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patterns or patternize the individual data for desire and need in the culture predominated by consumption and economy-politics.