NEWS CENTER – If we define the concept of humanity, currently the concept of society and sociality in its historical dimension, we can explain it in a comprehensible framework. One dimension of sociality encompasses the values we all have in common. This “all of us” starts with the living human world and includes all collective units and structures up to the family. The other dimension of sociality encompasses individual reality. Thus the concept of humanity encompasses “all of us” collectively and “us” individually. Let us briefly explain why and in what sense we use the concepts of humanity, society, sociality and the individual in this article. By humanity we mean material and immaterial values that were created in the distant past, the history of which we cannot and do not need to clarify, and which are still being created in the period in which we live. In some sentences of this article, society, sociality and the individual refer to all of us, all of us who are alive. Thus, when we say humanity, we are trying to make our point more easily by making a subtle distinction between today’s human condition and social values.
Humanity is living through the most problematic period of its history. No one can deny this reality anymore. This should be the only issue that today’s society and individuals “confess” to. Ecological problems are certainly the most powerful sanction that forces society and the individual to confess to the human condition. As our planet warns its inhabitants, confessions begin to come one after another. As dangerous, problematic and immoral as it is to force someone whose political demand is moralistic in the sense of “the collective consciousness (conscience) of society” and democratic in the sense of opening space for freedom to confess for the sake of state and power interests, it is just as moral, right and useful for our planet to “confess”. However, we cannot deny that this result harbors a very serious moral problem. While it is the society and the individual who have made humanity problematic, the fact that water, air, soil, greenery and forests make society and the individual talk, when they should, as the people say, “take their heads between their hands and think”, must be seen as a moral problem for the intelligent and sensitive man who boasts of his technical and technological inventions.
We live in an age where reason is hegemonic. There is no doubt about it. It is also indisputable that we create all our creations by using our minds. For this reason, shouldn’t the fact that humanity is experiencing its most problematic age under the hegemony of reason require turning the arrows to reason? The fact that reason is social requires us to immediately say yes. However, today’s human beings live in ignorance of this natural law. Compared to humanity, he thinks he is living. It is because of this state of illusion that we have already been forced to confess by our planet Earth. Reason is at the forefront of the social laws that create humanity. The chaos and crises that the age of reason, or rationality with its conceptual name, has dragged humanity into, has made it imperative for us to think of this age and society with a new reason through the individual.
It is known that capitalist civilization is the system that has removed reason from the social. It is indisputable that the philosophy that has led to this illegality and plunged humanity into chaos and crisis is positivism and the ideology is liberalism. It is also widely discussed that it is this duo that insists on calling this wrong right. The biggest problem for humanity now is the multitude of those who believe in this illegality and the fact that this majority is on the offensive against “us” and nature. Capitalist civilization and the nation-state mind, which is one of its pillars, has led to these results by “philosophizing, or rather religiousizing, the positive sciences with positivism… philosophizing or religiousizing social reality in the same direction as liberalism”.
We know that Michel Foucault was one of the philosophers who examined the problems caused by capitalist civilization using rationality. Foucault’s criticism of capitalist power is as remarkable as the method he chose to make this criticism. With his method, he has shown to a great extent the experience of power that the capitalist system has taken from its predecessors, the ways and methods, as well as the concepts and institutions that sustain its existence and lead to chaotic-crisis life.
While analyzing biopower, which Foucault emphasizes and brings up as a striking concept, he also explains that capitalist civilization and the nation-state impose thinking on human beings by staying within their own laws. “Another important consequence of the development of biopower is the increasing importance of norms over the legal system of laws. The law is limiting and, at its extreme, its weapon is death. However, a power whose object is life needs regulatory and controlling mechanisms, and it does this regulation and control through the norms it creates. But this does not mean that the law has disappeared. It is only that the law has begun to function as a norm and the legal system has been incorporated into a set of apparatuses whose purpose is to regulate the forces of life. In short, the biopower that focuses on life creates a society of normalization, a society that forces people to conform to norms, a society that normalizes them.” Let us consider this observation in the context of our topic. More precisely, let us interpret it on the basis of what we understand by adapting it to the positivist mind and liberal correct assumptions. We know that in Foucault’s definition, biopower also means “an imposition in which human beings are subjected to oppression and violence down to their cells”. It is possible to call the claim that calls the scientific approach to subjecting the human individual to oppression, violence and imposition down to his or her cells the thesis of positivist reason. It is the liberal ideology’s definition of human beings and life that the human being who is being worked on to be enslaved down to his or her cells considers or thinks that he or she is the freest type of human being that has ever lived. It is the understanding of freedom.
After these sentences, it should not be difficult to say that the mind of our age is a mind that is detached from social law, a mind that is enslaved by the knowledge produced by power and that produces power. It would be more accurate to call the individual an individualist who deceives himself more than Sumerian slaves. The substitution of the tool-creating intellect for the social intellect is leading society and our planet to extinction. And it does this through individualism. The individualist human type created by this mind attacks social life. Liberalism presents the individualist human type as the type “heralded with heaven”, to use the religious concept. It considers its intellect and lifestyle as the legal and indispensable norm of life. This reason, which plunges humanity into chaos and crisis, is very dangerous because it is a reason that has gone against the social law of reason and is subject to the law of producing commodities. To put it in terms of its counterparts in the history of power, we are confronted with a scientific version of the same mythological mind that makes gods out of clay and then enslaves society to the shapes it makes with its own hands. In the religious phase of this mythological mind, when the chaos and crises caused by slavery to one’s own product began to threaten life, the masters bought time by preaching to society about paradise, the whereabouts of which we still do not know, in order to maintain their power. Today’s equivalent of this law of reason in this religion of power is the call to prepare rockets for a trip to Mars instead of changing the capitalist civilization that has made the world uninhabitable. It is to create virtual worlds and universes. With the thesis that “even if the world disappears, we have a virtual world, the journey to Mars will begin”, the new masters advise society to “let it go” instead of struggling to overcome chaos and crisis. We are asked to believe in virtual worlds. This quest, which started with games for children, is now being imposed on the whole society. The aim is to divert attention from the fact that life and humanity are being destroyed. It would not be wrong to call this the new religion. Individualists are the first to believe in this religion. While the gods and kings of this religion are preparing to go to Mars, their subjects are wandering in their virtual world, which they assume to be paradise. As its believers multiply and its rituals become more widespread, the world becomes a little more unlivable.
Unless we get rid of illusions, neither reality nor truth can be reached. Getting rid of illusions is more necessary for solving aggravated social problems. What is even more interesting is that in this so-called age of reason, there is so much irrationality. In fact, this is due to the ideological dominance of liberalism and the acceptance of individualism, the product of this ideology. This is because liberalism is the ideology of a system whose “… mentality is eclectic, it fits into every mold, the risk of deception is high, on the one hand it is more dogmatic than the most rigid religious dogmas, on the other hand it is more absurd and speculative than the most abstract philosophies, it is shallow idolatry that even idolatry has never fallen into.
Cihan İnanç
