The decline of civilization

Kırmızılar, 4 May 2025

This was the case throughout history, everyone defines love differently. Today, Badiou, Alain de Botton, Žižek, for example, say different things. In fact, Žižek said many contradictory things. In the past, he used to say love was evil. Then he said "eros is a catastrophe". Then he said that the love you devote yourself to a woman is the highest form of freedom. This third one is something we need to focus on... Where there is no love, the sky is dark, there is no freedom, and therefore no civilization. The uncivilized things that Herodotus described about the women in the Mylitta temple in Babylon or the general situation of Lydian women emerge. These things still exist today. A hundred years ago, the European family was modest, the Russian family, the American family was modest... For example, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, which were designed and established as "Christian plantations", have undergone a great transformation.

Not much is being done about family. Do you know? I don't understand why there are daytime programs. In my opinion, most daytime TV programs should have been removed long before 2025. These programs are not only killing love, they are killing all civilization.

Žižek and Badiou meet at a similar point regarding love. Both draw attention to the "fall in love", that is, the act of falling in love. They say that people meeting and meeting on a social media application by matching various pieces of information is not about love. Badiou says that in this case, there is no love because there is no adventure and no risk taken. He talks about the lack of courage and creativity in these conditions. Žižek says that you stepped on a banana peel and a girl helped you at that moment, love loves such coincidences. The deficiency here, in the application, in the marriage agency, is actually a lack of respect rather than the risk and banana peel they are talking about... Because women are beings that should not be commodified...

What lies beneath all this is that the great technological developments in the world in recent decades have not been accompanied by any progress in conscience, mercy, or decency. Technology has served an anti-civilization in terms of where it has reached. Maybe we need to develop an artificial conscience at the same pace as artificial intelligence. As humans, you have to defend justice and conscience. As politicians, you have to defend this. In many countries, administrators have failed a good test. If you cannot do this, the gap between politics and conscience widens. This can lead to major transformations...

How did Lamartine talk about conscience in The History of the Girondins? He said, "Conscience is the law of laws." In the face of problems, many people can act as if nothing has happened. They can continue to have fun. Maybe they have fun because they don't know what to do. After all, the culture we act on has a sense of being predetermined. There is an aspect that we participate in without thinking. It is not only what we will eat and drink, what we will do, but also how we will not think. We need to move from this unthought culture to a culture where we think a lot, have a conscience, and are in solidarity.

I explained it through Prostejov Square. People may want to distance themselves from apperception, they may look for a "small square". Today's people do this. Changing the TV channel provides this. If a news channel talks about children killed in Gaza, you can change the channel. You watch people surfing in Malibu, etc.... This provides temporary happiness. But the crisis is a huge crisis. The crisis is a crisis that can even reach Malibu. In order to try to overcome this, we all need to talk more about the problems. We need to see that culture is related to violence, harassment and crime rates. We need to see that it is related to corruption. In other words, the source of the problems is in the field of values. Raising civilization also depends on the extent of the value you give to education, children, women and nature. This is the real context... We are faced with a cultural structure that is increasingly corrupt. This is something related to global corruption. What is the value given to people, animals or nature today? Like the birdhouses and bird houses in Ottoman architecture... Now they are told with pride, aren't they? Or like the incident where Adnan Ziyalar bought coffee for the murder convict he was examining... It is necessary to start from such a point.