A call to Seneca’s Divine Foresight from today. You know, there is a cliché in our country: If we go back 20 years, we go forward 100 years. I went back 1950 years and read Seneca’s Divine Foresight. Today, we cannot find the philosophy developed 1950 years ago anywhere.
In our country, philosophy is only a course in schools and it is not even given as much scope as sewing courses in daily life. Beautifully organic, philosophy from its source, I missed it so much. I was craving something, but that’s what I was saying. I would like to share the sentences that I chose with difficulty from the long paragraphs I underlined:
“Find me someone of value with whom I can fight; “It would be a shame for me to fight with a person who is ready to be defeated.”
It is humiliating to be pitied, and it is completely dishonorable to be such a weak rival that you become someone else’s shame. So the master says, “Stand up and show them who they’re dancing with.”
“Here is a noble spectacle that God, who cares about his own work, can watch, here is a rival worthy of God: A man who has come face to face with his evil fate, especially if he can challenge it!”
Seneca you are crazy, a real crazy. 1950 years after you, heads are being cut off for committing shirk with Allah, and sermons are being given about not loosening your anal muscles while purifying yourself so that water does not leak in and break the fast. This week we were arguing about the uncriticism of sharia and the way it can be criticized, and you are talking about being a worthy opponent of God by defying fate. Wait, okay, let’s challenge you too, but first, we will make new determinations, analyzes and question the real intention of our hubri at length, as if you had not written anything, even again and again…
You said, “It’s not what you endure, but how you endure it.”
We generally based our strategy on waiting with pain, you have touched upon an important issue. We put what we endured into the subject, as if everything would be okay if it went away. The way out; The truth may lie in the form of endurance, in the “how”, that is, in the teaching of an action, this belief had never come to our mind.
You say, “Disaster is the opportunity to display virtue.” The speed of time is the fire of the age. We are all virtuous in times of disaster, so that it does not overtake us the next day. We are looking for a new disaster to showcase our virtue with the most fancy sentences. Weren’t there so many serial disasters during your time? Was time flowing more slowly, or did virtue appear as a visible, tangible entity in your age because it was difficult to put it in writing? I don’t want to upset all the stoics, but virtue is not worth even as much as a tip in today’s world, only three favs bring five retweets.
Speaking of Divine Foresight, Seneca, let me open the doors to discussion of prescient acceptance. Philosophy is contagious, once you bring a subject up for discussion, and especially if you find someone reliable to discuss it with you calmly, it satisfies your soul until it bursts, its taste lingers on your palate, and you crave it all the time. Have we succumbed to a prescient acceptance?
Have we foreseen what might happen to us based on the experience of those who have happened to us, accepted it as if it had happened before it even happened, and escaped into our shells? Instead of learning from past defeats, did we wear the psychology of defeat and fall out of the race to never wear it again because it burned, scorched, and made us sweat?
For example, whenever I come out and say, “Only the slavery regime is fueled by foreign capital. Foreign capital comes because we sell our labor cheaply, and because we give away the land for free.” We need to become a country that earns from production again. One way to do this is through workers’ resistance, spreading from factory to factory, to determine their own minimum wage, no matter what the state decides. There will come a time when the amount written on the papers signed by the yellow unions doubles for the majority of workers through strikes and resistance.
The segment we call white collar; He looks at the system, leagues behind it, and learns to organize. The practice of organizing teaches respect for the pursuit of rights. When healthcare workers go on strike, they are respected by patients. People do not give up their power of attorney just because a lawyer who does not take part in their case is on strike.
The struggle for rights spreads from here and no matter what the government orders, its main rule is; It puts masses of people in resistance, city by city, factory by factory, plaza by plaza. Then they can go and sign as many agreements with Israel as they want. If organized dock workers go on strike, where will Netanyahu’s ship sail from? You even determine foreign policy with the labor movement…”
Someone in front of me laughs sarcastically; Ms. Ayşen, the country’s economy does not work like that, of course you don’t know, but these neoliberal policies of ours…
So, you believe that sending paid tourists to space is a national move, but you do not believe that the regime will change with the power of labor? Afterwards, you know, long observations: “AKP did this and that, this can’t happen like this, this can’t happen that way…” We ask: What should we do?
“Well, our people are a bit like this, there is nothing we can do, leftist sentiments do not come to us.”
It’s like these people; After reading in the textbook that Turks converted to Islam in one day, we woke up in one day and suddenly we became religious, liberal, and passive. It suddenly became absurd that the means of production, mines, natural resources and ports were in the hands of the state, as if there were no fifteen thousand Ulaş, eight thousand Taylan, one hundred sixty-four thousand Deniz, thirty thousand Mahir in this country; Have we become millions of people who are so unaware of the functioning of the state and the social security institution that they say, ‘Am I going to pay the salary of EYT students’, as if the previous generation had not retired in their forties?
When the word socialism was mentioned, it was as if a rainbow-colored unicorn had suddenly entered the studio, reactions, and surprised but sarcastic laughter.
“Well, let’s take your suggestion?”
“We have not come to the subject of suggestions yet, we have not dealt with that issue yet, Mr. Bagyan.”
Let’s face it: Everything has happened to us, and more will happen. That’s the whole strategy, to make him say, “Whoever does this to him, what wouldn’t he do to us?” So let’s do nothing so that their mills turn. The gods of the new world, unlike Seneca’s, do not want a rivalry and a gratifying struggle, they take pleasure in anticipatory discouragement, and thus their systems flow like oil.
It is not said that they will not let it be done, it is done, it is not said that they will not let it be done, it is said, it is not said that this people is like that, this people is us, it is not said that they will not give it, it is taken away. This is how the field is determined, this is how victory comes.
For those who are too lost in memory to go back 20 years, I recommend 1950 years ago. Once you start, the rest comes. Seneca says in his Moral Letters:
“If a person doubts everything, there will be no reason to live, and no disaster will have any limits. Sometimes let a foresight come to your rescue, and sometimes remove the obvious fear from you with the power of your soul! At least overcome weakness with another weakness, reduce fear with hope.”
Visits: 45
