“I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.”
— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born
Something is going terribly wrong in this world, isn’t it? Children are being killed, kidnapped, and exploited for dirty purposes in various geographies of the world. So, what are we doing? Far from fighting with determination to correct this cruelty, we are wasting our lives for the sake of constant profit and, even worse, to fill our bosses’ pockets, forgetting even death in accordance with the norms imposed on us by capitalism and the modern world. In this context, I find it appropriate to quote Seneca, who occupies a significant place in my mind:
“Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdidimus.” (It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it.)
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae
Undoubtedly, our fathers and their fathers had responsibilities they had to fulfill. Whether they did their best or not, this is the world they left us. We have responsibilities to fulfill so that our children do not say the same things to us. The fundamental change we must make to fulfill these responsibilities must start in our minds. In this context, I want to speak about capitalism’s declaration of death as a defect, the meaning of life and death, and finally, religions and social relations.
Marx discusses four types of human alienation in his Theory of Alienation: alienation from the product, from the production process, from oneself, and finally, from other people. The worker cannot possess the product he has created with his own hands; this situation alienates him from the product. Since he lacks control over the mechanisms of production, he also becomes alienated from the act itself. The way competition pits workers against each other, the ongoing domination by others during working hours, and the exchange of freedom for material goods ultimately alienate the individual from their own essence.
To return to our topic, I believe that the only truly meaningful capital human beings possess is time. If we consider ourselves as factory workers, trading this unique capital for material goods rather than working for our own moment of death alienates us from life, and even from ourselves and each other. This shitty system doesn’t stop there; it even monetizes immortality—mankind’s oldest desire—in order to eradicate death, the greatest enemy of productivity, or at least to make us believe it can.
Whether through biohacking methods and cryonic promises, or everything from vitamin supplements to bags and bags of skincare products, we are subjected to indoctrination in every field through advertisements that exploit consumerist frenzy, and this is a highly immoral situation. This system, which takes our most precious possession and gives us material goods in return, then sells us either things we don’t need or outright nonsense in exchange for those goods in the second step. Yet, it is death that is the concept determining the value and meaning of life. Every single moment lived, every second, is for the construction of that moment of death. Well, can a magnificent death scene emerge from a life ruthlessly exploited by capital?
‘‘Death is an absurd contingency; it is always outside my possibilities.’’
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant.
I personally believe that we are the ones who create the concept of meaning in this life. Each of us subjectively assigns the meanings that entities possess. In this context, this exceptional being—worthy of such a noble task as defining and assigning meaning to the unique and absolute truth, which is death and consequently life—has transformed its definitions of living and dying into a pathological state by conforming to the doctrine imposed by modernity. We have begun to define death as a mere coincidence devoid of logic or order. In the light of this definition, we forgot death; in the void created by this forgetfulness, we justified our personal ambitions. We lost ourselves in meaningless desires belonging to the “small picture.” And our lives lost their value. Because every moment, every second we live is valuable only to the extent that it constructs our moment of death.
Some clever people noticed our worthless lives and sought the remedy in the wrong places. Lacan, for instance, linked life and death to desire. He defined death as the point where desire ends and attributed the value of life to its ability to give humans the capacity to desire. While not entirely wrong, it is not that simple. First, let us define death. Death is neither an extinction, nor a coincidence, nor a salvation. To me, death is what is absolute. Every definition besides this is just a label we subjectively attach to it. If we think of life as a painting, every moment we live is a brushstroke we apply to that canvas. Death, on the other hand, is the signature we place at the end of the painting. In this way, death elevates the meaning and value of the life we have lived to the level it deserves. This is how death determines the meaning and value of life.
The lives we have are as valuable as the extent to which we spend every moment and every second—as I mentioned above—to construct our moment of death. Well, if the signature at the end determines the value and meaning of the painting, what determines the value and meaning of the signature? The answer to this question is the consistency of the artist, namely us. The more we can reflect our brushstrokes onto the canvas in harmony—being confident and aware of the realities of life—the more meaningful our lives, and more importantly, our deaths will be. In this context, what gives death its value is its role as the ultimate authority of validation.
So, what is this consistency that this ultimate authority will approve? Undoubtedly, the reason why man is an exceptional being, the “most noble of creatures,” is because he possesses will. We exist to the extent that we can think and protect our free will. Consistency, then, is the amount to which we put this free will and ability to think into action. Consistency is the ability to show the courage to reject the consumption habits imposed on us by the system, the stereotyped career paths, the common belief that the key to achieving great things lies in superficial and self-serving networking, and the myth of immortality that capital tries to sell us—it is the courage to choose our own life and, consequently, our own death. “Modern man” loses the ability to sign his own name at the end of the day while trying not to cross the lines of a coloring book colored by someone else. We must be wise and never for a moment lose sight of what our ultimate goal is.
I never claimed that I was presenting literary or intellectually brilliant things on this blog; as a matter of fact, anyone with a slight understanding of literature might dismiss these lines as hollow or nonsense, and I respect that. From the very beginning, my fundamental goal has been a “vulgar display of my truth.” In this context, I see this place as the only medium where I can pour my heart out and speak my mind, and I grant myself this privilege.
Let’s come to religion. If there are three or five people reading these lines, they are likely people who already know me from real life, but I want to leave a written record: I am a Muslim. Alhamdulillah. HOWEVER, the things I have seen in the Muslim/conservative community for the last few years bother me so much that sometimes I feel like saying, “If the heaven you aspire to is what I see, I would rather go to hell than go to heaven with you.” Do we really believe in Allah, friends? Or is religion just a statistical table for us? Is it just an insurance policy or a game where points are collected and deducted?
Insidious plots, backstabbing, and sycophancy are everywhere. All of this has spread like a virus through every stage of society, from the lowest level to the highest, killing us and our brotherhood step by step. The self-centeredness and arrogance imposed on us by capital will leave us lonely. For whom the bell tolls? My selfish sibling, who cannot stand by me today when I fall—it tolls for thee. Tomorrow, when you fall, I will still be the one standing by you, but we will have lost everything, and by then, it will be too late for everything. If we cannot stand behind each other today, even when we are so comfortable in today’s political environment in terms of living our religious freedoms, then tomorrow, when we lose all power centers, this time the “February 28th era” will last a hundred years.
When the last ruler of Andalusia, Boabdil (12th Muhammad Nasri), began to cry as he looked at Granada for the last time after surrendering the city, his mother Ayşe said to him: “Llora como mujer lo que no supiste defender como hombre.” That is, “Do not weep like a woman for what you failed to defend like a man.” We won’t even have anyone to say that to us. It is now very difficult to establish and maintain both social and romantic relationships within the Muslim community. We must pull ourselves together. Righteous men are not “experienced.” Our righteous girls cannot trust men. The elders cannot take responsibility and show the way. We spend the most productive times of our lives like grass blowing in the wind, in vain. Whereas, what needs to be done is to establish trust. It is to strengthen our bonds of brotherhood, not to be offended over shitty matters, and to maintain our composure.
Self-interest and selfishness in social relations, and mistrust and lack of virtue in romantic relations, will bring our end as a community. If we remember the painting metaphor I mentioned in the previous paragraph, man is a political animal by nature (Aristotle); therefore, we paint not only our own canvases but also each other’s. Therefore, we must first be righteous and virtuous, and then spread this truth and virtue around us. We are the ones who will make this bad and misty world left to us virtuous, good, and colorful again, and this action will only be possible through this mindset.
In conclusion, we are all duty-bound to make the paintings of our own and of the precious people around us meaningful. To truly hold each other’s hands in this misty world, rejecting the wreckage that capitalism will leave us at the end of the road… This is what sobremorir is. Rather than a passive act like surviving (sobrevivir), it is to make our death, and consequently our life, meaningful and virtuous by feeling the breath of death on the back of our necks at every moment. With the hope of building the only sensible thing among those ‘inconceivable’ people mentioned by Cioran: namely, meaning and virtue.
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