Türkiye’s Wasted Stock of Reason

By Murat Yıldız

A nation's greatest capital is not its land, its population, its army or its treasury. What gives all of them meaning is a nation's stock of reason: the accumulated capacity to think, judge, remember, decide and act.

The stock of reason is not merely the sum of intelligent people. It is the accumulated human quality of a society: its institutional memory, historical experience, moral measure, intuition, knowledge, strategic judgment and capacity to decide. A country rises to the extent that it can select, protect, place and mobilise that stock. It drifts to the extent that it wastes it.

The great legacy of ancient Greece points to the same truth. A city, a polis, is not strong only because of its walls, ships or wealth. What sustains it is logos: reason, measure, speech and the capacity to create order. Plato's philosopher king is not simply a man who knows much. He is someone with the courage to see truth and return it to the city as justice. Aristotle's phronesis, practical wisdom, leads to the same place. Knowledge is not enough. One must be able to make the right decision, at the right time, with the right people and the right instruments.

The stock of reason is therefore greater than raw intelligence. It is intelligence disciplined by paideia, character shaped by arete, and judgment sharpened by phronesis. A society's rise depends not only on producing knowledge, but on governing knowledge with morality, courage and measure.

Victories are often born from this. Economic, political and military success comes when those who use their stock of reason well prevail over those who use it poorly. The most developed countries in the world are ahead not only because they possess more resources, but because they use their available reason more effectively. No capital is greater than reason for the success of a country, a society or an institution.

Türkiye's problem is often not the absence of reason. It is the inability to identify existing reason, protect it, place it correctly and mobilise it. It is the exhaustion of the right person in the wrong task, the enlargement of the wrong person through the right office, and the habit of leaving believers outside while placing the unconvinced in the window display.

Giving the right task to the wrong person makes a problem intractable. Giving the wrong task to the right person blocks a possible success. Worse still is forcing someone to defend a value he does not believe in simply because the leader wants it defended. Trying to persuade others of values one does not believe in is a tragedy.

Those who have been subjected to this know it best. It is one of politics' heaviest contradictions to place a person who himself needs to be convinced in the role of convincing others. Those who avert their eyes while speaking, hesitate, stumble, swallow dryly for no clear reason, and build lifeless sentences often display not merely personal inadequacy, but the symptoms of political disbelief.

The strength of a political movement does not depend only on having educated, intelligent, knowledgeable or hardworking people in its ranks. The real question is whether such people can be directed toward the right aims, protected and made productive. Placing the "right person" in the "right position" is a skill in itself.

In Aristotle's political thought, good order does not rest only on good laws. It also requires good people to hold the right duties. Justice is not giving everyone the same thing. It is giving each person the responsibility he deserves and can carry. Giving the right task to the wrong person disturbs the order. Giving the wrong task to the right person wastes the possibility of order itself.

Yet many institutions in Türkiye have grown accustomed not to managing people, but to herding them. They prefer to discipline reason rather than multiply it, to suppress thought rather than develop it, to control talent rather than reveal it.

This tendency is not new. The Ottoman devshirme system could draw talent to the centre, but it also tied advancement to loyalty and narrowed the space for independent judgment. In the early Republican period, the concern for merit was often sacrificed to ideological conformity. Repeated under different justifications in different eras, this pattern weakened institutional memory and consumed the stock of reason from within.

When this happens, scarce brainpower is either lost to rivals or rendered unproductive inside its own institutions.

The escape of politics from the whirlpool of inadequacy, incompetence and arbitrariness is directly tied to the quality of the reason it uses. A political movement can be noble, right, just or competent only to the extent that its members are. Great honours cannot rise on weak shoulders.

The minds that carry a nation's culture, history, language and values must be as large as the nation itself. Because this has not been the case, knowledge in Türkiye is orphaned, intellectuals are rootless, and values are left without guardians.

Mobilising the stock of reason is not merely a technical matter. Vision, perseverance, passion, sensitivity, commitment, insight, intelligence, moral standards, charisma, courage and determination are closely related to the quality of mind possessed by political or bureaucratic figures. What matters, however, is not simply that these qualities exist inside a structure. What matters is whether they are made dynamic and effective.

Those who claim a political mission need two further virtues: courage and honesty.

Great tasks cannot be achieved without courage. They cannot endure without honesty. High ideals are not carried by words alone. They require character, mind and the will to pay a price. The road to stepping on the moon begins with the dream of climbing to the stars.

That is why education, a sharp mind and sound ideas are not enough for those who belong to an ideal. Great success also requires self-awareness, adaptability, empathy and social skill. Reason without character becomes a cold calculator. Character without reason becomes a well-intentioned drift.

Türkiye still possesses a vast stock of reason. The issue is not its absence, but its awakening. The giant emotion and great potential sleeping inside the nation cannot be awakened by slogans. They can be awakened only by a political ethic that places the right person in the right position, does not monopolise knowledge, does not punish thought, and does not crush merit beneath loyalty.

Nationalism, in this sense, is not a dry excitement. It is the will to raise a nation's accumulated reason to its feet. National ideals must be activated without being commercialised. Knowledge must be democratised without being jealously monopolised. Those who make political claims must raise their cultural quality. Space must be opened for people who do their work at a first-class level.

As the ancients understood, the city either enlarges or diminishes the character of man. Türkiye's problem is, in part, this. The country has a great stock of reason within it. But that stock can become a historical force only through cadres that turn logos into a guide, phronesis into a method, arete into character, and courage into political will.

Türkiye does not need more noise. It needs reason used better. It does not need larger crowds. It needs people placed more accurately. It does not need more slogans. It needs cadres who believe what they defend, know what they defend, and have the courage to turn what they know into action.

When a nation wastes its stock of reason, victory becomes accidental. When it protects that stock, selects it, places it and mobilises it, success becomes an act of will.