Yesterday, I read a column about democracy and how some governments fail to uphold democracy in practice. The columnist wrote that it is very normal for democracy to fail in states where the education level of people is low, to which I agreed. This is not hard to understand, uneducated masses lack the ability to grill and criticize, so deceiving them with fictitious promises is not a tall order. When the majority is ignorant, democracy is not in safe hands- just like John F. Kennedy once said, “the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”
On September 12, 2010, the proposition to amend the constitution passed with 21,874,192 votes for, and 15,878,206 votes against. %57.94 of the public voted for the amendments.
Talking about the relation between education and democracy, we should perhaps take a closer look at the vote distribution of the Turkish constitutional referendum according to the educational status of the voters:
From top to bottom: university, upper school, high school, middle school, elementary school, not educated. From left to right: yes, no.
The statistics say that %65.1 percent of people with no degree in education voted “yes”, whereas %58.3 of university graduates voted “no”.
(Now, readers reading this who are not familiar to the constitutional referendum might think that voters who have voted for the amendments have their own opinion and we might as well respect that. Firstly, the statistics above speak for themselves. Also, I can’t respect the ruling party whose leader previously declared that their aim was not democracy, democracy was just a tool. A tool for what? Surely, it is a tool to carve Turkey so that they will reach their aims to transform Turkey into a tyranny. No wonder why he is among my favorite authors, Aldous Huxley once said “All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time.” The party has been the ruling party for seven years now, and the referendum results show that they will continue to rule in the for a long time in the future, having such bigoted supporters.)
The date “September 12, 2010” has a particular significance to me now, it is the day I came to realize that democracy is a way of ruling that has lots of flaws in it- particularly in states where education is not efficient and the society in general is ignorant. I have been a liberal person to extreme levels, I value everyone’s opinion and I love the idea of equality the ballot box offers- however, this does not apply to Turkey. In Turkey, democracy is no longer democracy, it has become majority-rule.
Realizing these flaws is pushing me to have an elitist or even conservative approach in the fashion of Plato and Socrates, who were worried that the Agora (an open “place of assembly” in ancient Greek city-states where politicians would address the public – eventually the Agora became a place for merchants and their stalls, it turned to be both a political and a commercial place) merged the uneducated people’s everyday activities with “noble” matters such as law, philosophy and politics.
I have come to realize that when the majority is formed by uneducated people, the ones who are aware and educated are in great danger.Thomas Jefferson put it this way, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine”. It drives me crazy when votes of ignorant and unconscious people take away my rights, shape my civil liberties and shape my way of living.
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“September 12, 2010” is now an important date for Turkey, to a level it is a turning point for Turkey- it is the date when the Turkish constitution got changed, certainly this referendum was more significant than general elections. The change is within the internal dynamics of Turkey, the change is within the substructure. Once the substructure is shook, the whole structure will eventually collapse.
Of course whether the change will lead to “brighter days” or back to the “dark age” depends on which side you are on, but one thing both sides do agree on is that things will never be the same again. Yet, one must keep in mind that after every turning point, there is a falling action.
