"Thinking through these conclusions, something else became visible to me. In fact, the whole country was in this same condition. This mediocrity was a smell that had settled over all of us, and we fit right into it. We are a country where half the working population earns minimum wage, where most of the rest chase after a civil-service post, and where anyone with a bit of money chases cheap land. And the most innovative idea that occurs to those who notice this state of affairs and want to escape the bottleneck is: manufacture dog-drinking-bowls in China and sell them to Europe."

I ended the previous piece with this paragraph. In truth, I had circled around this paragraph throughout the whole piece, built its structure around it, and poured the matter on my mind into that final paragraph — but I got feedback from friends saying that a few points hadn't landed, that they were left hanging in the air, and that some parts of the piece reeked of arrogance. So writing this epistle became, so to speak, obligatory.

Now, after all those words, we need to clear up one thing: we have no ontological quarrel, neither with India's poor nor with dog-drinking-bowls. Since we meet on the common ground of humanity, we hold that India's poor deserve a life befitting human dignity, and we love and respect them as human beings. Likewise, since dog bowls answer to a real need, we don't look down on them; we bear the sector goodwill for the contribution it makes to the economy, we respect the entrepreneurs for venturing out and turning the wheels of the economy, and we watch with pleasure as dogs manage to eat and drink in (dare I say) civilized fashion.

Our problem is with the mindset. A mindset is the universal that gives direction to all action, sets the horizon of thought, and produces the set of values. It is with us as we act; we think from within it; we see the horizon colored by it. Mindset is the pattern observable across the sum total of our behavior and thought.

So what is this mindset we take issue with? I don't think I can show it to you outright — only point toward it, as far as I'm able.

In the previous piece I described the urgent money-making project of two people with no skill whatsoever that could be turned into cash outside their professional occupation. What I tried to emphasize throughout the piece were these two points:

  1. Urgency
  2. The lack of any deepened interest

I struggle quite a bit with long-range undertakings. As far as I can tell, I'm not the only one with this trouble — I belong to a rather large crowd. Long-range undertakings include acquiring abilities like learning a language, playing an instrument, developing a talent, or periodic assignments like reading so many books or writing so many pieces a year. In essence, every long-range undertaking is bound up with what I'm calling periodic assignment. That is, what we call a long-range undertaking is work that requires planned, day-by-day effort toward a goal whose due date lies far in the future. At first it gets waved off lightly — "come on, surely I can manage two hours of instrument lessons twice a week?" — but later on you realize the matter isn't really a 2×2=4-hour matter; those four hours are bound up with traits buried deep in a person's character, far more than with the hours themselves: impulse control, the ability to delay gratification, willpower, endurance, patience, a weakness for comfort.

So how does this crowd, one that struggles with long-range undertakings, behave when it wants to make money? It will most likely want to obtain the money urgently and by the easiest route available, because neither its psychology nor its wallet can afford an investment that will take five years to turn a profit. I hope to get to the wallet part — that is, the scarcity of capital — later on.

Given all this, the only thing to be expected from these people beyond scraping together Amazon links is selling dog-drinking-bowls — a product with thousands of examples already on the market, marketed by thousands of people using the exact same methods. And the more sharp-eyed among them, those who know how to sniff out the market, will spot the lint-remover gadget the moment the dog-bowl craze loses steam, and rush to get it manufactured and sold ahead of their competitors.

Here I feel compelled to step back in. My complaint isn't with selling dog-drinking-bowls; my complaint is with every lazy person's eyes lighting up at the sight of one. My complaint is with the motive that gets someone to scrape together Amazon links, or to try to sell a product with thousands of existing examples on the market without adding a single feature, a single point of difference, without expending a shred of mental effort on it. This is taking the easy way out, it is reductionism, it is not-my-problem-ism, it is the sovereignty of the mediocre. In other words, I'm saying the matter was never the dog bowl — haven't you understood that yet? My claim is that this motive I've been describing is one of the forces that makes everyday life in Turkey unlivable. This motive:

  1. generates its own petty schemers in daily life, producing every kind of injustice, ethical-legal corruption, disregard for what matters, and disrespect; and
  2. keeps the horizon of thought confined to daily life.

This motive breeds its own petty schemers and their little schemes. Because the employer trying to get rich the easy way doesn't pay his employee's overtime; the driver who doesn't want to wait at the light cuts across from the neighboring gas-station lane; the driver who sees the light turn yellow before it turns red, despite seeing pedestrians waiting to cross, floors the gas and tries to nose past to the other side.

This motive confines the horizon of thought to the everyday, because the only horizon that people without the skill or the eye for long-range work can set — for themselves or for others — is, again, daily, short-term goals. For instance, members of this mindset can hang a "grocery, 50 meters =>" sign where an old fountain's inscription plaque ought to be; they can tell an acquaintance whose child attends a private school, "son, instead of giving all that money to the school, you'd earn a lot more opening a meatball stand somewhere" — because what matters is the moment, right now. Anything beyond right now isn't even an object one can imagine.

And it is this very motive that keeps a person from manufacturing a product worth $1,000 a kilo instead of $10; that keeps them, just as much, from researching, from putting in real mental labor, from working out what a good dog-drinking-bowl should really be — from producing something beyond whatever it is that merely makes a dog bowl a dog bowl, an original design, an advertising strategy. Because there's no production in any real sense happening here to begin with. The factory in China is already manufacturing tens of thousands of dog bowls. All you do is risk your money, condescend to buy 100 of them, and slap a label on.

January 20, 2024