Search or escape?

Events involving injustice are replete with examples of how reality is distorted. This is what truly drives one to pessimism: the transformation of reality into something like playdough. Horrific things used to happen, too. Great injustices and injustices did occur. But reality wasn't so easily snatched away. Despite everything, one could create small, safe spaces for oneself and seek an environment that could nourish one's body and soul. Today, however, this search has often been replaced by escape . An escape from reality into fantasy. Many people now believe that nothing is as it seems. The boundary between reality and fantasy is constantly being violated. Political commentators do the same. They toy with reality by creating fantasies that appeal to the masses. The "foreign powers" conspiracies circulating on social media, the fake agendas fabricated during election campaigns, and the irrational theories even spouted in the face of disasters like earthquakes and floods are all part of this. However, fantasy serves a different purpose in literature: it offers us a better understanding of the world by rising from a solid foundation of reality. Today, that foundation is rapidly disappearing.

FANTASY TRAP

Fantasies exist on two levels of experience: the inner or private world and the outer, especially the public sphere. Public fantasies are distinguished from private ones by the fact that they are shared. But the apparatuses of power have pushed public fantasies to such a point that internal fantasies have begun to replace reality. As a result, even real, major threats have begun to be treated as fantasies. For example, the climate crisis is on everyone's lips. When a natural disaster strikes or temperatures rise above normal, global warming is immediately mentioned, but only mentioned; no one does anything. Because when you live in such a fantasy, reality doesn't feel real. Whether it's an alien invasion, a zombie invasion, the fantasy world of cinema, or global disaster dramas, we constantly witness a struggle for survival and a fierce battle of wills. These stories constantly whisper to us that survival is a precarious situation. Thus, we become even more distant from the suffering of the other.

GOOD OBJECT

Humanity has been placed in a hypnotic state by fantasies. With all available aspects of reality appropriated to fantasy, reason and reality have lost contact with "will and discrimination." Thus, all emotions and thoughts are now bent in the direction determined by the hypnotist. But this bending, the loss of reality, transforms the world from a dangerous to a desolate place. This desolation, in psychoanalytic terms, is related to the loss of the "good object." In the general human condition, the good object symbolizes the resources that make life sustainable, bearable, and meaningful: a nurturing nature, a trusting community, a caring relationship, a hopeful future. Thus, the "good object" has been taken from us. This has condemned us to the "bad object": absence, disappointment, threat, and destruction. In general existence, the bad object overshadows the will to survive, undermines trust, and reminds us of our own limitations. Human communities, like individuals, must turn to the "good object"—love, solidarity, and hope—to cope with these bad objects. The desolation of the world stems from the absence of good objects. That's why we are surrounded by fantasies of destruction, inside and out. And from these fantasies of destruction, we flee not into reality, but into fantasies.

THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH

The hope that we can reclaim the good object and become good people once again should be the fundamental concern of politics and art. This requires understanding public fantasies, particularly those instrumentalized by governments, and what they do to us, how they destroy reality. What is being imposed today is that humanity is evil, the world is dangerous, and the future is full of destruction. But in reality, this is not the truth. Everything can be reclaimed. As Judith Butler put it, we are reclaimed by each other. In other words, humans are not self-enclosed, completely autonomous, self-constructing beings. Humans are constantly reshaped, recalled, and transformed in their relationships with others. If we think of ourselves as entirely "belonging to ourselves, unaffected by the outside," we miss the essence of being human. Reality lies in that essence, in the good object. If we can reclaim the good object from each other, the world is reclaimed. And then, the fantasies of destruction are replaced by a shared future we reconstitute.