Covering Up the Truth

Rastinews — I get on the subway with my phone in hand. I don't look around; I hold onto my phone. Like a child gripping its mother's hand. The child already knows how to walk, but without that hand, its confidence falters. The hand isn't just physical support; it's an object of trust against the world. The child doesn't fear falling when it lets go of its mother's hand — it fears being left alone. I don't let go of my phone either. In this sense, the phone isn't just a device; it's something I hold onto, something that makes me feel safe, something that postpones loneliness. It works like what Winnicott called a transitional object. To endure a mother's absence, a child chooses a substitute: a toy, a blanket, a scrap of cloth. That object stands in, in a way, for the mother. By carrying it, the child denies the separation, at least partly. As if the mother, even absent, still has a piece of herself nearby.

The phone can turn into just such a transitional object. Like a mother, like a toy, an object I can't let go of. Clinging to it, I postpone both being alone with myself and facing the world directly. The phone isn't only a tool for connecting to the outside world; sometimes it's a refuge from both the outside world and my own inner one. To put it plainly: enduring oneself, sitting alone with oneself, can feel like a disaster. Most people mistake boredom, the inability to do anything, or the unwillingness to do anything, for depression. But boredom isn't always emptiness; sometimes it's the threshold where a person meets their own inner conflict. Holding onto the phone stops being simply using the phone; it becomes hiding inside it. Trying to escape that kind of depression, a person usually ends up escaping from themselves. Because boredom is, at times, a flight from inner conflict. If someone is running this hard from themselves, perhaps what they're running from is the monster within.

One reason inner conflict feels so frightening is this: while the two sides within us clash, fight, compete and try to overpower each other, there's no longer a third party to reconcile them. That third party is an inner position that observes, keeps its distance, can arbitrate, and listens to both sides. Once that position disappears, only two hostile poles remain inside a person. The conflict stops being an inner dialogue and turns into an inner war. With reconciliation no longer possible, a person can't sit with themselves; where they should meet themselves, they instead face the noise of two voices trying to destroy each other. That's why the phone is sometimes more than a distraction; it becomes a shelter from having to hear that inner war. The screen's glow drowns out the darkness of the inner world. Notifications silence the call coming from within. The more a person scrolls, watches, looks, the more they multiply ways of getting away from themselves rather than facing themselves. In this sense, the death of the third party inside us isn't just a loss of balance — it's a psychological catastrophe. Because to reckon with one's own inner world, a person needs somewhere beyond the warring sides — a third position capable of seeing, thinking, discerning and connecting. When that position is gone, a person becomes a prisoner of their own inner polarization. Perhaps the reason people cling so hard to their phones isn't only the fear of being alone; it's the fear of confronting a war that has lost its referee.

In fact, the death of the third party isn't confined to our inner world; it's closely tied to polarization outside. As people outside increasingly view each other as hostile camps, the reconciling position inside weakens too. When the third position — the one that would arbitrate, notice injustice, bear witness to pain, and keep intellectual distance between two sides — disappears from public life, that loss seeps into a person's inner world as well. Polarization outside feeds polarization inside; the death of the inner third party, in turn, reproduces the silence, blindness and indifference outside.

What I mean by the death of the third party outside is roughly this: while countless people today are exposed to injustice, violence, poverty, humiliation and exclusion, large segments of the public make a deliberate effort not to see any of it. Through entertainment, consumption, scrolling social media, getting lost in an endless feed, they escape the weight of bearing witness. This isn't just playing dead; at times it's behaving as if truly dead. Someone playing dead still shows a sign of life, still carries the possibility of waking up. What's more frightening here is that the third party — the one who would witness, object, intervene, say "there is an injustice here" — falls silent as though genuinely dead.

This social mechanism is internalized over time. As a person learns to stay silent in the face of outside injustice, to not see, not hear, to withdraw into their own comfort zone, a similar silence takes hold inside. The arbiter position that would witness inner conflicts, make sense of them, and stop one side from destroying the other, falls silent too. So it isn't just that two hostile sides remain inside a person; the third eye that would see them also closes. Inside us now there is no longer a third party playing dead — there is one that has actually died.

When a country holds this much injustice, wrongdoing and oppression, it's inevitable that all of it generates enormous anger among the wider public. What matters is where that anger goes. Most often, it doesn't reach the address that actually caused it; it spreads sideways. People direct their anger at each other instead of at the structures producing the oppression, injustice, poverty or repression. The fights that erupt in the neighborhood, in traffic, on a shared taxi, on the subway, at work, in an apartment building, within a family, are, in part, scenes of this displaced anger. Vertical conflict is converted into horizontal conflict. Anger that should point upward — at power, at institutions, at the system, at the mechanism producing injustice — points sideways instead: at a neighbor, a coworker, a fellow passenger, a cashier, a friend or spouse. This horizontal conflict can look dangerous, loud and destructive in the moment, but it's also an easy way for people to protect themselves. Confronting the real source is risky; it demands courage, organization, confrontation. Venting anger sideways is easier. A person gets to feel their anger without ever having to face its true address. This is why people who ignore innocents being jailed, exiled, fired from their jobs, impoverished or humiliated can, on that same day, keep fighting with each other on a shared taxi, the subway, in traffic, or while waiting in line. Someone who stays silent in the face of great injustice can turn into a warrior for justice in small encounters. They settle scores with the person next to them on the subway, a neighbor in the building, another driver in traffic, a colleague at work. But this reckoning is rarely a search for justice — it's usually the release of displaced anger. It is the orgasm of anger.

When a person stops pursuing a broader, more comprehensive justice, they start looking for justice in small scenes instead — in a glance, a bumped shoulder, a dispute over a place in line, a tone of voice, a fight over a seat. Facing large-scale injustice is heavy; it calls a person to responsibility. Fighting over small injustices, on the other hand, gives a person a brief sense of power. What circulates in society, then, is not genuine objection to injustice but scattered anger aimed at one another. This makes the death of the third party even more visible. Had the third party still been alive, it could have pointed to anger's real address, could have said, "this fight isn't with your neighbor — it's with the system that put you in this state." But once the third party is dead, a person can no longer separate their anger, direct it, or make sense of it. Then everyone becomes everyone else's enemy. Just as inside, there is no referee outside either — only sides attacking each other.

This is why the phone, social media or constant busyness are not just individual means of escape; they are also the spiritual mechanisms of the age. A person looks at the screen to avoid seeing injustice outside; the same screen shelters them from hearing the war inside. So the dead third party of the outer world completes the dead third party of the inner world. The death of witnessing in society echoes as the death of thinking within the individual. A person does not only flee the world; they also flee the witness within, the arbiter within, the living third position within.

Sometimes a person makes an intense effort not to look at their surroundings, the world, other people. I look at the screen to avoid looking at the faces across from me on the subway, the city flowing past the window, the silence beside me, the feelings rising inside me. When the world feels too real, too crowded, too demanding, the phone offers a small and manageable world. On that screen I choose what to look at; I decide who I see, how long I stay, when I leave. The real world is not like that. The real world comes with glances, coincidences, discomfort, emptiness and uncertainty.

Looking at the phone to avoid looking at the world, to avoid seeing it. And if the phone itself grows boring, then looking inward instead. Meditation, yoga, the be-positive story. In recent years, people turning toward their inner worlds, trying to understand themselves and giving more weight to their spiritual lives seems, at first glance, like a positive development. Indeed, being able to be alone with oneself, to recognize one's emotions and notice one's inner conflicts is a valuable achievement. But this tendency can, over time, swing to another extreme. The inner world is exalted to such a degree that a person's relationship with the outer world, with social conditions and with the problems of shared life is pushed into the background. What I mean by looking inward here is not a person seeing their own inner conflicts, trying to understand those conflicts, or being able to watch themselves from the position of a third eye. On the contrary, what is often done under the name of looking inward is an effort to silence the conflicts in the inner world, to suppress the noise, to create a calm and smooth inner space. When a person sets out on a meditative journey, they sometimes want to silence all the voices in their inner world rather than hear them; they want to close all the seeing eyes rather than open them. In this way, looking inward can become a way of sustaining not-seeing in a more refined form, rather than truly seeing.

In this sense, turning to the inner world is not always confrontation. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is a more aesthetic, more acceptable, more "spiritual"-looking form of fleeing conflict. A person looks at the phone to avoid seeing injustice in the outer world; when bored with the phone, they turn inward. But this turn, too, is not always a turn toward truth. Sometimes the inner world, just like the screen, turns into a space of escape. To avoid seeing the conflict outside, one takes refuge in the screen; to avoid hearing the conflict inside, one takes refuge in the language of peace. Yet real inward looking is not ironing out the inner world, flattening it, erasing all its creases. Real inward looking is a person being able to look at the conflict, contradiction, anger, fear, shame, jealousy, aggression and helplessness within themselves. More importantly, it is being able to see these inner experiences not as purely individual matters disconnected from the outer world, but as part of the bonds we form with the world, with society, with relationships and with shared life.

So what I mean here by genuine inward looking is touching a depth, living that depth, and through this depth being able to see the outer world better. Real inward looking is a person's ability to open corridors between their inner world and the outer world; to be able to build connections between what happens inside and what is lived outside. When a person can see their own fear, anger, shame, helplessness or unease not only as a personal matter but also as part of their relationship with the world, the inner world truly deepens. But today, turning inward mostly avoids this difficult gaze. The purpose of the inner world becomes not seeing the truth but creating a harmonious and calm scenery. Instead of trying to understand the fight within, a person tries to silence it, tries to turn their inner world into a kind of decoration. Here, turning to the inner world is not for deepening but, on the contrary, for dulling the inner world. A person turns inward not to understand the conflicts within but to silence them. Instead of shining a light into their own dark rooms, they turn off all the lights and call this peace. In this way the inner world, too, is depoliticized. Just as the conflicts of the outer world are rendered invisible, the conflicts of the inner world are likewise pacified. A person finds new ways to avoid seeing both the injustice outside and the unease inside. As the phone screen covers up the outer world, a false search for inner peace covers up the inner world. In the end, a person truly sees neither the outside nor the inside. They only look; they do not see. In this state, the inner world stops being a living space that helps us grasp the outer world better; it turns into a numbed, flattened, de-conflicted place. A person no longer builds a bond between their inner world and the outer world; on the contrary, they use their inner world to flee the outer world. Withdrawing inward becomes not a path to understanding the outside more deeply, but a safe excuse for moving away from both the outside and the truth within.

So a person either flees the outer world by looking at the screen, or suspends the weight of the outer world by withdrawing into their inner world. Yet the matter is not simply turning inward or looking outward; it is a person's ability to stay in contact with both. The phone sometimes turns into an intermediary object that cuts this contact, that comes in between, that protects us from both the world and ourselves. It protects; but it also separates. It calms; but it also isolates. It provides a hold; but it can also delay growth, separation, being able to stand on one's own.

Perhaps this is why not being able to put the phone down is not merely habit or addiction. At a deeper level, it is an inability to bear an unmediated encounter with the world and with oneself. Like a child who cannot let go of its mother's hand, a person too sometimes cannot let go of their phone. Because that small screen covers up, for a while, the anxiety of being alone, of looking, of being seen, and of being open to the world.

One of the most fundamental theories of psychoanalysis is conflict theory. According to psychoanalytic thought, the human psyche is not made up only of the pursuit of peace, harmony and balance; on the contrary, it is a conflictual field built through repressed desires, prohibitions, guilt, shame, anger, jealousy, envy and experiences of loss. For this reason, turning toward the inner world does not only mean calming down or feeling good; it means a person encountering their own conflicts. Yet today, turning toward the inner world is mostly presented as an ideal of peace purified of conflict. Instead of confronting the symbolic objects, object representations, losses, anger and desires within their inner world, a person is called to keep their distance from these as well. It is idealized as though "not rocking the boat," not getting involved in anything, living a life free of conflict and friction were signs of spiritual maturity.

The prominence given to meditative methods, yoga and positive psychology is part of this same tendency. A belief is marketed that if a person turns enough to their own inner world, focuses on their breath, preserves their peace and thinks positively, they can somehow cope with the heavy realities of the outer world such as hunger, poverty, environmental pollution, war, exploitation and injustice. In this way, social and political problems are reduced to the individual's task of establishing inner balance. In this understanding, a person's task is not to change the world but to become more resilient to the blows it deals. Peace turns almost into a technique of adaptation. The conditions that cause pain are not removed; the individual is merely expected to be calmer, more accepting and more "positive" in the face of these conditions. Thus yoga, meditation or personal development practices stop being merely a spiritual pursuit; they turn into tools for individually managing the pain produced by the existing order. While the outer world burns, a person is advised to build a small, sterile and silent room within themselves. In this way, peace is sought not in trying to transform the world but in withdrawing from it. Instead of striving to build a fairer and more livable outer world, a person turns to creating a safe shelter within the boundaries of their own mind. Yet psychological well-being is not only an inner matter; a person is also a being who lives within social, political and economic conditions.

For this reason, excessive emphasis on the inner world may, without one realizing it, also serve a function of preserving the existing order. Because once all problems begin to be reduced to the individual's psyche, inequality, exploitation, insecurity or injustice become invisible. A perception forms as though it is not the world that needs to change, but only the individual's response to it. In this way the system goes unquestioned, while the individual is invited to adjust themselves to fit the system.

At this point, the negative is also ignored. Pain, anger, disappointment, ruin and social reality are treated as if they were simply a matter of mental attitude. A person shuts their eyes to reality and tries to count themselves happy. But this happiness is not the result of a living relationship with reality; it is the result of withdrawing from reality, avoiding conflict and denying the negative. Neglecting the inner world is as much a problem as forgetting the outer world entirely. What is healthy is the capacity to relate both to one's own psyche and to the reality of the world one lives in. Because peace found only by turning inward can sometimes be not liberation, but another name for withdrawal from reality.