Mirror: Fascism Is a Political Filter, Too

Rastinews — Sigmund Freud wrote of an "oceanic feeling" — an experience in which the boundaries of the self dissolve, and a person feels one with the world, unbounded. A kind of rapture. The self merges with the universe, even mistakes itself for the universe. The "I" loses itself in the "we," becomes the "we," and takes the boundaries of the "we" as its own. The feeling echoes an early psychic stage, before the self has fully separated. An infant whose every need is met without effort assumes the comfort comes from its own power. It perceives its mother or father as an extension of itself. There's an old saying for it: the dog slept in the wagon's shadow and mistook the shadow for its own.

A boundary means a lack — it means admitting "I am not everything." Fascism speaks directly to this early longing for wholeness. Inside the collective "we," individual boundaries dissolve. Think of a rally: bodies melting into the crowd, voices chanting the same slogan. The military uses the same technique — units singing the same anthem, marching the same step at the same instant, moving as if they were a single machine, dozens of people fused into one body, one will. This is not merely a military or political display; it is also an experience of dissolving boundaries, a political version of the oceanic feeling. Loneliness vanishes; the sense of smallness dissolves. The experience is pleasurable, but it is also regressive. It suspends the acceptance of limits that adult autonomy requires. There's a phrase we sometimes hear: "If only I were a drop in the ocean." At first it sounds like modesty, like smallness. But a drop in the ocean is no longer just a small drop — it has joined the ocean itself. Behind this seemingly humble image lies a fantasy of grandeur: limitlessness, absolute power, a narcissistic dream of wholeness.

The feeling of becoming the ocean is, at bottom, a spiritual experience. Throughout history, people have most often reached spiritual experience through religious ritual. One of the basic human needs is the urge to touch something spiritual, and that urge draws people toward religion. What we call "religious need" is, more often than not, a need for the spiritual. Religion lifts boundaries; the laws of physics no longer apply. Death, for instance, does not exist. Every religion, one could argue, builds a narrative around what death is and what comes after it. Death is the most radical boundary there is — the end. Religion erases that boundary: life continues after death. There is an afterlife, a place everyone goes to, where people will be reunited, settle their accounts, or live together in happy union. Jinn, fairies, supernatural beings, fairy-tale narratives, stories of reincarnation, astral journeys, the spiritual travels to other realms made during worship, in dhikr, in meditation — all of these are humanity's spiritual experiences beyond the boundary. Long journeys into one's inner world, yoga sessions, psychology's constant suggestions to travel inward — these amount to an escape from outer reality, a person locking himself inside his own inner world. In one sense, these are often also stories of escape from reality. Religions have offered such experiences throughout history through various rites and rituals. That is one of the very things that makes religion appealing.

Fascism carries this spiritual experience into the political arena — in a limited but potent form. Grandeur, absolute power, the sight of oneself in a giant's mirror. What psychoanalysis calls the "primary process," those experiences where the boundaries of reality loosen, come into play here. Consider dreams: in a dream, reality dissolves. A person can find himself in another body; an adult suddenly becomes a child, speaks with the dead, and a place thousands of kilometers away appears right beside him. The boundaries of reality disappear. People often want to escape reality, because reality is heavy — poverty, the daily struggle, constant rushing, the fragility of human relationships. Against a reality that is hard to bear, fantasy and fiction offer shelter. This is exactly where fascism steps in: it offers a fantasy in place of reality, and over time that fantasy comes to be lived as reality itself. The chance fascism offers to disappear inside a "great whole" answers this spiritual need with a political substitute. In the universe, a person is small; but once he finds a great collective in which to dissolve himself, he grows as large as that collective. When someone says "I am a Turk," it is no longer just the individual speaking — it is as if "Turkishness" itself speaks. When someone says "I am a Muslim," the one speaking is not just that person, but the essence to which he belongs. Sentences that open with "the Islamic World"…

The "I" and the "we" fuse. The speaker positions himself as the representative of the nation, the homeland, history itself. When someone says "love it or leave it," the words are no longer presented as a personal opinion but as the nation's verdict. This is not mere rhetoric; it is an attempt to monopolize the right to define. One of fascism's most powerful tools today is exactly this: it regards the authority to define as its own. It claims for itself the right to decide who should leave, who is acceptable, who counts as a "traitor" or a "patriot." Phrases like "go over there," "come back here," "death to traitors" are expressions of this claimed authority. It assumes that it alone is the body that decides who is a terrorist and who is not, who belongs to the nation and who stands outside it.

Here emerges what we call "collective narcissism": "we are so great," yet at the same time "wrong is being done to us." Grandeur and grievance walk hand in hand. Past humiliations, losses, and collapses remain in the collective memory as an open wound. The fantasy that "a greatness we deserved was taken from us" grows stronger. Fascism offers this wound a promise of repair: "we will be great again." But this is not real healing; it is clinging to an inflated image. As long as boundaries go unaccepted, the oceanic feeling produces only a brief rush of exhilaration — and leaves behind an immature self.

Rejected, or Rejecting?

Fascism is built not just on a political program but on the engineering of emotion. In a sense, fascism is a management of fear and anger. It constantly manufactures narratives of danger — of external enemies, of being under siege, of a world plotting to destroy us. Over time, these repeated narratives create a paranoid climate. A person stirred by fear and anger eventually starts behaving almost like an addict inside that paranoid atmosphere. Fear stops being an ordinary emotion; it turns into a political resource, managed, fed, and steered at will. New enemies are added, the threat is inflated, the state of alarm is made permanent. This fear is one of fascism's most valuable assets.

One of the most visible moves in this emotional engineering is converting failure into contempt. At one point, the desire for "a seat at the big table" runs strong; the wish for recognition, approval, inclusion becomes a collective goal. The "we are a game-changer" rhetoric heard so often in recent years is a typical example. Not long ago, the eagerness to "become European" was just as widespread. Success stories about joining Europe were told, and reforms were justified through that orientation. The desire fused with the collective self's fantasy of growth. But when the goal goes unmet — and even getting a visa to those countries eventually turns into a serious problem — facing the resulting failure becomes hard to bear. Because being rejected means accepting a limit. It means admitting "we are not strong enough." When that vulnerability becomes too heavy to carry, the narrative changes. The object once desired is now belittled; Europe and "European-ness" begin to be devalued. At exactly that point, the rhetoric flips: "We never wanted it anyway." "It's they who need us."

A goal desired yesterday, one pursued with effort, can be declared worthless in an instant. The past desire is denied; dependency changes direction, the power relation reverses. The unattainable object is diminished. On a psychoanalytic level, this is the defense of devaluation. Saying "we were rejected" carries passivity, limitation and injury; saying "we rejected them" produces a sense of power and agency. In short: the reality does not change, but the story does. And the story regulates emotion — it suppresses the feeling of dependency, sustains collective pride, and renders the narcissistic wound invisible.

The mechanism recalls an old fable: the fox calls the grape it cannot reach "sour." The taste of the grape has not changed, nor has the fact that the grape is out of reach. Only the story changes. Devaluation appears to repair the wounded self, but it merely denies the injury. This transformation is not accidental. When the fragility produced by rejection becomes unbearable, the narrative is rebuilt. Saying "we were rejected" means accepting a limit; saying "we rejected them" is a fantasy of reversing that limit. In the end, the real limit goes unacknowledged; the injury it causes is compensated for with another story. Being rejected is a passive position; rejecting produces an illusion of power. Fascism organizes exactly this illusion, carrying the collective self from injury toward grandeur — at least on the level of feeling.

Closing the Corridor: Banning Contact

Fascism does not only magnify; it also isolates. Critical voices get labeled: "traitor," "agent," "terrorist." The idea itself is never debated; the person is criminalized instead. Rather than countering an argument, the speaker's legitimacy is targeted. The corridor between the public and critical thought closes. A fear of contagion takes hold: the danger is no longer the dissenting idea, but contact with it. Plurality is sold as threat, complexity as chaos, a single voice as stability. Truth is gathered into one hand. Here the metaphors of the funhouse mirror and the filter grow heavier again: fascism does not merely produce a feeling of grandeur — it makes unfiltered reality unspeakable. Criticism aimed at the filter is perceived as an attack on identity itself, because the magnified image and identity have become fused. Turning back grows harder, since the way out demands not just ideological persuasion but accepting a narcissistic "shrinking." Saying "this is all we really are" means risking a step down from the funhouse mirror.

Fascism, in its early stages, often touches on a genuine problem. Economic crisis, for instance, is real; unemployment, poverty and precarity are real. Fascist rhetoric draws attention to these problems, but simplifies their causes and solutions. Complex structural issues are reduced to a single cause. "Foreign powers" are responsible. "Traitors among us" are to blame. A legitimate social grievance is thus manipulated and redirected toward a specific enemy figure. The real problem goes unsolved, but the anger is channeled.

Throughout this process, fascism continually manufactures fear. In one sense, it is a management of fear — fear management, so to speak. New threats, new enemies, new states of alarm are created. Fear becomes the bond that holds the mass together. Evolutionarily, humans were among the weakest creatures in nature; survival required banding together. Whoever broke from the herd was left defenseless. Fear drives people to act together, to seek protection. Fascism reproduces this primitive mechanism at the political level. By manufacturing fear, it stabilizes and controls its mass. It offers the frightened person a group; the group becomes a refuge. Being inside the "we" means safety; being outside it means danger. For this reason, fascism is not only repression — it is also the promise of a refuge. For the fearful individual, the group is both a shelter and an identity.

When the corridor closes, contact is cut off; when contact is cut off, plurality disappears; and when plurality disappears, only a single voice remains. And that voice declares itself the whole of truth.

In Love Not With the Mirror, But With the Reflection

Fascism does not change reality; it changes the reflection. It gives small, ordinary, tired, anxious people the feeling, for a moment, of being giants. The appeal of that feeling grows stronger against the world's intractability, because reality is heavy while the reflection lightens the load. But that is exactly why it is dangerous: it calls people not to solve their problems but to deny them, not to transform reality but to sanctify the image.

The funhouse mirror does not merely magnify; it produces dependency. After a while, you no longer want to see your unfiltered face. You no longer want to see the real economic picture, the real dependencies, the real limits, because then you would feel small and fragile again. In the funhouse mirror, though, grandeur is constant; there is no limit there, no lack, no embarrassment. Perhaps the hardest thing is this: to one day step out of the mirror and stand at your own height. To accept the limit. To be able to say, "this is all I am." Neither denying the lack nor taking refuge in a fantasy of grandeur.

This becomes even harder in countries where fascism has become normalized, because the funhouse mirror itself becomes ordinary; the magnified image is accepted as normal. Fascism never disappears entirely; once suppressed, it can return. For this reason, every generation must reproduce its own critical consciousness and guard its own mirror. A healthy society is not handed down ready-made; it is built each time, anew, through the courage to face the limit.

There were no mirrors once. People used their reflections in water as mirrors. The myth of Narcissus is, in fact, just such a story — a person meeting their own reflection for the first time on the surface of water. Today, though, mirrors are everywhere. We look at ourselves many times a day. We examine ourselves under magnifying glasses. We can enlarge ourselves, make ourselves enormous. I recently saw a two-meter-wide television screen at a friend's house. In close-up, the woman's face on the screen was nearly two meters across; her nose, her eyes, even the veins in her eyes appeared in exaggerated detail. Seeing so much of oneself also turns the self into an object that is constantly up for correction. The mirror, today, is really a device for finding flaws. We live in an age obsessed with beauty and visibility, an era in which even plucking hair counts as aesthetics. We look in the mirror again and again, find fault with ourselves, and try to recreate ourselves at aesthetic clinics. But there are not only individual mirrors — there are cultural and ethnic mirrors too. The images that appear in these mirrors also spread rapidly. The body of claims produced about nations, identities and cultures keeps growing.

Perhaps one reason for the hostility directed at Kurds and Alevis lies exactly here: they are mirrors. They hold a mirror up to the narrative of Turkishness. Because a mirror does not only show the face — it also makes visible the things we do not want to see. That is why some mirrors are meant to be broken, done away with.