The Drama of the Organized Individual and the Unorganized Society

As a theatrical genre, drama stages the clash of opposing situations and events. In this piece, too, drama "the sorrow felt when two opposing situations become each other's cause and effect in a negative sense" is used in that sense. I will try to explain why "organizing " for the individual and "not organizing " is characterized as a drama for society is what I will try to explain. For this is a dilemma, and grinding on in a cycle, each is the cause and effect of the other.

Rastinews — This dilemma is what causes social and political development to crawl despite the dizzying pace of the civilization humanity has created, and it is the source that keeps modes of thought and behavior surviving from antiquity in circulation today. Socrates was tried on slanderous charges of every kind, and today dissidents are held hostage and tried the same way, on fabricated charges.

Organizing is the only way a community can determine its own governance, or fight against misrule and the abuse of power and achieve results. Centuries ago, many state theorists, political scientists and philosophers put forward brilliant ideas, for their time, on better governance and their views still represent an ideal that remains out of reach today. Because even though there is a deficiency and inadequacy on the intellectual level, the real deficiency and inadequacy lies in organizing.

People's hair stands on end at the mere word "organization." One day a lawyer went to a courthouse clerk's office and asked for the documents in a file. The clerk refused to hand them over. The lawyer said, "Look, I'm an organization member - I'm going to go get my organization's members and come back," and walked out. The clerk ran to the judge, the judge notified the prosecutor, the prosecutor called the police, and everyone waited anxiously for the organization-member lawyer and his organization. Then the lawyer arrived - with the bar association president and a few members of the bar's board. Everyone was baffled: wasn't he supposed to come back with organization operatives? The judge asked, "Counselor, you threatened the clerk and said you were an organization member - what exactly are you trying to do?" The lawyer answered, "A lawyer's organization is the bar association. The bar president and board members are the organization's leaders. That's exactly what I meant - I came back with my organization." And the tension dissolved.

I taught law for many years, and in every class I would ask, "Friends, is the state an organization?" Almost no one saw the state as an organization either - some even reacted with "God forbid, of course not."

By "organization" I mean every legal entity. Whether legal or illegal, official or unofficial, statutory or customary, any structure in which people come together for a shared purpose and sensibility, form a leadership and carry out activity, is an organized structure. So in this piece, the assessments about organization apply, more or less, to the state, political parties, every kind of political movement, unions, associations, cooperatives, and every other legal entity too numerous to list.

Two diametrically opposed conditions - an organized individual and an unorganized society - being described as a drama is rather ironic, but it is a statement of fact. To take this fact up separately, first for the organized individual and then for the unorganized society:

An individual's turn toward organization is a natural consequence of being a social being, but the conditions vary by both the individual and the society. For the individual, weaknesses matter as much as virtues. Motivations can include the desire to have a say, to play a role, to redirect the flow of events, to realize one's dreams, to pursue one's ideals - as much as the wish to escape one's own crisis, to add meaning to life, to join an adventure, to cool boiling blood, or to settle a score. The frustrations or anger the individual has been subjected to or exposed to in their environment, as well as the ideas they have learned and adopted, the world they imagine, and the drive to realize that life, can push them toward organizing. (Recall, in the film Braveheart, the reason William Wallace launched his revolt against the English. It is a singular example of an individual, wounded by a reality they are aware of, turning to change that reality.)

It is not easy to pin down what motivates an individual's urge to organize and search for belonging. According to Erich Fromm, an individual joins an organization partly as a way of avoiding the responsibility that life places on them alone. Where an organization lacks democratic process and collective reasoning, no one has the luxury of examining the source of that motivation.

The individual thus carries both the virtues and the failures within them into the organized structure. The individual joins the organized structure with an identity, and the organized structure in turn tries to impose an identity on them. Both identities may carry elements harmful and foreign to both bodies. This is why the drama of the organized individual begins with a clash of identities. The individual - who becomes the object of ambition, of maneuvering, of the organization's own power-building - grows estranged from their own reality, loses their autonomy, and severs ties with society in their natural life, and lets themselves drift with the current.

The organized individual willingly takes on the role assigned to them within the organization and disappears into the structure, losing their own will, even becoming an object - but what can one person matter against the liberation of a society, a community? An individual's freedom and autonomy rarely align with the interest of the collective, and joining a community nearly always means the individual must sacrifice something of themselves and accept constraint. Political organization represents this constraint at its most intense, since unity in the face of opposition is required, and with it comes uniformity - everyone comes to think and act the same way.

Almost every organized structure has a hierarchy, and that hierarchy quickly forms a skeleton of decision-makers and those subject to them, leaving everyone else passive. Those driven by ambition and single-minded motivation, often born of personal weakness, are usually either sidelined within the organization before long or come to dominate it. That many people who rise within organized structures are people three others would not even follow outside one rests on the role ambition and exploitation play. Virtue and flaw serve the same function there - weakness turns into skill.

Particularly within ideological organizations, the individual shapes their culture, morality and belief around the organized structure, and the day the ideology collapses, morality and culture collapse with it. This swing from one extreme to the other happens most of all among radical individuals. Someone who leaves the organization comes to despise everything about it, without exception.

The organizational problems an individual encounters in their efforts to organize or in organized struggle, and the sacrifices endured, the personal freedom given up, keep reminding the individual, deep down, of a ceaseless state of questioning "whether it was worth it" This state persists. Beyond that, if success, victory or progress is not achieved, if the right steps toward the cause and the goal are not being taken, disappointment builds. Everything feels as if it has gone to waste — a thought that merges with the doubts, worries and questions in one's head, and everything that made being there possible collapses all at once.

If an individual has sincerely joined an organized struggle for a cause, breaking away from it is a genuine devastation, because from it they reaped neither career, nor wealth, nor status nor reputation. In this way they abandoned their personal story, set aside economic gain, never entertained the thought of rising by stepping on others, but rather lost themselves for the liberation and relief of society or the community — yet at the stage they have reached, having lost the organization, the society, the wealth and the status, what greater drama could there be than also having lost their belief and their cause?

Every form of organization that consumes the individual for the sake of shouldering the organized structure and relies on interchangeability — in other words, one that does not recognize the individual's autonomy — every such organization is no different from a sect, and this is exactly what we are living through today: in a civilized, developed society's organization, protecting the individual's autonomy is essential.

Almost every organized structure grinds people down. Emile Durkheim: "political parties swallow good people and spit them back out to society as bad people" he said. This is exactly where the drama of the organized individual spreads into society, and the irony in the title of this piece emerges precisely at this point. The drama of the organized individual pushes society toward being unorganized; the unorganized society resigns itself to the fate assigned to it, and a mass drama unfolds.

Society, if it organizes around its demands and puts its demands forward in an organized way and finds a response, then meeting those demands becomes possible. A society that does not organize, faced with the determining power of a handful of organized members has no choice but to complain, to feel sorry for itself, to sigh again and again, and ultimately to live under the conditions set by the organized structure.

Eric Hoffer "We often define a society by its deviant, unruly, radical and disruptive elements — though this may seem unfair on the surface, there is in fact a considerable degree of truth to it, because many societies' fate is determined by these elements" he said. The truth the author points to — that a handful of organized people determine the fate of society — is nothing but a societal drama.

In an age when specializations have split sharply from one another, and even a single field has splintered into many specialties, while society holds thousands, tens of thousands of people who have fused their talent, intelligence and knowledge with their expertise, the sheer dominance of incompetence and shallowness in politics is the clearest sign that capable people stay away from organizing.In a society home to tens of thousands of qualified, talented, intelligent people who are experts in their fields, is the belief that the leader knows everything, manages everything flawlessly, handles everything, is flawless, is sufficient, not the drama of an unorganized society?

One of the most distinctive traits of an unorganized society is that it waits for a day and a leader. Just like in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"! Everyone waits for Godot to save them. And it is likely that within that society there are also thousands of capable, leader-worthy people, who are themselves waiting for a day and a leader. A person, waiting for himself — is that not the drama of an unorganized society?

The pent-up anger and energy of an unorganized society is mostly released at the wrong time through the wrong methods, though even released at the right time, results are unlikely. (Take the Gezi protests, for example, or in Iran, the waves of protest that have swelled for years and ebbed) In an unorganized society too, social events happen, confrontations happen, clashes happen, but in the end they all disperse, get defeated, lose. Yes, every unjust and oppressive regime falls sooner or later, but believe me, most collapse from their own inner decay. Isn't, an unjust, cruel and oppressive regime's collapse through its own inner decay the drama of an unorganized society?

An unorganized society only acts as a mass when things finally reach a breaking point, when conditions become truly unbearable, sparked by a single trigger it rises up as a mass. It clearly knows what it doesn't want but not what it wants, its vanguard and goals undefined, and in fact usually ends up building something resembling what it tore down. When the masses who waited for that day rise up not knowing what they want and live out that same wretched fate — isn't that the drama?

Lukashenko, Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, Orbán and others like them.. The single most important factor that has kept them in power for 20-30 years is that society is unorganized. If the masses standing behind them formed an organized society, they could never have become who they are. As leaders grow, society shrinks. That small man who is not the hero of his own story, who burns inside, who hasn't contributed one gram to the cause, and who is a disappointment to himself in his inner world — being part of undoing the schemes turned against his country, as a foot soldier of a great cause, spares him from confronting his own individual story, and lets him experience the honor of the shared great cause. Besides, he doesn't even need to do anything — the great leader is already doing whatever needs to be done. Isn't the survival of a power propped up by such individuals the drama of an unorganized society?

Every striking, valid, brilliant idea has a journey from the moment it is first voiced, which is why they say "no one can stop an idea whose time has come." For an idea's time to come means it has been discussed within society, matured, and generalized. Yet no idea, however valid, however beautiful, however brilliant, organizes society on its own the moment it is released into the street. On the other hand, many people who broke from the main body over differing ideas (Trotsky, for instance) were right but were not organized, and they were purged. Is it not the drama of an unorganized society that it squanders both its free-thinking minds and its brilliant ideas by failing to organize them?

It would in fact be unfair to say that a society's lack of organization always produces bad results; at times a society's tight organization also paves the way to disaster. A monolithic state that erases the individual entirely is a disaster for any society. History offers many examples of this condition as well. The most sophisticated example is probably the Nazi organization, in which millions of Germans lined up behind Hitler like a single rope, becoming one body. Any organization that overrides individual autonomy is an anomaly that cannot be remedied, a state of mass derangement and excess.

Even when a high degree of social organization is achieved through an individual whose will has been castrated and turned into a zombie, an order-taker, the result is Hitler. Organizing around a god-king or prophet-leader and an ideology accepted as absolute truth benefits neither the individual nor society; at best it brings disaster to both.

A form of organization built on individual autonomy is, at the same time, genuine democratic organization, not one that is exploited or exists only in words. In an age when individualization has begun to harm social life, has reduced sharing among people, and conformism and hedonism run rampant, it is not easy to draw people into the toil and hardship of building the common good and the future, and the only way to do so is an organizational model that secures the individual's autonomy.

What turns organized individuals into Sisyphus, condemning them to a hopeless, futile, empty task of "pushing a boulder up a hill," and turns society into a mere spectator of this, is sanctified leadership and dogmatic ideology. Just as the abuse of power reverses the principle "the state exists for society" into "society exists for the state," the abuse of organization reverses it into the rule "society exists for the organization, and the organization exists for the leader." The current, flawless example of this is the Öcalan-PKK-Kurds equation.

We finally understand that the shared drama of the individual and society is sacrificing both to a leader and an ideology. What is essential is a social organization that does not dissolve the individual within itself, that allows for the individual's autonomous existence, and that rests on common reason and accumulated knowledge. The equation in which Marx, building his thought on the claim that freedom comes from independence from the commodity, missed the individual, and Freud, by placing the individual at the center, missed society, needs to be reconciled. In other words, the individual's autonomy and organization need to meet.

Contrary to Eric Fromm's observation cited above, it is possible to say that today individuals flee organization to protect their own autonomy. In a state built on pluralist democracy, human rights and the rule of law, where institutions and rules govern society, the individual's autonomy vis-à-vis the state is relatively secured. The same principle should hold in every other form of organization. There too, the key to and guarantee of individual autonomy is an organization's own pluralist, democratic functioning, common reason and human rights. These elements matter for more than individual autonomy alone. They are also essential to the organization's functioning, purpose and success.