Guiding questions for local administrator candidates

I am inclined to say that none of those who founded great civilizations throughout history set out to found a great civilization. I say I am inclined to say, because ending the sentence with a statement of judgment would be a great generalization, and one that can hardly be falsified, or even tested.

For this, it is in fact hardly even possible to examine the thoughts, ways of looking at life, and perspectives on the future of the first founders of all those who founded great civilizations. Because we do not have sufficient information and data about precisely those "first people." Nevertheless, we can say that the intentions and perspectives on the future of those who founded the civilizations we know were not this.

We have a serious perception of the will that founded the Ottomans because of the series currently on screen these days, but we must not forget that these perceptions are built through a retrospective view determined by abundant good intentions. We can imagine Ertuğrul and his friends as people who could make plans for centuries ahead, but this does not fit the nature of humankind and of history.

Perhaps this much is very clear: Ertuğrul did not know the future, that is, the unseen, could not have known it, but he knew very well what he would do that day, what he had to do, and he did what he would do with complete determination, upright.

Both good and evil have a universal validity. If you have left the world a work that requires you to be remembered, the choices you made about good and evil shine, together with the works you put forth, centuries later toward the present day as brilliant ideas and actions. Your voice reaches today from the depths of history as if you had seen today. Just as in the style of this article, the tense is withdrawn from between, people who lived thousands of years apart become contemporaries, and meet one another without recognizing any historical barrier.

Civilizations are of course greatly influenced by the intentions of the people who first founded them, their ways of looking at life, and especially the small principles and quality of behavior reflected in everyday life relations and relations between people.

How do you see other people? Where do you see yourself within this network of relations or cosmos?

What is God's effect and role over you and other people? Do you have a belief in the hereafter, in which you will one day be called to account?

If you do, how does this belief reflect in your behavior and in your relations with other people, with nature, with your environment? Will the nature and quality of all these beliefs also have an effect on your city life?

The city is the place where you feel most intricately, most thoroughly and most powerfully that you are not alone in this world and that you have a responsibility toward other people. To put it more accurately, the city is the place where you are tested most frequently and most subtly by the existence of others and by your responsibility toward others.

What does the other mean for us? Who is the other? If the other is not from our tribe, clan, our homeland, our religion, our sect, our party, what is our responsibility toward him?

The city is not always made up of people like us, that is, people like us. A place formed by people "like us" coming together alone is not called a city. In the Middle Ages there were those who sought precisely this kind of city. The sterile "City of God," in which only people of a certain religion and a certain race could live, was designed and also put into practice as a model of the ideal city. The modern city, even if one wishes, does not permit such closedness; cities differ, however, according to how they place difference in the city.

At precisely this point, how the "stranger" given a place in the city is treated in the city, and what organic role he is given within the bodily integrity of the city, is a separate test that also reveals the quality of civilization.

The quality of civilizations is tested precisely in this division of labor. In the relationship with the other, in the place of the other in the bodily integrity of the city, in what kind of body politics is used to respond to differences...

The other is different from you not only ethnically but especially economically. The spatial separation of people who are differentiated by level of material income, level of wealth, and their relations with one another. Today, for example, our cities have increasingly turned into "economic ghettos" in which separate worlds that have no contact with one another at all settle. What worldview is this a reflection of?

If we have the indifference to go to bed full while our neighbor is hungry, even if we think we have a belief in the hereafter, it actually means we do not. Because belief in the hereafter is not merely a simple game of opinion. Belief in the hereafter is a state of effective anxiety that we will be called to account for everything we do, even for everything we could have done but did not. It is a state of concern that leaves no room for the postponement of our responsibility toward another for precisely this reason. We are responsible toward our neighbor, and this responsibility of ours determines all our behavior, our local and general politics.

We do not go to bed full while our neighbor is hungry, thank God. Because we have no poor neighbor at all. And the problem is here. We have built our body politics regarding the city in such a way that by living in housing estates, districts or neighborhoods where there is no poor person among our neighbors even forty buildings away, we get past that responsibility of ours in an instant.

Today's city world is now given this way. For the newborn children, who will build their lives anew and build and live all the foundations of ethics from here on, there is no other alternative either. Who is his neighbor, how will he know? Since he has no hungry neighbor, will he regard himself as exempt from this responsibility? If there is no hungry, destitute, helpless person among his own neighbors, will he be exempt also from the hunger and problems experienced in other districts?

Will city management, in a city structure in which the poor and the rich cannot be neighbors to one another, also have a mission of working out people's responsibilities toward one another and setting it in motion?

The city is a place where a human being can see himself, become aware of himself, develop himself further if he wishes, or deepen all his illnesses further if he wishes.

Let us keep looking at ourselves.