With a little sociology: "welcome to the desert of the real!"

The election results that come out of the ballot boxes actually provide the strongest data for understanding a society's present condition and making sociological analyses of it. Before these results come out of the ballot boxes, there are of course different ways of foreseeing them. One is to try to understand by establishing direct relations and contact with the people, with all segments of the people, by listening, lending an ear and hearing, rather than making one-sided speeches. Those who can truly do this can understand the people and foresee what may come out of the ballot boxes.

A somewhat more numerical, statistical way of foreseeing is properly conducted polls. These polls too can arrive as an important herald. But if you turn polls into a tool for shaping public opinion rather than a tool for listening and foreseeing, if instead of listening to the people you try to make the people say what you want to hear, it will only mislead you.

In fact Erdoğan's politics knows both of these ways very well and never neglects either of them in his political life.

The most important loss of all his opponents lined up against him so far is that their contact with the field is very deficient. It is as though they go to the field not to "listen" but to "command". Let no one make a mistake: the air of "here are the enlightened, educated, urban candidates with the right to govern, do not let your votes go to the wrong place" is very dominant.

They have so believed that the election will end this way, by virtually creating the people who will vote for them, distributing them as they wish across social media and running simulations of election victory. Truly, in the world of simulacra they created themselves on Twitter (a world of appearance that wants to be perceived as a reality), there is not even any need to hold an election. In it their own crushing victory has long since been declared. Yet the real world is very different from that world of simulacra. So they seem to be subscribed to being met each time with a bitter voice: "welcome to the desert of the real!"

Of course, this desert is a desert for them; for those living life in its normal course it is quite a real and authentic world.

When they wake with a shock from the dream of that sweet reality they have created, the excuses they find for their defeats are always the same each time. The people are still very ignorant, uneducated, villagers, townspeople, a mass of people living on state aid. They have never managed to appreciate their own worth. In fact, the next stage is: "damned democracy, if only it did not make these elections necessary, how nice it would be to be able to govern this people in spite of the people, for the people."

Yet whether they like it or not, democracy makes elections necessary, and the most honest, most equal ones at that. It puts the vote of the shepherd on the mountain and that of the educated man into the same ballot box, as it should.

Before the elections they were certain to win. Instead of trying to understand the reasons for the great disappointment they experienced in the first round, blaming their voters was customary. But that the strongest argument resorted to by their great sociologists, poets, journalists and writers was precisely the contrast of "uneducated masses, townspeople/villagers who have nothing to be proud of other than their religion/race, most of them living on state aid" with "the educated, urban, productive segment" showed sufficiently how much they deserve a lifetime of defeat.

While Ataol Behramoğlu belittled the people who, by voting for Erdoğan, gave them the customary disappointment, as "the villager whom the Enlightenment could not reach, the opportunist-conservative townsperson, the poor-unconscious shantytown dweller, the Turk living abroad with Euros whose business is booming today, the refugee used as a pawn and the rich-reactionary Arab votes who acquire T.C. citizenship for money," he described those who voted for Kılıçdaroğlu as "enlightened, conscious, urban votes." With this mindset, should we not now say that he who has for years introduced himself as a poet in this country has downright deceived the nation?

Reuters, which listens to Turkey with the same mindset or from the same mind, has jumped headlong into this discourse and, by saying in the election results that "the urban, educated, world-aware" segment preferred Kılıçdaroğlu, has on the one hand engaged in plainly disgusting discrimination and on the other revealed its ignorance, like all those who resort to this argument.

First, Kılıçdaroğlu did not finish ahead in all the metropolitan cities, but in only 9 of the 30 metropolitan cities, and in most of these 9, especially in the two largest cities, Ankara and Istanbul, the race was neck and neck. That is, a rate very close to fifty percent chose Erdoğan again.

Second, trying to identify big cities with education and production is the result of becoming thoroughly blind to the sociological reality of Turkey and of today's world. In a world heading toward the peaks of globalization, where even the difference between city and village is closing, the urbanization rate in Turkey today is above 90 percent.

That is, Turkey is no longer the Turkey that the CHP governed as a single party and entirely without elections, that is, just as they yearningly miss. In that Turkey the urban rate was in the twenties percent, and moreover the difference between city and countryside was truly too great to close. In Turkey there was only one and a half universities, and entering and graduating from those universities was impossible without obtaining pre-ideological permission from the Single Party.

Third, every point of Turkey is now integrated into the global world, with its production, its education, and all its channels of political participation. This is the reality that those who want to read Turkish sociology must now see first.

Fourth, one of the important factors that provide, accelerate and feed precisely this integration is that in each of Turkey's 81 provinces there is at least one university. Turkey is currently in first place in the world in its rate of universitization. There are 8.5 million university students. What are you talking about? Before you go on claiming a privilege to live in the city, take a tour of Anatolia, if you will.

Fifth, Anatolian cities carry as much weight in production as in education. Go and look at Gaziantep, Konya, Şanlıurfa, Bursa, Çorum and the organized industrial zones of all the cities. In production, who is lacking compared with whom, who has more than whom?

Sixth, if we accept, according to the clichés in their heads, that educated, urban people vote for Kılıçdaroğlu, where are we going to put the votes of the voters of Şırnak, Hakkari, Tunceli, Bitlis, Siirt, Ağrı, Iğdır, Kars? Here who is supposedly voting according to his race, who according to his religion-sect? Where exactly do they themselves stand?

Ignorance actually begins with regarding one's own education, view, outlook and mind as superior to and more privileged than others'. Or all reason comes and gets stuck in that swamp, the gaze goes blind there, knowledge runs dry there.

Perhaps it will recover from there again: from knowing oneself.