Human is a ‘Social’ Being!
Tags: Life, Humanity, World, Social Change, Psychology

I often think that he is tired of the meanings that words carry. Tired words make the sentences heavier. All these tired words and heavy sentences create distortions in the functions of our mind. Words drive us away from ourselves and become the object of society. Human beings who are integrated with society have to divide themselves into two as social (apparent) identity and real (self) identity.

There is almost no meaning that has not met with words. However, meaning always existed, words were born later. At the point where our desire to invade everything brought us, we put words on the forehead of meanings like weapons. We gradually enslaved them to ourselves, first with sounds, then letters and words, and then sentences from many different languages.

We needed definitions in order to be able to grasp them, and thus, we drew boundaries of words to every meaning, encoded meanings that lost their limit to our minds, and we continue to carry them with great arrogance for millennia. We carry with affirmative codes such as culture, knowledge, and morality, whereas what we carry is nothing else than the silent corpse of meanings.

Of course, the person who defined everything had to define “human”. A lot of different words were used, some of them were excommunicated from the language because they were worn out, and new, more sophisticated words were replaced. I am currently obliged to use these enigmatic words even while writing this article.

So how was human-defined? According to the dictionary, the human is defined as “a living being that lives in a cultural environment as a society, has the ability to think and speak, can comprehend the universe as a whole, can change and shape it as a result of its findings.”

There are many different definitions of the human, of course, but one of the most common of them is “human is a social being”. In this article, I would like to focus more on this aspect. The definition of a social entity is certainly not wrong, but there is also a heavy responsibility it imposes on us. Because of its nature, this definition has a structure that relates people to the outside. Yes outside, not with himself.

Since the earliest times we know, human beings have highlighted their social skills, connected with the outside, established ties with others, and even transformed this into an organization and formed societies and states.

We are living in a time when we are starting to get tired of our relations with all this outside that is now built. Just as words got tired of their meanings, people started to be overwhelmed by the fatigue of the sentences they produced.

Everything that happens outside of us has become so attached to us that we have lost ourselves. Yes, a human has lost himself. While the people had a relationship with themselves was deeper before digital times, now there is nowhere left where we can stay ourselves. In the past, masks worn outside could at least be removed at home, nowadays they have to continue to be worn at home.

This digital invasion of individuality that started with phones has gained an incredible dimension with the pandemic. With the necessity of working from home, Whatsapp groups, social media posts, our homes, which are the only place we can live as ourselves, are also surrounded.

Today, our homes are no different than outside and we all have to live our outside identities at home. Because ‘human is a social being’. While it was not possible to be completely ourselves outside, we could breathe a little in our private spaces. Previously, when we entered the door, we had the opportunity to leave outside the mask of the outside and live ourselves. Now, in our private spaces, we have to keep alive both our external identity and our true identity inside.

If we get too caught up in our identity outside and neglect our identity inside, we will completely lose the “possibility of being ourselves”. Every corner of our lives has been filled with photos, videos, and sentences with a seamless flow from digital channels. So much, the first thing we need to do to calm down is to put the phones on silent.

What thing that we live, think, feel can really belong to us, in a loud communication that we cannot hear its own voice?

Writer Hasan Ali Toptaş said in an interview he gave in 1996, “I have a rather unpleasant civil service life that seems ridiculous to me. In every moment of this life, I breathe in and out of the masks. But, I get up after 24 pm and become Hasan Ali Toptaş and work until morning.¨ Then, he says ¨all day, I yearn for myself in the night, I live the loneliness of staying away from him.¨

“What I really miss is authentic isolation, true loneliness” says sociologist and philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

Starting with sound, words and sentences, unfortunately, our high understanding, which is brought us by our illness of making a definition, analogy, ascribing everything, finally created a great ‘social entity’.

But this social being has become so social that he completely forgot about himself. With the longing to meet ourselves years later, during the curfews imposed in the early days of the pandemic, we celebrated our meeting with ourselves by watching movies, reading books, making bread, exploring our painting and music aspects, and had a great time with ourselves. Of course, this did not take long. Now we are at the juncture again.

I do not know how long our problem of reaching ourselves and living ourselves will continue with this problematic state, but first of all, we have to reduce the outside sounds. Like special plans to meet people outside at certain times of the week, we need to make plans to meet with ourselves and even prepare to live with ourselves for a while.

Please do something and don’t leave yourself desolate.