The great conspiracy

Psychologists suggest that the tendency to believe in conspiracies stems from a search for meaning and the need to transfer responsibility for the way things are to some unseen agency -- just as those who doubt evolution do so out of a determination that things are the way they are for a purpose rather than a random process of selection. To my mind, however, conspiracies are a manifestation of a sense of powerlessness. What is the point of trying to change society through a process of reform if some all-powerful but unseen force is conspiring to ensure that things stay exactly as they are?

Let me not try to second guess for the umpteenth time the outcome of the Ergenekon trial now taking place in Turkey. Ergenekon is reputed, as innumerable column inches have described, as a state within a state -- an unelected network which tried to manipulate events in Turkey, to weaken the parliamentary process and allow for its own members to take control. Whether it is as well organized a conspiracy as the prosecutors contend or simply the name for the failures of Turkish democracy has yet to receive a verdict. Those who have lived and worked in Turkey have little doubt that there were members of the security forces prepared to take the law in their own hands, media outlets prepared to print only their own version of the truth and tin-pot bureaucrats prepared to enforce an order that protected their own privileges rather than the people they were there to serve.

What makes the Ergenekon conspiracy model of the universe seem so absurd is that it is so very blinkered. There are several events this week that will profoundly affect Turkey's future but none of them are happening in Ankara. The UN conference on climate change -- the prelude to December's Copenhagen summit -- will help determine the very sustainability of human life on this planet. The meeting of the G-20 in Pittsburgh will influence the rate of economic recovery, whether the growing army of unemployed gets back to work. There are upcoming elections in Greece and Germany which will influence Turkey's future in Europe. If the Ergenekon conspiracists had actually seized a radio station, who in this day of Internet would actually have noticed? The current government is still banning YouTube, but even the prime minister has confessed to using electronic trickery to get around this judicial inanity.

This brings us closer to what Ergenekon was all about. It is less an attempt to seize power (if you met some of those on trial, you'd come to the conclusion they couldn't run a paper route let alone a $700 billion economy) than to deny the world is changing. There are now, for example, a group of ultra-nationalist lawyers languishing in jail as part of the Ergenekon trial who once made it their business to vilify distinguished public figures like Orhan Pamuk as public enemies. Their aim was to humiliate their own country and isolate it from the outside world. They did not want to see Turkey swimming in the global tide, and they were resentful of those figures with an international stature who knew that it could be done.

It is important to put on trial -- and to try fairly -- any criminal conspiracy. Yet at the same time, it seems to me important to lock horns with the world view which the Ergenekon trial represents. It is not so much that recent Turkish history has been manipulated by a group of successful conspirators so much as it has been dominated by a conspiratorial mentality -- one in which anything that happens is always someone else's fault.