Descartes opened the door to modern thought with the phrase 'I think, therefore I am.' Over the course of four centuries, humanity has gradually distorted this phrase and finally transformed it into its current form: 'I can, therefore I do.' From cogito ergo sum to possum ergo facio... This is not just a simple wordplay; it is a summary of a civilization crisis. The first sentence ties existence to thought, while the second connects legitimacy to power. Where legitimacy is tied to power, there remains no ethics, no law, nor shame.

Kant established one of the fundamental pillars of moral philosophy with the statement: 'You must, therefore you can.' Duty was placed before possibility. Today, the equation seems to have reversed: possibility has replaced duty. The mere ability to do something is considered a sufficient justification for doing it. Legal scholars refer to this as the displacement of the source of legitimacy; sociologists call it norm erosion; the ancients would summarize the same state with two words: the rupture of the moral vein.

Let us speak the truth plainly: in today's world, ethical concern has ceased to exist, and ideology has lost its status as a cause... Ideologies—although flawed and sometimes catastrophic—were concepts that connected individuals to something greater than their own interests; they were ideas for which one would pay a price. Today, politics has become devoid of ideology; parties have turned into marketing organizations, ideas into packaging, and voters into customers. What is often called pragmatism is merely a gentle term for lack of principles. However, there is a hidden connection between shame and cause: shame is the feeling of one who realizes they have betrayed an ideal. If there is no ideal, there is no betrayal; if there is no betrayal, there is no shame. The simultaneous liquidation of ethics and ideology is therefore not a coincidence; they are the two pillars of the same ship—when one falls, the other cannot stand for long.

The death of scandal

Have you ever noticed: no one resigns anymore. Politicians caught lying, states breaking promises, companies violating commitments... There used to be a price for these; at the very least, one would blush. Now, violations become 'the agenda' after just one night; the second night, they revert to 'old agenda'; and by the third night, nothing happens at all. Scandal has died; because for a scandal to live, there must be an agent capable of feeling shame and a society capable of shaming. It is understood that both have retired.

Yet shame, contrary to popular belief, is not a weakness; it was the invisible sanction of social order. In Durkheim's words: written law is merely the visible face of social control; the real weight lies in informal sanctions such as reproach, condemnation, and embarrassment. The question 'What will others say?' was not only a tool of neighborhood pressure but also a vast control mechanism that worked for free. When that question dies, this mechanism is laid off without compensation. The famous distinction between shame culture and guilt culture by anthropologist Ruth Benedict seems to have lost its meaning today; for we have entered a third stage where both have disappeared: the culture of shamelessness.

The Turkish language has developed a remarkable richness in distinguishing the degrees of this emotion: to be ashamed, to feel embarrassed, to be uncomfortable, to feel shame, to be abashed, to feel modesty, to sink into the ground... The fact that a nation has produced so many words for a single emotion suggests that this emotion is one of the supporting columns of its social architecture. In the old etiquette, these were degrees of the same state: to be ashamed was the act itself, to feel embarrassed was its perception, and to be uncomfortable was the more subtle discomfort of even mentioning that act in front of others. Today, not only these states but the words themselves are becoming obsolete. Wittgenstein said, 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world'; when a word disappears from the lexicon, the emotion it represents also falls from the souls. A society where the term 'shameless' is considered a heavy insult has transitioned to one where the same attribute is translated as 'self-confident' with the intent of compliment. The issue, as seen, is not merely a matter of words but a matter of the world.

In a hadith narrated by Bukhari, it is stated: 'Do as you wish, as long as you have no shame.' This sentence is not a permission but a warning; it means 'if you lose your sense of shame, nothing will stop you.' The tragedy of our age is that humanity has taken this warning as a command.

From Melos to today: the law of the powerful

Let us look at the international arena. Thucydides has the Athenian envoys say: 'The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.' The response given to the people of Melos, who sought justice, was that justice can only be discussed among equal powers. Twenty-four centuries have passed; Article 2, paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force, this prohibition has been elevated to the status of jus cogens, and the principle of pacta sunt servanda has been declared the cornerstone of international law. However, today the Melos dialogue is read not as a shameful historical memory but as a current user manual.

Occupations, annexations, 'preemptive' strikes, faits accomplis waiting for recognition... Each of these is grave on its own; but the most serious issue is that the perpetrators no longer feel the need for a narrative of legitimacy. La Rochefoucauld defined hypocrisy as 'the tribute that vice pays to virtue.' The age of hypocrisy at least acknowledged the existence of virtue; the liar lied for the sake of truth. Now, no tribute is paid. Power considers justification as mere detail. The selective application of rules by those who never cease to utter the phrase 'rule-based order' is killing the norm itself; for a selectively applied rule ceases to be a rule and turns into a privilege. Carl Schmitt declared the one who decides the state of exception as sovereign; Agamben wrote that the exception has become the rule. This is precisely the snapshot of today’s international system: the normalization of the exception, the exceptionalization of the rule.

The institutional picture confirms this diagnosis. The decisions of the International Court of Justice are being deprived of enforcement capability; international criminal justice is being accused of being a court that can only try the defeated and the weak; the Security Council, due to the veto power of its five permanent members, is paralyzing its founding purpose of collective security. In legal science, a norm without sanctions is called lex imperfecta—an imperfect law. International law is transforming before our eyes into a voluminous collection of lex imperfecta. As long as erga omnes obligations, which are duties that can be asserted against everyone, remain on paper and violations go unpunished, the phrase 'against everyone' is practically read as 'against no one.'

To put it in a mariner's perspective: norms are like lighthouses. Ships chart their course by looking at them; even if the light is sometimes dim, the mere knowledge of its location creates order. Today, lighthouses are being extinguished one by one, and every captain is told, 'sail in your own darkness.' It does not take a prophet to foresee that in such a sea, the exception will be not to clash but to avoid conflict.

Contagion: the dissolution of national paradigms

Normlessness drips from top to bottom. Every violation that goes unpunished in the international arena sends an implicit message to national powers: 'If you can do it, do it; no one is asking.' Indeed, in the last quarter-century, we have witnessed the transformation of the rule of law into a 'lawful state'—that is, a structure that uses law as a tool rather than a goal. Loyalty has replaced merit, the public good has been replaced by power consolidation, and negotiation has been replaced by imposition. Post-truth politics has turned lying from an accident into a technique of governance. Weber grounded legitimate authority in tradition, charisma, and law; today, a fourth type circulates: authority that derives its legitimacy solely from 'being able to do.' Power has replaced legitimacy; yet there is a truth that legal science has known for centuries: power does not give birth to legitimacy; it can only imitate it for a time.

Turkey, of course, has not remained outside this global wave; it could not. Our society has lived for centuries with a strong sense of shame that preceded written law: in the tradition of the guild, the heaviest penalty for tradesmen—the throwing of shoes on the roof—was not a monetary fine but the declaration of shame; the concept of 'the rights of others' was the name of a condemnation that no court could impose; the question 'What will others say?' was the unwritten constitution of the neighborhood. Today, we must acknowledge that these ancient control mechanisms have dissolved; that the practice of 'if I can do it, I will do it' has become commonplace in traffic, commerce, bureaucracy, and even academia; that an atmosphere has thickened where apology is seen as weakness, resignation as clumsiness, and embarrassment as innocence. The saying 'not a year of shame, but a year of profit' was once a phrase passed down with reproach; it now seems to have transformed into a practical philosophy of life. However, the same society still has a strong culture of modesty, a discipline of 'not taking others' rights,' and a sense of neighborly law flowing in its veins. As long as this vein does not completely dry up—and there are many signs that it has not—there remains a possibility for normalization in Turkey. The issue is to transform this moral capital from nostalgia into a re-institutionalized form: merit-based public administration, predictable judiciary, accountable governance... These may seem like technical reforms; however, if looked at carefully, they are all institutionalized forms of shame.

How did we come to this point?

No decay can be explained by a single cause; however, five dynamics can be highlighted.

The first is the void of meaning. Dostoevsky warned through Ivan Karamazov: 'If God does not exist, everything is permissible.' Nietzsche made the same diagnosis and even warned of the wave of nihilism that would follow. By the end of the twentieth century, ideologies and grand narratives collapsed as well. Fukuyama heralded 'the end of history' as the ultimate victory of liberal democracy; what actually occurred was the death of all causes. When a cause dies, only naked existence remains.

The second is the victory of utilitarianism. Ethics has been reduced to a cost-benefit analysis. The question 'Is it right?' has been replaced by 'Is it profitable?'; the question 'Is it wrong?' has been replaced by 'Will I get caught?' However, ethics, by definition, should be outside the realm of calculation; ethics included in the calculation is no longer ethics but an item open to negotiation.

The third is the cycle of impunity. Every violation that goes unpunished invites the next one. As criminology's 'broken windows' theory states, if a broken window is not repaired, the entire street will soon be stoned. Perpetrators cloaked in the armor of veto in the international system and immunity in national systems have become models rather than warnings for those who come after them.

The fourth is the age of digital exposure. Social media has systematically eroded the threshold of shame; for the algorithm rewards audacity, not embarrassment. Things that used to be shameful were hidden; now they become 'content.' Where privacy evaporates, shame also evaporates; because shame is an internal mechanism—what lives for the audience does not have an internal mechanism but an image. In Baudrillard's language: reality and representation have swapped places, and the display window has replaced conscience.

The fifth is what Bauman calls 'liquid modernity': in a world where no bond, belonging, or commitment is permanent, there can be no lasting shame either. Durkheim named this situation a century ago: anomie. A state where norms dissolve, and the compass needle spins aimlessly...

The results are evident and severe. First and foremost, trust is collapsing—which is the real capital of societies. Where loyalty dies, contracts die; where contracts die, everyone takes their own precautions: states arm themselves, capital moves underground, individuals play hide and seek. Thomas Hobbes' 'war of all against all' was a depiction of a state of nature; humanity seems to be busy reconstructing it in the age of technology. This truth should not be forgotten: normlessness hits the weak the hardest. The rule is the armor of the weak; the powerful do not need it. The world of 'I can, therefore I do' is a paradise for those who can do, and a hell for those who cannot.

Is Godot being awaited?

So when will humanity return to normal? Are we like Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's play: waiting under a withered tree for a Godot who is said to 'definitely come tomorrow'?

Everyone has their own Godot. Some are waiting for the great powers to come to their senses one day; some believe that a new and just international system will emerge spontaneously; some are waiting for a savior leader, some for a technological miracle, and some for the comforting historical philosophy that 'the pendulum will eventually return.' The diversity of this waiting is also an indication of how global inaction has become. The real tragedy of Vladimir and Estragon is not that Godot does not come, but that they do not even think they can stand on their own feet.

History provides a cold and bitter answer: normative orders are often built on the ruins of disasters. From the ashes of the Thirty Years' War came the Westphalian order; from the fire of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna; from the First World War, the League of Nations; from the millions of deaths of the Second World War, the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were born. Humanity has learned to feel shame only after paying great prices. The current question is: will a global disaster be awaited to learn this time as well, or will it be built without the ruins, learning from history for the first time?

The real secret of Waiting for Godot is not that Godot does not come; it is that those who wait do not leave. Both acts of the play end with the same dialogue:

And the stage direction: They do not move.

This is the real paralysis.

Returning to normal is not a train to be awaited but a building to be constructed.

Its materials are clear: a law that functions with sanctions, a rule that is applied equally rather than selectively, an accountable civil society, a memory that does not forget, and families, schools, and states that teach their children to say 'you can do it, but you should not.'

What we call civilization is precisely this: being able to stand where power allows.

Law is the 'you cannot' that stands against the able; morality is the internal court that operates even when no one is watching; and shame is the guard that one erects within oneself. Until that guard is reinstated, Godot will not come. It will not come; because Godot is not outside. The one waiting under the tree and the one being awaited are us.

Being able to do is not a skill; the real skill is not doing when one can. What makes a person human is that brief pause: the distance between hand and conscience. If that distance closes, nothing remains but bipedal beings with reflexes.

Source: SeaNews Türkiye