2023 Reflection: Democracy and Communism are The Losers

Many lamented the "restoration" of Turkey's historic Hagia Sophia, which was converted from a museum to a mosque in 2020. UNESCO was among them.

On the other hand, an Indonesian news site saw that Turkish President Recep Erdogan permission for non-Muslims to visit the Hagia Sophia mosque was "remarkable", since the founder, Emperor Constantin I, ordered its construction as an Orthodox Christian cathedral in 360 AD.

Four minarets were added to each corner of Hagia Sophia in 1453, marking the conversion of the Byzantine Empire's landmark into a mosque following its defeat by the Ottoman Dynasty of Turkiye.

Historians claimed that as Sultan Mehmed Fatih entered Hagia Sophia church, he felt like the eyes of the infant Jesus on the building's mosaic were following his every moves inside the building.

The Turkiye's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, made the decision to convert the Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1934 in an attempt to reach a compromise over the historical issue surrounding the structure, whose name translates to "Sacred Wisdom" in Greek.

According to President Erdogan, Attaturk's decision was incorrect as it betrayed historical precedent and looted the Umayyad Dynasty's properties.

To set the record straight, a pagan temple served as the foundation for the early construction of the Hagia Sophia cathedral, as ordered by its founder, Constantine I.

Capitalism leads to religious shock

According to the 2005 article Capitalism and Human Nature, human thought patterns have remained mostly same since the Stone Age: people have always tempted to search for more since that's their significance of life.

Hence, people are capitalists since birth, aren't they? While the cavemen of the past hunted to seek something to eat, the wolves of Wall Street are the hunters of today, searching for gains on the trading floor.

This article suggests that the human mind functions similarly to a Swiss Army knife, as it can generate numerous answers for each given situation. Humans are social animals at heart, and they naturally seek to connect with the outside world by avoiding situations that could incite bias.

That’s the ideal.

What pushed the Turkish government to disregard the historical context of Hagia Sophia and decline to allow it to once again serve as an Orthodox Christian church—let alone a pagan temple?

The current Hagia Sophia's status, in my opinion, does not create a feeling of pleasant among the Orthodox Christian community, although they are allowed to visit it.

Such discomfort caused by the behavior of a group of people outside them with psychological condition that is geared to deal with life in a small community (micro-cosmos) experienced cultural shock (or religious shock in this case) as they interacted in a broader socialization (macro-cosmos).

If only all people are willing to admit that individual freedom is meaningless if it infringes upon the freedom of others, capitalism would have managed to avoid similar incident from happening on the course of international intercommunication.

Peaceful coexistence

All countries are basically yearning for a peaceful coexistence, even the Soviet Union (succeeded by the Russian Federation) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) held differing opinions about this idea.

Nikita Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence was the Soviet Union's foreign policy built upon on an optimism that socialism would triumph over capitalism and maintained positive relations with other parties, especially the capitalist United States, in order to avert war. 

Khrushchev advocated this idea as to revert the measures enforced by his predecessors, Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, which were thought to have damaged the Soviet Union's reputation, as the results of Soviet's annexation of numerous regions, 

Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China highlighted its commitment to peaceful coexistence in international affairs by the declaration of Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in December 1953. These principles were subsequently incorporated into the terms of the peace accord that the PRC and India reached following the Sino-Indian war in Tibet.

The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence also served as the model text for the Asia-Africa Conference's 1955 proclamation, thanks to the presence of its founder, Zhou Enlai, who was also the PRC's prime minister at the time.

Mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity (the government is free from outside influence), non-aggression, mutually beneficial cooperation, equality, and non-interference in each other's domestic affairs were among the contents of the PRC-style Principles of Peaceful Living.

When humans intelligence could build and change the function of a building like the Hagia Sophia to fulfill their goals, why is the similar compatibility not put in place to renovate the idea of socialism's peaceful coexistence and freedom of capitalism in order to build a better future?