Why?

“Why?”

“Yes, but why?”

I prefer people who have more questions than answers, people who are rare to find in societies like ours, where almost everyone has an opinion on every subject and a ready response to any query. People who understand that questioning life is a fundamental skill, one that should never be abandoned under any circumstance.

Like children asking “Why?” again and again, even after every explanation from the “grown-ups.” Perhaps we shouldn’t react negatively when kids repeat this question endlessly, because once they become “adults,” the inability -or unwillingness- to ask that question even when it’s necessary can cause far greater problems in our world.

Indeed, where questioning ends, decay begins. And “why?” is among the most essential questions in the art of questioning.

The idea of questioning often has negative connotations in our minds. Especially in conservative, insular societies like ours, it’s frequently associated with disobedience, rebellion, or lack of faith. Granted, in our country, it’s hard to find anything that hasn’t been tagged with some label, but that’s another topic altogether. Regardless, questioning is among the defining features of being human. Our attempts to suppress or stifle it, like we do with so many of our innate human traits, doesn’t negate this truth.

Ours is a place where it’s hard not only to summon the courage to ask questions, but also to get genuine answers. An environment where everything is done to discourage asking, and those who do ask are labeled or isolated, it’s no easy feat to live seeking truth, resisting moral decay, and maintaining curiosity.

When people stop questioning, they cease to be individuals and start forming herds.

This is because questioning is a key factor that drives a person, an individual, to interpret and live life using their own mind, within its limitations.

Once questioning stops, power structures appear, entities that supply people with convenient labels, attachments, and “sacred” duties, making them feel valuable by grouping them into certain beliefs, certain identities, certain cliques. These structures might revolve around a religion, a political ideology, an ethnic identity, a lifestyle, or even, bizarrely, something as trivial as a sports club. What enables these exploitations to flourish in such varied forms is our collective fear of facing ourselves, coupled with our endless quest for identity, belonging, and self-worth.

Why, though?

Why can’t we answer the question “Who am I?” on our own? Why do we prefer to define our identity through affiliations? Why do we, for instance, defend decisions made by people who lived centuries, millennia ago, people who have zero real connection to us, as if their decisions were our own?

Why do we feel compelled to protect a sultan, a caliph, a ruler, indeed, anyone we associate with the labels we hold, at all costs? Why, for example, can we not accept the possibility that Atatürk might have made a mistake at some point?

Why do we regard individuals we call “teacher,” “scholar,” or “saint” as if they were incapable of sin, error, or misjudgment, how is it we allow someone else’s choices and will to supersede even our own?

Because we never manage to peel away the identities that have stuck to us all our lives, to genuinely ask ourselves who we are. We don’t even want to try. We’re terrified that if we strip away the religion, the ethnicity, the political viewpoint—even the place we were born or the sports team we root for, there’ll be nothing left of us.

We sense our “self” in those labels and never find the courage to question them. We never brave the self-confrontation that might show us what these identities rob us of in our outlook on life and our relationships with others.

We don’t learn to accept people without judgment, precisely as they are. Instead, we want to classify everyone by the labels and identities we possess, and in doing so, we drift further from what it means to live as truly human.

We make life harder for ourselves and for others, and in the process, we become enablers, whether directly or indirectly, of all kinds of oppression and suffering in the world.

Why?

We should ask ourselves this question more often.

With love to all those beautiful souls whose questions far outnumber their answers.