‘Why I moved from Turkey’

Blogger Melih Karakelle has written a piece to inform his friends and relatives why he left Turkey. His blog, www.melihkarakelle.com, is usually visited by 500 people a month. But his latest piece hit 100,000 in the first 24 hours.

Karakelle is a mechanical engineer who decided to leave his family and friends behind and settle in Britain. This is a shortened version in a loose translation.

He starts with a lexicon of terms for the piece: An ignorant person is not a person who has been schooled less, they are someone who has not been educated to suit the norms of society, who poses a threat to daily life. For example, while everybody is queuing, they cut in line, thinking they're being clever. A driver who has not grasped that he needs to stop for pedestrians at a crosswalk is ignorant, regardless of his degrees.

Stupid: Statistically, one in every three people in society is stupid. It is the answer to “Why do they do this?” in many situations.

There is a critical threshold in societies to prevent ignorance, Karakelle wrote: This threshold can be defined as the number of ignorant people per one person of reason. The state is responsible for educating the ignorant and the stupid to a level where they do not harm the rest. The best example of this is when a Turk goes abroad and comes back, saying: “Dude, everybody gets in line there. Nobody violates anyone else’s rights. You step into the crosswalk and all the cars stop.

“Well, the state has primarily educated all its citizens to a level where they would not harm society. As a result of this, the fact that the other person is stupid does not constitute a problem for you. Thus, fewer cons grow up in civilized societies; more scientists emerge from there.