According to the results of a global poll on optimism, African countries dominate

US-based research company Gallup recently released the results of a poll on optimism in countries around the world. According to this, African countries have a high share among the most optimistic 10 countries. This was the most shocking result of the survey to me. I will not talk about Turkey’s ranking in the league of optimism. Rather I will address why Greece and France are extremely pessimistic while Turkmenistan, let’s say, is quite optimistic. While I was checking the poll results I recalled my conversation on a plane from Afghanistan’s capital Kabul with a gentlemen sitting next to me. I will get to that in a minute. But for starters, I believe that the people who intend to govern Turkey must acknowledge what such polls tell us. Otherwise devastation is unavoidable. Let me tell you why.

A couple of years ago, Kabul was in misery. It still is not doing very well. It did not have an interconnected electricity system. If a company needed uninterrupted electricity, it had to produce the energy on its own. The sewage water used to leak next to the roadside. Kabul’s best-conditioned buildings, looked like villas in Ankara’s wealthy district of  Gaziosmanpaşa in the 1970s before they disappeared,  victim to the passion for real estate speculation. Kabul felt like a rural area rather than a capital city. The city also suffered from security shortcomings. On the flight from Kabul to Dubai, a United Nations (UN) psychologist dispatched to Kabul was sitting next to me. He told me that UN employees who continuously worked indoors due to security concerns had need of occasional psychological support. That was why he was visiting Kabul. “Do the Afghans not need psychological support?” I asked. It should not be easy to live in the dearth of any public service. “No,” he responded. “They do not know that a better life is possible. For ordinary Afghans, there is no other normal than that.” The optimism of Africans and the pessimism of Europeans about the future reminded me of this anecdote, which sticks in my mind.

Let’s define optimism first. The poll asks respondents, “do you think your life will be better in five years than your current life?” The ranking is made on the basis of the percentage of those responding yes. According to this, the top three countries are Burkina Faso, Comoros, and Nigeria. Ninety-five percent of the respondents in these countries are optimistic about their future. Please note that nine out of ten of the most optimistic countries are African. And the tenth is Turkmenistan. On the same criteria, the rates of optimists are remarkably lower in Turkey and in European countries. Why is that? Because the number of things to do to enhance life standards is growing. The bar is set higher.

Meanwhile, expectations for a better life in the near future, the next three years in this case, are lowered. Let me first draw the framework and then derive a conclusion. If you don’t have electricity for a remarkable period, starting to have it immediately improves your life quality. But regularly having electricity opens up an entirely new platform concerning which electrical household appliances you should and can afford to buy. Just like a computer game. When you complete one level, you recognize a bulk of new missions you have not thought of before. It all starts with electricity and moves to domestic appliances, mobile phones, and Internet access. You may repeat this exercise with other infrastructure items. At the beginning of each new level, people recognize that another life is possible. In the chain that starts with electricity supply, more and more people start comparing their lives with those in other countries.

The more public services are improved, the longer the requirement list becomes. The things you lack become more disturbing. Demands increase continuously. The high degree of optimism at the initial levels of the computer game later on decreases. Once people recognize the possibility of another world, they start yearning for that world more and more. They feel disappointed when they fail to achieve that standard. This is the very mechanism that politics has to acknowledge. I believe that we have a problem of awareness about this in Turkey.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 06.08.2013