Originally taken from here.

Is Recep Tayyip Erdogan just thin-skinned or why does he feel insulted so often? Is Recep Tayyip Erdogan just thin-skinned or why does he feel insulted so often?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan feels insulted. Again and again. But what does that say about the Turkish President? A philosopher brings it to the formula: How quickly a person feels offended is directly related to the size of his ego and soul.

With his libel poem, Jan Böhmermann provoked the anger of the Turkish president. But he is only one of the thousands who offend Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Almost 2,000 people are on a list under investigation for an alleged insult to the President. These include opposition politicians, journalists, comedians, cartoonists, doctors, private individuals and even children.

So is Erdogan particularly often insulted or is the Turkish head of state just particularly thin-skinned? “Whoever feels offended puts a small soul on display”, says Christoph Quarch. In his short essay “Wenn das Ego Amok läuft” the philosopher writes that the perpetrator is in truth the one who thinks he is offended and complains. Because, according to his reasoning, whoever is accused of insulting a counterpart has almost no chance of escaping this accusation. Simply because the insulting nature of a person cannot be measured in any way. The fictitious demarcation line separating “insult” from “criticism” or “ridicule” can be shifted at will, Quarch says. This makes “being insulted” a perfidious weapon and its application a problem that is hard to solve for lawyers who have to deal with it.

The philosopher states in his essay: “Whoever is offended usually claims that one has attacked his honour. But whoever speaks of “his honour” suggests that he has it, just as he has his body. That is wrong, Quarch clarifies. “Truth is, there’s no honour you could have – and that someone else could hurt, the way you could hurt a body.” Consequently, you cannot lose “your honour” by being insulted. You lose it when you sink in the face of other people. If others “insult” you, it is a symptom of the fact that you have already lost your honour.

This derivation leads the theologian to the phenomenon of being insulted. It explains why people are quickly offended, especially those who cannot bear it, when they are not held in high esteem by others, or when they sink in their reputation to such an extent that they are ridiculed and mocked. According to Quarch, being offended is “not the symptom of insulting honour, but of a bloated ego that believes it has to ensure its own value through the esteem of others”.

But he said that anyone who is concerned about the esteem of others has no sense of his own value and dignity. “He lacks the maturity of a person who would have been attested by Aristotle to the virtue of the “greatness of the soul”: a man who does not have to hide behind his inflated ego and who, on every occasion, yells “insult!” where he doesn’t feel valued enough, but whose soul has grown through suffering and pain, through love and happiness,” states Quarch and comes to the simple equation: “The sooner a person feels offended, the greater his ego and the smaller his soul is.”