The Last Loss of the Man Who Always Lost
What 19 political defeats can teach us about rejection, shame, and the courage to remain visible.
The headline announcing the death of Menderes Koçak carried the cold efficiency of a scoreboard:
“The man who lost nineteen elections in his lifetime has lost his life.”
Koçak had stood as an independent candidate in Turkish local and national elections for thirty-nine years. Nineteen times, he put his name on the ballot. Nineteen times, the majority chose someone else.
To run nineteen times is not merely to suffer nineteen defeats. It is to nominate oneself to the world nineteen times. It is to step out from anonymity, accept the certainty of public refusal, and say: I am still willing to be seen.
The headline compressed nearly four decades into a single verb: to lose. It made his death sound like the twentieth and final defeat, as if life itself were a match whose final whistle had blown. But a human life cannot be counted like ballots.
To run nineteen times is not merely to suffer nineteen defeats. It is to nominate oneself to the world nineteen times. It is to step out from anonymity, accept the certainty of public refusal, and say: I am still willing to be seen.
The Primitive Wound of Being “Not Chosen”
An election, psychologically, stages our earliest human anxiety: Will I be chosen?
Long before we understand politics, we read the faces around us for acceptance. Because our ancestors faced literal death when cast out from the tribe, the nervous system does not process social rejection as an abstract opinion. It registers it as a threat to survival.
The vote count takes thousands of private choices and collapses them into one public sentence: Not you. It doesn’t just reject a platform; it threatens our sense of belonging.
Defeat belongs to an event, but shame injects it into the bloodstream. Koçak’s repeated candidacies resisted that poisoning. Each campaign asserted: The result belongs to the election. It does not own my identity.
When Events Become Identities: I Failed vs. I Am a Failure
The human psyche has a dangerous tendency to turn transient experiences into permanent traits.
- The Event: “I failed.”
- The Identity: “I am a failure.”
A specific disappointment expands until it colonizes the entire person. Shame completes this toxic translation. Guilt says, I did something wrong — it focuses on action and can be repaired. Shame says, There is something wrong with me — it focuses on essence and forces us to hide.
Get Senai Demirci, MD’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Defeat belongs to an event, but shame injects it into the bloodstream. Koçak’s repeated candidacies resisted that poisoning. Each campaign asserted: The result belongs to the election. It does not own my identity.
Rejecting Ourselves in Advance
Most people look at nineteen losses and see unusual endurance. Yet his story actually exposes a quieter, far more common pattern: most of us protect ourselves from rejection by refusing to become candidates in the first place.
We don’t submit the manuscript. We don’t articulate the feeling. We don’t enter the room. We call this realism or modesty. Usually, it is just fear wearing respectable clothes.
This is called self-handicapping. We perform the rejection in advance so the world doesn’t get the chance to. Avoidance saves the ego from an immediate wound, but the protection comes at a ruinous cost: we remain undefeated only because we never stepped into the arena.
Koçak entered it repeatedly — campaigning on a modest electric bicycle against massive political machines. He didn’t deny the asymmetry; he simply refused to let the odds erase his agency.
Healthy Persistence vs. Compulsive Obsession
Repetition is not inherently noble. A person can repeat an action out of denial, grandiosity, or an inability to grieve. The difference lies in where we place our self-worth:
- Compulsive Persistence: “I must win, because without victory I am nothing.” (It demands the outcome to repair a damaged self.)
- Healthy Persistence: “I may lose, but losing does not cancel my right to participate.” (It desires the outcome sincerely, but refuses to surrender its dignity to it.)
This brings us to learned helplessness — the psychological state where repeated failure convinces the mind that action is useless. Koçak’s life offers a counter-image. Not the naive fantasy that effort guarantees success, but the conviction that action retains meaning even when it does not command the result.
Popular culture promises that if you persist, you will eventually win. Life signs no such contract. Mature resilience asks a different question: Not just “Did I succeed?” but “What kind of person did this action allow me to remain?”
When Metrics Steal Human Worth
We live under the rule of quantities: views, sales, votes, rankings, and followers. Metrics measure reach and output exceptionally well, but they become psychologically violent when they cross the boundary into defining human value.
A vote count tells us how many people selected a candidate; it cannot measure the integrity of his presence. Applause measures popularity, not the truth of a voice.
When the counting stops and the scoreboard is turned off, another set of questions becomes audible: What did this person remain loyal to? What fear did he repeatedly walk through? Did he keep his intent intact?
Dignity is not the guarantee of being chosen. It is the refusal to treat someone else’s choice as the final verdict on your being.
Dignity is not the guarantee of being chosen. It is the refusal to treat someone else’s choice as the final verdict on your being.
Menderes Koçak may have lost nineteen elections. But he never withdrew his candidacy from life.
