President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s shift from a reformist to an authoritarian path has been accompanied by an insistent narrative that a “supreme mind” is behind Turkey’s woes. For Erdogan and his aides, the supreme mind is a foreign hand with an influential network inside Turkey that plans, orchestrates and triggers every crisis, unrest or setback in the country.

Who the foreign hand is, is not exactly clear. Sometimes the term alludes to the United States, sometimes to Israel and, most recently, to the international economic and political system. For the government, the supreme mind extends to a wide range of actors — from local collaborators and influence networks to financial funds and the banking system, from covert and dangerous structures such as the Gulenists to liberal intellectuals.

The term was first used in March 2014 by then-Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc. Commenting on the events of Dec. 17-25, 2013 — a Gulenist attempt to unseat Erdogan intertwined with corruption probes implicating government officials — Arinc said he believed that “an operation planned by a supreme mind” had been staged. Asked by journalists what he meant by a “supreme mind,” he replied, “I cannot say. I cannot say, even if I know it.”

In a recent article, Turkish writer and political analyst Tanil Bora described how things unfolded thereafter. “As Recep Tayyip Erdogan began to use the term, it took hold in the official political rhetoric. In the runup to the June 2015 elections, for instance, it was said that [the three opposition parties in parliament] wanted to form a coalition by means of the ‘supreme mind,’” Bora wrote. “At one point, Germany was implied to be the ‘supreme mind’ of the Gezi Park revolt. The German parliament’s recognition of the Armenian genocide was said to be ‘the work of the supreme mind.’ Erdogan himself said, ‘They must have received an order from the supreme mind to take such a step.’”