State Liquefaction

KOMPAS/FERGANATA INDRA RIATMOKO

Local villagers work together on Jan. 25, 2018 in repairing a house belonging to Jumilah, who lives alone in Jatimulyo village of Girimulyo, Kulon Progo, Yogyakarta. The villagers follow the local tradition of raising funds and providing mutual help to build and repair houses for the poor.

The foundation of the Indonesian state today is like a plot of unstable land with alluvial soil. During vibrations of social earthquakes, all the buildings so painstakingly erected are endangered by liquefaction, which could see them disappear from the face of the earth.

We must seriously examine the process of stretching social cohesion. For a highly diverse nation like Indonesia, no social capital is more important for the survival of the state than that of social cohesion. Achieving social cohesion in the multicultural nation is far more complicated than in other nations.

In a multicultural nation, the path someone must take to flow from the individual survival interest, through loyalty to the flow of small rivers of communalism, toward the estuary of the fusion of citizenship life for the common good, is indeed a long and winding road.

First, we have to realize that – sociobiologically – humans are 90 percent chimpanzees (selfish) and 10 percent bees (in groups). It is natural when people put their own interests before those of groups, which leads to competition and tension among group members. However, there are individual interests that cannot be achieved unless they are fought for together with other group members. This common interest gives rise to communalism with its own esprit de corps.

In a pluralistic society, the interests of one group must compete with various other groups, and the law of evolution applies where groups with stronger social cohesion will defeat groups with weaker social cohesion (Jonathan Haidt, 2012). Finally, these competing communal groups are forced by historical challenges, which link and risk common destiny, to merge into a larger community. Then there appears the civic nation.

The process of fusing the various groups with conflicts of interest into the container of citizenship nationality is made possible by the spirit of mutual cooperation. In Sukarno\'s words, "Mutual cooperation is a dynamic understanding, which is more dynamic than family ties. Mutual cooperation is a joint struggle through hard work, a struggle to help each other. The charity of all for the benefit of all, the whole sweat for the happiness of all." A static family spirit tends to direct altruism among their own family members or groups. Meanwhile, the spirit of mutual cooperation that is dynamic has more ability to direct altruism to fellow citizens even from other groups.

The emergence of a spirit of mutual cooperation is not automatic but is produced through historical sweat. The spirit of mutual cooperation is fostered by perceptions of common interests and threats, which are bound by the construction of norms to give reward and punishment through joint decision-making mechanisms that consider the interests of all parties, as well as loyalty to what is jointly sanctified (civic religion).

Stretching our nation\'s social cohesion today indicates a weakening of the spirit of mutual cooperation, which is caused by the waning of these factors. First, shared interests fade away because of social inequality in various forms: one gets the profits, the others get nothing. Consequently, perceptions about shared threats fade away. There are those who see the threat as coming from religious fundamentalism, latent danger of communism, market fundamentalism, certain racial and ethnic groups, and so on.

Second, the Indonesian state has developed into a state with a regulatory surplus but deficits in ethics and the enforcement of norms. Various laws are made to be violated. The sense of respect and loyalty to common norms fades away, because laws and regulations are misused. Shame and a desire to maintain one’s reputation wane, because social sanctions are no longer effective. The desire to pursue glory of life by running the virtues of citizenship are dimmed, because rewards and punishments are not carried out consistently: All values are converted into value for money.

Third, the decision-making mechanism on shared affairs loses its inclusiveness. This happens when the model of democracy applied is based on majoritarian principles through financial capital competition rather than on principles of deliberation based on the competition of arguments and wisdom. Democracy, which should be able to integrate diversity with the bonds of unity and justice actually encourages social division and disparities.

Fourth, as a derivative of all these decadences, citizens begin to remove their loyalty to a joint consensus as something supposedly sanctified. Many parties are beginning to dare to ignore or even dishonor Pancasila as the state ideology. Shared values, which are the intersection, the point of view, and the fulcrum of all the differences of interests and groups in this country, are no longer truly cultivated and upheld as "civic religions" occupies the heart of mutual cooperation spirituality.

All of these are signs of a social nature we must watch seriously. Amid oblivion toward the shifting of social plates and disobedience toward the principles of state space, social earthquakes in this country could cause liquefaction that makes the earth swallow the state. (YUDI LATIF, Caretaker of the National Alliance)