In this country, political gossip spread faster and wider than celebrity gossip. This includes insults not based on facts, deliberate lies and slander wrapped in ethnic, religious, racial and intergroup hatred and rabble-rousing.
By
Budiarto Danujaya
·6 minutes read
In this country, political gossip spread faster and wider than celebrity gossip. This includes insults not based on facts, deliberate lies and slander wrapped in ethnic, religious, racial and intergroup hatred and rabble-rousing.
Oftentimes, our political activities draw us further apart. Instead of promoting initiatives for the greater good, many of our politicians shamelessly sow prejudice without any care for its negative impact on our solidarity. These prejudices may tear down our collective imagination as a nation. It is unsurprising that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo quipped about the prevalence of “politik sontoloyo” (“crooked politics”), which then triggered a wide spectrum of reactions. It seems that the President was deeply concerned about the prevalence of “divisive and rabble-raising politics based on hatred”, which he said was “terribly outdated”, which appears to form the backbone of this President’s discourse.
Without explicitly mentioning those involved, we can agree that this breed of politics seems to be the rule of the game in the politicization of our public communication. We can easily find such politics in the various pamphlets intended to agitate that protesters bring to their demonstrations, in social media posts and even in televised debates. Since the 2014 presidential election and especially during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election, many politicians have not thought twice before opening their mouths to utter crude things that could undermine our foundation and collective imagination as a nation.
Sameness and togetherness
Surely we can reject such concerns by taking pride in our culture of gotong royong (mutual assistance), which sometimes comes out of the blue in times of crisis. We may even try to reject such claims normatively by preaching about our inherited pluralism as espoused in the national motto, “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” (Unity in Diversity). Whatever the case, the fact remains that our political praxes tend to neglect our own collective efforts to nurture our kesesamaan (sameness). Politicians often neglect to think twice before putting our collective imagination (read: shared home) at risk in forging their path to power.
In their public speeches, our politicians often revive the dichotomy of “pribumi” (indigenous people, indigenousness) versus “non-pribumi” (non-natives) or stoke the flames of religious differences and class conflicts. It seems that these issues, which could tear down the fabric of sameness among Indonesians and which were arduously managed in the first decade of the Reform Era and even during the New Order Era, are now being let loose into the open, like opening Pandora’s Box.
In trying to gain power, none seem to care about burning down this shared home of ours. Many seem to prefer everyone losing to letting the other guy win. Jakob Oetama, the founder of Kompas, has been deeply concerned about this for a long time. On several occasions, he referred to the phenomenon as “geger wong ngoyak layangan” (making a fuss over chasing kites).
Put simply, our politicians often act like adolescent kite runners. Rather than letting another child “win” the kites, they prefer tearing up all the kites. This is why we have often seen children running after their kites, only to end up with a kite that has been deliberately destroyed.
By letting loose these figurative ghosts that may potentially tear down our collective imagination of our sameness and togetherness as a nation, are we not becoming that same as these adolescent kite runners? Rather than forging paths towards lose-lose situations, would it not be more responsible to look at our power struggle as a struggle within our political disposition toward improving our nation as a whole while taking care of our imagined sameness as a nation?
Put simply, does politics not include an awareness of one’s pledge to improving our nation’s sameness and togetherness?
Anger and pretense
In the past, the principle of “mors tua vita mea” (“your death, my life”) was often applicable to conflicts arising from the struggle for power. Unsurprisingly, other than its proneness to causing open war, managing conflicts according to this law of the jungle will only end in mutual destruction, including the winner. However, as President Jokowi said, such a political paradigm is outdated. Politics should no longer follow the rule of divisiveness, as we cannot deny our actual sameness and need for togetherness. It is this rationale that led to democracy’s wide acceptance as a political system.
Democracy is gaining popularity all over the world not because it is a perfect system for distributing power, but because is the most rational one for managing transitions of power. As Elias Canetti (1973) said, democracy makes for bloodless power struggles and conflicts over differences as these are managed not by physical force, but by vote.
Accordingly, if politics requires some kind of normative boundary, the spirit of bonum commune communitatis (the common good of the community) must serve to restrict its articulatory struggle. How can the public good be implemented through political praxes filled with slander, hate mongering and rabble-rousing? How can the public good be developed through political praxes that deliberately set aside national sameness and burn down our collective home?
Therefore, such reactionary fuss over the President’s statement may be due to our own lack of awareness on the increasingly prevalent politics of slander, hatred, divide-and-conquer tactics and rabble-rousing. The ensuing anger following the fuss might not be because politicians are unaware that such political praxes are both terrifying and embarrassing. As in Slavoj Zizek’s reinterpretation (1989, 1994) of H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the villagers are shocked and angered not because they were unaware of the emperor’s nakedness; they are shocked into anger when a naive little boy points out the fact and prompts them to face the emperor’s nakedness, which they had carefully tried to deny in an act of collective pretense.
In other words, the politicians’ anger over the President’s statement might have been caused by his statement’s success in tearing down their shroud of pretense over what they were actually doing, but were too embarrassed to admit. Perhaps, herein lies some sort of ideological mechanism in the manner of Peter Sloterdijk’s cynicism (2001): “They know exactly what they are doing, and they keep doing it anyway.”
This is the most deeply concerning aspect of these terrifying and embarrassing political praxes. These politicians are entirely aware of the ethical and political distance between their shroud of ideological pretense and their actions, but they choose to stay under their shroud anyway. According to Zizek, “They are doing it as if they have no idea what they are doing.” So, in some sense, they are aware of what they are doing, but then again, they are not.
Budiarto Danujaya, Observer, political and ideological discourses