Broken mentals of the archipelago

Indonesia is riddled with societal dysfunctions. This can be partly explained by the fact that authority figures in Indonesia have some kind of dysfunctional personalities stemming from a broken mental schema that was never fixed. I state this both out of cynicism, and a sincere feeling-based observation of how public life is treated in our society. Young professionals, students, labourers, and honest entrepreneurs of MSMEs have to contend with an arbitrary administration who seems to love senseless policy-making, and a nation whose institution are generally hostile to those who questions its authority.

We often look at these institutional failures through the lens of economic scarcity or structural corruption, yet I believe another lens we consistently ignore is with the psychological condition of the human beings who run the bureaucracy. Obviously, I am neither a psychologist nor a student of psychology, but I’ve learned things as an international relations student in regards to leaders’ psychology. I know that public offices in our democracy do not operate under the assumption that they are isolated from psychological factors, instead they are fundamentally human and thus must be understood in a human-oriented way. For the IR nerds, they may point to the all-encompassing concept of human security, but this isn’t exactly that either. I believe that the nation is partly governed by individual human minds. And when these individuals who hold authority suffer from deep-seated cognitive instability, the state itself will pronounce, amplify, and display that disorder.

“Most of us undergo a personal upheaval or crisis”

I sympathize with Jared Diamond, the American world historian who is widely criticized as being an oversimplifier, in his book Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change of which a copy I managed to attain from a fortunate encounter with a helpful staffer at Books Kinokuniya in Singapore back in 2019 during an ill-remembered family trip. The book posits an idea that how a nation ought to deal with a crisis can partly be explained via the same treatment framework of how a crisis therapist would help a patient deal with a personal crisis. Diamond pointed to twelve factors which he believed could help a nation deal with their own issues. In the order he proposed, these are as follows (quoting directly):

1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis
2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something
3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved
4. Getting material and financial help from other nations
5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems
6. National identity
7. Honest national self-appraisal
8. Historical experience of previous national crises
9. Dealing with national failure
10. Situation-specific national flexibility
11. National core values
12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

Switch “nation” with “self” or “person" then change “geopolitical” to “external” and what you have are what Diamond stated to be the dozen factors that “make it more or less likely” for an individual to successfully deal with a crisis. I find it personally a robust mechanism to deal with issues, but on a less tangential point, it is an especially interesting framework once you consider the relationship of these factors with Diamond’s opening statement in his book’s prologue.

At one or more times during out lives, most of us undergo a personal upheaval or crisis, which may or may not get resolved successfully through our making personal changes. Similarly, nations undergo national crises, which also may or may not get resolved successfully through national changes.

Jared Diamond in “Prologue: Legacies of Cocoanut Grove” of Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change

But my question in this text is simple. What if a personal/national crisis do not get resolved? Is there a relationship between compounding personal crises in a nation’s society with the level of crises that occurs nationally? And if there is, to what extent? How does the aggregate of personal crises contribute to the efficacy of a nation’s efforts to resolve its own national crises?

My favorite example has to be our Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto. Just several days ago, he gave a widely-questionable speech in front of the People’s Consultative Assembly, the umbrella institution consisting of the House of Representatives and the Regional Representative Council, essentially a joint council of the upper house and lower house of the Indonesian parliament, or what is equivalent to the American congress.

In the same speech, he covered a big breadth of sub-topics, yet it is apparent to anyone who has watched the speech in full that many parts of the president’s address shows a kind of disjointed thought process which is ill-suited for someone of his stature to showcase. In fact, I’d argue that in the majority of his speeches, this disjointing of thoughts, opinions, policy statements, and expectations melts into the persona of a disgruntled egotistical old nationalist who wishes nothing more than to be perceived as such. Let me quote one passage amongst many which shows just how disjointed the man’s mental apparatus truly is.

Saudara-saudara sekalian, bangsa yang kuat adalah bangsa yang mampu memberi makan rakyatnya sendiri. Ketika kami menerima mandat, petani masih menghadapi pupuk yang sulit diperoleh, harga gabah yang jatuh setiap saat panen, aturan yang berbelit, berbelit-belit. kita harus berani menghadapi kesulitan dan masalah ini. Dan dengan demikian, walaupun kita tidak menyalahkan siapapun, kita melangkah dengan mencari solusi. Birokrasi tidak boleh menghambat keputusan yang baik. Kita harus mengakui masalah bangsa kita adalah masa adalah antara lain masalah birokrasi yang berbelit-belit, birokrasi yang tidak bekerja dengan efisien. Para birokrat yang sering menggunakan jabatan dan wewenangnya untuk memperkaya diri, memperkaya keluarganya, dan memperkaya kelompoknya. ini harus kita berantas, bukan kita tutup-tutupi.

In the middle of the passage (the bolded line), the president claims that he seeks not to blame any particular side for the plight that are faced by farmers, yet on the same subsection of his mouth-breathing immediately shifts the focus on bureaucrats, showing that indeed perhaps the issue are with a certain side of the governmental aisle. And this isn’t an instance of perhaps the president is trying to be diplomatic. How could he? No, that is far too penchant of an instance to ignore. We can see as well how the president doesn’t care for softening his words to unveil some kind of visceral reality in regards to the malpractices of state-owned enterprises.

Saya mengira BUMN itu adalah 300 atau 400 1074 dan BUMN-BUMN ini kadang-kadang bekerja seenaknya, tidak bertanggung jawab kepada bangsa, kepada negara… pemerintah tidak dianggap. Saya tidak paham bagaimana bisa terjadi seperti ini. Mungkin harus kita bentuk suatu pengadilan adhok khusus untuk kita usut untuk kisa kita usut pengurus-pengurus direksi 30 tahun ke belakang mungkin. Tapi saya juga akan menghadapi majelis, saya akan menghadapi DPR. Saya akan minta kalau perlu kita memberi juga peluang semacam amnesti khusus untuk mereka yang tobat, mereka yang sadar, mereka yang mengakui. Nah, ini saya serahkan kepada wakil-wakil rakyat untuk memutuskan. Kalau saya laporkan semuanya, saya takut rakyat kita marah semuanya, Saudara-saudara. Terlalu banyak BUMN yang tidak produktif. Rugi terus laporannya untung. Ngarang aja itu untungnya itu.

He even goes as far as to propose a baseless ad-hoc court to judge these malpracticing SoEs (the bolded statement). Perhaps a joke, or something he came up with at the back of his mind. Nevertheless, I do not wish to turn this text into a rhetorical analysis. These instances so far serve as what I believe to be high-level instances of disorders in the mental apparatus of our leaders. But it is not just our leaders. And it is certainly not only a disgruntled old man who takes pride in perpetuating corruption, collusion, and nepotism in the archipelagic republic.

To understand why our public administration — and therefore our public administrators — may behave and portray themselves so erratically, I wish to simply posit that one could start by examining the internal structure of a leader’s mind. As per Diamond’s proposed treatment framework, certainly an honest self-appraisal in this regard should be a positive endeavor to pursue, especially when we have quite a narcissistic, self-absorbed administration who simply does not wish to partake in such a project.

A brief review of pol-psychology lit

The idea that a politician’s mind can be analyzed via — what are typically called — “idiosyncratic factors” is rooted in the study of human psychology, especially in the works of Leon Festinger in 1957.¹ Through his theory of cognitive dissonance, it was demonstrable that there were adjustments that were constantly being made in the psychological operations of the human mind in relation to individual belief systems when reacting to new information, often ending in denial of these new informations. Simply put, what Festinger wrote pointed to the fact that our leaders often enter into a state of denial and many other changes, especially when faced with new information about things that they really strongly believe in.

Such a phenomenon was quite clearly present in the minds of decision-makers during formulations of policies as noted by Alexander George in 1969.² Specifically, however, George posited the “operational code” which referred to a system that can frame the inner workings of a decision-maker’s belief system, political perceptions, and philosophical assumptions and by which the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance and consistency can arise, that is, when new information clashes with a pre-existing operational code. In this way, when researchers analyzed leaders’ psychology, they would have an actual terminology to point to their decision-making such as in foreign policy analysis.

If we skip to 1994, we can already see figures such as Deborah W. Larson who pointed to conceptual variations and potential biases when applying operational codes to decision-makers’ decision-making.³ This was sort of an expected turn in the field, I think, because not only was the concept quite new at the time, but the applications were even so. I would guess that a bibliographic analysis of the field of the time would only reveal a handful of journals who would be willing to entertain detailed or complicated analyses using the operational code as a framework if not coupled with other conceptual tools to aid in analysis. This warranted the formulation of what is known as schema theory to tackle methodological gaps in implementing operational codes in decision-makers.

Larson stated that schemas that are possessed by influential decision-makers to contain general information of the world in an organized manner which are interrelated, but not necessarily structured, based on the content of the decision-makers’ experiences. This would account having presumptions towards people from another social, ethnic, or economic group because a leader’s personal experience with individuals of such group constituted either negative or positive. Do consider that George’s initial implementation of the operational code was to also introduce decision-makers’ “subjective perceptions and beliefs” as important considerations to understand how decision-making may play out in a given conflict situation.⁴ So, with schemas in mind, the value of operational code as an analytical tool were extended to be able to frame the aforementioned perceptions and beliefs of leaders and — at the same time — explain the nature of leaders’ beliefs being static.

Dogmatism was further explored by Margaret G. Hermann as a variable on its own through the identification of what Hermann called “personal characteristics” which could be expressed in four broad categories:

1. beliefs which refers to “a political leader’s fundamental assumptions of the world”
2. motives which affects how political leaders interpret the world around them
3. decision style which is meant as the “preferred methods of making decisions”
4. interpersonal style as the manner by which leaders interact with leaders or policy-makers⁵

By turning the abstract notion of “subjective perceptions and beliefs” from George into a more concrete form, I think Hermann managed to operationalize the idea of “operational code” in a way that is more falsifiable and thus, more appropriate for formal analyses. The limitations of these concepts become apparent in Winter et al.’s analysis of Bush and Gorbachev in which it is stated that there were alternative interpretations to the speeches that were used as the basis to “guess” the operational codes of each leader. This limitation, therefore, is a rational justification to document ways in which leaders’ personalities and subjective perceptions may be framed in a way that is more operationally utilized in academic analysis.

It is notable to consider as well that prior to Larson’s remarks in 1994, Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson introduced the concept of “scripts” in 1977,⁶ originally understood as a way in which humans may organize knowledge in a structural and causal sense. It is clear, however, that the implications of these scripts to respond to events were equally applicable, potentially playing a central role, in the context of human decision-making as pointed out by Abelson in 1981.⁷ Afterwards, Susan T. Fiske and Patricia W. Linville in 1980 noted how despite the scathing criticisms of scripts as schemas being unfalsifiable and conceptually imprecise,⁸ it stands as a very important contribution due to the fact that it provides essential features for leaders to respond to a given situation with a series of actions.

What pol-psychology lit tells us about jealousy

Successful and longstanding leaders have broken minds. Their schemas are probably all messed up, yet some things in their noggin — likely how to deal with people, how to treat others, how to talk, and how to deal with dissidents or those who disagree with them — still works well-enough to catapult them into office. And when in office, their mind spirals to design their office, tools of power, and room of power to their liking to accomodate for such operational codes. In other words, they are fragile little creatures who have great enough mental configurations or well-endowed with a lot of psychological resilience to the point that such psychological fragility actually becomes a superpower. In this sense, they are people who have no choice but to be dogmatists. This does not mean, however, that they are dogmatic.

From a top-level, it might not make sense, which is why I want to pivot the discussion to a lower level discourse: the subject of us, normal people who — I assume — does not possess state-level political power.

I think psychological fragility manifests most visibly in the pervasive cultural instinct known as crab mentality where those without or with low power will actively pull down anyone who attempts to excel in having power. Consider the relationship between cognitive dissonance, how people evaluate themselves, and jealousy.

In writing Self-evaluation maintenance and the perception of friends and strangers, Abraham Tesser and Jennifer Campbell assumes a model of behaviour which states:

…people are motivated to maintain a positive self-evaluation and that one’s relationships with others have a substantial impact on self-evaluation.

They further define reflection — one of the two processes which impacts social relationships — can be further broken down into two components.

The reflection process has two components: psychological closeness and another’s performance. Closeness refers to the extent to which two people are seen to be in a unit relation (Heider, 1958). Anything that “ties” one individual to another will increase closeness: Closeness increases with things like physical proximity and similarity in age, background, group membership, or reputation. Closeness is often associated with positive affective bonds, although a positive affective bond is not a necessary condition for closeness. For example, friends and family members are considered close, not only because they share affective bonds, but because they are viewed by others and themselves as forming a psychological “unit” (e.g.. Miller, Campbell, Twedt, & O’Connell, 1966). Closeness may also be contextually defined: A Texan and a New Yorker are closer if they meet in Paris, France, than if they meet in Paris, Texas.

Is it so strange then to witness how leaders easily discriminate against some people, yet have such a unifying ability for some others? It may boil down to their operational codes, yes, but their operational codes perhaps are so well-attuned to this reflective mechanism that when their personal self-evaluation and their group’s self-evaluation is threatened on a task of substantially high relevance (either a common enemy or an extraordinary threat), they would also be actively hinder the performance of close associates (either personal allies or geopolitical alliances) to protect their own standing. This is crab mentality in political psychological terms, at least to my understanding.

I wonder in this case what the treatment would be in accordance to Diamond’s crisis model?

Yet, Tesser and Campbell tells us that it isn’t so strange for people to feel positive by the achievements of a close other.

Reflection and comparison processes are dependent on the same interactive combination of closeness and performance. However, when a close other performs well, reflection is presumed to have a positive effect on self-evaluation while comparison is presumed to have a negative effect.

The latter process, that of comparison, is quite interesting as well to explain the phenomenon of crab mentality because Tesser and Campbell attributes it to the same components of closeness and performance. This means a father feeling proud of their son for an achievement would likely instigate the same psychological mechanism as a mother feeling jealous of their daughter’s success. That is, the components of closeness and performance. There is, however, cognitive dissonance in the admittance of these people when they are confronted with such facts. Surely, one does not admit of their jealousy, for if honesty was to their likeness, jealousy would be self-actualization, or perhaps manifests into a kind-hearted loyalty and desire to protect.

I find that music — as a cultural medium — really answers this dilemma.

Pengen Ini Itu

I am constantly reminded that the reality we live in is a jealous reality when listening to the social commentary of Indonesian artists who record our collective frustration in the most memorable fashion.

In his song “PENGEN INI ITU,” the Indonesian musician Vikri Rahmat rightfully captures this phenomenon, albeit from a different cultural angle.

He articulates the exhaustion of attempting to move forward in a culture governed by insecure individuals who will do their best to claim the position of authority figures, thus even going as far as to monitor and judge others. A line from the chorus: “aku tau yang ku mau tetapi kamu tak setuju” (I know what I want, but you do not agree) is perhaps the best portrayal of this fact.

Perhaps instead of using others’ lived experiences as rightful guides to a better life, many Indonesians suffer from consistently violating Diamond’s fifth treatment factor, that is, the ability to use others as “models of how to solve problems.” Instead, maybe we see models that work as cultural failures, and do our best to remain as our dependent, toxic, crabby selves. In Rahmat’s lyrics, “mencoba mandiri, dibilang tak peduli” (trying to be self-reliant, called as uncaring) and I will be lying if I deny the next part of the song, “mencoba peduli, malah sakit hati” (try to care, instead get hurt).

And in this sense, we get our answer — at least in very partial directions — to why dogmatism is so favorable or persistent amongst leaders’ operational codes. It’s simply favourable for us as well. It’s an impulsive way to avoid responsibility, yet at the same time, exert control over how others places us in their own schema. This has clear implications on how our authority figures, including our national and provincial leaders, actively try to capitalize on societal dysfunctions, the parts of our societies that are clear to everyone as having been broken since long ago.

Archipelagic post-colonial dogma

It must have been so satisfying when Soekarno, the most well-known Indonesian founding father, blamed Dutch imperialism and capitalism as the primary cause of Indonesia’s debts and poverty. In December 1930, the famous Indonesia Menggugat speeches were delivered as a defense speech (pleidooi) by Soekarno to platform Indonesian revolutionary nationalism in front of the Dutch colonial court in Bandung. My favorite passage in this regards comes in when Soekarno viscerally defined the meaningless distinction between old imperialism and new imperialism. Forgive me for quoting the full passage.

Nafsu, kecenderungan, keinginan atau sistem ini sejak zaman purbakala sudah menimbulkan politik luar negeri, menimbulkan perseteruan dengan negeri lain, menimbulkan perlengkapan senjata darat dan senjata armada, menimbulkan perampasan-perampasan negeri asing, menimbulkan jajahan-jajahan yang mengambil rezekinya,–dalam di dalam zaman modern ia menimbulkan “Bezugländer”, yakni tempat mengambil bekal industri, menimbulkan daerah-daerah pasaran bagi hasil-hasil industri itu, menimbulkan 12 lapangan bergerak bagi modal yang tertimbun-timbun…, menimbulkan “daerah pengaruh”, menimbulkan “protektoratprotektorat”, menimbulkan “negeri-negeri mandat” dan “tanah jajahan” dan bermacam-macam “lapangan usaha” yang lain, sehingga imperialisme adalah juga bahaya bagi negeri-negeri yang merdeka. Baik “daerah-daerah pengaruh”, maupun “negeri negeri mandat”, baik “protektorat” maupun “tanah jajahan”,–semua terjadinya begitu, sebagai ternyata pula dari dalil-dalil kami tadi, untuk mencari rezeki atau untuk menjaga penarian rezeki, semuanya ialah hasil keharusankeharusan ekonomi. Partai Nasional Indonesia menolak semua teroi yang mengatakan aha asal-asal penjajahan dalam hakekatnya bukan pencarian rezeki, menolak semua teori yang mengajarkan, bahwa sebab-sebab rakyat Eropa dan Amerika mengembara di seluruh dunia dan mengadakan tanah-tanah jajahan di mana-mana itu, ialah oleh keinginan mencari kemashuran, atau oleh keinginan kepada segala yang asing, atau oleh keinginan menyebarkan kemajuan dan kesopanan. Teori Gustav Klemm yang mengajarkan, bahwa menyebarnya “bangsa menang” ke mana-mana itu selain oleh nafsu mencari kekayaan ialah didorong pula oleh “nafsu mencari kemashuran”, “nafsu mencari keakuran”, “nafsu melihat negeri asing”, “nafsu mengembara merdeka”, atau teori Prof. Thomas Moon yang mengatakan, bahwa imperialisme itu selain berazas ekonomi juga adalah berazas nasionalisme dll., sebagai diutarakan dalam bukunya “Imperialism and World-politics[3]”,–teori-teori itu buat sebagian besar kami tolak sama sekali. Tidak! Bagi Partai Nasional Indonesia penjajahan itu asal-asalnya yang dalam dan azasi, ialah nafsu mencari benda, nafsu mencari rezeki belaka.

Every speech is filled with both spiritual and theoretical rigor. I personally believe it is Soekarno at his rhetorical best. Yet this same line of thought reveals a broader pattern of dogmas that I believe can be summarized into three assumptions:

1. New articulations of Dutch presence will never provide fundamental changes to its colonial system in Indonesia
2. Intellectual theories serves as solid justifications for a national cause (both his own and for others)
3. Desire to extract and profit are two fundamentals to all forms of colonialism and imperialism

These are very much powerful dogmas that drives the man, and by no means are they weak. At the time of his speech, Dutch presence was probably at its strongest, just before the Japanese invasion. The Dutch continuously optimized their extractive industries for rubber, oil, tea, coffee, and sugar via the mature Dutch East Indies, a corporate identity that should ring a bell to any Indonesia who have attended at least elementary school. What is interesting however is that these three underpinning assumptions lines up as both mental schemas and a manifestation of an Indonesian founding father’s reflection of their situation during colonial times.

As a mental schema, the three statements very much forms a general knowledge-base to work from as a revolutionary. Later on in his life, likely believing himself as the best representation of the anti-colonial movement, he would reject gradualist, parliamentary, or cooperative avenues offered by the colonial administration and under his own administration via the abolition of the-then United States of Indonesia’s Konstituante. His own Presidential Decree of 1959 stated the following in regards to their inefficacy:

Bahwa dengan dukungan bagian terbesar Rakjat Indonesia dan didorong oleh kejakinan kami sendiri, kami terpaksa menempuh satu-satunja djalan untuk menjelamatkan Negara Proklamasi;

Indeed, this would usher in an era of Guided Democracy and further impacted Indonesian society’s self-identity as a democracy that could not be trusted in expressing their differences.

As a self-evaluation maintenance mechanism, I have no doubt as to Soekarno’s efforts to take away seemingly noble justifications of colonialism. Any preensions of moral alignments were ultimately disintegrated in a process of reflection that is made public and visceral via his Indonesia Menggugat statements. The colonizer and the colonized are not the same. One is a predator, one is a victim is likely the essential message. A super effective one, I believe, which have lasted long enough to survive the boring explanations of a school textbook.

All-in-all, I would not find it strange if crab mentality as a subject is something that has culturally predated the archipelagic nation. It is something primordial, and is probably the same reason as to why our leaders — the crabs that survived the barrel — are crabby in of themselves. Their statements are crappy, their existence are crappy, and their society — us — are pretty crappy too. With a society like this, you don’t need to find a boogeyman to blame anymore. Just look at the families we have, the friends we make, and the coworkers we treat. I am sure Soekarno and Prabowo have got it all figured out with their own mental schemas.