Comments On Article About Characteristics of Indonesian

JAKARTA, KOMPAS--Manusia Indonesia dicirikan dengan karakter yang picik, solidaritas rendah, serba instan, dan sulit menerima kekalahan. Kondisi tersebut membuat keadilan dan kesejahteraan sosial di Indonesia sulit diwujudkan.

Penggiat filsafat kebudaayan Tony Doludea di Jakarta, Jumat (16/3) sore mengatakan karakter manusia Indonesia adalah mudah iri hati, picik, dan tidak menyadari solidaritas untuk tujuan bersama. Mereka juga suka memperoleh sesuatu secara instan, mengabaikan proses dan kerja keras, percaya terhadap klenik, dan tidak dapat menerima kekalahan.

English translation for the above article from Kompas online ( www.kompas.com ) as follow :

Indonesian are characterized by narrow mindedness,low solidarity,instant culture and hard to accept losing.This conditions cause justice and social welfare in Indonesia hard to be realized.

Tony Doludea,a Cultural Philosopher activist in Jakarta,Friday ( 16/3) afternoon said that Indonesian characters are easily jealous or envy,narrow minded,low solidarity for common goals.They also like to get something instantly,ignore the process and hard work,believe on the clenics and can not accept losing.

We can find many interesting points made from above article.Let analyze it one by one.

1.Is it true that Indonesian have characters like stated by Tony Doludea ?

I am going to elaborate it from character by character as follow :

Supporting some of the characters :

a. Easily jealous or envy

I would like to tell story when I was doing my KKN ( Kuliah Kerja Nyata ) or equivalent as field work in the village during my university years in Gadjah Mada,Indonesia. I was assigned together with other 7 students in one village in Kebumen,Indonesia.

The field work duration was 2 months so more than enough time to know the culture of the village and villagers. For me and most of my friends the field work was a good chance and fun period for us ( people from town and big cities ) to know and get immerse with life in Indonesia villages.More than 60% of Indonesian population live in village so knowing and understanding the life there is a very important and rewarding thing to do.

I still can remember how some of the villagers tended to be jealous or envy on each other even for simple things.You can easily know it when you spoke with them,during the discussion,body gestures,biased comments and etc.It can be envy on the position of village chief,envy on the material possession,envy on your new clothes and etc.

Although envy in some perspectives is good and needed for motivating competitiveness and hard work but if it is too much it can be counterproductive.
People just spend most of the time on being jealous/envy on other people’s achievements and then just continuing with biased and other negative feeling towards other people. Simply wasting time and no positive effects afterwards from this continuing jealous/envy.

Other popular topic for envy/jealousy in Indonesia is a relative much better economics condition of Indonesian Chinese.Indonesian Chinese is around 3-4% of total Indonesia population so from 240 million it is around 7-8 million people. But relatively most Indonesian Chinese better in economic condition ( better does not always meant rich as many Indonesian can be constituted only as middle class both upper and lower middle class ) as they concentrate more on trading and business ( though you can easily find Indonesian Chinese who simply workers or farmers,for example in Singkawang,Medan,Palembang,Riau and etc. ).This has caused many envy and resentment towards it from other parts of Indonesian population.

This sentiment itself has been rooted back as long as Dutch colonial period.Dutch has divided Indonesian ( people living in East Indies ) as many classes with Dutchman and Westerner the highest class among all followed by Ningrat ( The Old Royal Indonesian family ),Chinese and commoners. Chinese and Ningrat who belonged to higher class then had better privileges and access to wealth during this time.

The situation is not getting any better after Indonesian independence especially during Soeharto’s period when most of the fields can not be easily entered by Indonesian Chinese.You can find handful of Indonesian Chinese as policeman,soldier,civil servants or lecturers in Indonesian State Universities. Then you can see that most of Indonesian Chinese heavily concentrated on trading and business. The rampant corruption,collusion and nepotism during this time which acted as de facto rule of the game also caused and forced many Indonesian Chinese to cooperate in this manner with corrupt officers,soldiers and etc.People can easily pointed out Edi Tanzil,David Nusa Widjaja,Hendra Raharja and etc. as examples of crooks part of Indonesian Chinese or simply known as black tycoons ( konglomerat hitam ). These thing actually caused so much resentment although I can surely say and guarantee that they are just bad /rotten apples from so many apples and consist only small percentage of Indonesian Chinese.

b. Can not accept losing

I think everybody of us has often heard about supporters of soccer clubs going into amoks and rampages after their favourite soccer clubs lose. The target of the rampages can be as diverse as any nearby motor cycle,car,stores and etc which they can target easily. It is just one sign that some parts of Indonesian population not ready yet to accept losing even though it is only a soccer match. What is a big deal of losing a soccer match ??? Sport and any kind of competition always consists of two thing only. It is either you win or you lose it.

We often heard also that after the Governor or Mayor direct elections then the losing candidates filled complaints and made headline news that alleged conspiracy and rigging during the direct election process. While some of the allegations can be true but when almost every time directly after election that losing candidates fill complaints and sue then we can see that losing is not an easy thing to accept in Indonesia.

c. Ignoring the process

One example is how a queue can be easily ruined. I still remembered one day I was queueing for check in at one airport in Indonesia. There were 2 check in counters for the flight so 2 queueing lines formed and existed.Unfortunately 1 counter had temporary computer system problem which caused this line had to wait for sometimes to reboot the system. Instead of waiting the rebooting of computer to finish in 5-10 minutes several people in the queue just simply made ‘brave way’ to cut the line directly in front of me. They gave reasons that they were all in a hurry. Well,give me a break. I simply refused their requests and answered politely that ‘ We will board the same plane and everybody will get into the destination at the same time no matter how hurry you are in the check in process’.Soon they just cancelled their move and went back to their old queue line.

I gave my response not because I was so pricky or trying to stir up the move but I just want to give little lesson of respecting others and follow the rules.If we just let everybody messed up in front of us daily so how we can expect Indonesia can be a much better country any soon.

While Tony Doludea gave some good insights into characteristics of Indonesian but I am not 100% agree on his conclusions as follow :

1. Characteristics of human can not be generalized easily. Indonesian is a very large entity and consists of many subcultures,religions,languages,the perceptions,level of education and etc. Simply generalizing the things that we observed in several places into whole Indonesian population can be a wrong and misleading thing to do.

2. The over emphasize on negative characteristics of Indonesian.

In the article itself only negative characteristics of Indonesian exposed and stated. I believe that Indonesian have still so many positive characteristics such as strong belief on family values, warm treatment towards friends and foreigners and etc.

3. No proofs and surveys provided to support his conclusion and statement.

No matter how abstract any thing but giving several quantitative measures actually can lead more people to understand and accept his conclusion and statement.

4. I never heard of Tony Doludea before so I simply do not know his credibility so far.

5. For me the mention of cultural philosopher activist seems to me as rather vague job or functional description. Why the writer do not simply mention him as cultural philosopher instead of cultural philosopher activist ?

So just to close it all basically the article on Kompas online ( despite several things lack on it ) can be used positively as a good reflection for all of us ( Indonesian especially ) to improve from the bad things around us and sustain the already good things around us. Hopefully can be useful. Thanks.

Cheers,

Herman