381 Society’s Projection

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In a certain religious society, they tend to project their god as an ultimate deity without any single mistake, without any dark side. For projecting the dark side the society prefer to blame it on evil force. But this system creates a judgment system with the only ultimate truth, the others are heathen. The system doesn’t recognize relativism and the freedom for the society to explore what to be consider as the dark side fairly. The projection is not only god and religion, it could be ideology. The truth always has 2 contradicting side. Either its black or white, they have their own pro and con, thus it’s worthy to know both.

352 Post Reformasi, Kematian Demokrasi

Wahai partai-partai dan lembaga-lembaga agama, apakah jasamu bagi negara ini sampai sekarang ini kalian seakan-akan lebih berkuasa dari MPR. Sewaktu revolusi kemerdekaan para pemuda, pelajar dan militerlah yang berjasa, bukanlah kalian, bahkan kalian hanya berusaha membuat sistem totalitarian baru, yang sejak dulu kita lawan, berdasarkan agama. Setelah Orde Baru jatuh, yaitu kembali kepada jasa para pemuda dan pelajar, kebebasan kepada partai-partai dan lembaga-lembaga agama teraih secara total tanpa ada kontrol lagi dari para pemimpin, bahkan partai-partai dan lembaga-lembaga oposisi hampirlah tidak ada kekuatan untuk melawan.

Apakah kita perlu berterima kasih akan pembantaian PKI, pengeboman Bali dan berbagai pelanggaran HAM? Apakah sejarah-sejarah gelap kalian sekarang sudah tertutup di bawah bangunan-bangunan institusi agama, dilupakan dengan pencucian otak masyarakat?
Tulisan ini bukan bertujuan untuk menyudutkan suatu pihak agama, melainkan mempertanyakan apakah kita perlu memegang kepercayaan beragama yang seharusnya bersifat pribadi sampai ke ranah politik dan sosial.

Proses demokrasi yang lambat dan tidak terlihat arahnya dalam era reformasi ini menyebabkan ketergantungan masyarakat akan suatu keyakinan baru, suatu sistem yang praktis dan cepat, meskipun sistem itu akan membunuh demokrasi tersebut. Demokrasi hanyalah menjadi jalan pintas untuk menuju totalitarian baru yang kehilangan kemanusiaannya. Keyakinan akan demokrasi haruslah kita pegang teguh untuk kebebasan kita untuk berkembang, berekspresi dan beropini, bukan hanya untuk generasi kita saja tapi juga untuk yang mendatang.

Ada banyak jenis mata. Bahkan Spinks pun punya mata: dan karena itu ada banyak “kebenaran”, dan karena itu tak ada “kebenaran”. – Nietzsche

319 Vision from George Orwell

Men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and most be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves.
The coice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Orwell, George. 1984. 1949. 109. Print.

258 Decoding Utopia

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Every religion has their own version of Utopia, except Buddha with its promise to end its reincarnation cycle. Islam and Christian Utopia has a similarity in the goal, a good & holy place without any sin. But how the society can’t ever found a problem in its cycle. Every problems are created by individual and social interaction. Men has tried to manage this problem since the beginning of their ages, from imperialism, socialism, liberalism, even the most totalitarian system to every individualism created another problem. Religion use a totalism ideology, as you can see today and from history, it can’t answer to all society problem fairly. In my point of view, the idea of heaven seems vague. Even if a utopia filled with unlimited resources, the social interaction & the difference of each individual create problems.
The Catholics believe in purification of souls in purgatory concept, but isn’t it as same as making a new human as pure as the day he/she born, without the beauty of knowledge and thinking. Even the communist did that. It’s the elimination of human nature that makes human unique, isn’t it going back to the fear of emptiness that we’ve feared since the first time…

254 The Humanist

I do think god is cruel.
He sent a choosen people to define the path to heaven.
Through his massive power in society,
he could persuade people & break the unity of the society.
Creating hell on earth & fake utopia up ahead.
Bashing the homo in blessing from their fags loving god.
Damning the humanist as the cause of all evil.
Exploiting the society in the name of holy cause.
Each religion created their own version of Hitler as the son of God.

242 Lowest Instinct

Joseph Goebbels was exploiting the lowest instinct of German people, which are racism, xenophobia, class envy & security. He used these elements in his powerful propaganda. As a humanist Indonesian I experienced the suffering effect from the propaganda inside the country. All of the propaganda plays in religious field, it’s as effective as Nazi propaganda, they have some good oratories and the mayority of people follow religion blindy since the ancient age. The religious party alliance once crushed the indonesian communist only because of its atheism nature. So, that is the Indonesians’ lowest instinct.

235 Marxist Humanism Maturity

For liberal humanists such as Rousseau or Kant, the universal law of reason guided the way towards total emancipation from any kind of tyranny.

Such ideas did not go unchallenged. The young Karl Marx criticised the project of political emancipation (embodied in the form of human rights), asserting it to be symptomatic of the very dehumanisation it is supposed to oppose. Marx argued that because, under capitalism, egoistic individuals are constantly in conflict with one another, rights are needed to protect them from each other. True emancipation can only come through the establishment of communism, which abolishes all private property. While the mature Marx may have retained a belief in the inevitability of progress, he also became more forceful in his criticism of the concept of human rights as idealist or utopian. For the mature Marx, “humanity” is an unreal abstraction: because rights themselves are abstract, the justice and equality they protect is also abstract, permitting extreme inequalities in reality.

229 Social Evolution

Social evolution is a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology that is concerned with social behaviours, i.e. those that have fitness consequences for individuals other than the actor. Social behaviours can be categorized according to the fitness consequences they entail for the actor and recipient.

* Mutually beneficial – a behaviour that increases the direct fitness of both the actor and the recipient
* Selfish – a behaviour that increases the direct fitness of the actor, but the recipient suffers a loss
* Altruistic – a behaviour that increases the direct fitness of the recipient, but the actor suffers a loss
* Spiteful – a behaviour that decreases the direct fitness of both the actor and the recipient

Creating a social system is best relying on mutually beneficial factor, but it’s hardly work in any society in micro factor, only in some specific areas maybe. I never agree on Social Darwinism, a study of Herbert Spencer, which suggesting on the weak members of society can lead to the degeneration of a domestic race of the society. That theory is a selfish act, used by Hitler for holocaust propaganda. But I believe society evolve from time to time, it wants to reach the mutual benefactor, as long as humanists never prevail.

222 The Origin of The Word of Propaganda

Its first documented use occurred in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV established the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. At the time, in the wake of Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church was engaged in mostly unsuccessfully holy wars to reestablish the faith by the force of arms. Realizing that this was a losing effort, Pope Gregory established the papal propaganda office as a means of coordinating efforts to bring men and women to the “voluntary” acceptance of church doctrines. The word propaganda thus took on a negative connotation in Protestant countries but a positive one (similar to that of education or preaching) in Catholic areas.

The term propaganda did not see widespread use until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was used to describe the persuasion tactics employed during World War I and those later used by totalitarian regimes. Propaganda was originally defined as the dissemination of biased ideas and opinions, often through the use of lies and deception. However, as scholars began to study the topic in more detail, many came to realize that propaganda was not the sole property of “evil” and totalitarian regimes and that it often consists of more than clever deceptions. The word propaganda has since evolved to mean mass “suggestion” or “influence” through the manipulation of symbols and the psychology of the individual. Propaganda involves the dexterous use of images, slogans, and symbols that play on our prejudices and emotions; it is the communication of a point of view with the ultimate goal of having the recipient of the appeal come to “voluntarily” accept this position as if it were his or her own.

Pratkanis, Anthony R., and Elliot Aronson. AGE OF PROPAGANDA, The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. 1. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2001. 11. Print.

80 Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development

Levels of Moral Development:

Level 1: preconventional morality
• Stage 1: Individual obeys rules in order to avoid punishment.
• Stage 2: Individual conforms to society’s rules in order to receive rewards.

Level 2: conventional morality
• Stage 3: Individual behaves morally in order to gain approval from other people.
• Stage 4: Conformity to authority to avoid censure and guilt.

Level 3: postconventional morality
• Stage 5: Individual is concerned with individual rights and democratically decided laws.
• Stage 6: Individual is entirely guided by his or her own conscience.

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