Critical Reflection: Assessing the Anchor of Golden Indonesia

The grand discourse regarding ‘Golden Indonesia 2’45’ is frequently echoed as a utopian narrative promising an economic surge, prosperity, and geopolitical glory at the centenary of the republic. However, if assessed honestly, this mega-project vision is essentially anchoring itself on fragile ground.

The primary foundations of a nation—namely education and social welfare—are instead experiencing a tangible decline. Without a solid anchor in the quality of its human capital, the dream of Golden Indonesia runs a high risk of turning into a mirage of development that leaves behind technocratic inequality.

The government today is deemed to have failed in formulating an emancipatory education system and an equitable social welfare scheme. Education is often treated merely as a factory for producing cheap industrial labour, while social welfare guarantees are viewed simply as aid distribution programmes without sustainable structural empowerment. When these fundamental sectors are ignored in their true essence, the ambition to produce a superior generation for 2045 collapses at the most basic level.

This failure is rooted in a public policy formulation process that is increasingly alienated from academic ethics and philosophical reflection. Recent policies tend to be oriented towards short-term interests, laden with political compromises, and indifferent to scientific integrity. When academic standards and deep reflection are sidelined, the resulting legal products and regulations often harm the wider community and damage ecological and social structures.

The government appears highly pragmatic, where development orientation is dominantly dictated by technical-administrative rationality rather than a humanistic approach. Physical development in the form of megalomaniac infrastructure and targets for statistical growth figures are used as the sole measure of success. Meanwhile, the human dimension—such as social justice, living space, mental health, and cultural quality—is marginalised because it is deemed to lack instant economic calculative value.

The impact of this technocratic and pragmatic socio-political landscape results in the alienation of the younger generation. The youth are being shaped to be critically dull and sceptical of philosophy. Activities involving deep thinking, questioning the status quo, and exploring fundamental ideas are now considered strange, unproductive, or even dangerous to public order. The realm of public debate has degraded into mere shallow ripples of conversation on social media.

This culture of anti-intellectualism creates a condition where society, particularly the youth, loses their capacity for rational exploration. When philosophy is exiled from classrooms and public discourse, young people lose the most fundamental analytical tools to unravel information manipulation, power imbalances, and policies that disadvantage them. Without the capacity for philosophical analysis, they are vulnerable to falling into mass apathy or, conversely, blind fanaticism.

This is where the vitality of restoring critical thinking and philosophy as the true anchor towards Golden Indonesia 2045 lies. Philosophy is not merely an abstract academic discipline, but a method of the courage to think (sapere aude) and to challenge inequality. Without a critical culture, a nation may grow materially, but it will become hollow in terms of culture and leadership ethics.

From the perspective of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, this condition of systemic failure shows that the government is only focusing—and even then, only partially—on fulfilling the most basic needs (physiological needs and safety needs). Social assistance policies and technical physical development seem forced to resolve issues of hunger and security mechanically. However, because they are not grounded in humanistic ethics and philosophy, the fulfilment of these basic needs is often unstable and manipulative.

This technocratic approach, which ignores Maslow’s humanistic dimension, prevents society from ascending to higher levels of need, such as the need for belongingness, esteem, and the pinnacle of human development, which is self-actualisation. Pragmatic education only produces workers trapped in economic anxiety, rather than whole human beings who are free to maximise their human potential.

When the younger generation is prevented from the space of critical thinking and philosophical thought, they are essentially being amputated from the achievement of self-actualisation. Within a Maslowian framework, a society comprised of self-actualised individuals is a society possessing critical awareness, high creativity, and deep social empathy. Without mass self-actualisation, the dream of Golden Indonesia is merely an aggregation of GDP figures without humans who are happy and internally empowered.

Philosophy provides the space for humans to fulfil esteem needs and self-actualisation through the search for meaning and truth. When a young person is trained to think philosophically, they are invited to understand their essence, their social role, and their ethical responsibility to the nation. This process re-humanises humans amidst the onslaught of a system that commodifies all lines of life.

Making critical thinking an anchor means demanding radical reform in education and social policies. Education must have its function restored as a space for sowing critical awareness, where philosophy, ethics, and logic are established as foundations from an early age. Schools and universities must no longer serve merely as agents for labour market certification, but as bastions for the defence of academic integrity and freedom of thought.

Public policy must also reintegrate philosophical reflection and ethics…