The unseen and the unseeable in Indonesian society
By Mochtar Buchori
JAKARTA (JP): This is one of the "heavenly voices" revealed to Dr. Hogen Fukunaga, founder of the Tensei Kaisetsu movement (Harvey Stockwin in Clinton fund scandal gathers force in The Jakarta Post of Nov. 12, 1996).
Dr. Fukunaga is a "reborn" who got his "revelations" in January 1980. He was affiliated to a Japanese billionaire who funded right-wing causes in Japan and is a person who seems to enjoy the company of world personalities such as President Clinton, the Pope, and Mother Theresa.
The person who arranged the meetings between Fukunaga and those three world personalities was Yogesh K. Gandhi, a California resident whose "donation" of US$325,000 to the Democratic National Committee was hurriedly returned.
Gandhi is the chairman of a charity organization which has also been awarding Gandhi Peace Awards. One recipient of this prize was the late Ryoichi Sasakawa, an "extremely wealthy patron of extreme right-wing groups" in Japan. After he received this prize in 1988, he donated $500,000 to Gandhi's foundation.
What is Dr. Fukunaga in reality? A religious leader, or a peddler of political influence? This is a question that cannot be answered on the basis of the information reported by Harvey Stockwin in his article.
The focus of this article, however, is not Fukunaga himself, but the "heavenly voice" mentioned toward the end of Stockwin's article.
This advice which, in the opinion of a friend of mine, is in stark contrast with the current situation in our country. According to a friend of mine, what has been happening lately in our society can be summed up in one short but beautiful Javanese statement, that is "Micekake mata melek", meaning literally, "blinding seeing eyes" or "forcing seeing eyes to act blindly".
What this means is there was a time in our society when for awhile, people were forced "not to see what we did see, and to see what we did not see."
In other words, we were asked to see an unsubstantiated illusion. We were not asked to see the unseen, but to see "the unseeable", to see something which can never be seen, because it does not exist.
"The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unseeable" is just a variation of an earlier title, The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable, the title of Ralph E. Gomory's very beautiful essay (Scientific American).
In this essay, Ralph E. Gomory maintains that in our education, we overemphasize "what is known, but we rarely learn about what is not known, and we almost never learn about the unknowable". This bias has lead us towards "misconceptions about the world around us".
There is, however, a very big difference between the spirit behind Ralph Gomory's title and the one behind my variation of this title. The essay The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable was born out of a sense of modesty, out of an awareness concerning the limits of our knowledge.
Ralph Gomory, in this essay, pointed to two important facts of life: that we are always surrounded by the unknowable, and that even though we have succeeded in building an increasingly artificial, and hence more knowable environment, this achievement will not reduce the unknowable around us. This is because the artifacts of science and engineering which create predictability may themselves become unpredictable, and embedded within our increasingly artificial, and hence more knowable, world are large numbers of complex and idiosyncratic humans.
My variation of the title, "The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unseeable", on the other hand, has nothing noble behind it. It is merely a combination of intentions which are at best vague, and a blatant display of the arrogance of power. We are not sure what the real intention was of Fukunaga when he asked others to "See what you cannot see! Listen to what you cannot hear! Seek the source of truth to be true!"
Did he ask others to sharpen their senses, or did he say those words just to increase his political stature within the Japanese society?
Taking into account his personal dealings with shady characters like Gandhi, John Huang, and personalities from the extreme right within Japanese politics, it is hard to believe that he was genuinely motivated by religious desires when he expressed his "heavenly voices".
When my friend talked about the coercion "to see the unseeable", the coercion to blind our eyes to the seen, and to genuinely believe that we have seen something that does not exist, it was clear that he was talking about arrogance of power. He was talking about a time when some people within our society believed it was possible to completely control people's perceptions and thoughts about what was going on in the society.
I think it is this kind of attitude and belief which someone -- I do not remember who -- called "circumcision of the brain". I read this expression somewhere, and to the best of my memory, it was meant to remind us of the danger of governance or management practices aimed at total control of concepts, ideas and practices. It is the practice of demanding total conformity in thoughts and expression which considers any heterodox idea or view as automatically "wrong" and "disloyal", or even "subversive".
What is our problem here?
It is that the advice to see the unseen is to be treated cautiously, and the coercion to see the unseeable is to be resisted with full force. While the advice to see the unseen and to listen to what cannot be heard can be viewed as an advice to extend the power of our perceptions, it is also possible that such advice is given to intentionally mislead us from the obvious to the realm of unproven speculations.
It is quite possible that such advice is just a calculated political maneuver conducted for very selfish reasons. In the world of politics, it is sometimes hard to draw the line between calculation, speculation and illusion.
The coercion to see the unseeable is simply an anti-democratic political practice. It is an attempt to discourage people from independent thinking, an attempt to divorce political life from reality.
It is a practice which ultimately will lead us towards an uncritical obedience. It will lead us towards a very polite society, one in which popular opinion has no value whatsoever and can be easily disregarded.
The ultimate outcome is a machtstaat, a power state in which the ruler is the law, and not a rechtstaat, a law state in which the law is the ruler.
The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.