The unseen and the unseeable in Indonesian society

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.