A PAIR of leaders. A national anthem. A pretty backdrop, healthy children, a fluttering flag... Advertisements, particularly presidential campaign advertisements, are stories that know that what is shown is just a dream, and therefore no-one needs believe in it—yet actually they are also the belief-making machine.
This paradox resembles the Tibetan prayer wheels. The cylinders can spin like tops, and we can pray with them.
This is how it works. First of all, you write a prayer on a scrap of paper. You roll it up and put it in the cylinder, and then you spin it. And then you can think about anything at all, about Richard Gere for instance, but at that moment you are praying, because your prayer in the cylinder is on its way...
Of course you know that this revolving paper is not on its way to The Wish Granter. Your reason does not believe that prayers can be set in motion by a piece of equipment. Yet in what you do, you believe it. No, you are not confused or split. There is nothing odd about this.
For we do this on a daily basis: from buying shampoo to sending our kids to school, from going on the haj to using banking services, from holding wedding receptions to voting-in parliamentary representatives. Who can say that both our reason and hearts are certain that the wedding reception makes people happy, that school will make our children smart, and that, in the House of Representatives, the will of the people is the same as the will of their representatives?
We live in a time ruled by what the German intellectual Peter Sloterdijk rather dramatically calls "cynical reason" (der Zynischen Vernunft). Sloterdijk wants to show that Marx's statements about ideology are no longer valid. According to Marx, ideology is when "they do not know it, but they are doing it." Ideology is "false consciousness". But that was the 19th century. These days, with advertisements and rhetoric, a different kind of false consciousness is in vogue: people go to the police station to report a theft, knowing perfectly well that this will not get the thief captured or the goods returned. In other words "they know these things, and yet they do them". And this is "cynicism".
So to Sloterdijk, Marxist understanding of ideology is no longer valid. Marxist critique sets out to open masks, for instance that religious faith or democratic political ideals are actually merely class interest. But in this post-Marxist era, we recognize this mask as a mask. And then what? Cynical reason is "false consciousness" that is "enlightened" (aufgeklärt). In other words, we admit this falseness. We know that what is called "justice" and "truth" is actually something hiding the interests of the rich and powerful—and yet people seem automatically still to stand before the judge, to hire lawyers, and to be willing to wait for days upon days.
Sloterdijk's analysis rings true when applied to the process of justice in Indonesia today, but he is actually also talking about people living in tidy, developed countries. What is interesting is that this tidiness and development are linked to a sense of ennui. People are no longer surprised by politics, once the plans and promises for improvement have become routine, and once disappointment has become something familiar.
In other words, once democracy has come to resemble what Baudrillard calls "menopause". In societies that are still hungry with hope like Indonesia, that are still fired with faith that a new era will come and that defunct institutions will be revived, there is an implicit naïvety which gives life passion. But can this naïvety last?
Once we see the ennui that Sloterdijk describes, the answer has to be "no". False consciousness, yet enlightened, will come via information and education, an "education in disillusionment". People know that eventually, as in Brecht's Threepenny Opera, there's not much difference between robbing a bank and opening a banking business. People might know how life is really set spinning, but they do not know how to reject it.
It is only the desire to go on living that makes people want to accept existing relationships and institutions, the worth of which they find dubious. In other words, illusion is necessary, and "truth" is perhaps merely social consensus in fantasy. Take money, for instance. We know that those paper notes can be easily ripped or burnt, and yet we accept them as something having the value of the sweat of our labor. Our labor has been conjured into something that is no longer ideas and sweat, but rather something totally abstract, that can be measured and exchanged—for a box of chocolates, for instance.
Of course, this illusion cannot go on holding us in its thrall, no matter how much we need it. People will often oppose it and mock it. And in this opposition and mocking, and in the rejection, Sloterdijk says, we choose kynismus, not zynismus. With `kynismus', which is reflected in the ridicule of the streets or the satire of cabaret and comedy, people seem to pinch themselves, to remind themselves that something has been actually oppressed in "education in disillusionment" all this time.
Yet I am doubtful that cynicism will liberate us. Maybe it is merely opium for the people. Laughter is healthy, but it can also be arrogant. After all, isn't it by saying, with a snide laugh, things like "the elite are just deceiving the people" that we actually want to appear smarter than the people?
So something else seems to be needed, self sacrifice perhaps, so that mankind is able to rediscover integrity. And with this, people will witness something that regulates the routine, blocked, and non-cynical. And we recall, wasn't that what happened before that noble moment was replaced by the belief machine?
Goenawan Mohamad
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