Muting Manichean Mindsets in Indonesia: A Counter-Ideological Response

Abstract

This chapter reiterates the study’s central argument – deriving from the Human Nature Triad of binarity, religiosity, and complexity – that a highly tuned Manichean Mindset and an embattled religiosity reside at the core of religious fundamentalism. It reminds the reader that when religious fundamentalism interacts with the six intervening factors of a tight counterculture, an enabling ideology, a protean charismatic group, intragroup psychic dynamics, social humiliation, and an enabling environment of poor governance, fundamentalist violence against out-groups often results. The chapter further argues that the intervening factor of ideology – rather than being the root of terrorism in Indonesia – is instead an enabler. More precisely, ideology is the center of gravity or focal point of the complex, self-organizing, and adaptive DICG system or superorganism. This suggests that targeted policy manipulation of the ideological factor offers the opportunity to generate cascade effects within the DICG system in order to effect transformative change in desired directions. To this end, the chapter sketches out a Counter-Ideological Response (CIR) Model. It suggests that by steadily eroding the potency of the DICG ideological frame through ideology-relevant policy interventions in the Five Spaces of Sender, Message, Mechanism, Recipient and Context, the application of the CIR Model could gradually ameliorate the threat of Islamist violence in Indonesia. It could do so by encouraging evolutionary change within the complex, self-organizing, and adaptive DICG superorganism, away from Manichean-minded fundamentalist religious forms with their latent violent potentials, toward more genuine, self-transcendent, and accommodating forms of spirituality and religiosity.

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is very difficult.

– Carl von Clausewitz

No plan of war survives first contact with the enemy.

– Helmuth von Moltke