1---Comfort of The Chamber
It was 2008---a band of young kids of different and unique appearances wearing flayed jeans with high leather boots, denim & bomber jackets embedded with colourful patches of obscure ideological semantics and jargons, marched around Institut Teknologi Bandung's boulevard. They were chanting the chants of tribalistic mantras about unity in diversity, collective pride--- both spoken in overly simplified, low-resolution depictions--- and oftentimes, obscene and vulgar words spoken in their local dialect were shouted in a rather humorous manner.
When one's not a part of this particular mass, one might feel indifferent towards them, or annoyed due to the loud chants and seemingly arrogant jests and attitude radiated from the individuals in the group. The opinion and experience seem to be entirely different if one's a part of that mass. The surge of enormous pride, the undeniable feeling of belonging, and the engulfing sense of invincibility in the crowd were clearly evident in the minds of these kids. It's them against the world, they might think to themselves, ready to take on the world's malevolence, turn the tide of injustice normality, and to correct the wrongs of the world. They were the notorious KMSR group, or Keluarga Mahasiswa Seni Rupa (Visual Art Students Family).
I was one of them 12 years ago.
The group's offerings of collective belonging and identity were a prime antidote to my double-minority background. I was a Peranakan descendant, and as a Christian enclaved in an overwhelmingly Islamic majority territory of Bandung, Indonesia--- a city I've just moved into with having neither relatives nor friends in it. Being a double-minority for 18 years in Indonesia back then, I knew most people around me didn't look at me with the same eyes as they look at other people--- be it positively or negatively. Unfortunately the latter was much more frequent and apparent than the other.
I thought to myself that I would be safer in the shelter of the group's identity, to have something I could be proud of and hold on, with an underlying hope that it would cover the objective fact that I wasn't exactly like the majority of people in Bandung on racial and religion grounds. It surely did me a great favour on that case, albeit slight inconveniences still came from a few unpleasant people inside that group, calling me names with no humorous context. Luckily, the overwhelming majority of the people in the group were caring, kind, and most importantly, racial and religiously colour blind. It was a place of comfort, and--- for the lack of a better term, a safe space for a lot of youngsters, especially the ones branded with a permanent minority's physical attributes like me.
As a group built on the pillars of free-thinking and creativity, it wasn't such an anomaly for KMSR to be a den filled with post-modernist movements driven by talented thinkers and creators with a plethora of unique train of thoughts and methods. It was a place where youngsters with idiosyncratic or even almost borderline autistic characters were tolerated and appreciated in contrast to the scarcity of respect these people got from other normal people in their lives before.
Unique thinking and concepts were glorified to their highest pedestal inside the group. One could witness different Olympics of Weirdness being held in these people's daily lives---be it in casual talks and banters, or even on more serious grounds like activism and artwork brainstorm sessions. It was like everyone participated in a quasi-competition of standing out, to be as weird and as free as possible in a hope of getting a reaction from their peers, whether it was laughs or respect. These particular attributes were directly reflected on the daily outfit they wore as well. It was evident that the people inside the group took pride in their visual portrayals as KMSR is the only student body at Institut Teknologi Bandung that didn't require its members to buy or wear typical uniform jackets like virtually every other faculties there, which pushed the freedom of appearance in each member even further.
2---Cracks in The Chamber
As someone who was completely enveloped by the warm hospitality of this group, combined with the fact that I was just a naive 18 years old boy, it took me long enough to realise that as diverse as this group could apparently be from the outside, there was an underlying yet undeniable policy on how the group should think and act. The policy itself was an echo chamber of attitudes that came naturally as the byproduct of positive feedback loops and invisible social control brewed inside--- a widely-known phenomenon exists not exclusively in KMSR, but practically in every other social groups, albeit with varied levels of magnitude.
The magnitude of this invisible social control in KMSR was considerably tight, which was the feasible reason why the group was solid and united, in my time, at least. However, this mechanism also came with its side effects. It caused a good number of mainstream, conservative ideas to sound foreign compared to the usual narrative of the chamber, which made these ideas were not resonating well amongst the dwellers of the chamber including me in the past. Reflecting to what I've witnessed directly, glorifying capitalism and profit was arguably the most despised amongst other ideas, and the most likely to attract social judgements if one brought it as a main concept of an artwork or activism. Then religious dogmas came on the second place. Religious people didn't really mix well with the bulk of the group, most evidently on large gatherings because as they would usually go home early, or being completely abstain. And then there were several other things the group deemed as too traditional or trivial that were collectively rejected entirely or partly, like discipline and punctuality, obedience in a hierarchy, politics, or even money--- although definitely neither as severe nor as hostile as the Evergreen State College's fiasco that happened to Bret Weinstein in March, 2017.
It was visible to me as insiders that the decision of these youngsters made to police the group identity didn't come from a place of deliberate malevolence, but certainly more from the place of solidarity, soul-searching, and---as clich as it might seem (but inherently true)---love. Searching for a group to belong and maintaining it once they are settled down is a natural state for youngsters. It's essential for their character development and growth, and it benefits them as a form of physical and mental self-defence---a pleasant stage of life to prepare youngsters to face the real world, if you may.
It was completely natural for these young people to wish this particular stage would never ends, so they could be forever inside the warmth of the herd, never to move on to the next phase of life, stay with their band of caring folks and sustain the melancholy of togetherness as best as they could. Why would they ever think to move? They had everything there, things that they've never had a taste before: acceptance, friends, respect, and love. But like any other things, this good phase would come to a transitional end along with their increasing age.
Around the time of graduation, I've been faced directly with the inevitable question we all had growing up; What do I want to do with my life? Armed with the ideological beliefs and fragments on how to live my life to its fullest taught by from the echo chamber, I took a confident step towards the real life, trying to seize my potential into its fullest, ready to change the world as a new radical contender---but only to realise that some of those methods and ideologies back then were quite impractical and unsustainable to be applied in the workforce. It was a devastating failures after failures for me; on the company that I started with my partner (on the first few years after graduation), on my past love relationships, on my relationship with my parents, and even on my personal spiritual well-being--- How could these methods which served me well from all these years fails? I often thought to myself.
3---Getting Out the Chamber
On my moments of reflection I remembered the jargons and manifestos our chamber's orators shouted through the dead of the night on our pre-initiation days. I couldn't help to think about how those things weren't merely inapplicable, but incredibly harmful to apply in my post-graduation life phase.
Turned out, profit-minded practices weren't just incredibly important to sustain a livelihood, but they were also not vile in nature because we could generate savings from it and make more jobs available to people who needed it the most.
Turned out, punctuality and discipline were essential in business and human relationship, because the seemingly cool and rebellious practice of being late to meetings or delaying work because of art block hurts trust more than it's building it.
Turned out, hierarchy is important to make a quintessential organisation, because without hierarchy everyone in the boat would paddle to each of their own direction, ripping the boat apart as the boat tried to sail.
The disconnection between the ideologies of my former chamber and the real world was so prevalent, that it ultimately made me rethink about the practicality of those obscure ideologies when applied in high resolution practices, which ended up to be incapably naive, or even, borderline ignorant to reality.
It was evident that the replacement process gave me some kind of a new anxiety, as if I was slowly losing my entire identity. But as I continued working, it was clear to me that holding the old chamber's methods and ideologies wouldn't get me far in life's next phase. I decided to change myself, I stepped out. It was nothing short of a miracle that saved me from my fated stagnancy. That psychological surgery enabled me to grow my company sustainably, albeit it's not a big company yet even now, but not insignificantly small either in both financial power and work quality for a 15-people sized creative studio in a 3rd world country down in the Southern hemisphere.
Frankly, I wasn't the only one who could feel the crack on the chamber early on. There were several other friends of mine who decided to step out much earlier than me, and in quite a bold fashion---usually pushed by the imminent needs of a stabler monthly income to simply prolong their livelihood. Typically, these friends of mine would pursue and work on other career path unrelated to art, craft or design, be it in banking, accounting, F&B, farming and other field of disciplines with firm vocation elements. I talked to some of these people to get to know more about their considerations to step out. Some simply stated that they were just trying to continue their lives, getting food on the table daily, giving their sick parents monthly allowance, paying for their next master's degree---things that they couldn't get from their art, craft and design skill and mindset at that time; a decision that was quite wise and logical, in my opinion.
Sadly, these decisions, more often than it was not, were usually judged pretty harshly by their former chamber's peers; a failure of ideological purities, a boring tragedy of creative incompetence, sell-outs who trade their liberal soul for sub-worthy jobs, or even went as far as a traitor of the creative hemisphere. Ironically, these criticism were typically spoken from the people who hadn't really make a livelihood with their pure ideologies, getting their daily bread and water from who-knows-whom, and yet, had quite the nerve to ridicule other people who were just trying to survive and continue their daily lives. These typical behaviours were so common, that some of the people who stepped out (me included) wouldn't even bother to tell about opening new business or getting a new non-art-related jobs to these zealous KMSR members in order to save themselves some headache coming from the imminent, judgemental ridicules. And they didn't regret it one bit.
Fast forward to 2020, some of my closest circle whispered me the stories of my other old friends' struggles. Who wouldn't struggle on times like these? I initially thought to myself, almost ready to hear the whispers with half an ear---until I heard the full stories. Some of my KMSR friends struggled a lot to fit into the current workforce; devoid of any jobs and income, and even worse---losing a great chunk of their passion and identity. Some of them became utterly bitter to the society and the systems of the world---leaving them no choice but to reject the world entirely and caved to their own unsustainable safe spaces. Some of them went as far as seriously contemplating to attempt serious criminal conducts in their last desperate moments, hoping to gain some air to breath.
My heart was utterly heartbroken. A good number of these people were my closest friends back in the days before I stepped out from the chamber. They were amongst the brightest people I've ever met in my entire life, they could've easily outdid me in my entrepreneurship endeavours be it fiscally or by performance standard. I tried to reach as much of my old friends as I could, trying to integrate them to my company's projects---but sadly most didn't change much from the days of the chamber, with bad punctuality and discipline amongst the most apparent traits, making it even harder to sustain any projects with budgets for typical small companies such as mine.
The stories of these old friends of mine quickly transcend itself from a tragedy to an enormous mirror, begging for my attention for a high-resolution reflection. And up until this point, the only prominent difference I found between them and my journey is how we treated each of our own chamber when we grew up. I was fortunate---I stepped out. Sadly, they stayed.
I hope this writing wouldn't be perceived as a critique on echo chambers from the place of hate and malevolence, as it sincerely came from the place of empathy and love---as a bitter-sweet break-up letter from someone who benefitted greatly from the family, and as someone who inevitably drifted away from it. ---Michael Alexander, 2020.
I'm still working on the Bahasa Indonesian version of this writing.
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