Under a Failing State, Even Hope Becomes Political

Exhaustion may push us to retreat, but retreat reshapes power, teaching institutions they can fail us and teaching us to settle for far less than we should.

Abigail Limuria’s widely shared post begins with a sentiment many Indonesians have already internalised: the belief that the state will not protect us, that institutions will continue to fail, and that survival lies in retreating to what is small and personal. It is emotionally accurate. But it also reflects a political shift that worries me. Not the exhaustion itself, but the conclusion that withdrawal is the only sensible response.

@abigailimuria

Abigail Limuria on Instagram: "😊"

The Temptation of Retreating From a Failing State

There is a pattern I’ve watched unfold over the last few years, even decades. When people live through enough institutional failure, something in them shifts. They stop expecting improvement. They start lowering their hopes to avoid further disappointment. Eventually they settle into a quiet rhythm of survival: fix what you can, ignore what you cannot, protect the few things that still make sense. In the short term, that strategy feels strangely liberating. It gives you back a sense of control that the political system has denied you. It allows you to breathe around problems that otherwise feel too vast to confront.

But this “turn inward” doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it sits on top of an entire ideological infrastructure that has, for years, been telling us that we are each a tiny, self-contained project of perseverance. Under neoliberalism, people are trained to think of themselves as micro-capitalists, responsible for optimising their own lives, their own “resilience”, their own marketability, their own mental health. Structural failures are reframed as personal challenges to be overcome through grit, hustle, and a positive mindset. Resilience becomes less about communities resisting injustice and more about individuals adjusting themselves to whatever violence the system throws at them.

What looks like a coping mechanism at the individual level is, at the systemic level, a convenient way to keep things running without ever fixing the underlying machinery. Each time citizens take on responsibilities that should be held by the state, the state absorbs a subtle lesson: that people will cope no matter how badly it fails them. Flood survivors raising their own emergency funds, neighbours organising makeshift security after police refuse to intervene, communities building informal safety nets where public hospitals fall short—all of these acts emerge from necessity, but they also sit perfectly within a broader neoliberal script that celebrates “resilient communities” while quietly withdrawing public support.

The rhetoric of resilience and self-reliance turns predatory at this point: instead of being a language for collective survival and resistance, it becomes a tool for offloading risk downward. What should be read as evidence of systemic breakdown is rebranded as inspiring perseverance; stories that should provoke rage are packaged as feel-good proof that ordinary people can “rise above” anything. In that sense, the shift from public to private, from national responsibility to personal resilience, is not neutral—it is one of the main ways the current order protects itself from being fundamentally questioned.

The Hidden Politics Behind “Just Cope”

The more society adapts to compensate for governmental absence, the more that absence becomes politically invisible. At first it looks like ingenuity: people find workarounds, build informal systems, “get things done” without waiting for the state. Over time, though, these workarounds harden into a new common sense. What used to be understood as a public obligation slowly becomes reimagined as a matter of personal character: if you really cared, you’d organise your own safety, crowdfund your own healthcare, take responsibility for your own mental health.

This is the logic of responsibilisation, the quiet insistence that a “good” citizen is an enterprising self who copes, adapts, and never makes demands. Neoliberal culture wraps this in predatory optimism: it tells people to see their exhaustion as a growth opportunity, their abandonment as a chance to become more “resilient,” their grief as something to be managed through self-care routines rather than collective anger. In that atmosphere, even the language of care is hollowed out; instead of pointing us back to the structures that produce burnout and despair, it redirects us inward, asking us to breathe, meditate, optimise, purchase, and carry on.

Over time, the public loses its sense of what the state ought to provide because everyone has become accustomed to filling those gaps themselves. This is an erosion. And while individuals may feel stronger in their immediate circles, their collective leverage shrinks. Power does not recede alongside public engagement; it simply becomes more insulated, more opaque, and more unaccountable, buffered by a population that has been taught to treat structural breakdown as just another test of personal resilience.

That is why Abigail’s conclusion, however heartfelt, carries a political risk. When she suggests that criticism no longer matters and that our energy is better spent tending to the small things within our reach, she is not just describing a coping strategy, she is helping to naturalise a particular political arrangement: a state that fails, a public that adjusts, and a governing class that learns it can survive crisis after crisis without fundamentally changing. Once failure is accepted as immutable, crisis management stops being about repair and becomes a permanent mode of rule. The normalization of crisis—floods, blackouts, institutional scandals, policy collapses—gradually erodes any sense of what effective, legitimate governance might look like. Instead of asking why institutions keep breaking down, people are encouraged to ask why they themselves are not coping better.

In that climate, legitimacy decays in a strange, uneven way: the state loses moral authority in people’s hearts, but not necessarily its grip on power, because the very people who are disillusioned have also been convinced that withdrawal is the only realistic response. The sentiment may be born from fatigue, but its effect is a quiet endorsement of the idea that we should abandon the public realm because it has abandoned us. And that is precisely how a brittle, crisis-driven order manages to endure: not by convincing people it is just, but by persuading them that anything beyond survival in their own small corner is no longer imaginable.

The New Order Never Really Left

Yet the nation’s problems do not exist in a vacuum. They are the result of deliberate decisions about budgeting, governance, accountability, and power. The underfunded public services, the decaying infrastructure, the indifferent bureaucracies—none of these are acts of fate. They are choices, reinforced over decades, and choices can be changed. But they cannot be changed if those most harmed by them decide that change is no longer worth pursuing. Indonesia’s political history has trained citizens, over generations, to expect little and endure much.

The New Order spent three decades teaching people that the state was not a space of negotiation but a distant, punitive authority; that stability mattered more than justice; that good citizens adapted quietly. As Bourchier shows, this was not merely authoritarian technique but the deliberate reengineering of political subjectivity through the ideology of the “family-state,” which cast society as an organic whole under benevolent paternal leadership. In such a framework, political contestation becomes pathology, and obedience appears natural—a moral duty rather than a loss of rights.

After Reformasi, this legacy never fully dissolved. Power shifted, but the administrative culture—its caution, its opacity, its deep aversion to accountability—remained. The family-state’s conception of citizens as dependents survived in bureaucratic habits that expect compliance and in public attitudes shaped by decades of hierarchical socialization. Decentralisation brought political access closer to the people, but also multiplied sites of patronage and diffused responsibility so thoroughly that failures now feel everywhere and nowhere at once. In that environment, people learn to stop imagining the state as something that could work differently. They learn to cope instead. And coping, repeated long enough, becomes a worldview.

This is not an argument against small acts of care. They matter deeply. They hold communities together in the moments when institutions fail. Indonesia’s social fabric has always relied on gotong royong, mutual aid, informal networks that step in where the formal state falters. But when mutual aid becomes a permanent substitute for public obligation, it stops being a cultural strength and becomes evidence of political abandonment. Reformasi promised the strengthening of democratic institutions, yet the reality for most Indonesians has been a state that expects communities to fill its gaps while oligarchic interests fill its corridors.

The New Order’s organicist ideology also lives on here: citizens are subtly encouraged to understand social problems as familial burdens rather than political failures, reinforcing the idea that solutions must come from community, not from confrontation with authority. In this context, turning inwards—focusing on family, neighbourhood, ritual, and personal stability—feels natural, even necessary. But it also continues the long historical pattern of depoliticisation: the belief that the public realm is inherently dangerous, unchangeable, or irrelevant to everyday survival.

But care should never be mistaken for a sustainable political strategy, nor should it be treated as a replacement for public responsibility. When citizens turn entirely inward, focusing only on their gardens, their families, their private joys, the larger terrain is left undefended. Indonesia’s political elites have always benefited from a population that is exhausted, cautious, or preoccupied with survival. The New Order’s paternalism taught people to distrust dissent; today’s oligarchic democracy benefits from that lingering reflex.

From the bureaucratic labyrinth inherited from colonial rule to the authoritarian disciplining of political imagination in the 1970s and 80s, the message has been consistent: do not expect too much, and do not demand too loudly. That message still echoes today—not through censorship, but through fatigue. Through an accumulation of small disappointments that quietly convinces people that systemic change is impractical, even naïve. And in that resignation, the governing class finds its greatest insulation. The people who benefit from that abdication are rarely the ones suffering from the consequences of government neglect; they are the ones who flourish when public expectations remain low and criticism is dismissed as idealism rather than necessity.

Taking Back What Was Always Ours

To move forward, we need a politics that holds both truths at once: the necessity of caring for the people closest to us and the necessity of refusing to accept systemic failure as something we must simply adapt to. These layers do not cancel each other out; they sustain each other. The intimate work of community-building can coexist with, and even strengthen, the collective insistence that institutions must fulfill their obligations. Indonesia’s history shows that small-scale solidarity has always been a lifeline, but it also shows that solidarity alone has never shifted the architecture of power. Community can nourish political will, but it cannot substitute for it.

What Abigail captures beautifully is the emotional landscape of living under a dysfunctional state. What she underestimates is the cost of surrendering the public sphere to those who have already demonstrated how little regard they have for it. Exhaustion is real; withdrawal feels tempting. And in Indonesia, withdrawal is not just a personal response—it is a historical inheritance. For decades, citizens were taught that safety lay in obedience and that politics was the domain of powerful men, not ordinary people. The New Order’s paternalistic ideology—casting citizens as anak bangsa who must be guided, corrected, disciplined—left behind a quiet skepticism toward public action that persists even today. When people retreat from the political arena, they are not only responding to burnout; they are stepping into a cultural script designed to make retreat feel natural. But if we allow that withdrawal to harden into a worldview, we will wake up one day unable to recognize the line between coping and conceding.

We don’t need to believe we can save the entire nation by ourselves. But we do need to believe that the nation is not beyond saving—and that political collapse should never be met with private acceptance. The work of tending to what is small must continue, but it cannot be the only work we do. The public realm remains ours, even when it feels hostile. History shows that when citizens vacate the public sphere, other forces—oligarchic networks, opportunistic elites, bureaucratic cartels—move quickly to claim it. Authority rarely stays unoccupied. A depoliticised public is not neutral; it becomes the raw material through which unaccountable power grows. Leaving it uncontested only guarantees that it becomes even less hospitable than it already is.

If hope exists at all, it lies not in shrinking our scope of action but in refusing to let exhaustion dictate the limits of what we imagine is possible. Hope is political, not emotional. It expands when people refuse to treat crisis as normal, when they insist that decay is not destiny, and when they recognize that the distance between the world they inhabit and the world they desire is not a reason to retreat but a reason to step forward.