"Political expert from 'Uncle Sam' was observing the candidate debate in Indonesia, and was asked about the differences between Democracy and Dictatorship, here's the Q&A:Q: What is democracy?A: Imagine that you have children, your distant neighbors have children, your close neighbors have children, all of them are planning to sell bananas. Your children, you neighbors children, far and near, are allowed to shout and offering their bananas to anyone and everyone.Q: And what about Dictatorship?A: Imagine that you have children, your distant neighbors have children, your close neighbors have children, all of them are planning to sell bananas. Afraid of being imprisoned and probably their bananas will be confiscated, your neighbours children, can't even talk either selling bananas.Your children, are allowed to say anything they want and offering their bananas to anyone without worrying about being jailed and confiscated. However, they can't avoid to 'slip on banana peel'.""Why do 'term limits' found in presidential and semi-presidential systems, show us that they are restricted on a number of terms, or in another words, they—and we do too—are living in a short term world?" said Sansevieria while putting together some pictures on the wall. Then she pointed at a picture and said, "This Michael Julius Motta's portrait, tells us that Humans have always been short term thinkers and doers. And that’s a good thing. If early humans hadn’t asked questions like 'Where’s my next meal?' or 'Where will I sleep tonight?', our species wouldn’t have lasted very long. Early humans were short term people because they had no choice.We, whom Darwin called 'Modern Apes', however, do have a choice. We needn’t concern ourselves with day-to-day survival. Instead, we can concern ourselves with the year-to-year and the decade-to-decade. Yet, so few of us do. Almost everyone we know has aspirations they will accomplish 'someday, when I have more time.'A sad truth of the human condition: Most people die regretting things they thought about doing but never actually did. Another sad truth: Each of us thinks we are the exception.Society judges people not by their long term pursuit of highly-personal goals, but instead by their short term pursuit of goals more societally acceptable. The world expects us to be short term and is surprised when we aren’t. When we act long term, we get strange looks and a million other signals from society telling us we’re living life all wrong.Someone who actively resists the gravitational pull of the short term world and takes strategic actions in pursuance of long term goals, and who does so consistently is, according to Motta, a long term person.Of course, we can’t leave the short term world behind, nor do we want to. Much of the short term world is fantastic. The ability to be spontaneous and live in the moment, these are some of the best parts of the human experience. Life often requires us to be short term. We must put food on the table tonight, not a year from now.A long term person, cultivates and develops these following three characteristics. Discipline: Doing the long term work every day. Finding reasons, not excuses; Grit: Maintaining a long term focus even when society demands conformity; Self—awareness: Discipline and grit without self-awareness risks making us a long term person in the wrong direction. We must know ourselves and what we want from this world before we can go out and get it.The bottom line is: Who we are in the short term is who we become in the long term. Unless we align our day-to-day, week-to-week actions with the month-to-month, year-to-year person we want to be, we will not become that person. If you can’t do it today, you won’t be able to do it tomorrow, and if you can’t do it tomorrow, you never will. A long term person starts today. A long term person starts now.To get where you want to go, you first have to assess where you’re currently going. Your current short term actions are leading you in a long term direction. Unless you identify that direction, you can’t change it. Most people have numerous aspirations, some out in the open, others yet to escape their lips, many hidden in the subconscious.Our long term selves are well-served by incorporation of routines that improve mental and physical health. Even if none are directly linked to the achievement of any one specific goal, they maximize our resources and improve the efficacy of our systems. You need not study quantum physics, run marathons, or become a Buddhist monk, but simple steps can strengthen your most important faculties.While we’re completing our most important tasks, the short term world lives on. It has not forgotten about us. We must face the reality that we have no choice but to keep our long term and short term balls in the air. We must be good spouses, parents, and friends. We must get our oil changed and reply to this e-mail and that text. And we must fit time in for our passion projects.Portrait by Roman Krznaric tells us other perspective about long term - short term world. Matto tells us about how to see ourselves, while Krznaric suggests us about how to think long term in a short-term world.Perhaps, when we have ambition to ‘be of some help to humankind’ and to leave a positive legacy for future generations, we straighten out our intentions with asking a question: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’We are the inheritors of gifts from the past. Consider the immense legacy left by our ancestors: those who sowed the first seeds in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago, who cleared the land, built the waterways and founded the cities where we now live, who made the scientific discoveries, won the political struggles and created the great works of art that have been passed down to us. As Indonesian, we would agree that our 'founding parents' have left us good things, even though almost all of their names have been forgotten by history. We seldom stop to think about how they have transformed our lives.Becoming a good ancestor is a formidable task. Our chances of doing so will be determined by the outcome of a struggle for the human mind currently taking place on a global scale between the opposing forces of short-term and long-term thinking.At this moment in history the dominant force is clear: we live in an age of pathological short-termism. Politicians can barely see beyond the next election or the latest opinion poll or tweet. Businesses are slaves to the next quarterly report and the constant demand to ratchet up shareholder value. Markets spike then crash in speculative bubbles driven by millisecond-speed algorithms. Nations bicker around international conference tables, focused on their near-term interests, while the planet burns and species disappear. Our culture of instant gratification makes us overdose on fast food, rapid-fire texting and the ‘Buy Now’ button. ‘The great irony of our time,’ writes the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, ‘is that even as we are living longer, we are thinking shorter.’ This is the age of the tyranny of the now.Thus, how will the people of the future remember us? Most of us hope that our actions and influence will somehow ripple into the years ahead, ensuring that the fire of our own life keeps burning beyond the inevitability of death. Few people truly wish to be forgotten forever.But we choose to express our legacy in very different ways. Some pursue an egocentric form of legacy, hoping to be remembered and glorified for their personal achievements. That was the approach of Alexander the Great, who had statues of himself built throughout his empire, including at the sacred Greek site of Olympia. The legacy he sought was to be venerated in perpetuity for his heroic actions and brilliant conquests, and to be memorialised like a god – unsurprising for someone who claimed to be a direct descendant of Zeus. Today’s corporate oligarchs who use their philanthropic largesse to have buildings, football stadiums and museum wings named after themselves have similar ambitions.A more common aspiration is to leave a familial legacy, typically in the form of an inheritance written into a will for children, grandchildren or extended family and ranging from money and property to precious family heirlooms. It is the kind of legacy valued by aristocrats who want to keep their landed estate within the family bloodline, in the hope of leaving enough money for their children to have more opportunities in life than they did. For many people, it is less important to leave material possessions than to pass down their values and culture, whether in the form of religious beliefs, native languages or family traditions.If we truly wish to become good ancestors, we need to expand our conception of legacy and think of it not just as a route to personal glory or as a bequest for our offspring, but as a practice of everyday life that benefits all future people. We need to get better at imagining ourselves when we are much older, and that this would somehow be a stepping stone to caring about future generations.A legacy is not something that we leave but something we grow throughout our lives. It is not just a bequest written into a will, but a daily practice. We grow our legacy as parents and friends, as workers and citizens, as creators and activists and as members of communities. It is about being mindful of the consequences of our actions into the distant future, whether through the way we shop or the way we vote. It is about passing on a world that is fit for the flourishing of life. It is about planting acorns in the ground on behalf of those yet to come.Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me? We are now faced with one of the most urgent social questions of the twenty-first century: what obligations and responsibilities do we have to the generations who will succeed us? If we have an obligation not to plant a bomb on a train that would harm a child now, we have the same obligation not to do so if it was timed to go off in ten minutes, or ten days or even ten years from now.If we think back to our own forebears, there are many things that we might wish they had never passed on to us, from the inheritance of colonial-era feudalism and patriarchal attitudes that still have a hold in so many countries, to the environmental impacts of an industrial system based on fossil fuels. If we would wish that our ‘bad ancestors’ had not left us such legacies, what grounds do we have for passing on a similarly negative inheritance to the future, whether in the form of the ecological damage we cause, the potential risks of new technologies or the thoughtless dumping of nuclear waste? After all, we wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of such an inheritance ourselves. The Baton ensures that we are mindful about the consequences of our actions, and is among our best guides for becoming good ancestors. We can also think about it in relation to positive actions, so we make sure to pass on the public health institutions or great works of art and literature left to us by previous generations.While we cannot change the path dependency of the short term world, we can change the path dependency of our long term lives. We can be the ones who take advantage of the increased availability of resources. We can turn commuting time into a side project. We can conduct virtual meetings with colleagues from the comfort of our home office. We can use Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and whoever else comes, to help us be long term versions of ourselves. But we have to start now. The longer we wait, the more entrenched the dependency becomes. Before you know it, you will be one of the many on the sidelines, wishing they’d played. Or worse, you will be one of the many lying in their last bed, wishing they’d lived. When you pursue your long term interests, you are being your authentic self. Becoming a long term person is nothing more than becoming who you are.So now, we move on to the photo display by Alexander Baturo. The portrait tells us about our question at the very beginning of this session, about 'term limits'. Between 1960 and 2010, from Latin America to post-Soviet Eurasia, out of two hundred term-bounded presidents that have served their terms, more than a quarter have managed to extend their stay in office beyond constitutionally mandated periods in one way or another. Many ambitious presidents throughout the world strive to increase their power and control the executive, the legislative and judiciary branches of their nations, and to preside over enforcement agencies that make it possible to extend these leaders' remit into all corners of public and private life. Yet, if these leaders have to surrender all these powers and step down, as stipulated by presidential term limits—an institution that prescribes the maximum length of tenure that a president can serve in office—then dictators they are not, so term limits are not compatible with absolute power.Indeed, as the eminent scholar of democracy Juan Linz underscored, one of the defining characteristics of democracy is that it is government pro tempore, and authoritarianism is the one that is 'forever'. During the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt one of the key demands of pro-democracy protesters, eager to leave decades of one-man rule in the past, was to impose mandatory term limits on future presidents. Yet, in a never-ending cycle of history repeating itself, just as the long-standing rulers in the North Africa were departing from the scene, other national leaders—Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Daniel Ortega—were implementing personal designs in their own quests for political immortality.Term limits have a long history, just as the numerous attempts to circumvent them do, and remain at the center of our understanding how many political regimes across the world function. The names of Napoleon III of France, Porfirio Díaz of Mexico, or Juan Perón of Argentina, who were elected for limited periods, became 'indispensable,' then overturned limitations on the duration of their mandates.Many presidents attempt to rule by decree, diminish the power of parliaments or replace constitutional courts' judges with their own supporters, and they surely encounter virulent criticism and opposition. Yet, no other institutional changes provoke as much debate and opposition as meddling with term limits. Consider the failed attempt to prolong his stay in power by President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999–2007) of Nigeria. The president's bid was backed by supporters who wanted him to complete his economic reforms as well as, allegedly, by a group of businessmen with close links to the president who benefited from rent-seeking.Monetary and personal motives to remain in office—the value of holding political office for individual presidents—depend on the income-generating capacity of that office, in contrast to potential income after leaving it, as well as on personal concerns over future immunity and status. The larger magnitude of spoils from the political office and the lower probability of retaining these spoils and immunity after exit from office increase the likelihood that a president will try to personalize his or her regime and extend tenure. The stakes of losing office for a president in a poor, corrupt country are much higher than for a president in an industrialized democracy.In the next session, we'll see that Presidents who are able to extend their stay, usually have personal control over the president's own party, a larger number of effective legislative parties, a weaker legislative opposition, and judiciary that is not independent from governmental interference. Bi 'idhnillah."While waiting for the next session, Sansevieria sang,Kita bicara dalam bahasa cinta[We speak in the language of love]tanpa suara, tanpa sepatah kata[without a sound, without a word]Pelukan asmara mengungkapkan semua[Amorous embrace says it all]tanpa suara, tanpa kata-kata *)[without a sound, without a word]
Citations & References:
- Michael Julius Motta Ph.D., How to be a Long Term Person in a Short Term World, 2017, Amazon-Kindle Edition
- Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World, 2020, Pinguin Random House
*) "Bahasa Cinta" written by Oddie Agam
