Jakarta – In the past few weeks, leading up to next year's elections we have been presented with Indonesian politics at its most gladiatorial level.

It's a blood sport with very little in the way of rules or regulations and as we ourselves witnessed earlier this week, whatever was left of the rules of the game was dismantled to make way for a vulgar display of power.

Democracy can only work on the assumption that the rules of the game prevail and that everyone is playing by the same rules, that you cannot bend the rules just to win the game. Or worse, change the rules simply because you have the power to do so.

That is exactly what happened earlier this week, when the Constitutional Court issued a ruling that changed the electoral law that had set an age limit for aspiring presidential candidates.

The sad truth is that legal means had been abused long before the court made that decision.

Threats of criminal prosecutions have been bandied about to get politicians into line. Some actually have landed in jail for mounting opposition to the ruling coalition, although some of these politicians did engage in wrongdoing, embezzling funds from the state coffers.

But this should probably not surprise us at all, we have now ended up in a situation where civility and propriety have gone out the window.

After all, this is a political arrangement founded nine years ago on the promise of building more roads, bridges and ports, all the facilities that we thought would solve our most pressing problems; poverty, illiteracy and inequality.

We definitely need roads, bridges and airports to tackle the problem of poverty, but we seem to be forgetting about ways to deal with the poverty of the mind.

What if the problem of errant politicians is simply the result of their lack of exposure to the more refined things in life, like the arts, philosophy and world literature?

What if the poverty of the mind results from their lack of exposure to world literature, the classic works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Eka Kurniawan, Dickens or Tagore?

In that case, these politicians should travel to Bali this week to join the crowd at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, where prose and poetry are being celebrated, where for once instead of talking about politics, folks can discuss ways to make the world a better place through arts and culture.

Man cannot live by bread alone.

Or in the words of modern Chinese literature's dominant figure Lu Xun: "A nation with great physical wealth would be nothing but cannon fodder or gawping spectators, if its people is intellectually feeble."

"And to change their spirit, literature and the arts are the best means to this end," he wrote in his first collection of stories, Outcry.

Source: https://www.thejakartapost.com/opinion/2023/10/21/go-to-ubud.htm