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unisia. Egypt. Libya. Bahrain. Yemen. Syria. The riots that fanned across Britain. The “Occupy” movement in 30 countries. The demonstrations in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. The migrations of people fleeing their traditional homes in Africa. The “boat people” who continue to risk their lives in seas around the world. The anticorruption crusaders unified by Anna Hazare all over India.

The list goes on. The one common thread? Desperate people, everywhere. Today is Day 3 of 2012. What have we learnt from a tumultuous 2011? Very little, apparently. The army in Egypt seem to think they can hijack the revolution. The Assad brothers are gambling at the sectarian roulette table. The English are still focused on the symptoms and not the disease. The supposedly left-of-center Obama administration has joined the extreme-right in discrediting the motley crew of “Occupiers”. The EU is determined to save the euro with the have-nots alone paying the price of austerity. Much of Africa remains in darkness, without hope. The leaky boats continue to plough their inhuman trade. And the Indian parliament has failed to pass the one bill that most people want but nobody will get.

That’s the bottom line, for the human species. Whichever way you look at it, whatever your ideological bent or religious persuasion, the common link for protests the world over is desperation. And some of those desperate people have had enough, many more are getting angrier by the day. When you remember that more than half the world’s population lives in varying degrees of pain, you realize there is good reason for anger to pour out onto the streets, for desperation to climb into leaky boats. Building over time, the pent-up steam is now coming to the fore. In an Internet world of social networks and citizen journalists, one group of desperate people is inspiring others across the globe.

But the politicians and the businessmen are carrying on. It’s business as usual, with some occasional lip service to calm the angry mobs. Very few seem to really care about what the overwhelming majority think or feel. The universal culture of consumerism has consumed everyone, top to bottom, from the West to the East. The credit card is god, at personal and national levels. While some of us are living on borrowed money and borrowed time, the rest of us are standing in line for our own opportunities to grab what we can. Or so it seemed in recent years. But 2011 saw different people with different catalysts united in their desire to express their desperation, their anger at the old order and the old paradigms. Yet, very few at the top have accepted the blindingly obvious. Communism is dead. Capitalism is dying.

It is time for a new world ideology to sweep the world. Capitalism as it is practiced in much of the developed democracies of the West is virtually bankrupt, both financially and morally. Developing democracies like India and Indonesia are plagued by systemic and endemic corruption, the ugly nexus of big business and big politics paying scant respect to the voter.

Only in places like China, Vietnam and Singapore does a distinct brand of “authoritarian capitalism” flourish today. If that’s the best we can come up with, we need to look again. And perhaps the best places to go looking are Scandinavia, Canada and Australia. It is in these countries, among the world’s richest, that we will find the most caring of social structures. Not perfect, not nearly. But that’s where the best building blocks of a democratic and egalitarian society are institutionalized for the world to see.

What is it that people everywhere appear to be seeking? Quite simply, it is social justice. Or a reasonable attempt at fostering a society that seems to care about its fellow citizens, privileged and under-privileged alike. We cannot continue as before, with market forces dictating who survives and who falls by the wayside. It’s just that our leaders aren’t listening, our philosophers aren’t screaming loud enough. Here too in Indonesia, the voice of the
silent majority is asking to be heard.

As in recent years, eight out of 10 Indonesians now think “the gap between rich and poor is growing”. This is despite an economy that has seen unemployment go down and consumer confidence go up, to record levels. It is the dazzling inequality that has become increasingly difficult to stomach in silence. What Indonesia’s elite appear to have forgotten is the rage that overthrew a dictatorship not so long ago. The military displayed their collective wisdom then, they continue to do so with laudable maturity now. Nobody should take anybody for granted. The winds of change are growing stronger, all across the globe.

That Indonesians are instinctively a caring people is easy to see. A number on the rise, now nine out of 10, think that “it is the government’s duty to support those who can’t find work”.

In other words, “market forces” and “survival of the fittest” are phrases that are acceptable only to the privileged few, not the teeming masses. Nobody would quarrel with the concept of risk and reward, nobody would want to douse the spirit of the entrepreneur. But it’s a concrete jungle out there and we aren’t exactly animals anymore.

The opinions expressed are my own. The conclusions are based on Roy Morgan Single Source, the country’s largest syndicated survey with over 26,000 Indonesian respondents annually, projected to reflect almost 90 percent of the population over the age of 14.

The writer can be contacted at debnath.guharoy@roymorgan.com.