Though drawn from one linguistic tradition, the relevance of these expressions crosses regions, languages and political affiliations. They speak to urgent dilemmas, credentials without learning, speech without meaning, power without influence and efficiency that exploits the weak. They may not offer comfort, but they do offer accuracy.

In today’s Indonesia, titles are conferred, degrees celebrated. Government communication is prolific. Political transitions appear smooth. Platforms promise affordability. On the surface, there is motion, sometimes even applause.

Bureaucratic language projects competence. Economic indicators suggest progress. It all resembles the outer structure of a functioning nation.

But for those living inside the system, those structures often feel vacant. Signs are abundant, but meaning is scarce. Performance abounds, but depth is thin. The rituals remain, yet the substance beneath them has quietly drained.

But that emptiness is not always easy to name. It is not collapse, but drift. Not absence, but substitution. That is why language matters, and why inherited expressions from Javanese wisdom may speak more sharply than imported frameworks.

These four phrases, sarjana tanpa wiyata, ngendika tanpa panggrahita, kuasa tanpa prabawa and meres tanpa deduga, capture not just individual failures, but patterns of erosion that have become normalized across the cultural, political and economic domains of national life.

Sarjana tanpa wiyata (graduates without learning) speaks to the dissonance between title and knowledge. Those who have undertaken serious academic work know that study is not glamorous. It is exhausting and requires solitude, discipline, humility and time.

For doctoral students, each step must be defended, each claim grounded.  That is why it is quietly devastating to witness advanced degrees proliferate among political figures, often obtained through unclear paths, with little trace of intellectual labor.

When academic titles become social capital rather than cultural capital, namely intellectual contribution, it sends a corrosive signal: that appearance is enough and merit can be simulated. It hollows out the value of genuine learning and degrades public trust in academic institutions.

Ngendika tanpa panggrahita (speaking without thought) captures the mood of official discourse. Press conferences are held, statements are issued and media strategies are rehearsed. Yet too often, the words land awkwardly, sparking confusion or unintended backlash.

The recent controversy over the terms rakyat jelata or ndhasmu or kamu gelap or other snide remarks was not simply about word choice. It was about the failure to understand how language functions within power.

The issue is not definition, it is reception. As Marshall McLuhan warned, the medium is the message. When words come from a place of authority, they carry weight far beyond semantics.

Derrida's insights into context, repetition and hierarchy show us that meaning is never neutral. Communication is never technical. It is relational, situated and political. When officials forget this, language becomes performance, not connection. The cost is growing distrust, and the widening of the gap between the state and the citizens.

Kuasa tanpa prabawa (authority without traction) describes the condition of those who inherit the microphone but not the mechanism. Power, too, suffers from this performative drift. So many compete for office, but real decisions are made elsewhere.

What appears as an electoral victory often masks a deeper dependency. In a system where institutions are fragile and political continuity is framed through personalities, influence becomes something to be invoked, not exercised.

This is not a failure of leadership style, it is a structural dislocation between position and consequence. Authority is performed but rarely absorbed.

In one scene from the award-winning movie Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler quietly tells Amon Göth that real power is not in killing, but in choosing not to. It is not the act, but the restraint that defines command. That kind of moral traction, rooted in judgment rather than theatrics, is what has gone missing. Power echoes but does not move.

Meres tanpa deduga (extraction without foresight) names a quieter, more dispersed erosion. The celebration of platform-based business models masks a painful truth, that the burden of efficiency falls not on systems, but on people.

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), small producers, informal sellers, traditional service providers, are forced into a race to the bottom. Prices are slashed to match imports. Margins disappear.

Digital visibility is not power when the platform sets the terms. What looks like inclusion is often a cycle of commodification. The labor is local, but the leverage is not.

Even when small producers innovate, they are often reduced to playing a small role within a larger extraction machine. The irony deepens when these same platforms operate at a loss, fueled by investor speculation, while those who labor within them are left unprotected. This is not market efficiency. It is organized precarity.

Then what? These expressions, when taken together, reveal a deeper crisis, not one of headlines or emergencies, but of systemic erosion with real-life consequences.

Degrees lose their credibility. Public speech loses its meaning. Political leadership loses its independence. Economic participation loses its dignity. Institutions remain but become less able to serve.

This is not collapse, but chronic depletion. And when depletion becomes normal, society adapts to lowered expectations.

Repairing this condition is not cosmetic. It is generational. There is no quick fix for substance loss. The only true solution begins at the root: early childhood. If institutions are hollowed from the top, they must be rebuilt from the foundation.

That foundation is not merely infrastructure, it is moral formation. It is the architecture of mind and heart, shaped through exposure, language, memory and modeled behavior from the earliest years. As my research into neurodevelopment shows, a child’s early environment lays the scaffolding for future discernment, empathy and ethical reasoning. But this work will take time. No policy cycle can contain it. It will require 50 to 75 years of persistent commitment. Two to three generations of investment, humility and reorientation toward long-term public ethics.

And it will require something even harder: repentance. Not simply in the religious sense, but in the civic and cultural sense. A national confession that we have prioritized display over depth and must turn back.

Without that turn, without the choice to begin again at the root, what survives may still resemble a functioning nation but will no longer be able to renew itself.

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The writer is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and an affiliated alumnus of MIT Sloan School of Management.