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All power to the people: Resistance, a civic duty
There can be no reckoning of social order without the deconstruction of systematically imposed constructs and the awakening of society at large.
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Students hold a rally titled Indonesia Gelap (Dark Indonesia) to oppose budget-cutting policies by President Prabowo Subianto in front of the East Java Regional House of Representatives building in Surabaya on Feb. 17, 2025.
(AFP/Juni Kriswanto)
H
umanity, by nature, possesses absolute freedom, subject solely to the dictation of its own conscience, constrained only by individual conviction and confined alone by imagination. There is no force capable of removing a person from this nature if the person has not consented to this dispossession.
Consistent with this reasoning, it can be understood that no mechanism may function without the components that drive it, nor can any structure endure without the support of the pillars that uphold it. Just as the act of yielding authority implies autonomy, so too does the ability to withdraw it.
When the authority to which power has been entrusted begins to abuse this power, it must be recognized that it is not only the right but the civic duty and moral imperative of the people to reclaim this power.
When the culture of a state becomes one of oppression, it must become the tradition of the populace to resist. A political system, like any force, is incapable of compelling its will without the compliance of the public it governs.
This acquiescence may not be expressed through mediums of immediate address, however, the causal behaviors embedded in daily action and discourse are a mode of compliance by which one becomes complicit in the will of the state. Particularly, in constitutionally democratic states where the power of governance is vested in the whim and will of the people, it is through us that power is conferred, and through us that power can be revoked. It is time that our authority is reminded of this.
However, there can be no reckoning of social order without the deconstruction of systematically imposed constructs and the awakening of society at large.
There are multiple modes of dissent through which we express frustration with our state-manufactured circumstances. It is universally understood that to express oneself effectively, our mode of communication must align with that of the other party.
