Diana Susanti’s original blogpost in collaboration with Angga Bassoni Al Barkah & Ayisha Abdul Basith
Assalaamu ‘Alaikum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh
Al Ain, 13 May 2025 | In recent conversations surrounding the social and psychological conditions of Javanese society, a familiar refrain echoes with remarkable frequency: “As Javanese people rooted in Kejawen tradition…” This prefatory clause is meant to anchor contemporary Javanese behavior within the context of a long-standing spiritual and philosophical framework known as Kejawen. It is a gesture toward depth, a bid for cultural authenticity. Yet, the continued use of Kejawen as a catch-all explanation for modern Javanese actions—particularly those marked by alienation, hyper-capitalist anxiety, and spiritual disconnection—is increasingly out of step with historical and material realities. Far from being a living cultural compass, Kejawen today functions largely as a symbol, often invoked without substance to explain behaviors that are better understood through the lens of post-colonial dislocation and neoliberal transformation.
To clarify: Kejawen is real, rich, and worth honoring. It is a deeply syncretic spiritual worldview unique to the Javanese people, shaped by centuries of engagement with animism, Hindu-Buddhism, Islam (especially Sufism), and local cosmological systems. At its core, Kejawen emphasizes inner harmony, spiritual balance (rukun), and a meditative relationship with nature and the unseen. But what Kejawen is not—and never was—is a framework for market fundamentalism, performative religiosity, or unchecked individualism. In fact, Kejawen is antithetical to much of what defines contemporary urban Javanese life.
And yet, time and again, AI models like Grok or public commentators trot out Kejawen as the master key to decipher why, say, a middle-class Javanese worker is obsessively climbing the corporate ladder, immersed in a hyper-consumerist lifestyle, and experiencing quiet despair. It’s a narrative move that’s both lazy and insidious: lazy because it bypasses historical complexity, and insidious because it romanticizes cultural identity in service of neoliberal narratives of “resilient tradition.”
If one wants to understand the root causes of the existential weirdness experienced by many Javanese today, one must first look at the historical trauma of colonization. The Dutch colonial regime not only extracted economic value through brutal forced cultivation systems (Cultuurstelsel), but also restructured social hierarchies, eroded indigenous power systems, and disrupted traditional knowledge networks. The colonial government favored “adat” only insofar as it could be codified and controlled; the living, fluid aspects of traditions like Kejawen were rendered suspicious, irrational, or backward.
Post-independence, the Indonesian nation-state did little to restore these indigenous epistemologies. The rise of Suharto’s New Order (Orde Baru) in the mid-1960s introduced a new ideological project centered on economic development, political stability, and centralized authority. Spiritual traditions like Kejawen were pushed to the margins, often deemed “unorthodox” or “syncretic” in a pejorative sense, especially within the framework of state-endorsed religion (Agama). At the same time, the Javanese people were cast as the obedient ideological subjects of development: disciplined, modest, harmonious—ideal workers in the service of a burgeoning capitalist economy.
This authoritarian modernization project had profound psychological consequences. The Javanese inner world, once navigated through layered cosmological and spiritual grammars, was increasingly flattened by the demands of the state and the market. Traditional conceptions of selfhood rooted in communal responsibility and mystical introspection were replaced by more transactional, performative identities. Urbanization, education reform, and the penetration of global consumer culture only accelerated this shift.
In this light, the alienation observed in contemporary Javanese society is not the product of a distorted Kejawen, but the symptom of its widespread displacement. It is not that Kejawen has somehow mutated into neoliberalism; it’s that Kejawen has been systematically sidelined and replaced by economic and ideological forces fundamentally at odds with it.
There is a certain irony, then, in invoking Kejawen to explain behaviors that reflect its very erasure. When AI models or cultural commentators gesture toward Kejawen as an explanatory device, they are often doing so not out of cultural fluency, but out of algorithmic pattern-matching. In effect, Kejawen becomes a kind of mystical placeholder, a way of avoiding more uncomfortable discussions about capitalism, colonization, and ideological indoctrination. This is cultural gaslighting in slow motion: the use of a revered tradition to mask the mechanisms of its suppression.
To meaningfully understand contemporary Javanese subjectivity, we must look beyond the surface symbols. We must interrogate how power, history, and capital shape not only behavior but perception itself. The spiritual disconnection and social fragmentation felt by many today are not aberrations within a Kejawenic worldview—they are what happens when such a worldview is gutted, co-opted, or buried under decades of developmentalist dogma.
In the end, the task is not to nostalgically recover a “pure” Kejawen, nor to fetishize it as a spiritual cure-all. Rather, it is to recognize that the modern Javanese self exists in the wreckage of multiple epistemic ruptures—colonial, nationalist, and capitalist. Understanding this context is the first step toward articulating a decolonial framework of identity that honors tradition without romanticizing it, and critiques modernity without surrendering to cynicism.
Only then can we begin to speak of the Javanese condition with honesty—and perhaps, even, with hope.
No ivory with no cracks
Wa Allahu ‘Alam bi Sawaff, Hasbi Rabbi Jalallah.
Wa Assalaamu ‘Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh
