The Deeply Rooted Disease of Scheming

Scheming in Indonesia is not a modern moral failing but the predictable product of centuries of patronage, weak institutions, and scarcity — and it is sharpest precisely when someone else begins to grow.

The prevalence of political and social “scheming” in Indonesia — transactional politics, backroom deals, and strategic alliances — is not merely a modern moral failing. It is the result of centuries of historical precedent, cultural norms, and economic structures that have made patronage the primary currency of power. When formal institutions are weak or inaccessible, informal maneuvering becomes the most reliable way to survive and to advance.

Understanding this matters, because a problem that looks like a character flaw is usually a system doing exactly what it was built to do.

The Cultural Foundation: Paternalism and Patronage

At the core of Indonesian political culture is a deeply rooted patron–client dynamic. In traditional societies across the archipelago, power was heavily centralized around a paternal figure. A leader provided protection, resources, and access; in return, subordinates offered absolute loyalty and political support.

This dynamic makes politics highly personalized. Instead of organizing around abstract ideological platforms or strict legal frameworks, political maneuvering centers on aligning oneself with the right power broker. Scheming, in this context, is the constant recalculation of alliances — ensuring one remains in a patron’s favor, or secures enough clients to become a patron oneself.

The Historical Blueprint: From Feudalism to the VOC

The mechanics of modern political scheming were laid down long before the Republic of Indonesia existed.

The pre-colonial era. Nusantara’s ancient kingdoms operated on patrimonial systems in which all land and wealth theoretically belonged to the ruler, who then distributed them to loyal elites. Access to the economy required proximity to the crown, making court intrigue and scheming a necessity for prosperity.

The colonial era. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) operated through local aristocrats (bupati), demanding quotas of crops. To meet those demands while enriching themselves, local leaders exploited their own people, creating a dual layer of extortion. The VOC itself was famously hollowed out by the rampant internal corruption of its own underpaid officials — setting a long-lasting bureaucratic precedent that blurred the lines between public duty and private enrichment.

Institutionalized Patronage

During the long authoritarian decades of the late twentieth century, patronage hardened from an improvisation into a system. Power was consolidated through a highly centralized and predictable machinery of favor. State resources, monopolies, and government contracts were distributed along a familiar triad: the military apparatus, the technocrats, and a small circle of business cronies — often conglomerates, and often the ruling family itself.

Political survival during this era meant mastering the art of the backroom deal. The system was stable because the scheming was orchestrated from the top down. Bureaucrats and business people knew exactly who to align with, and what transactions were required, to secure a position.

The Decentralization of Scheming

When the authoritarian regime eventually fell, the democratizing era that followed successfully opened up the political system — but it also democratized the culture of scheming.

Instead of a single dominant patron in Jakarta, power dispersed to political parties, regional heads, and local parliaments. Because political campaigns in Indonesia’s direct democracy are extraordinarily expensive, candidates often cannot afford to run on their own. They are forced into opaque transactions with wealthy oligarchs and business backers. Once in office, the politician must manipulate budgets, issue corporate permits, or draft favorable regulations to repay those political debts.

What appears from the outside as chaotic or corrupt scheming is, fundamentally, a rational response to how the environment operates. When the formal system fails to provide a level playing field — and when navigating the bureaucracy or running for office requires massive capital — ideological governance is quickly discarded in favor of pragmatism and strategic alliances.

The Structural Roots

If tactical, grassroots interventions feel too small for a problem this deeply embedded, it helps to look at the macro-level reality of Indonesian society. When the state and the law cannot be fixed, and when surface-level campaigning barely scratches the surface, change happens only when the underlying social and economic structures shift on their own.

If structural reform is off the table, the deep roots of scheming are only ever disrupted by broader, generational shifts. Here is what actually alters an entrenched culture of patronage over time.

The rise of a professional middle class and urbanization. Patronage thrives on scarcity and dependency — when people rely heavily on local strongmen, family networks, or feudal bosses just to get a job, a permit, or basic protection. As urbanization expands and a more independent, white-collar or service-sector middle class grows, people rely less on traditional patrons. When citizens earn a living independent of state favors or local bosses, the leverage of political scheming starts to dry up.

Generational turnover and shifting worldviews. Deeply rooted political cultures are often sustained by generational habits in which hierarchy and compliance are valued above all else. As younger generations — digitally connected, exposed to global standards, and less tethered to traditional feudal deference — step into communities, civil society, and local leadership, the social tolerance for backroom dealing slowly erodes. They may not fix the national laws, but they change what is socially acceptable among peers.

Economic diversification beyond resource extraction. Much of Indonesia’s regional scheming is fueled by money from natural resources — palm oil, mining, local budget concessions — controlled by local elites. When local economies diversify into sectors that require transparent, rule-based markets to stay competitive — technology, manufacturing, specialized services — the old style of opaque, transactional deal-making becomes an economic liability. Business owners eventually realize that scheming is bad for business growth.

Crisis-driven exhaustion. Historically, deeply entrenched political systems rarely reform gracefully; they usually hit a wall of exhaustion. When the cost of chronic inefficiency, environmental degradation, or infrastructure failure becomes too high for everyday life, public fatigue reaches a tipping point. Even without institutional reform, a society can collectively decide that the transactional status quo is simply too expensive to maintain.

When a problem is this deeply rooted, you don’t “fix” it with a program or a campaign. You starve it out by changing the economic and social soil it grows in — letting modernity, generational change, and economic evolution slowly render the old ways obsolete.

What It Looks Like From the Inside

Zooming in to NCO Café, our informal education public space movement, we have experienced at least three major schemes. The first came in 2023, when our co-founder was influenced to step out and simply went “missing” without notice. Then, in 2025, a competitor disguised as a loyal regular spent a whole year planning to finally pull our head barista and our customers away from us in 2026. Lastly, approaching the end of 2026, after we had grown a handful circle of regulars, someone again influenced that very circle to leave.

Fortunately, our North Star isn’t profit or traditional business success, and we genuinely do not see anyone as competitors as we are operating on an entirely different plane of purpose. It renders such scheming to hit differently. It is not a material loss; it is a collision between a high-optimism, idealistic purpose-driven movement and an environment wired for zero-sum survival.

The Scarcity Mindset vs. Generative Purpose

When we look at why scheming becomes so rampant precisely when others experience significant growth, it exposes the mechanics of how a scarcity-driven culture responds to abundance or momentum.

In an environment shaped by deep-seated scarcity, people are conditioned to believe that success is a fixed pie. When they see someone else — someone generating real growth, building a loyal community, or moving with clear purpose — their immediate internal calculation is not inspired collaboration. It is competition and threat assessment.

The zero-sum reflex. Because the surrounding culture teaches that power, influence, and success must be taken from someone else, growth can be automatically perceived by others as a challenge to their status.

Exploiting the optimist. High optimism and a purpose-driven approach often look like vulnerability to a transactional mindset. People steeped in scheming view trust not as a bond to be honored, but as an asset to be leveraged. They assume that if you aren’t playing the cutthroat game for pure profit, you must be naive.

Why Growth Attracts the Schemers

Paradoxically, the more authentic your growth and the more magnetic your community, the more flies it draws.

Riding the wave. Many people lack the internal friction or vision to build something from scratch, but they are skilled at scheming. Infiltrating a healthy, growing circle like a Trojan horse is a shortcut to acquiring a community, a reputation, or a platform they could never build on their own.

The incompatibility of frameworks. When you operate with a mindset of purpose and community, you expect others to share a baseline of mutual respect. When schemers enter that space with entirely different, hidden metrics of success, it creates a blind spot. You aren’t looking for betrayal because you wouldn’t operate that way, which makes their long-game maneuvers so disorienting when they finally drop the mask.

If we are building from a place of creation, while the culture around is still trapped in extraction, then when we grow, we illuminate that gap.

And that gap is not very pleasant to see.