Indonesia's pathway to power in 300 years
What does it take to transform Indonesia into a global superpower empire?
I grappled with some version of this question since 2017 when I had much free time after finishing undergraduate (Empire-Building (1/7): Bootstrapping). Now I am five years wiser (I hope) and once again in a quite relaxed environment so I can pick up where I have left off during this 2 year vacation.
How much time do we need? Qin Dynasty unified China in a generation, but the preparation for Qin’s state machinery goes back to six generations before. Probably they took around 150 years. US has been around for roughly 240 years and had been quite an isolationist state for the earlier half portion or so. So to be conservative, I would 2x China’s figure and put 300 years as our runway.
Qin Shi Huang - The Rise and Fall of the First Emperor of China:
(There’s also a manga about Qin’s China Unification that has been ongoing since my college days: Kingdom - sometimes I was so engrossed I can spend probably 12 hours in one day reading it, imagining what principles that I can translate to modern times for path to power either at individual level or nation-state level.)
Coincidentally, the theme of my first Friday prayer khutbah / sermon in Harvard was that Muslims need to be super long-term thinker. The Ustadz was citing examples that Ramadhan programs in universities like Harvard is not an annual one-off thing, but it is a 10-year program. He said to the jamaah that if needed, Muslims should “create 100-year plan that will blow people’s mind” for their life’s work. Amazing. So let’s do it.
Now, 300 years is an insane length of time. We will probably have climate collapse, demographic collapse, collapse of post-WWII world order as we know it, a couple of revolutions here and there, unimaginable black swan events, AGI might take off unexpectedly, and many more. This can be an ample opportunity and is a sufficient time window for empires to rise and fall, and world leadership to rotate across nations. Indonesia need to be on top of its game, and its future elites need to buckle up and be astronomically better than our predecessors.
I don’t think many people have thought this much, so there’s not much playbook here. So I mostly rely on first principles thinking and integrate / synthesize disparate sources. If readers have any useful resource, I would be happy if you share those resources for additional references.
What do we need to do within the next 300 years? We can attempt to frame and model what we need in an empire in “building blocks”, “components”, or “stacks”. My current thinking on those stacks:
Compass: We need elites / leaders with the right value system and utility function to paint visions for multiple areas, break those visions down to their most granular steps, and organize whatever resources they have access to towards their fullest yield
Talent pool: We need to identify talents and surface them, structure meritocratic systems where they can grow to be hyper-competent operators, and deploy them to critical area for building an empire
Capital base: We need visionary oligarchs who can go beyond the wealth defense / wealth preservation mentality, provide flexible capital to invest resources to advance our scientific and industrial frontiers
Winning coalition: We need significant & reliable power bases - voters or other types of constituents - to derive mandate and provide justification to mobilize nation state-level of resources, and to allow more breathing room / flexible trade-off elasticity between policies to ensure political survival vs policies to advance the long term mission
Enduring institutions: We need robust institutions and handover protocols to continue the work across generations and immortalize the mission
Foreign policy framework: We need a way to convert internal national resources to consolidate our sphere of influence, impose our will to other players, and do power projections globally
Let’s dive in one by one
Compass: Designing value system and recalibrate utility function
My theory is that some people are much more capable in shaping the world than others. Let’s use the term “elite” in its broadest definition. What kind of value system and utility function that they adopt and lived is very important because those will affect what kind of world to shape.
Because elite competes so much with each other, they have tendencies to want what other people want - mimetic desires. This inhibits independent thinking, and the process can start early in the education system.
College as an incubator of Girardian terror
In the US, where I attended college, nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high school at age 18. When they start school, few people have a clear sense of the career path they’ll set on; it’s rare to meet a person who has high confidence of what they’ll end up doing, and even rarer to see someone who actually follows that plan. Instead, people happily confess that they don’t know what they’ll do, and that they’ll figure it out by trying different classes and by joining clubs, sports teams, fraternities, and so on.
None of this is bad, really. Unless you’re a Girardian.
It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other. By construction, whatever distinctions any does have are usually earned through brutal, zero-sum competitions. These tournament-type distinctions include: SAT scores at or near perfection; being a top player on a sports team; gaining master status from chess matches; playing first instrument in state orchestra; earning high rankings in Math Olympiad; and so on, culminating in gaining admission to a particular college.
Once people enter college, they get socialized into group environments that usually continue to operate in zero-sum competitive dynamics. These include orchestras and sport teams; fraternities and sororities; and many types of clubs. The biggest source of mimetic pressures are the classes. Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes; those seeking distinction throw themselves into the hardest classes, or seek tutelage from star professors, and try to earn the highest grades.
There’s very little external intermediation, instead all competitive dynamics are internally mediated. The prizes are so obvious. The big companies that come to career fairs soothingly assure high-status jobs; the speakers at convocation tell us that we too will become as successful as them one day; our peers hold leadership positions at clubs, get internships at exciting companies, and earn those chances to have lunch with the university’s president.
The lack of external mediation explains why objects of desire on campus can be seen to have such high worth. And why certain leadership positions on campus are heavily fought over, even though they don’t seem to have much influence. It also helps to explain why so many people enter into only a handful of fields.
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“I think one challenge a lot of business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hothouse environment for a few years—at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that they largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley expect for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity.”
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If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?
I want to make a point that I’ve brought up once before: Because acts of youth are more easily recalled, our future elites will be made up of people who’ve managed to keep their records unsullied. What happens when most records of our life are accessible via Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or blogs? I think that makes it so that our future leaders will be selected for whether they were willing to be really boring in their 20s, who have no recorded indiscretions that might derail a Senate confirmation. Are these the people we want to be governed by?
I liked this piece by Mihir Desai: “The Trouble with Optionality,” published in the Harvard Crimson: “The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
“This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up.”
If elites focus too much on the tournaments, they will have no time or inclinations to develop a proper value system , as illustrated by Mitt Romney’s example below. This is too funny and hits close to home because now I have the same routine that Romney also had.
How Harvard Shaped Mitt Romney
Unlike George W. Bush, who was a year behind him in business school and was immortalized in the yearbook blowing a huge bubble of gum, Mr. Romney had limited interest in socializing. (The two barely met, but if Mr. Romney had known where Mr. Bush “was gonna go, I would have been on him like white on rice,” he later told The Atlantic.)
And unlike Barack Obama, who attended Harvard Law School more than a decade later, Mr. Romney was not someone who fundamentally questioned how the world worked or talked much about social or policy topics. Though the campus pulsed with emotionally charged political issues, none more urgent than the Vietnam War, Mr. Romney somehow managed to avoid them.
“Mitt’s attitude was to work very hard in mastering the materials and not to be diverted by political or social issues that were not relevant to what we were doing,” said Mark E. Mazo, a former law school study partner.
Instead, Mr. Romney threw his energy into being the best. Nearly all business school students formed study groups to help them digest the constant flow of cases, but Mr. Romney recruited a murderers’ row of some of the most distinguished students in the class. “He and I said, hey, let’s handpick some superstars,” said Howard Serkin, a classmate.
Every day for an hour, the all-male group — there were relatively few women in the program back then — sat at a semicircular table outside the classroom and briefed one another on the reading material. It was an exercise in mutual protection, since any of them could be called on in class and their performance would affect their grades. Mr. Romney served as a kind of team captain, the other members said, pushing and motivating the others.
“He wanted to make straight A’s,” Mr. Serkin said. “He wanted our study group to be No. 1.” Sometimes Mr. Romney arrived early to run his numbers a few extra times. And if his partners were not prepared, “he was not afraid of saying: ‘You’re letting us down. We want to be the best,’ ” Mr. Serkin added
Two pieces above originated from US higher education system. In Indonesia, we have the opportunity to catch these mechanics before it seeps to much in our elites. Our elite composition and production process might be different now (fewer Ivy League aristocrats, more heirs of New Order elites / extractive resource barons?), but we can start to think what other mechanism that we are having now and we will have later and correct for those.
Article below provides amazing perspective on how we can start to plan what kind of world we want to build.
There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. This is actually a consequence of a fairly general theorem about how to find treasure in complex search spaces: The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.
The key implication is that while you have not yet found the unique opportunity that will be the engine and purpose of your empire, you have to adjust your sense of value. Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.
Working even a good job cramps your sense of possibility, imposes narrow objectives, and eats away at the little things that could grow into big things if they weren’t so oppressed by the rigors of existing structure. I’ve seen this with my friends, in how they are full of ideas and adventurous spirit a few months after I convince them to quit their jobs. The world is full of ideas and opportunities to explore, but it takes time outside of structure to even adjust your eyes to the landscape of possibility. You are cramped by your job, unable to make the class of investments that is necessary for a life beyond the existing tracks.
If your role in the universe is structured work within order found and built by someone else, those off-road investments are pointless. This conventional work is usually more immediately valuable than anything you could do on your own and it does not require much open-ended exploratory leisure. This efficient pursuit of predictable value is the quiet dignity of the mass of working people. But if we are to solve the bigger structural, spiritual, and intellectual problems which aren’t addressed by existing institutions, someone needs to be exploring off of the established road, where there is a high probability of failing to accomplish anything at all, and a significant probability of discovering and exploiting the next big breakthroughs.
This is part of why we need an active leisure class in society. Productive exploration requires the application of skilled personal judgment to chasing hunches and interesting problems without narrow material and objective constraints. It is generally unfair and wasteful for this to be anything but voluntarily self-funded, though some well-designed research institutions can effectively simulate productive leisure and accelerate the exploration process. Thus, speculative exploration is a special duty of those with means.
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But this isn’t really about your job. It’s about your relationship to resources and value. It’s about whether you are building a conservative nest egg along the conventional tracks or a bold empire on the frontier. This is, after all, the point of quitting your job and exploring: to find the new lands of opportunity in which you will build an empire.
Spending the money on private jets, mansions, and fancy meals is hardly much better without some driving higher purpose to give them meaning. What good does that do for society, or even for you? What grand future are you building thereby? Or is it just someone else’s desire you picked up by mimesis from Instagram? Keeping up with the Joneses, chasing the validating promotion, and slaving away at a job for material trinkets that ultimately mean nothing are not vices limited to the middle class. Or really, they are limited to the middle class, but the middle class includes most of our supposed rich—“upper-middle class,” indeed. The American dream will not free you from this cursed dharma.
True ascent beyond the kept life comes only from taking bold, determinate leaps of faith on real constructive projects. When Elon Musk pocketed his Paypal winnings, he turned around and plowed all of it into a handful of his own projects, designed to produce not just further wealth, but particular concrete futures. If he was wrong, or he didn’t perform, he easily could have been blown out and left with nothing. He very nearly was.
To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world. Ruin is largely an illusion in the modern world anyway. If you lose everything you own, you generally still have your network and skills. Even a nominally risk-loving financial utility function is overly conservative in practice because it’s hard to lose these intangible assets.
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A key difference between the job life and the empire life, besides having a literal wage job or serving your money as if it were your boss, is in whether you take full responsibility for the question of ends. Are you plugged into someone else’s assumptions about value, and deferring to the existing structure, or are you maintaining and defining your own understanding of what must be done that other people can plug into?
No one can or should be the lone overman who defines all value for himself. We need to cooperate with and defer to each other to make society possible. But even if we individually can only bite off a small piece of the overall purpose structure of our society to manage ourselves, we need to actually do that far more than we do now. For any given question of ends, someone, somewhere, must be taking responsibility. Someone must make that leap of faith to define ends for the rest of us to work towards. No one else is going to do it. Why not you?
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But what will you build? A business empire designed to make money with which you can buy yachts? You will have only escaped back into the metaphysical wage-cage. Haul yourself back out and take your appointed sentence of years of hard leisure while you search for inspiring purposes that are truly worth your life and for the skills and secret knowledge you will need to fulfill them. You will find them only in the strange and unjustifiable curiosities you have when you’ve been freely following informed instinct for months.
In practice, this is the hard part in actually betting your assets, privilege, and life on some grand leap of faith: you haven’t built the faith. You nurse your money in investments and imitative yacht-chasing because, like Eric Schmidt when Peter Thiel roasted him for keeping too much cash on Google’s balance sheet, you actually have no ideas. Where will you get ideas? You’ll find them out on the un-tracked frontier while playfully chasing hunches for novel value. You get good ideas from years of hard leisure.
When the time comes to take your leap of faith and build, any empire worth your time needs to be financially sound. Healthy life grows and becomes looked upon with envy. This is, after all, the only meaning of market capitalization: how much do others want what you have built? But we mustn’t confuse this financial growth for purpose. The purpose of your empire is some higher task that you have built it to accomplish. Its nature is not its market capitalization and financial flows, but the whole system of machinery that gives it a very particular strategic position and animates it towards that particular task. Financial growth is simply one operational constraint among many towards the accomplishment of its visionary ends. Ironically, it is these focused strategic empires that display the best financial performance. But don’t let the venture capitalists confuse you: that is not what is important about them.
To be continued in the following weeks’ edition.