If you’re anywhere involved with the general political or cultural talks of Indonesia with the locals for just more than a week, one thing becomes clear: We love to hate the country.

We love to laugh things off cynically, say that things will never work here. We laugh at hyper-patriotic people, people who are actually in love with the country. They are naive and stupid and pretentious and what have you.

#IndonesiaBanget

We love to claim how much potential we have. And yet this claim always has to be supplemented by something like, “But sadly there are too many bad things in this country, we need a lot of work, but the government is unreliable and the industry is too conservative,” and so on.

Because we love hating so much, I thought I’d give a few handy pointers about healthy hating.

DON’T: Hate to Excuse Failures

A lot of people do this. They work their asses off in their early twenties, hoping to achieve something new, different, and edgy in conservative, plain Indonesia with creative experimentation — only to find that their years of hard work gets rewarded by lazy claps of like eight people on a good day.

You know the story. They become jaded 30-year-olds who keep claiming that Indonesia sucks and cannot appreciate talent, and how the industry refuses to evolve. All that shit you’ve heard a million times before from every other 30-year-olds.

There are facts here. Many Indonesians do suck ass big time when it comes to appreciation of the arts and sciences (funding, anyone?). Many parts of the industry are conservative and resistant to change. All of those are true.

But if you waste the remainder of whatever you have to pursue your creative career on this hatred, will you ever get anywhere?

Also: if you’re too used to cynically hating society when things go wrong, who’s to say you won’t blame the Japanese or the Australians when you finally get that big break to move out of the country, but still find yourself stuck in the rat race, somehow?

Shit happens, you know. And it’s not always in Indonesia.

DON’T: Hate to Substitute Thought

Here’s something that might surprise you: I hate political satire. There are some really good ones out there that make us think, but those are few and far between. Most are designed to make us laugh — and feel good about ourselves, as if we already did some critical thinking.

Laughter against the government and the politicians has become so prevalent that it has become ingrained into its functioning. There is nothing subversive about them.

Are you aware which TV channels produce them? Exactly.

What I have noticed is that all this inverse racism against Indonesia functions in exactly the same way. Go on, try and enter a conversation and bring up some critical point, a critical social symptom currently happening.

And then, out of the blue, just say something like “Yes, it happens because we live in Indonesia.”

There is hardly a more effective way to end what otherwise could have been a critical conversation. We hate Indonesia because we don’t want to think critically about its problems.

DON’T: Hate to Escape Love

You’ve all heard the story: A guy walks up to the stage and preaches about how Indonesia is awesome, and everybody claps.

When he gets down, he whispers to his friends, “What I said was bullshit. How can I love Indonesia when the reality is so terrible?”

Photo by Rizki Arrida

It’s too easy to read this cynically, how all our love is really a fake. But if that were true, would we really be so prone to anti-Malaysia sentiments and hyper-patriotic chain text messages?

But what if it’s the hate that is often faked? What if you really love Indonesia, but are too ashamed to admit it because the reality is too terrible, so you whisper to your friends just to come across as not naive? Which is why, at the first sign that it’s okay to show love (in racism, in chain text messages, in patriotic creative gatherings), you get really excited?

Look: I know hating is trendy, but really, don’t do it for the sake of looking cool and critical. It’s true that hyper-patriotism is a terrible right-wing attitude — a whole other topic of discussion — but at least those right-wingers are brave enough to be honest about themselves.

DO: Hate What’s Happening — Not a Name that Stands for It

When you live in Indonesia, there are so many things deserving of your hatred. But there is one critical distinction we must make. Is it racist to say that most Indonesians suck? No — of course most Indonesians suck, because most people on Earth suck.

What’s racist is when we say how most people here suck because they are Indonesians. What’s chauvinistically racist is when we say we are awesome because we are Indonesians.

Similarly, all the terrible things that’s happening around us are not happening because it’s Indonesia. Sure, most happen to be the faults of some horrible Indonesians in power under a corrupt system, but they are not horrible and corrupt because they are Indonesians, are they?

And don’t think I’ll let you off easy: When we say we love Indonesia and the amount of talent it has or the kind people, let’s face it: Those people are not full of talent, kindness, and compassion because they are Indonesians. They made some correct decisions in life and had some good luck, and they just happen to be Indonesians. Big surprise!

Photo by Rizki Arrida

Let me say this again: Living in Indonesia, there are so many things deserving of hate. And hate can be good— it can make you take to the streets, it can make you strive to build better alternatives.

It’s just that, you know, be straight with what you’re hating. Don’t just slap on the name “Indonesia” to everything and call it a day. That’s lazy thinking.