Gary Dean
Preface
> These essays were assembled in an unusual way, by an unlikely person, in an unlikely place. So before starting, you are owed an open account of all three; not as credentials, but as disclosures: where the work comes from, who helped make it, and, m…
Defining Dharma
> Dharma: A word almost no one can define without a lot of hand-waving, and almost everyone uses anyway. At its root it means something very plain, "to hold"; the interesting thing is how far this plain idea reaches. The word is everywhere, once you …
The Genesis of Dharmas
> Why does every society grow a dharma, and why did so many of the greatest ones appear, in different worlds, at almost the same moment? It starts with a problem that arrives the day your village gets too big to know. Picture two human worlds, separa…
The Dharmas of the Samin of Java
> An illiterate farmer, a fenced-off forest, and a way of living so complete it outlasted its maker by a hundred years. What a Javanese peasant movement can show us that the great religions no longer can. Sometime in the first years of the twentieth …
A World of Dharmas
> A relational web, a rational fortress, a sung land, a commanding covenant: four ways of living that disagree about almost everything, and rhyme underneath. Including, if you have the nerve to look, your own. Picture four people, in four worlds, eac…
How a Dharma Gets Under Your Skin
> Why does a dharma feel, from the inside, not like a belief you hold but like reality itself? Because it was never installed as a belief. It was grooved into your gut, your habits, and the wiring of your brain, below the reach of the part of you tha…
When Dharmas Go Wrong
> Every failure of a dharma turns out to be the dark twin of a strength. The bond that holds a group together is the fence that shuts others out; the authority that can free people is the authority that can rule them; the practice that liberates is t…
Dharmas in a Secular Age
> Hundreds of millions of people now say they are "spiritual but not religious." That is not the absence of a dharma. It is the search for one, carried out by people who have lost the old foundations but kept the old need. There is a kind of person n…
Creating Dharmas
> We have always created our dharmas and told ourselves we found them. What becomes possible, and what becomes dangerous, once we admit it and start building on purpose? Begin with two pictures, both true, set side by side. In the first, a woman sits…
A Rant
> `Bash` is the fifth most-used programming language in the world, and the one that most programmers refuse to take seriously. This must change. --- According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 48.7% of developers worldwide use Bash. Not "h…
A Case Study of Collaboration Across Departments Between Gen Y and Gen Z
## Abstract > This research examines intergenerational communication and collaboration between Gen Y (born 1981-1996) and Gen Z (born 1997-2012) employees at Okusi Associates, a management and consultancy firm in Central Jakarta, which has several de…
Reflections 14 years after the Asian Tsunami
In 2004 and 2005, in addition to running my consultancy firm, I also moonlighted – quite literally – as a copy editor at The Jakarta Post. This meant my work day averaged 16 hours at that time. I totally didn’t need this additional workload, but it w…
A nothing story
I was 14, a quiet boy living in an outer suburb of a small and isolated city called Perth1, in a large and remote state called Western Australia, in a large and isolated continent called Australia. The Perth of that time considered itself a bastion o…
Indonesian Land Law is quite different to the laws that apply in most Western or developed countries. Foreigners wishing to use or purchase land for whatever purpose need to be aware of these differences and not assume that legal conventions that app…
On Tuesday, 17 December 2002, BM wrote: > I think, on balance, that if I am to be ruled, I would much rather be ruled by complete fucking moron civilians than by clever army generals, or religious fanatics for that matter. > A friend, who had been a …
An email exchange with Dennis De Tray, Indonesia country director, World Bank 1997-1999
> The views contained within this article are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect past or present opinions or policies of any other person or organisation. Culture really matters when doing business, especially in Indonesia. An understandi…
A manufactured war
> "Tragically again, of the approximately 20 Christians who were killed [by Muslims] in the village of Benteng Karang, 15 of them were them were burnt alive. One of them was Mrs Rina Serpiela, a six-month pregnant woman who was killed by having her b…
Since the very beginning of a notion called 'Australia' some 200 years ago the European occupiers of this continent have rarely felt at peace with its geography. As a transplanted, predominantly European, society situated within Asia,[1] far from the…
A model development path?
The rapid economic development of the NIEs (Hongkong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) over the past three decades has necessitated the utilisation of external resources, principally foreign capital.[1] Without such resources, industrialisation an…
Brian Toohey's article, "Time to rout the Jakarta Lobby", was published in The West Australian on 27 September 1999, just four weeks after the East Timorese autonomy plebiscite. During this period East Timor was in the process of being laid waste by …
A conflict of values
The sun began to set upon Indonesia's corporatist 'New Order' state starting in the early 1990's. Speculation about the presidential succession was rife, mainly due to President Soeharto's increasing age and frailty, and such speculation was especial…
From a Western perspective
The past two decades or so has witnessed the increasing dominance of neoliberal perspectives within international political, social and economic thinking. This has particularly been the case since the end of the Cold War, which seems to have triggere…
in comparison to South Korea and Taiwan
The rapid pace of economic development in East Asia over the past few decades has awed the world. This is particularly so for the so-called Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs) which include South Korea and Taiwan, together with the city-states of …
Australians have always felt uncertain about their place in the world. As a transplanted, predominantly European, society situated within Asia, Australians have always felt a sense of threat from the north. Profound differences with the nations of Ea…
It only been these past few decades that Australia has begun to pursue a relatively independent foreign policy, from under the shadows Britain and the US. Australia's unique historical circumstances have led to the development of a certain set of att…
until 1870
To trade is human. Like the ability to communicate abstract ideas, trade is one of those activities that differentiates Homo sapiens from the rest of the animal world. And trade is more than just a mere exchange of surplus; its social and political i…
Humanity's political 'state of nature' has characteristically been defined in terms of small, nomadic family groups with little need for complex organisational structures. Continuously moving across the landscape with tenuous attachment to the land u…
It is frequently alleged that the nation-state in the 1990's is at a precarious moment of history, poised to somehow inevitably disintegrate under the pressure of globalisation. It has been a mere decade since this word 'globalisation' started to inf…
The role of culture in Indonesian politics
The incantations and vocabulary of the new era are rapidly taking hold in Indonesia since the fall of Suharto and his New Order regime. KKN, reformasi and transparansi have replaced UUD'45, Pancasila and pembangunan as catchphrases of the emerging or…
> (Universitas Gadjah Mada, NIM 96/111909/EK/13500) Yogyakarta, Desember 1997 Selama dasawarsa belakangan ini kata 'globalisasi' secara berangsur-angsur masuk ke dalam bahasa sehari-hari di negara-negara di seluruh dunia. Tetapi, apa sebenarnya artin…
