Don’t Look Back! The Gomorrah-ification of a Nation
An Unexpected Parallel
Uncontrolled lust and rampant corruption brought down Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. Their failure to master these things caused their downfall. Yet the conversation around the two cities does not always revolve around their corruption. It often turns on a small detail in a single verse: "But Lot's wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt" (Genesis 19:26, RSVCE). Many readers interpret this as a longing for the old life she had known, a hesitant attempt to leave the only home she had ever had. Her mind was stuck between leaving and staying, and her fate has been remembered for thousands of years.
It is easy to judge Lot's wife for failing to obey a simple command from God while we sit in the comfort of our own lives. But as we reflect on the current situation of our nation, we see a striking similarity not only in the Gomorrah-esque shift in our society but also in the state of the fleeting Indonesian youth compared to other nations.
The rise of corruption, the imprisonment of the seemingly innocent, and wicked people living freely while the working class is crushed between inter-generational financial obligations became reasons why the youth chose to leave. When the global oil shock happened in April, we saw how sensitive Indonesia's economy truly is, of which the most impacted are the middle class – which is also the majority of the economy. Government policies are seemingly built on hollow grounds and are executed in a way that is questionable.
The cases of Ibam and Nadiem show how a citizen who tried to fix the country was punished for it. Their upright morals and vision seem to have backfired in a legal system many consider questionable. In this parallel, those who "looked back" for the nation, trying to repair what they loved, are punished like Lot's wife, and the pillar of steel that imprisons them echoes her pillar of salt. Their martyr-like status became a final blow for youth already considering refuge abroad. Indonesia seems to be paying for its "sins", as the number of Indonesians changing their nationality reaches an all-time high (Kemenkum, 2026). Many are choosing to do what Lot's wife could not: follow the simple command "Don't look back" and start their new life on foreign soil.
The hashtag #KaburAjaDulu became a sensation because it captured growing disappointment in the state of the nation, and the data supports it. The level of satisfaction with the Prabowo-Gibran administration has fallen from 75% to 37%, a 38% decrease (Tempo Data Science, 2026).
The Voice of Judgement
Our socio-economic state seems to have abandoned the very thing our forefathers spent their lives emphasizing: gotong royong. In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi argued that the collapse of nineteenth-century European civilization into the crisis of the early twentieth century began when society tried to remove social authority from its economy. He argued that treating labor (human life), land (nature), and money (a token of purchasing power) as ordinary market goods, which he called "fictitious commodities", destroys the fabric of society where people starve, communities collapse, and ecosystems are wrecked.
Polanyi argued that separating social norms from the economy provokes a counter-movement from society, which he called the "double movement". When policies treat human lives as commodities and numbers, pushback is almost inevitable, and if it sounds familiar, it is because it is.
Since early 2025, Indonesia has experienced a sustained wave of unrest, with nationwide protests from August to September 2025. Reported causes include rising unemployment, economic hardship, and democratic backsliding (Human Rights Watch, 2026). The proximate trigger was anger at a new Rp 50 million monthly housing allowance for members of parliament, roughly ten times Jakarta's provincial minimum wage, a seemingly tone deaf policy. Indonesia’s socio-economic state is transforming into a textbook case of Polanyi’s double movement, striking enough that many analysts have made this connection.
Many demonstrators specifically pointed to the Omnibus Law, which was intended to increase job creation and foreign investment. But in practice it treats labor and land as fictitious commodities. Polanyi warned that market forces without protective institutions escalate human costs, such as mass layoffs. The state responded to the protest by reversing spending cuts, which is almost a miniature version of Polanyi’s cycle: market-first policy provokes backlash, backlash forces partial protective retreat, tension resets rather than resolves.
The Voice of Exit
The part many people seem to miss is how protesters are framed as ‘traitors’ to their own nation. But Albert Hirschman, in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), shows that their protest actually tells a different story. Hirschman argued that the act of raising one's voice is not a sign of disloyalty — it is its purest expression. People do not protest things they have abandoned, but rather to protect things they still believe in.
That reframing changes everything about how we read the wave of unrest sweeping Indonesia. The demonstrators who took to the streets in August and September 2025 were not enemies of the nation. They were the people who had not yet left — people who, in Hirschman's terms, had chosen voice over exit. The real warning signal is not that they protested. The real warning signal is what comes after the protest is ignored.
But Hirschman’s framework also has a devastating implication: that loyalty has its limit. Voice is only exercised when there is still some belief that the institution can be changed from within, and the data shows that when voices are met with silence and worsening institutions, the people leaving also reaches its peak. The #KaburAjaDulu wave is not a generation turning its back on a country, but rather a generation that spent its voice, received nothing in return, and concluded that exit was the only option left on the table.
The impact of the quality of institutions for a nation's development is never something new. Using the World Bank definition to measure institution quality (Worldwide Governance Indicators), which quantifies quality in sectors such as government effectiveness, rule of law, and control of corruption, Indonesia has scored relatively weakly in those sectors. These indicators are important to measure Indonesia’s future growth. In arguably the most famous economics formula, the Cobb-Douglas Production Function ( Y = ALkK1 - k ), institution quality (A) proves to be one, if not the most important factor for a country's future growth. Having a weak scoring on several key sectors, and the worsening fact that Indonesia’s ICOR is also below its ideal position, further proves what the youth are already feeling.
Which brings us back to Lot's wife. Her tragedy was not that she looked back. Her tragedy was that she had something worth looking back at — something she had built her entire life inside — and was asked to abandon it in an instant. The Indonesian youth leaving today are not so different. Many of them are not cold, but rather heartbroken. And a nation that cannot tell the difference between heartbreak and indifference is a nation that has already begun its own downfall.
A Spiritual Crisis
The Gomorrah-esque shift doesn’t happen from a top-down transformation, but rather the opposite. The social culture in Indonesia has transformed into what our heroes have warned us about. We become hypocrites to what we protest against. Going back to Polanyi’s work, the great transformation not only happened due to governmental policy, but also because the values within societies shifted. We fill every conversation with money talk, and people spend their entire lives chasing honor and assets. The wealth disparity and inter-generational financial obligation turned money into our second religion, where every paycheck becomes the food our soul eats just to survive.
The rise of consumerism doesn’t happen by chance, but rather slowly due to years and years of systematic failure. Rather than fixing our own, society has failed to reflect on its failure and has put the blame on something else. The parallel of Gomorrah doesn’t point its destruction to policy failure, but to the corruption of the people themselves.
DAFTAR PUSTAKA
eg
Cobb, C. W., & Douglas, P. H. (1928). A Theory of Production. The American Economic Review, 18(1), 139–165.
Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Harvard University Press.
Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation.
Human Rights Watch. (2026, February 4). Indonesia: Perks for military, lawmakers spark dissent, protests. Diakses dari https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/02/04/indonesia-perks-for-military-lawmakers-spark-dissent-protests
Kementerian Hukum Republik Indonesia. (2026). Data Permohonan Pelepasan Status Kewarganegaraan Indonesia. Direktorat Jenderal Administrasi Hukum Umum.
Tempo Data Science. (2026, August 27). Survei kepuasan publik terhadap kinerja pemerintahan Prabowo-Gibran: Juli–Agustus 2026. Databoks Katadata. Diakses dari https://databoks.katadata.co.id/datapublish/2026/08/27/survei-tempo-37-publik-puas-terhadap-kinerja-prabowo-gibran
The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE). (1966). Ignatius Press. (Genesis 19:26)
Comments