When Silence Becomes Political: Rereading Paulo Freire in Indonesia Today
On propaganda, the silencing of dissent and the importance of learning to question the reality we are told to accept.
There are books you read in college and then there are books that find their way back to you years later. For me, one of those books is Pedagogy of the Opressed by Paulo Freire.
Lately, watching what has been happening in Indonesia, from the devastating forest and land fires to the struggle for basic necessities, the circulation of competing political narratives, and the backlash faced by people who speak up about public issues somehow i keep finding myself returning to Freire’s idea.
Not because every crisis can be explained by one theory or because every government statement must be false.
But because Freire offers a framework for understanding something deeper than any individual contorversy
How power shapes the way people understand reality, whose voices are considered legitimate, and what happens when questioning the status quo becomes increasingly difficult.
What makes this book relevant to me is not simply its criticism of opression. It is its insistence that understanding the world should never be reduced to passively accepting someone else’s version of it.
The banking model: when information becomes something we are expected to swallow
This is one of Freire’s most well-known concepts.
In Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire criticizes an educational system in which teachers are treated as the sole holders of knowledge and students as passive recipients. Knowledge is deposited into students, who are expected to receive, memorize, and reproduce it rather than actively question and interpret it. Which this is what’s been happening on Indonesia’s educational system for decades.
For Freire, this model does more than limit learning. It discourages critical consciousness and encourages people to adapt to the world as it is, instead of recognizing their capacity to transform it.
Although Freire developed this concept in the context of education, I find it useful as a lens through which to examine political communication in Indonesia.
Think about how information circulates today. Government press releases, news coverage, political commentary, influencer content, and coordinated online messaging all contribute to how the public understands an event. These sources do not necessarily have the same intentions, reliability, or relationship to power. Yet they compete to shape the version of reality that reaches us.
This becomes especially concerning when political messaging is designed to influence public perception rather than encourage independent judgment.
The existence of political buzzers, for example, raises questions about how coordinated messaging can amplify certain narratives, discredit critics, or make particular viewpoints appear more widely accepted than they actually are. Not every coordinated campaign is necessarily deceptive, but undisclosed coordination and misleading claims can make it harder for people to distinguish genuine public opinion from strategically manufactured perception.
The same critical scrutiny should apply to official communications.
Consider the ongoing forest and land fires in Indonesia. In October 2026, Reuters reported severe haze, widespread health impacts, and estimates of burned land that varied substantially across sources. The scale of the crisis, the official response, and the underlying causes all warrant scrutiny. Reuters’ reporting on Indonesia’s wildfires provides a useful example of why different sources and measurements matter.
A discrepancy between official figures and independent estimates does not automatically prove that an official report is a lie. It does, however, make transparency, methodology, and independent verification essential.
This is where Freire’s concept becomes relevant.
The problem is not simply whether a particular statement is true or false. It is what happens when people are positioned as passive recipients of information, with little encouragement to investigate the evidence, examine competing explanations, or question the interests behind a narrative.
When public communication becomes a one-way process, people are expected to receive an interpretation of reality rather than participate in understanding it.
And that is precisely the kind of passivity Freire challenges.
The danger is not only misinformation. It is the gradual loss of our willingness to question information in the first place.
The culture of silence: who gets to speak, and who gets heard?
Another concept that has stayed with me is the culture of silence.
Freire explores how opressive social structures can prevent people from naming their own experience, critically interpreting their circumstances and participating in decisions that affect their lives.
Silence, in this context, is not simple the absence of speech. It is connected to power: who is permitted to define reality, whose interpretation carries the authority, and whose experiences are excluded from the conversation. This is particularly relevant in the era where people actively using social media to discuss environmental destruction, public policy, and government accountability.
When influencers, journalist, activist or even ordinary citizens speak about controversial public issues, the response can extend beyond disagreement. They may face harassment, coordinated attacks, accusations intended to undermine their credibility, or pressure to withdraw their statement.
The same applies to content moderation. Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, or Komdigi, has publicly stated that it removes content considered to violate applicable laws, including certain forms of misinformation and hate speech. The existence of such powers raises an important question about how moderation decisions are made, explained, and reviewed when controversial public-interest content is involved.
Not every takedown is censorship. Content can legitimately be removed for reasons unrelated to political criticism. But when content concerning public affairs is removed, transparency about the reason, the legal basis, and the available appeal process matters. Without those things, people may struggle to distinguish legitimate enforcement from disproportionate restrictions on expression.
The consequences can extend beyond the individuals whose content disappears.
Over time, this can produce a chilling effect: people become more cautious, self-censor, or withdraw from conversations they consider too costly to enter.
A society does not need to prohibit every form of criticism to discourage people from speaking. Sometimes, the repeated delegitimization of certain voices is enough to make public participation feel futile or unsafe. And when people begin to believe that their experiences will not be heard, or that questioning authority will only bring consequences, silence can become a condition that reinforces existing power relations.
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Being allowed to speak and having the power to make your voice count are not the same thing.
Conscientization: Learning to see beyond the surface
If the banking model helps us understand passive acceptance, and the culture of silence helps us understand the suppression or marginalization of voices, then conscientization offers a way to think about what comes next.
Often translated as the development of critical consciousness, conscientization refers to the process through which people critically examine the social, political, and economic conditions shaping their lives.
It is not merely the recognition that something is wrong. It involves understanding how a problem came to exist, what structures sustain it, how power operates within it, and what possibilities exist for changing it. This distinction matters because public crises are often experienced as isolated inconveniences.
A resident dealing with the consequences of forest fires may initially experience the crisis through smoke, disrupted routines, or health concerns. Someone struggling to obtain fuel may experience it through long queues, lost working hours, and uncertainty about everyday expenses.
These experiences are immediate and personal. But critical consciousness encourages us to look beyond the immediate experience and examine the wider conditions surrounding it.
Environmental destruction, for instance, cannot be understood solely through the existence of fire. A serious analysis must also consider land management, prevention, enforcement, ecological vulnerability, and the responsibilities of relevant institutions and businesses.
Likewise, a disruption in fuel distribution should be examined through its actual causes, the reliability of the supply chain, the effectiveness of the response, and the consequences for people whose livelihoods depend on access to fuel.
The causes of these crises differ. They should not be artificially collapsed into one explanation.
What connects them is the need to move beyond surface-level descriptions and investigate the conditions that make people vulnerable to their consequences.
This is also why critical consciousness cannot mean automatically distrusting every official statement or accepting every claim made by critics.
That would simply replace one form of passive acceptance with another.
Critical consciousness requires examining evidence, comparing sources, recognizing uncertainty, and remaining willing to revise our understanding when new information emerges.
It means refusing to let authority substitute for evidence, while also refusing to let anger substitute for analysis.
People must become active participants in understanding the world rather than objects whose reality is defined by others.
Critical consciousness begins when we stop treating the world as a fixed set of circumstances and start understanding how those circumstances are produced, maintained, and potentially changed.
From awareness to liberation
One of the most important distinctions in Freire’s work is that awareness alone is not liberation.
Recognizing injustice does not automatically change the conditions that produce it. Neither does expressing anger, sharing information, or participating in public debate.
Freire’s concept of praxis emphasizes the relationship between critical reflection and action. Understanding the world and acting to transform it are connected processes.
This is particularly important in the context of public criticism.
Social media can make people aware of problems that might otherwise remain invisible. It can help individuals discover that their experiences are shared by others, circulate evidence, organize collective responses, and demand accountability.
But awareness can also become a temporary cycle of outrage.
An issue trends, people express anger, statements are released, and attention eventually moves elsewhere. Meanwhile, the structural conditions behind the original problem may remain unresolved.
This does not mean public criticism is useless. On the contrary, public scrutiny can be an important part of democratic accountability. But it should not be confused with the completion of the work.
The question is whether awareness leads to sustained engagement: verifying claims, documenting harm, demanding transparent investigations, monitoring policy implementation, supporting affected communities, and evaluating whether promised changes actually happen.
In this sense, Freire’s work challenges both the institutions that seek to shape public understanding and the public itself.
We cannot expect institutions to become more accountable if people are discouraged from asking questions. But we also cannot build meaningful accountability through uncritical acceptance of whatever aligns with our own political preferences.
Liberation requires more than choosing which narrative to believe. It requires developing the ability to examine narratives themselves.
The real danger is learning to accept what should be questioned
Looking back at Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I find that its relevance lies less in providing a ready-made explanation for every political problem and more in offering a way to approach those problems.
Freire asks us to reconsider the relationship between knowledge and power, between silence and participation, and between awareness and action.
His work reminds us that people are not merely spectators of the realities they inhabit. They have the capacity to interpret those realities, question the structures behind them, and participate in changing them.
That capacity becomes especially important when public crises repeatedly affect ordinary lives, when competing narratives make it difficult to establish what is happening, or when people become hesitant to express criticism.
The response should not be to believe everything we hear, nor to assume that every institution acts in bad faith. It should be to strengthen our ability to investigate, question, deliberate, and demand accountability. Because there is a difference between learning how to survive within a difficult reality and recognizing that the reality itself can be changed.
And perhaps that is the idea from Freire that feels most relevant to me now.
We should never become so accustomed to surviving a problem that we stop questioning why it continues to exist.
Reading Paulo Freire again, years after college, has reminded me it is a way of refusing to surrender our understanding of the world to those who claim the authority to define it for us.
