What growing up under military dictatorship did to my brain, and why healing is not an easy process.

This September, I am turning 41. Triggered by the current turmoil unfolding in Indonesia, I felt the urge to reflect on how spending the first 14 years of my life under a military dictatorship shaped my brain.

So far, it has been 27 years of unlearning.

I do not pretend to have it all figured out. Healing is long and uneven, perhaps lifelong. But at this point of life I know this much: authoritarianism does not only silence societies. It rewires the brain.

Some of you may think my reaction to today’s crisis in Indonesia is exaggerated. After all, my access to events comes filtered through social media, which amplifies chaos.

But what rises in me is not just fear. It is a trauma response, the residue of growing up under Suharto’s New Order era.

The strange thing about trauma is that, at the time, it does not feel like trauma. It feels like life. I grew up believing what I now know as oppression was normal.

In classrooms we recited P4 (Pedoman Penghayatan dan Pengamalan Pancasila), state ideology repeated like a prayer. Suharto’s portrait hung above the blackboard, a reminder of whose gaze we lived under.

Every September, we were forced to watch the violent, age-inappropriate anticommunist propaganda movie G30S. Adults whispered about the disappearance of activists, while at home the rule was simple: do not ask, do not talk.

I did not know then that authoritarianism was shaping the very machinery of my brain, altering the fundamental mechanisms of how it learns.

The Brain as a Prediction Machine

Neuroscience has taught me that the brain is, at its core, a prediction machine. It builds models of the world and constantly updates them. When reality contradicts expectation, that “prediction error” is usually a gift. It is how we learn. This is called predictive processing.

Hand in hand with this is statistical learning, the brain’s unconscious ability to detect patterns. From infancy we use it to find words in speech or to learn which events co-occur. Together, these mechanisms form the basis of how humans learn from the world.

But they depend on input. Auditory deprivation shows this clearly. Children who grow up without hearing rewire their brains in ways that impair auditory statistical learning. And while cochlear implants may later restore some capacity, early deprivation leaves lasting traces.

Authoritarianism functions as a form of sensory deprivation. What is withheld is not mere sound but the social and cultural signals a brain needs to grow adaptively.

Instead of many voices, we heard only one. Instead of contradiction, we were drilled in certainty. Instead of ambiguity, we were taught obedience.

And authoritarianism does not just deprive, it entrains. The brain naturally synchronises to external rhythms: the prosody of speech, the beat of music, the pulse of civic life. This is called neural entrainment.

Under dictatorship, the rhythms are narrow: slogans, rituals, silences. Growing up, my brain became entrained to these patterns. And once entrained, anything off-beat, dissent, difference, new possibility, felt jarring, even dangerous.

My brain, like those of millions of others living in the system, was tuned to rigidity.

To make it worse, chronic stress sealed these patterns in place. Living under constant vigilance floods the body with cortisol, reshaping key circuits: the amygdala becomes hyperactive, the hippocampus shrinks, the prefrontal cortex weakens. The trauma leaves a structural imprint.

This is why authoritarian societies often tolerate only symbolic diversity: colourful traditional clothing, the “unity in diversity” slogan, but resist substantive difference.

Critical thinking requires stepping outside the rhythm. Under dictatorship, that move is punished.

Over time, even the capacity for metacognition, the ability to notice how your own mind is shaped, is dulled. The cage feels like the sky.

The dangerous result of growing up under authoritarianism is a form of fundamentalism.

When the brain only learns from narrow, limited patterns, and its prediction system treats error not as an opportunity to learn but as a threat to ignore, the mind clings to certainty and grows fearful of ambiguity.

That is what authoritarianism achieves: not only obedience in behaviour, but obedience in cognition itself.

Unlearning

For me, unlearning has taken decades and required a particular mix of geographies.

In Brunei, I saw how benevolent authoritarianism could wear velvet gloves: comfort provided in exchange for silence. It does not feel like a shackle, but it lulls you into ignorance.

In the Nordics, I saw children openly question their teachers and citizens freely debate their leaders. But there is no such thing as utopia. The privilege of not having to look beyond borders can breed its own kind of silence.

Each encounter offered richer input, forcing me to rebuild my models of the world. Slowly, I learned to entrain to plurality.

Unlearning authoritarianism has not meant trading one truth for another, but retraining my mind to tolerate error again, to resynchronise with complexity, to let curiosity return.

My September Wish

I do not want any Indonesian children to inherit the brokenness I did, to live shackled without realising they are shackled, only to discover too late what was stolen from them.

Authoritarianism is not just a political system. It is a biological one. It embeds itself in the body, passes trauma down families, and wires fear into the nervous system.

That is why the present drift towards authoritarianism demands resistance.

Indonesia cannot risk wiring another generation into silence.