The Irrational Edge, Edition 2. On why we idolize public figures, then destroy them, and what the cycle reveals about us.
On the morning of February 17, 2022, officers from the Indonesian National Police arrived at the Jakarta apartment of Indra Kesuma, a twenty-nine-year-old social media celebrity known to his six million Instagram followers as Indra Kenz. The apartment looked exactly the way you’d expect for a man who had spent two years posting photos of himself draped across Lamborghinis, clasping stacks of hundred-dollar bills, and wearing wristwatches that cost more than most Indonesians earn in a decade. He had built a persona so meticulously extravagant that Indonesian media borrowed a label from the title of a Singaporean novel: crazy rich. His followers loved it.
Indra told them his secret: it was binary options trading, a form of financial betting available through an offshore platform called Binomo. He offered education, tutorials, and signals. He positioned himself as a mentor to a generation of young Indonesians who believed that the traditional routes to prosperity (a civil-service job, a small business, years of patient saving) were too slow for the digital age. For a fee, you could learn to trade like Indra Kenz, and thousands believed him.
The problem was that, as international regulators in Europe and Australia had already determined, binary options trading was not really trading at all. It was structured gambling, with odds that systematically favored the house. Indra was not teaching people to invest. He was funneling them into a scheme that enriched him through referral commissions while they lost their savings. When police arrested him, the charges included fraud, illegal gambling, and money laundering. Victim losses ran into the billions of rupiah.
The reversal was breathtaking in its speed. Within forty-eight hours, the same media outlets that had profiled Indra as an aspirational young mogul were running exposés about “flexing culture” and social-media-driven fraud. The luxury cars, the watches, the stacks of cash, all that content that had generated millions of admiring comments, were now reinterpreted as evidence of deception. An Indonesian academic study applying the sociologist Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical framework concluded that Indra’s entire public persona was a calculated “front stage” performance designed to lure victims. The same images, the same posts, the same man. Only the audience’s frame had changed.
If Indra Kenz were an isolated case, one clever con artist and one gullible audience, the story would end there. He was not isolated. Within four years, a second influencer, a young man named Timothy Ronald who had styled himself the “Crypto King of Indonesia,” would face eerily similar accusations. Media coverage didn’t even bother with fresh language. Headline after headline called him “Indra Kenz volume two.” The pattern extended far beyond finance. It appeared in politics, where a former democracy activist endorsed the very general who had once overseen the disappearance of his comrades. It appeared in the personal development world, where a philosophy influencer who built his brand on an anti-corruption conviction hosted the son of a convicted embezzler on his podcast. Most remarkably, it appeared among ordinary citizens, where a government-scholarship recipient who had built a career in sustainability was demolished overnight for expressing frustration with her own nationality.
The more useful question is why the same four-phase sequence (idealization, deepening attachment, a sudden trigger, then total demolition) repeats so reliably across domains that have nothing else in common.
The naive-audience theory, and its crack
The standard explanation runs something like this: Indonesia is a young democracy with weak institutions, and its people are not yet sophisticated enough to see through charlatans. The scammers are too clever; the audiences are too credulous. Digital literacy is low. Regulatory enforcement is patchy. What you get, inevitably, is a succession of frauds and betrayals, each one a failure of individual discernment.
There is enough truth in this account to make it satisfying. Indonesia’s financial regulators were indeed slow to act on binary options platforms. Its media ecosystem is chaotic and under-resourced. And the country’s internet adoption has been staggeringly fast. More than two hundred and twelve million users, roughly three-quarters of the population, are now online, with over a hundred and forty-three million active social media identities. Millions of people are encountering persuasive digital content without much precedent for evaluating it.
But the “naive audience” explanation has a crack in it, and the crack widens when you look at the political cases. Joko Widodo, the president who governed Indonesia from 2014 to 2024, was not some unknown quantity. He was the most scrutinized political figure in the country for a decade. His supporters included journalists, academics, lawyers, and civil society professionals, people whose entire careers were built on institutional analysis. They were not rubes. And yet the arc of their relationship with Jokowi followed the same trajectory as a teenager’s relationship with Indra Kenz: fervent belief, deepening investment, an agonizing rupture, and then a collective judgment so harsh it seemed to erase everything that had come before.
If the smartest people in the room follow the same pattern as the most naive, the problem is probably not intelligence.
Splitting: the psychology behind the idol cycle
In 2023, a team of researchers led by Giles Story at University College London published a paper in Psychological Review that proposed a formal model of how people oscillate between idealizing and devaluing others. The model, built on something called a hidden Markov framework, describes a cognitive process that is both simple and unsettling. People do not, it turns out, maintain a single evolving impression of another person, gradually adjusting it as new evidence arrives. Instead, they maintain two separate mental representations, one positive and one negative, and toggle between them.
As long as incoming information mostly fits the active representation, the model hums along. Disconfirming evidence gets explained away as situational. He was forced into that decision. The media is distorting things. She must have a strategy we can’t see yet. But once enough contradictory evidence accumulates, the alternative representation activates. The switch is not gradual. It’s a phase transition, like water turning to ice. One day, the person is a hero. The next day, the same person, with the same history, is a villain. Every ambiguous fact from the past gets retroactively reinterpreted through the new lens.
Story and his colleagues were not writing about Indonesia. They were describing a universal feature of human cognition. But their model maps onto Indonesian public life with uncanny precision. The researchers called this process “splitting,” borrowing a term from clinical psychology, though they argued that it is not pathological. It is a normal inference strategy. Under conditions of uncertainty, when you don’t have enough reliable information to maintain a nuanced view, binary categorization is cognitively cheaper. Hero or traitor. Genius or fraud. Holding one of those positions is easier than holding both at once.
The conditions that make the cycle irresistible
Indonesia’s idol-and-demolition cycle makes more sense as a cognitive shortcut, meeting a set of cultural and structural conditions that make it almost irresistible.
Consider what those conditions look like in practice.
Indonesia scores seventy-eight on Geert Hofstede’s Power Distance Index, a widely used measure of how much a society accepts hierarchical inequality. The global average is around fifty-five. It scores fourteen on Hofstede’s Individualism dimension, against a global average of forty-three. These are not obscure academic metrics. They describe, in quantified form, two features of Indonesian social life that anyone who has spent time in the country will recognize: a deep deference to authority figures, and a powerful orientation toward the group rather than the individual.
Deference means that during the idealization phase, critical voices are muted. Questioning a respected leader, whether a president, a financial mentor, or a spiritual figure, feels transgressive, almost impolite. Early warning signs are absorbed and explained away, not because people are stupid, but because the social cost of public skepticism is high. The collectivist orientation means that once sentiment does shift, it shifts en masse. People don’t quietly update their priors and move on. They watch for signals from their reference group, and when those signals turn negative, they align. What could be a gradual correction becomes an avalanche.
Four cases, one sequence
The activist: Budiman Sudjatmiko
The case of Budiman Sudjatmiko illustrates how this works at the level of individual biography. Budiman co-founded the People’s Democratic Party, or PRD, a leftist organization that openly challenged the Suharto dictatorship at a time when doing so could get you killed. He was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for roughly thirteen years. When he emerged, he was a living symbol of the Reformasi movement, the generation of activists who had fought to bring democracy to Indonesia. His moral authority was, in the most literal sense, purchased with suffering.
In 2023, Budiman publicly endorsed Prabowo Subianto for president.
Prabowo was a former special forces general with long-standing ties to the Suharto regime. He had been implicated, though never convicted, in the kidnapping and disappearance of pro-democracy activists in the late nineteen-nineties, including members of Budiman’s own party. For a large segment of the activist community, Budiman’s endorsement was not a political disagreement. It was an ontological violation. It upended the story that gave his life meaning.
Former PRD comrades held press conferences. They accused him of betraying the Reformasi struggle and of tarnishing the name of every 1998 activist. He was expelled from his political party. Online, the discourse moved with startling speed from reverence to contempt. Budiman was no longer the man who had suffered for democracy. He was an opportunist who had been an opportunist all along. The splitting model could not ask for a cleaner illustration: two representations, one swap, zero middle ground.
The sequel: Timothy Ronald
The financial cases add another layer. When Timothy Ronald, the self-described Crypto King, began facing fraud allegations in early 2026, the Indonesian public did not need to evaluate his case from scratch. They had a template. Indra Kenz had already provided the narrative architecture: a young influencer flaunts wealth, sells education, and turns out to be running a scheme. Media coverage explicitly framed Timothy as a sequel. The cognitive work of assessment had already been done; all that remained was pattern-matching.
This is the part of the cycle that the “naive audience” theory cannot explain. If Indonesians were simply gullible, you’d expect them to be slower to catch on the second time, not faster. The opposite happened. Timothy’s fall was quicker and more decisive than Indra’s. The audience had not become more sophisticated in any conventional sense. They had acquired a schema, a prefabricated story about how influencer fraud works, and they applied it with ruthless efficiency. The idol cycle, in other words, is not just self-repeating. It is self-accelerating.
The scholar: Tyas and the passport video
The pattern is not limited to celebrities. In February 2026, a woman named Dwi Sasetyaningtyas, known as Tyas, posted an Instagram video unboxing her child’s British passport. Tyas was a graduate of the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology who had received an LPDP scholarship (a taxpayer-funded government program that sends promising Indonesians abroad for postgraduate study) to earn her master’s degree at TU Delft. After returning, she founded a sustainability-focused social enterprise and built a following as an environmental educator. She was, by any measure, the kind of person the scholarship program was designed to produce.
In the video, she said something that would have been unremarkable in most countries. She said that the world felt unfair, and that while she would remain an Indonesian citizen, she wanted her children to hold stronger passports. Then she added, “Honestly, I’m tired of being an Indonesian citizen.”
The explosion was immediate. Tyas had not committed fraud. She had not endorsed a dictator or platformed a corruption suspect. She had expressed a feeling. But that feeling collided with the implicit moral contract of the LPDP scholarship: the people invest in you, and you invest back in the people. Calling a British passport “strong” implicitly called the Indonesian passport weak, and saying it while holding an LPDP credential transformed a personal gripe into a national insult. Within days, netizens discovered that her husband had also received LPDP funding (for both master’s and doctoral programs) and had allegedly never returned to fulfill his service obligation. His father turned out to be a former senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture who had been called as a witness in corruption investigations. The story was no longer about one woman’s Instagram post. It was about elite families extracting public resources without accountability. Tyas went from sustainability hero to ungrateful elite in the span of a week, and LPDP itself trended on social media, driven not by curiosity but by rage.
The president: Jokowi’s decade undone
The deepest version of the pattern, though, belongs to Joko Widodo. When Jokowi won the presidency in 2014, he represented something that Indonesian democracy had been waiting for since the fall of Suharto in 1998: a leader who was not a general, not an oligarch, not a dynastic heir. He was a former furniture seller from the Javanese city of Solo who had risen through local politics on the strength of what Indonesians call blusukan, meaning impromptu, unscripted visits to markets, slums, and government offices, where he would talk to ordinary citizens and ask what they needed. Progressive civil-society organizations, anti-corruption activists, and young urban professionals saw in him the fulfillment of the Reformasi promise. He was their protagonist.
Over the next decade, Jokowi’s government weakened the Corruption Eradication Commission, expanded military involvement in civilian governance, used defamation laws against critics, and banned several Islamic organizations. Scholars described these moves as democratic backsliding. But for many supporters, each individual step could be rationalized. He was playing a long game. He was managing a coalition. The institutions would survive.
The trigger came in 2024, when a controversial Constitutional Court decision, overseen by Jokowi’s own brother-in-law, cleared the way for his son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to run as a vice presidential candidate. It was the kind of naked dynastic maneuvering that Jokowi’s entire political brand had been built in opposition to. Sentiment analysis of Indonesian social media in the final months of his presidency showed that negative perceptions dominated discussions of his legacy. Academic assessments reframed his tenure as an era of “authoritarian revival.”
What was remarkable was not just the speed of the reframing but its totality. Among former supporters, there was little room for a mixed verdict, for saying, as one might reasonably say, that Jokowi built significant infrastructure while also eroding democratic norms. The splitting model predicts exactly this: once the negative representation activates, every prior data point gets reassigned. The blusukan visits, once seen as evidence of humility, became evidence of populist manipulation. The furniture-seller origin story, once a sign of authenticity, became a reminder that he had never had real ideological commitments. Same facts. New frame.
When trust flips to reflexive suspicion
The splitting model and the parasocial-relationship research leave a gap, though, and it’s worth naming.
The cycle implies a permanent loop: idealize, invest, break, demolish, then find a new idol and start again. But the Timothy Ronald case suggests the loop may be changing shape. When audiences labeled him “Indra Kenz volume two” before the evidence was even fully established, they were applying a heuristic that might be more corrosive than the original gullibility. If the first phase of the cycle runs on excessive trust, the late phase may run on excessive suspicion, a reflexive cynicism that treats every public figure as a fraud-in-waiting. The schema that protects you from the next Indra Kenz also makes it harder to trust anyone with a legitimate message.
The case of Ferry Irwandi, a young content creator who built a following of millions through videos blending Stoic philosophy with anti-corruption commentary, shows what this transitional state looks like. In September 2025, when the Indonesian military’s cyber unit attempted to file criminal charges against him for criticizing the military’s involvement in civilian protests, the case collapsed, civil society rallied, and Ferry gained 70,000 YouTube subscribers in a single day. Three months later, he raised more than ten billion rupiah in twenty-four hours for Aceh flood victims, the largest disaster-relief campaign in the history of the crowdfunding platform KitaBisa. He was called a humanitarian hero. His moral capital seemed inexhaustible.
Then, in February 2026, Ferry hosted Muhammad Jannah, a twenty-three-year-old livestreamer known as Bigmo, on his podcast. Bigmo’s father, Muhammad Nashihan, had been convicted of embezzling fifty-five billion rupiah from a fund meant to cover health insurance and pensions for civil servants in Batam. He was sentenced to more than ten years in prison. When the subject came up, Ferry argued that a son should not bear his father’s sins. The argument was intellectually defensible. It was also, for someone whose entire brand rested on uncompromising anti-corruption conviction, strategically disastrous. Within forty-eight hours, clips from the episode had generated thousands of angry posts on X, and old videos resurfaced of Bigmo boasting about scamming his own viewers. One netizen’s comment captured the whiplash: he had just been the GOAT in Aceh, and now he was back to old habits. The cycle has not completed. Ferry is somewhere between the peak and the fall, with the hairline cracks just beginning to show.
What makes his case uncomfortable is the question it raises about what the cycle actually does. In a country where formal institutions of accountability are weak, where the anti-corruption commission has been deliberately hobbled, where defamation laws silence reporters, and where courts can be bent by political pressure, the collective pile-on may be the only mechanism of public accountability available. It is crude. It is disproportionate. It collapses nuance into caricature. But it is something. The idol factory does not just produce heroes and then destroy them. It may be the closest thing Indonesia has to a functioning feedback loop.
That possibility is more troubling than the simpler story about gullibility, because it means the cycle cannot be fixed merely by improving digital literacy or strengthening regulation. If the cycle persists because it fills an institutional vacuum, then it will keep running until the vacuum is filled by something better.
The same car, a different story
After Indra Kenz was arrested, Indonesian researchers interviewed his former followers and analyzed the content that had drawn them in. They found that once the fraud was revealed, audiences did not simply stop admiring him. They reinterpreted every piece of content he had ever posted. The Lamborghini was no longer a symbol of success; it was a prop. The stacks of cash were not aspirational; they were bait. The tutorials were not educational; they were the mechanism of the con. The researchers noted, with the dry precision of academic prose, that the “halo effect” had reversed into a “horn effect”: where one positive trait had once colored everything golden, one negative revelation now colored everything dark.
The content, of course, had not changed. Not a single image, not a single caption, not a single video. The Lamborghini was still the same car. The man leaning against it was still the same man. What had changed was the story the audience needed him to be part of, and the speed with which 143 million people, connected by the same platforms and governed by the same cognitive shortcuts, could agree on a new one.
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