Reading the NU Congress from a Neuropolitical Perspective: Between Trust and Obedience

The congress (Muktamar) of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia's largest Islamic organization, offers more than just a platform for internal decision-making. Examining its proceedings and participant behaviors through the lens of 'neuropolitics' can provide deep insights into the organization's decision-making processes and the mechanisms of loyalty to its leaders. Neuropolitics, a relatively new field merging neuroscience and political science, studies how the human brain's functions influence political decision-making, collective behavior, and power dynamics. In large gatherings like the NU congress, participants' emotions, cognition, and group psychology are crucial factors in individual voting behavior and collective decisions. Especially within traditional and authoritative organizations like NU, the concepts of 'trust' and 'obedience' are considered fundamental to the organization's cohesion and operation. Participants make judgments on leaders and organizational decisions not only based on their rationality or fairness but also on 'trust' derived from long-standing relationships and a sense of belonging to the organization. Simultaneously, the organization's hierarchical structure and traditional norms create a dynamic that encourages a certain level of 'obedience' from participants. The balance between this 'trust' and 'obedience' plays a significant role in adopting agenda items at the congress, electing officials, and determining the organization's overall direction. A neuropolitical approach, by analyzing participants' emotional responses in their brains and patterns of information transfer within the group, offers clues to understanding how these decisions are made and how they affect the organization's stability and adaptability to change. Neuropolitical analysis of the NU congress holds the potential to offer new perspectives not only on the governance of Indonesian Islamic organizations but also on the decision-making processes within other large religious and political bodies.