The Four Gospels of a Civilisational Death Cult in West Papua: Religiosity, Development, Progress, and Success

This paper examines four dominant ideological formations—religiosity, development (pembangunan), progress (kemajuan), and success (sukses)—as they function within the settler colonial system imposed upon the Papuan peoples of West Papua. Drawing upon the Psycho-Cosmocide Paradigm, the paper argues that these four formations function not as instruments of liberation or civilisational advancement, but as a coordinated system of psychological reorientation through which the Papuan cosmological world is dismantled while the process of destruction is rendered invisible beneath the language of hope and progress. The paper further argues that the “cargo cult” phenomenon—historically misread as irrational millenarianism—must be reanalysed as a rational, if colonially conditioned, response to civilisational rupture, one that continues to animate the contemporary political theatre of Otonomi Khusus (Special Autonomy). Engaging with Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Indonesian-language critical scholarship on pembangunan and kemajuan, the paper concludes that these four gospels constitute a single civilisational logic of extinction dressed in the colours of hope.