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Islam, Democracy and Human Rights in Contemporary Indonesia155rights and obligations in social, national, and state life, amongothers.Given the polarization between the proponents andopponents of the open proportional election system, this ExpertWitness will present findings from the perspective of HumanRights and Democracy that support the implementation ofelections using the closed proportional system.Allow me, therefore, to approach this issue reflectively%u2014examining the philosophical, conceptual, and empiricalfoundations%u2014to reaffirm our choice to conduct elections usingthe closed proportional system. I will also outline the impactsthat have arisen from implementing the open proportionalsystem across all aspects of social, economic, and political lifein our country.This principle is developed by referring to an analogy drawnfrom the research of a Belgian citizen and Nobel Laureate inBiochemistry, Ilya Prigogine, who studied the life patterns ofants. In his article %u201dThe Die is not Cast%u201d (UNESCO, 1999),Prigogine described the behavioral patterns of ants, which inmany ways resemble those of human beings.According to Ilya, there are approximately 12,000 knownspecies of ants in the natural world%u2014though there are likelymany more yet to be discovered. What is particularly interestingto study is their behavioral pattern. When ants live in smallcolonies or groups, their behavior tends to be highlyindividualistic. They search for food freely and bring it back totheir nests without any rules or coordination. However, whenants live in large colonies%u2014ranging from hundreds, thousands,to even millions%u2014they are governed by a control systemthrough an auto-catalytic reaction among the ants. This reaction

