Re: Ask a Korean "Korea's Nine Years of Darkness"

DISCLAIMER: This post was originally intended as a supplementary reply to

"Ask a Korean: Korea's Nine Years of Darkness part IV"

but as it grew way longer than I thought I decided to make it a separate post.



After his near defeat to Kim Dae-Jung in the 1971 presidential election, PGH's father Park Chung-Hee encouraged, or should I say outright created, regionalism and regional discrimination - a social plague that still haunts Korea to this day - for his own political gain. Nearly 40 years later, his political descendants, still strong in power thanks to the toxic seed of regionalism Park Chung-Hee had planted, now creates their own version of toxin - bigotry, rankism, and cult of competition which will all have long term negative effects on society - again, just for their political gain.

IMO the real problem of the LMB-PGH administrations was not incompetence (which both had oodles btw). Incompetent governing is a serious problem, but it usually just ends there. Systematically establishing a basis for unrestrained corruption OTOH, can ruin a society beyond repair. And this was what LMB & PGH set out to do with all their might - and their might in this regard was a pretty strong one because they collaborated with Korea's power elite. By controlling intelligence and media, they started a war against the very core of democratic functionality - its values.

Democracy is a system that functions on agreement. Establishing a commonly agreed set of reasonable, fair and universal values is the precondition for a system of this kind to work properly. Because of it's long history of dictatorship, Korea was seriously lacking in this regard with force-fed values handed down by dictators dominating general thought. The two previous progressive governments of KDJ and RMH (especially RMH) were well aware of this problem and undertook the process of updating Korea's outdated social values (e.g. anti-communism, rankism, regionalism, nationalism, developmentalism, neo-mercantilism, nepotism, chauvinism, misogyny, lack of social awareness, and a general 'survival of the fittest' mentality, etc.). Korea seemed underway of a slow but steady progress - a progress much needed to adapt into a post-industrial economy where wealth distribution becomes a more urgent matter than growth in terms of maximizing its citizen's happiness.

And then happened LMB. He wasted no time to go full reactionary, resurrecting all those obsolete ideas so that Korea could return to the good ol' days when thugs in charge were REALLY in charge. (Btw, the thugs of yesterday (military dictators) has since been replaced by thugs of today (Chaebols) but they are still thugs nonetheless.) To make sure democracy won't get in the way of thug rule, he aroused the greed inside an army of young wannabes by incessantly preaching the merits of competition - encouraging a life devoted to endless improvement of one's market value, and to enjoy the fruits of victory without shame which is mainly reigning above the 'losers' "since you worked so hard to win." It was around this time, for example, that Korea's largest internet portal and dominant opinion leader, Naver, changed it's slogan to "Naver is my competitive edge (나의 경쟁력, 네이버)", which millions of people had to see every time they fired up their web browser.

And OC, this didn't just end with preaching. Korea was already on its way descending into a dog-eat-dog gladiator pit ever since the 1997 asian financial crisis. It was the government's duty to revoke this trend and ease the endless rat race among people by arranging an economic truce through welfare and redistribution programs. However what LMB & PGH did was the complete opposite - they sided with the Chaebols who were seeing the increasing demands for equality as a threat. As a result, people were left to fend for themselves while automation, concentration of production and international competition were shrinking job markets and wealth distribution day by day. It didn't help that in order to justify their privilege against populist demands, the Chaebol-influenced conservative media ceaselessly preached that the rich deserved every bit of praise because they earned it - which also implied the poor deserves no sympathy since they were lazy losers. This was a horrible salt in the wound which had a profound effect on the minds of the people. Nobody wanted to be branded the 'worthless loser', anyone who stood up to abuse became the 'arrogant loser', and so the petty pissing contests to prove "I'm better than you" escalated high up to the skies.

TK described how the conservative administration directly orchestrated Korea's Alt-right movement. While I completely agree it was a governmental creation, they did it through both direct and indirect means and TK's post only covered the direct portion. IMO the indirect portion - the swimming against the tide implementation of laissez faire economics in a time when need for redistribution was greater than ever - was no less important as it layed down the basis for the rapid spread of far-right sentiments. As job markets intensified & economic instability grew, anxiety, fear, stress, and insecurity went up, which in turn increased paranoia and narrow-mindedness. Add to this the winner praising, loser shaming propaganda - and now you have the perfect condition for a world full of power worshipping wannabe bigots. (This trend affects the upper class as well, because they feel the heat knowing they are the greatest targets to dethrone by the people below.) The youth, who had been bred under this pressure-cooker environment ever since birth, were especially struck hard; they became the dominant source of Alt-right supporters.

To me, the biggest legacy of the LMB-PKH administration is that they tainted the minds of the people. They scattered out countless seeds of prejudice, skewed perceptions of economics and politics (like "welfare and social justice is communist that will only benefit lazy pigs"), elevated groundless beliefs to general truth (e.g. "the left are North Korea sympathizers"), attacked solidarity and compassion just so that nobody will stand up to injustice, and promoted rankism to justify the right of the privileged to continue their exploitation of inferiors. And in doing so, they suck out compassion and humanity from society - the very basis of any form of social progress.

In democracy, tainted minds don't end up just causing some unpleasant feelings. It has real material consequences, because it taints public opinion, which in turn taints elections, and finally, entire national policies. What the people think defines the world they live in. The so-called 'hell joseon' syndrome is the direct result of delayed reforms - if the society is left to drift aimlessly without any sort of rational intervention, it is guaranteed to become an all against all, Hobbesian dystopia.

It was indeed extremely fortunate for Korea that the Choi Soon-sil scandal happened at all - otherwise we probably would be looking at president Ban Ki-moon by now (thank god). And thank god the new president happened to be MJI - by far the most competent president I've ever experienced in my life. (I grew up watching Chun Doo-hwan smiling on television everyday.) I don't think this is a coincidence, because a huge number of Korea's young intellectuals voluntarily flocked to MJI's camp after seeing the tremendous social regression of the past 9 years so he probably has the best talent pool ever - such a far cry from LMB's 'Gosoyeong cabinet (고소영 내각)‘ or PGH's 'Choi Soon-sil and co.'. (Nearly every president before (with the notable exception of Roh - who was then again handicapped by being a political outsider) had been heads of certain crony groups which severely limited their talent pool.) Each day of his presidency is becoming a new day of exposing how the 'ancien regime' deceived the public: according to them, Korea should be burning down in fire by now because MJI is the worst person to ever breathe air.

But despite all of this, I'm still not that optimistic. There are many signs the taint imposed by LMB-PGH still remains strong. The "survival of the fittest" mentality is still there, which seems to have even worsened among the youth. The misconceptions regarding economic policies are still countless (most Koreans' understanding of economics are still stuck to outdated ideas of the 60's like "we must fasten our belts cuz we have few natural resources", "trade surplus is good, deficit is bad", "welfare and taxation will spoil the economy cuz nobody will want to work anymore", etc.) which will be a big hurdle for progressive reforms. Since the media and public education has neglected their duty so far of informing the public how to comprehend social/economical matters (which is usually very complicated so without proper guidance it is very likely many people will end up with bunch of misconceptions) properly, drawing out a rational social consensus over various issues will be very difficult for quite some time. The biggest problem IMO is that all reforms are bound to produce beneficiaries and casualties, and while I trust the MJI administration to handle things as fair as possible, the severe level of stress and anxiety over the years has made the people extremely territorial and even the slightest hint of losing some tiny privilege will drive them crazy. Take the extreme level of bigotry against feminism among young males for example, and if you live here you'll see and hear everyday of another disgusting episode of things like "XX residents don't want children of YY residents attend the same school because they will lower the school reputation which will then lower the price of their houses". With this level of rampant pettiness and short sightedness dominating people's minds, it's pretty much impossible to do anything else than to preserve the status quo - which is again the very source of all the problems mentioned above.

This is what a society looks like when the sense of solidarity and compassion is greatly destroyed, and this is what happens after years and years of thuggish rule. Societies can break down to the point where its self-healing ability takes a serious hit and if people allows it to happen, it will happen. I know TK wanted to tell a cautionary tale so here is my (slightly gloomier and more alarming) version. I still do have  hope since there're still lots of respectable people working vigorously to improve things. I'm writing this piece (I rarely post online and especially in English) to show my gratitude and support for them, and sincerely give my best wishes to everyone going through a similar process.