Blind nationalism and strong socialsim

Blind nationalism and strong socialism

I have been spending hours today on reading news columns and articles about North Korean nuclear weapons. Some politicians' arguments for the necessity of dialogue with North Korea sound more like an unreasonable expectation, given that North Korea has no reason to give up their nuclear weapons that they already have successfully and painfully made through decades of the disguised dialogue tactics and by help of the so-called South Korean Sunshine policies.

 

And now the North is merely trying to be officially and internationally recognised through the US. The party that North Korea wants to talk to or needs to talk to is not South Korea at all, who does not have any card or lever to use in this dilemmatic situation. In the eyes of North Korea, sad as it may sound, South Korea has been, and is, and will be, of no use to North Korea. Nay, South Korea is rather the target to revolutionise or the enemy to be defeated so as to achieve North Korean regime-led-unification, and is the potentially useful wealthy hostage in their fight (or game) against the US. 

It is somewhat shocking that South Koreans held such a strong belief that North Korea would not attack South Korea even though North Korea has now become one of the countries that practically have nuclear weapons. North Korea has until now always declared that their national aim is to finish their half fulfilled revolution since 1953. North Korean regime can threaten the South in a variety of ways, and also can irritate the US. The US may not easily decide to engage in a new war in the East Asian regions, which will be a heavy burden to the US, just as the US could not help Ukraine despite Russia's annexation of Ukraine's territory.

It is true that South Korea has been able to behave for the last decades as if it were much more powerful than North Korea, and could be generous to the North, just because of the support from the US and its relatively more affluent economy. The strong support from the US was able to be secured by their first president, whom now few South Koreans feel thankful for that. Also the economic miracle was brought by the leaders whom South Koreans always criticise as a military regime that made democracy retarded. 

In that sense, I do not agree with the way that South Korean history textbooks deal with historical events, which take an extremely reductionist approach. As for 20th Korean history, they clearly divide politics and economy, the former that was a dark period because of retarded 'democracy' and the latter that had a limited bright side because of its economic growth, while it sacrificed many labourers and farmers, which was another dark side. Those history textbooks judge all the political events on the basis of the political ideal of democracy. Also in order to judge economic events, they only emphasise quantitative measures like growth rate or trade volume, and adopt another ideology of economic socialism while completely ignoring economic liberalism. Those textbooks do not bother to introduce any aspects of economic philosophies that were importantly involved in the economic development of the last century, but just introduce governmental plans like the 5 year plans, which remind us of the North Korean central planning economic system. Particularly this economic bias that most of the current South Korean history textbooks show constitutes the reason why I regard them as too much inclined towards socialism or social democracy. As a result, few students are aware of the importance of the market, legal systems for free trade, and the philosophy of liberalism, which contributed to developing Western societies and enabled them affluent until the 19th century. 

As for 19th century Korean history, those history books lacked any fundamental explanation about why Joseon dynasty suffered from the severe decline in economy, which ended up with the loss of its military power against imperialist states. Was it all because of the evil nature of the corrupt civil officers? According to those history textbooks, it seems like in the 19th century civil officers were all devils and all the farmers had to suffer by them. They do not guide students to think about more profound reasons why any checking system of political powers failed to function in the 19th century. This cannot be explained by such a simplistic dichotomy of King's power vs premier's power. In some sense I am suspicious that the current history textbooks deliberately ignore the relations between the economic market and the political power in the 19th century. Why do they consistently try to divide economy and politics in history? 

I think that such an excessive inclination towards socialism has also made South Korean society significantly immoral. The people now tend to complain about things that they do not have while not feeling gratitude for what they have. They are encouraged to blame others (who are richer), government (which is not socialist enough) and (capitalist) society. Even though they are aware of the importance of collaboration like their previous generation, they collaborate to fight, fight against the big companies and market systems. Self-responsibility for their own behaviours and decisions is discouraged or neglected. Their wrong choice or bad behaviours are not their faults but are attributed to society. They contempt and ridicule their own laws and regulations. Most of them believe that ends can justify measures. 

South Koreans have now dispelled their own behavioural virtues of the last century, such as diligence, self-help and collaboration. I assume such virtues were partly related to Japanese legacies which the South Korean government of the 1960s and 70s tried to utilise constructively. More fundamentally, those legacies came from the Western tradition of Enlightenment humanitarianism and capitalism. Thomas Haskell argued that capitalism was an important precondition for the development of humanitarianism by encouraging certain elements such as 'a more extended social network, a notion of contracted obligation, concern for long-term consequences and disciplined behaviour'.[1] The US system at first seemed to be too liberal for South Korea to absorb and digest, given the fact that Yi Seungman's policies failed to critically change the economic situation of the 1950s. 

South Koreans might want to strongly deny the positive external influences from Japan. In human history, however, no country has developed alone without interaction with (and influences from) neighboring countries. If South Koreans keep emphasising only their own national traits, which they seem to believe to be by temperament extraordinary diligent and brilliant, this would lead to a pathologic state of nationalism. Humans can become lazy under a certain condition while they tend to be industrious under a different condition. It has been more than 100 years since Carl Menger's Austrian school of economics woke Western intellectuals up from the delusion created by the German Historical school of economics. However South Korean history seems still dominated by obscure and idealistic nationalist concepts like those of Park Eun-sick and Shin Chae-ho.  

Socialist philosophy is necessary to maintain healthy society and to check the market's autocracy, but in too powerful socialism dependence on governmental redistribution replaces individual person's efforts in the market, which leads individuals to learn how to organise collective demands rather than to learn to introspect their efforts and decisions. In a strongly social democratic society which denies the importance of individual liberty, the collective claim of a majority itself, irrespective of its long-term feasibility or consequences, is highly likely to become social justice. People will become more louder, selfish and shameless in their claims, and politicians' pursuit of power will become fiercer and meaner while bribing voters by massive redistribution policies. Despite rapid decline of investment, fiscal deficit will keep increasing both in private and public sectors, which will drain the economy of all the jobs and hopes. 

[1] C. Hamlin, 'State Medicine in Great Britain', in The History of Public Health and the Modern State edited by D. Porter, 1994, p 135.

© 2016 Min Bae