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| Courtesy of Velizar Ivanov |
By David Tizzard
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The candid remarks above from an intelligent young South Korean this week should be enough to make anyone stop in their tracks and reassess just how well they think they know this country. Korea is a place fascinated and fawned over by foreign visitors and international media while, at the same time, seen by some here as a society in which the death of their peers is so commonplace they have become somewhat numb to the idea of loss.
The country's young adults, raised on a diet of existentialism, know that each individual is worthy of dignity and the right to lead a fulfilling life. Psychological self-determination and personal dreams are capitalist mantras sung by pop stars and politicians alike. Yet at every turn the system appears deaf to such understandings, thwarting their right to both life and dreams. This makes the stratification, inequality, and degradation taste even more bitter. It fuels the resentment that manifests internally and externally.
At the same time that this is taking place, the youth are constantly reminded that the onus is on them as young South Korean adults to assert their will and imagination and tackle the eternal themes of power and justice. These are questions that are never settled but instead asked of each generation: the case retried in every epoch, the settings reset in every age. They were settled differently amidst experiences of imperialism, colonization, and dictatorship. They are now being put forward again.
Yet there is something unprecedented about this current experience. Never before have people seen tragedy and loss played out in real-time, in high-definition computers tucked in their backpacks and clasped in their hands. Surveillance capitalism not only observes their every move, it also predicts it. And never before has identity and individual experience been seen as consisting of unlimited choice. While previous generations knew what they 'should' do, the roadmap of life laid out clear and obvious, the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson has said of the modern condition that, "The patient of today suffers most under the problem of what he should believe and who he/she should or might be or become." Freedom can be very suffocating.
Decades of turbulent social change, technological explosions, and merciless neoliberal economic policies have left many young people feeling impotent. Individualism has demanded that each person be responsible for their own success, failures, and mental health issues. Fed the myth of the free and atomized individual standing alone. Disconnected from their peers, isolated from physical communities, and trapped in a world of harsh competition. Thus, young people feel easily excluded from a slowly cancelled future. Finding solace in rage-filled attacks on pieces of art or in the carrying out of violence, against others or themselves.
As a society we are often blind to these novel facts and experiences. We observe the situation through the eyes of the familiar: those with which we were raised. And, in doing so, we become oblivious to the unprecedented situation taking place. The abnormal is obscured by our inability to observe it. We think hagwons are the answer just like they were in the 90s. We think working hard and getting a job is the key to upward social mobility and happiness, just like it was in the 80s. We think men are men and women are women, just like it was in the 70s.
But this is 2022. While some of the youth here are screaming in distress, it is those speaking like the young lady in the opening sentence to whom we should be equally attuned. In his Sonnets from China, W.H. Auden remarked, "But hear the morning's injured weeping and know why: ramparts and souls have fallen; the will of the unjust has never lacked an engine; still all princes must employ the fairly-noble unifying lie." Perhaps it is time for us to better attune our ears to the weeping of the morning's injured in Korea before more souls fall.
Dr. David A. Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He is a social/cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the Korea Deconstructed podcast, which can be found online. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.
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