Fear of the Korean black swan

Courtesy of Olesya Yemets

By David Tizzard

Korean news in 2023 will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be. It might be good, it might be bad. It might be an unprecedented cultural success. It might be a catastrophic national failure. It could be war.

Of course, it could be none of these but rather something completely different. That's how history seems to work, particularly here in Korea. It doesn't crawl forward slowly. It is not a country of steady progress. Rather it makes dramatic jumps, transcending the present and entering a whole new paradigm in an incredibly short period of time. In such fashion was modernity compressed and thrust unapologetically upon the country, women's rights exploded into public discourse following a tragic murder and the release of a book, and K-pop became genuinely global and capable of fronting Rolling Stone magazine.

We like to see history as a slow methodical development. Each small flap of a butterfly wing contributing to an eventual outcome. History books and post-mortem analyses certainly narrate them in such a fashion. Academics look back into the past and draw lines and associations. Experts show how all of these past events made the present little more than an inevitably. Connecting the dots. Drawing the hand of destiny.

The reality, however, is far different. The future is not necessarily implied by the past. Moreover, there are clear epistemological limitations to our knowledge and ability to predict what might happen next. These limitations are both philosophical and psychological, characterized by a lack of data and the presence of human hubris and personal bias. Such epistemic limitations bring with them large consequences.

In recent years, Korea has experienced the turbulence of COVID-19, the Sewol disaster, the rise of BTS, the defeat of the Democratic Party of Korea, a tragedy in Itaewon, Squid Game, and much more. All of these events, for better or for worse, shook the country, the people, the politics, and the economy. They dominated news headlines, became talking points around the world, and generated countless retrospectives.

The experts, tucked safely in a position of hindsight, wrote innumerable pieces about the inevitability of these phenomena. They projected backwards, drawing straight lines from the present to the Sampoong Department store collapse, the Masan riots, or the rise of Seo Tae-ji. Things are so much easier to explain after they have happened. They are explained through narrative, particularly ones that fit with our existing worldview. In that sense, they appear as if there was a sense of inevitability about them. That not only could they have been predicted, they could have also been prevented or amplified.

Quite simply, however, that is not true. There will always be a solitary example tucked away in some corner of the internet that predicted just about everything, but we should not pretend that it was part of the grand narrative or broader consciousness of the time. No-one was writing 12 months ago that a heartbreaking crush was likely to take more than 200 of the country's young souls on a single night without so much as an explosion or a bullet being fired. Few, if any, would have bet on a group of young moody Korean hip-hop wannabes with questionable language and attitudes about race and skin color taking over the internet as an androgynously positioned boy group pushing western pop music. I can also point you to countless articles and essays from some of Korea's most respected thinkers saying how detente was finally on the cards for inter-Korean relations, President Moon had finally improved things with the North, or the Democratic Party of Korea was set for decades of domination. Those opinions are all still out there. The people who wrote them are still asked for their predictions of the future. And they still speak with a great deal of confidence.

It's not so much the accuracy (or lack thereof) that is problematic. Instead it's a combination of two things. First, the confidence. The refusal to indicate that perhaps we don't really have any idea of what might happen. Second, is the fact that what does happen is far beyond the realm of any of the expert's predictions. For the most part, we simply project yesterday into tomorrow. We take the same existing conditions and modify them slightly, either projecting them as being better or worse. These projections, rather than being an objective analysis of the existing conditions, often only give us insight into our own views instead of an understanding of the world itself. For the year ahead, the left-leaning authors among us will predict a continued series of democratic back-sliding under President Yoon Suk-yeol with fears over media control and gender issues. The conservatives among us will portray next year as being one in which South Korea's foreign policy, particularly vis-a-vis North Korea and China will be of paramount importance and see the government moving in the right direction, in lockstep with the international community.

Neither of these views is particularly useful. Again, it merely tells us about the present. Not about the future. More importantly, they do not account for the unpredictable unknown events that will take place in Korea, nor do they foresee the even more random occurrences that will happen in other parts of the world. Korea is affected, for example, just as much by its own policies and population as it is by events in Ukraine or Washington. A new president in another country, race riots abroad, or foreign invasions can all greatly influence what happens here.

Publicly confessing my inability to predict what next year's most significant event will be harms whatever credibility I might have as a "Korea expert," despite my Ph.D, university positions, and unpaid bluetick on Twitter. However, my inability to forecast next year's events is shared by many others. This is not to say we should stop predicting. Rather we should be cognizant of our limitations and be aware that in a country as extreme as Korea anything and everything is likely to happen.

Despite the cynicism, books on Korea are becoming more prevalent and, for the most part, better. There's a whole host of excellent resources from YouTube videos, podcasts, fashion magazines, and Insta reels about this country the world was once guilty of sleeping on. Many of them might not accurately predict the big events of 2023, but let's enjoy them while we can.

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..