A Little Prince statue facing the scenery of Gamcheon Cultural Village, Busan, South Korea. Photo by myself
There are a lot of internal and external critiques of every single culture the humanity has. And a lot of them offer valid points to think, while some of them are based on pure hate or misunderstanding. Some people say “being a critic is easy, changing what they don’t like is hard.” But for me, it sounds like they’re saying natural science is less valuable than engineering, while undermining the power difference and the reachability of one’s voice. Yes, someone in a big despair might grunt in raw, enraged voice. But no, that doesn’t mean their voice is invalid. Rather, it means that the voice is silenced by colonial oppression and the person didn’t even have a chance to obtain or invent words to express what they feel.
Being born and raised in South Korea, I’ve never felt like I belong to this society. The feeling was raw and rough in my early life, but I feel like it’s starting to get refined a bit, as time of endurance passes by. Of course, there are a lot of things I cannot even tell anybody, for the sake of my trauma, dignity of me and other people, and various other reasons. However, I can definitely say this society has never been welcoming or accommodating to me, who is actually from it. I am pretty sure that I’m a very quirky person, and this society, in the level even worse than any other contemporary societies, punishes people for being just different.
They don’t just passively exclude different people here; they actively hate and ostracise different people. If there is one thing that the humanity has learnt over time, that is every human being, or even every conscious experience, are sacred and never a subject of someone else’s “understanding” or “approval”. They just are here, existing in the world with you. Unless someone tries to threaten or actively infringe your dignity and existence, you should just accept it and move on. That is what every single piece of human knowledge tells you, after countless of lives were sacrificed.
Instead, this society tells you to be just a replacable part of the macro-organism. You should be exactly same as the others. Diversity is generously allowed for you, not accepted naturally. You should follow the societal norms at all cost. You should devote yourself for the “greater good”. You should live near Seoul if you want to be treated humanely. You should be… less of an independent human being.
Some might argue that there’s no place on the earth that’s perfect. I don’t deny that. Utopia is ethymologically “nonexistent place”. However, that simple relativity argument can’t be an alternative to the fact that there are better and worse societies in the world, both in general and for your fit. I don’t believe that would be an informed decision, but some might find an authoritarian society better fit to them, and some might find a more liberal and egalitarian society better fit to them. No one can judge someone else’s sense of belonging and the image of their ideal society, unless the ideal itself involves a serious infringement of others’ rights.
I am not going to hesitate to name this country as a softcore fascist regime. I know the actual fascist got kicked out from the power last April. But there are very highly prevalent fascist mentality here and there in this society. I once came up with a concept that’s called “MTBF”, and it’s not the tech term of “Mean Time Between Failure”, but instead it stands for “Mean Time Between Fascists”, the mean time between you meet one fascist to another on the street. I believe in South Korean society, that’s seconds. And as a long MTBF for hard drives shows their quality, I believe a long MTBF for a society shows its quality.
In the end, I might not belong to anywhere in the current world. In a broad sense, that’s a definition for a refugee status, I believe, because it means the people who can’t be safe in their homeland, and does not have a primary homeland for that reason. Like I once felt my whole life was like slash and burn farming. Maybe I would feel home somewhere else than here, but my life told me too much optimism gives you only frustration. Still, I don’t want to lose hope in this world.