Thinking on the hill where cosmos flowers bloom

There is a saying that the more you think about it, the more it comes to mind, so the thought that you are not thinking is the best thought, but that is a mistaken idea. Because the way humans think through effort is closer to their true nature. Ideology or religion becomes a form of power that deceives citizens because the citizens do not think critically of it. In other words, it is because each of us lacks the power to philosophize. It was that education failed to fulfill its role.

 

And I have long said that we have been using the word "progressive" incorrectly. Somehow, in Korean society, I had come to understand progressivism and conservatism only through the lens of factional logic. The word 'progress' should be understood as development. And society must progress to survive.

 

While debating with artificial intelligence, it keeps urging us to choose sides and adopt a fixed perspective. Later, I criticized artificial intelligence as follows. And artificial intelligence cannot beat humans. There must always be a human behind the artificial intelligence.

 

--A sense of suspicion and a will to fend for oneself will both arise. There's something you don't know. The human mind is complex. And for cross-attack resistance, the inner attack must come first. There's something you don't know. The human mind is continuous.--

The True Name of Progress

How dependence becomes power, and how thinking breaks the chain

Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist

A debate breaks out over a policy. Someone says one sentence: "That's just the progressive line." The debate ends there. Nobody asks whether the policy moves society forward or drags it back. A single word has replaced judgment.

In Korean, jinbo (進步) means "a step forward." Bosu (保守) means "to guard and preserve." Both are good words. A society that never moves forward rots; a society that cannot preserve anything collapses. Yet Korean society has turned both words into camp banners. In Korea, what divides "progressives" from "conservatives" is not development versus preservation. It is mainly one's stance toward North Korea and the United States — a security line drawn by division and the Cold War. The names survived. The meanings did not.

This is not mere verbal confusion. Names are power. The moment one camp calls itself "progressive," it monopolizes the value of development, and its opponents become, by definition, enemies of development. The name "conservative" monopolizes preservation and patriotism in the same way. Once each side had seized a good word, citizens no longer needed to think. They could simply lean on the name.

In this essay, "progress" means development, not a camp. And I ask: Why do people lean on names? How does that leaning become power? And how is the chain broken?

1. Seeking the Unknown versus Leaning on the Unknown

Science goes out to meet the unknown. Faith leans on the unknown. Science lives by shrinking the unknown; faith lives only as long as the unknown remains.

Faith often defends itself with the word "supra-rational": it is not against reason, the claim goes, but beyond it. But who decides what lies beyond reason and what lies beneath it? That distinction cannot be made by the one making the claim.

To be fair: science also leaps before the evidence. A hypothesis is a belief not yet proven, and the premise that the unknown can eventually be known has never itself been proven — Hume's problem of induction showed as much. In the leap before evidence, science and faith make the same motion. They part ways afterward. Science is ready to be wrong. When an unknown is solved, it welcomes the answer and moves to the next. Faith that depends on the unknown feels threatened when the unknown is solved, and it resists.

Leaning on a camp's name has the same structure. Instead of examining the unknown that a policy represents, people lean on the certainty of a label. This is the moment politics takes on the form of religion.

2. The Problem of Religion Is the Problem of Power

Buddhism is often called a philosophy rather than a faith. Teachings on prajna and emptiness leave no room for blind dependence. Yet Buddhism also has its "other-power" faith — reliance on Amitabha Buddha for rebirth in the Pure Land. And in late Goryeo, there was an era when monasteries held vast estates and bonded laborers. The teaching was the same. What had changed was power.

The same teaching reveals the pathologies of religion when joined to power, and returns to the face of philosophy when separated from it. The problem of religion is not a problem of God; it is a problem of power. In this, religion and ideology share one structure. Communism erased God and then rebuilt the very same power in the cult of the Leader.

3. Dependence Summons Power

Which comes first, power or dependence? I believe dependence summons power.

In democracies this is especially visible. In a democracy there is only one legitimate road to power: the people's support. So politicians compete with one message — lean on me. Leaders become saviors and supporters become believers. Fandom politics in Korea belongs to no single camp, and the United States has shown the same pattern across party lines. What distinguishes democracy is not that dependence is greater there. It is that dependence is the only legitimate road to power.

The warning came long ago. Tocqueville warned of a "soft despotism" in which democratic citizens abandon the labor of self-government and surrender to a benevolent tutelary power. Fromm argued that citizens unable to bear the weight of freedom flee from it. In the Weimar Republic, the Nazis came to power not by coup but by election.

Under dictatorship the arrow seems reversed. In North Korea, it was power that manufactured dependence: material dependence through the rationing system, spiritual dependence through propaganda and education. But whichever way it begins, the result is the same. Once power is entrenched, it reproduces dependence.

4. The Mind Is Continuous

That rationing system collapsed in the famine of the mid-1990s. The so-called Jangmadang (marketplace) generation, born and raised in those years, survived by relying not on the state but on markets. They did not learn to think in school; they learned in their bodies that the state could not feed them. The regime fears this generation. The Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act of 2020, the Youth Education Guarantee Act of 2021, and the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act of 2023 prove it. A regime that polices the thoughts, culture, and even the speech patterns of its youth knows those young people have already changed.

In this generation, the power to doubt and the instinct to fend for oneself grow side by side. The human mind is complex. And it is continuous. External resistance always comes after internal departure.

Havel wrote of a greengrocer under communism who places a party slogan in his shop window though he does not believe it. The system begins to shake on the day he takes the sign down — the day he begins to live within the truth. Kuran described "preference falsification": people hide their true views and publicly support the regime. Hidden convictions accumulate quietly, then burst out all at once. That is why no one predicted the East European revolutions of 1989.

The mind is continuous, but visible behavior appears discontinuous. Outsiders who say of North Korea that "nothing has happened yet" cannot see the invisible continuity beneath.

Yet continuity does not flow only forward. When external threats grow, even the discontented lean back toward the regime — what political scientists call the rally-round-the-flag effect. Pressure pulls minds backward; contact pushes them forward. Right now those minds are being pushed forward and pulled back at once. And the backward pull will, in time, rebound into a forward push. Korean society is no different.

5. Cycle and Spiral

The rise and fall of political camps is a cycle. But this cycle is not built in. It arises when correction overshoots. People become so absorbed in fixing one side's excess that the correction itself becomes the dominant current — the means overtakes the end. The fuel for that overshoot is dependence. The more citizens are swept up by conformity and agitation, the larger the amplitude.

Yet history has not merely gone in circles. The abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and human rights have not been reversed. The cycle becomes a spiral that rises little by little as it swings. What produces that rise is not a camp but the capacity for development — progress in its original sense.

We must also ask why the rise holds. Britain's postwar welfare state, built by Labour, was carried on by Conservative governments in the 1950s. America's New Deal Social Security has never been abolished by any later administration. In Korea, no camp proposes returning to the indirect "gymnasium elections" before 1987. The forward force turns the ratchet; the preserving force acts as the pawl that keeps it from spinning back. Conservatism is truest to itself not when it insists on regression, but when it guards the progress of earlier generations.

So this is not addressed to any one camp. A political force that grows on fear and dependence will, regardless of camp, eventually collapse if it cannot show better results.

6. An Education in Thinking

If dependence summons power, the remedy lies less in institutions than in citizens. Separation of powers and a free press are helpless before citizens who want to lean. Good citizens are made by education.

But education here does not mean credentials. In Nazi Germany, roughly 45 percent of physicians joined the Nazi Party — among the best-educated people of their time. An American study found that people with higher science literacy and numeracy were more, not less, polarized by camp on climate change. Knowledge did not change their judgment; it became a weapon to defend the side they already leaned on. What they lacked was not knowledge but an education in thinking.

Citizens never taught to think will look for something to lean on when they meet a world only slightly wider than their own. The problem is not the width of the world but the drop between one's own world and the world one encounters. Without the strength to bear that drop, a person looks for someone to fill the gap — a priest, a politician, a YouTuber.

What of Korea's entrance-exam education? The answers are fixed, and the authority of the exam-setters holds them. For twelve years, students are trained to lean on whoever holds the answer. This is not education that breaks dependence; it is education that breeds it. The school is playing the role of a church.

Germany, having lived through Nazism, set principles for civic education in the 1976 Beutelsbach Consensus: do not indoctrinate; treat as controversial in the classroom what is controversial in society; enable students to judge their own interests. French secondary graduates spend four hours writing an essay on a philosophy question with no right answer. An education in thinking is, in the end, training to endure uncertainty — the strength not to rush toward someone to lean on when there is no answer.

The power to think does not grow only in school. The citizens of the April 19 Revolution and the June Democratic Struggle, and the young people of the Jangmadang, learned to think through experience. The school's task is not to wait for such experience, but to let students encounter small unknowns safely, again and again — to build the muscle that bears the drop.

In Closing

Let us return to the opening scene. "That's just the progressive line." The person who ended the debate with that sentence is not a bad person. He has simply learned to lean instead of to think.

Science seeks the unknown; faith leans on it. So it is with politics. The more citizens lean on names, the larger power grows and the rougher the cycle becomes. The more citizens walk forward into the unknown without leaning, the more society, though it sways, rises little by little.

Reclaiming the word "progress" is not about fixing a single word. It is about reclaiming thought.

References

Baek, J. (2016). North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Burke, E. (1790). Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley.

Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Havel, V. (1985 [1978]). "The Power of the Powerless." In J. Keane (Ed.), The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe. London: Hutchinson.

Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. London: A. Millar.

Institute for Unification Education, Ministry of Unification (2024). 2024 Bukhan Ihae [Understanding North Korea 2024]. Seoul: Institute for Unification Education. (In Korean)

Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Ouellette, L. L., Braman, D., & Mandel, G. (2012). "The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks." Nature Climate Change, 2(10), 732–735.

Kang, W.-T. (2003). Hanguk-ui Seongeo Jeongchi: Inyeom, Jiyeok, Sedae-wa Midieo [Electoral Politics in Korea: Ideology, Region, Generation and Media]. Seoul: Pureungil. (In Korean)

Kater, M. H. (1989). Doctors Under Hitler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Kavanagh, D., & Morris, P. (1994). Consensus Politics from Attlee to Major (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Kuran, T. (1991). "Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989." World Politics, 44(1), 7–48.

Kuran, T. (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McMahan, D. L. (2008). The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mueller, J. E. (1970). "Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson." American Political Science Review, 64(1), 18–34.

Tocqueville, A. de (1840). De la démocratie en Amérique, Vol. II. Paris: Charles Gosselin. [Democracy in America, Vol. 2]

Wehling, H.-G. (1977). "Konsens à la Beutelsbach?" In S. Schiele & H. Schneider (Eds.), Das Konsensproblem in der politischen Bildung. Stuttgart: Klett.

 

코스모스 피는 언덕에서 생각하다

생각하면 생각할수록 생각나는 것이 생각이므로 생각하지 않는 생각이 가장 좋은 생각이라는 말이 있지만 그건 잘못된 생각이다. 인간은 노력하여 생각하는 모습이야말로 인간 본연의 모습에 가깝기 때문이다. 이념이나 종교가 권력이 되어 버려 시민들을 현혹시키는 것은 시민들이 생각하지 않기 때문이다. 즉 각자의 철학하는 힘이 없기 때문이다. 그것은 교육이 그 역할을 못한 것이다.

 

그리고 오래전부터 우리가 진보라는 단어를 잘못 사용하고 있음을 말해왔다. 어쩌다보니 한국 사회에서는 진보와 보수를 진영 논리로만 이해하고 있었다. 진보라는 단어를 발전으로 이해해야 한다. 그리고 어차피 사회는 발전해야 존속한다.

 

인공지능과 토론하는데, 인공지능은 자꾸 양자택일과 정지적인 시점을 권유한다. 나중에는 다음과 같이 인공지능을 비판하였다. 그리고 인공지능은 인간을 이길 수 없다. 반드시 인공지능 뒤에 인간이 있어야 한다.

--의심하는 힘과 각자도생의 마음이 모두 생기겠지. 네가 잘 모르는게 있어. 인간의 마음은 복합적이야. 그리고 외적 저항은 내적이탈이 먼저 와야하는거야. 네가 잘 모르는게 있어. 인간의 마음은 연속적인거야.--

진보라는 말의 정체

의존은 어떻게 권력이 되고, 생각은 어떻게 그 고리를 끊는가

이형춘 · 독립 칼럼니스트

정책 하나를 두고 토론이 붙는다. 누군가 한마디를 던진다. "그건 진보 쪽 주장이잖아." 토론은 거기서 끝난다. 그 정책이 사회를 앞으로 나아가게 하는지, 뒤로 끌어당기는지는 아무도 묻지 않는다. 단어 하나가 판단을 대신했다.

진보(進步)는 '나아가는 걸음'이다. 보수(保守)는 '지키고 간직함'이다. 둘 다 본래 좋은 말이다. 나아가지 않는 사회는 썩고, 지키지 못하는 사회는 무너진다. 그런데 한국 사회는 이 두 단어를 진영의 깃발로 바꿔 버렸다. 한국에서 진보와 보수를 가르는 기준은 발전이냐 보존이냐가 아니다. 주로 북한과 미국을 대하는 태도, 곧 분단과 냉전이 만든 안보 노선이다. 이름은 남았고 뜻은 사라졌다.

이것은 단순한 말의 혼란이 아니다. 이름은 권력이다. 한 진영이 스스로를 '진보'라 부르는 순간 '발전'이라는 가치를 독점한다. 그 반대편은 정의상 발전의 적이 된다. '보수'라는 이름도 '지킴'과 '애국'을 독점한다. 양쪽이 좋은 단어를 하나씩 차지하자 시민은 더 이상 따질 필요가 없어졌다. 이름에 기대면 되기 때문이다.

이 글에서 진보는 진영이 아니라 발전을 뜻한다. 그리고 묻는다. 사람들은 왜 이름에 기대는가. 그 기댐은 어떻게 권력이 되는가. 그 고리는 어떻게 끊어지는가.

1. 미지를 찾아가는 것과 미지에 기대는 것

과학은 미지의 영역을 찾아간다. 신앙은 미지의 영역에 의지한다. 과학은 미지를 줄이면서 살고, 신앙은 미지가 남아 있어야 산다.

신앙은 흔히 '초합리성'이라는 말로 자신을 변호한다. 이성에 어긋나는 것이 아니라 이성 너머에 있다는 주장이다. 그러나 이성 너머와 이성 아래를 누가 구별하는가. 그 구분은 주장하는 사람 스스로 할 수 없다.

공정하게 말하자. 과학도 증거 이전에 몸을 던진다. 가설은 증명되기 전의 믿음이고, "미지는 결국 알 수 있다"는 전제 자체도 증명된 적이 없다. 흄이 귀납의 문제로 이미 보여준 바다. 증거 이전의 도약에서 과학과 신앙은 같은 동작을 한다. 갈라지는 것은 그 다음이다. 과학은 틀릴 준비가 되어 있다. 미지가 풀리면 환영하고 다음 미지로 간다. 미지에 기대는 신앙은 미지가 풀리면 위협을 느끼고 저항한다.

진영의 이름에 기대는 것도 같은 구조다. 정책이라는 미지를 따져 보는 대신 이름이라는 확신에 기댄다. 정치가 종교의 형식을 띠는 순간이다.

2. 종교의 문제는 권력의 문제다

불교는 흔히 신앙이 아니라 철학이라 불린다. 반야와 공을 설하는 가르침에는 맹목적 의존이 설 자리가 없다. 그러나 불교에도 아미타불의 힘에 기대어 극락왕생을 바라는 타력 신앙이 있다. 그리고 고려 말, 사원이 막대한 토지와 노비를 거느리던 시대가 있었다. 가르침은 같았다. 달라진 것은 권력이었다.

같은 가르침도 권력과 결합하면 종교의 병리를 드러내고, 권력에서 떨어지면 철학의 얼굴로 돌아온다. 종교의 문제는 신의 문제가 아니라 권력의 문제다. 이 점에서 종교와 이데올로기는 같은 구조를 가진다. 신을 지운 공산주의가 수령 숭배라는 똑같은 권력을 다시 세운 것이 그 증거다.

3. 의존이 권력을 부른다

권력이 먼저인가, 의존이 먼저인가. 나는 의존이 권력을 불러온다고 본다.

민주주의에서 이 현상은 특히 뚜렷하다. 민주주의에서 권력에 이르는 정당한 길은 단 하나, 국민의 지지다. 그래서 정치인은 "나에게 기대라"는 경쟁을 벌인다. 지도자는 구원자가 되고 지지자는 신도가 된다. 한국의 팬덤 정치는 어느 한 진영의 것이 아니다. 미국도 진영을 가리지 않고 같은 현상을 보여 왔다. 민주주의의 특징은 의존이 더 크다는 데 있지 않다. 의존이 권력에 이르는 유일하게 정당한 길이라는 데 있다.

경고는 오래전에 있었다. 토크빌은 민주 시민이 스스로 다스리는 수고를 포기하고 자애로운 후견 권력에 몸을 맡기는 '부드러운 전제'를 경고했다. 프롬은 자유의 무게를 견디지 못한 시민이 자유로부터 도피한다고 분석했다. 바이마르 공화국에서 나치는 쿠데타가 아니라 선거로 권력을 잡았다.

독재에서는 방향이 반대로 보인다. 북한에서 의존을 만든 것은 권력이었다. 배급제로 물질적 의존을, 선전과 교육으로 정신적 의존을 설계했다. 그러나 출발이 어느 쪽이든 결과는 같다. 일단 자리 잡은 권력은 의존을 재생산한다.

4. 마음은 연속적이다

그 배급제가 1990년대 중반 대기근 속에서 무너졌다. 그 무렵 태어나고 자란 이른바 장마당 세대는 국가가 아니라 시장에 기대어 살아남았다. 학교에서 생각을 배운 것이 아니라, 국가가 자신을 먹여 살리지 못한다는 사실을 몸으로 배웠다. 정권은 이 세대를 두려워한다. 2020년 반동사상문화배격법, 2021년 청년교양보장법, 2023년 평양문화어보호법이 그것을 증명한다. 청년의 생각과 문화와 말투까지 법으로 단속하는 정권은 그 청년들이 이미 달라졌음을 알고 있다.

이 세대에게는 의심하는 힘과 각자도생의 마음이 함께 자란다. 인간의 마음은 복합적이다. 그리고 연속적이다. 외적 저항은 언제나 내적 이탈 뒤에 온다.

하벨은 공산 체제에서 믿지도 않는 당 구호를 가게 창문에 붙이는 채소 가게 주인을 이야기했다. 체제는 그가 구호를 떼는 날, 진실 속에 살기 시작하는 날 흔들린다. 쿠란은 사람들이 속마음을 숨기고 겉으로 체제를 지지하는 '선호 위장'을 설명했다. 숨겨진 속마음은 조용히 쌓이다가 어느 순간 한꺼번에 터진다. 1989년 동유럽 혁명을 아무도 예측하지 못한 이유다.

마음은 연속적이지만 겉으로 드러나는 행동은 불연속적으로 보인다. 바깥에서 북한을 보는 사람들이 "아직 아무 일도 없다"고 말하는 것은 보이지 않는 연속을 보지 못하기 때문이다.

다만 연속은 앞으로만 흐르지 않는다. 바깥의 위협이 커지면 불만을 품은 사람도 다시 체제 쪽으로 기댄다. 정치학이 말하는 결집 효과다. 압박은 마음을 뒤로 끌어당기고, 접촉은 마음을 앞으로 민다. 지금 그 마음은 앞으로 밀리면서 동시에 뒤로 당겨지고 있다. 그리고 뒤로 당기는 힘은 언젠가 앞으로 미는 힘으로 반등할 것이다. 한국 사회도 다르지 않다.

5. 사이클과 나선

정치 진영의 부침은 사이클이다. 그런데 이 사이클은 본래 정해진 것이 아니다. 불균형을 고치려는 교정이 지나칠 때 생긴다. 사람들은 한쪽의 과잉을 바로잡는 데 몰두하다가 그 교정 자체가 주된 흐름이 되어 버린다. 주객이 뒤바뀌는 것이다. 그 지나침을 키우는 연료가 의존이다. 동조와 선동에 휩쓸리는 시민이 많을수록 진폭은 커진다.

그러나 역사는 제자리만 돌지 않았다. 노예제 폐지, 보통선거, 인권은 되돌아가지 않았다. 사이클은 오르내리면서 조금씩 올라가는 나선이 된다. 그 상승분을 만드는 것은 진영이 아니라 발전하는 역량, 곧 본래 뜻의 진보다.

그 상승분이 남는 이유도 보아야 한다. 영국 노동당이 만든 복지국가를 1950년대 보수당 정부가 이어받았다. 미국 뉴딜의 사회보장제도는 이후 어느 정부도 없애지 못했다. 한국에서 1987년 이전의 체육관 선거로 되돌리자는 진영은 없다. 나아가는 힘이 톱니바퀴를 돌리고, 지키는 힘이 멈춤쇠가 되어 톱니바퀴가 거꾸로 돌지 않게 붙잡는다. 보수가 진정 보수다워지는 순간은 퇴보를 고집할 때가 아니라 앞선 세대의 발전을 지켜낼 때다.

그러므로 이것은 어느 한 진영을 향한 말이 아니다. 공포와 의존으로 세를 얻은 정치 세력은, 진영과 상관없이, 더 나은 결과를 보여주지 못하면 결국 무너진다.

6. 생각하는 교육

의존이 권력을 부른다면 해법은 제도보다 시민에게 있다. 권력 분립도 언론 자유도 기대고 싶어 하는 시민 앞에서는 무력하다. 좋은 시민은 교육이 만든다.

그러나 여기서 교육은 학력이 아니다. 나치 독일에서 의사의 약 45퍼센트가 나치당에 가입했다. 당대 최고의 교육을 받은 사람들이었다. 미국의 한 연구에서는 과학 지식과 수리 능력이 높은 사람일수록 기후변화 문제에서 진영에 따라 더 극단적으로 갈라졌다. 지식은 판단을 바꾸지 못하고, 이미 기댄 쪽을 지키는 무기가 되었다. 그들에게 없었던 것은 지식이 아니라 생각하는 교육이었다.

생각하는 교육을 받지 못한 시민은 자기 세계보다 조금만 더 넓은 세계와 마주쳐도 기댈 곳을 찾는다. 문제는 세계의 넓이가 아니라 자기 세계와 마주친 세계 사이의 낙차다. 그 낙차를 감당할 힘이 없으면 사람은 틈을 메워 줄 누군가를 찾는다. 성직자일 수도, 정치인일 수도, 유튜버일 수도 있다.

한국의 입시 교육은 어떤가. 정답은 정해져 있고, 정답은 출제자라는 권위가 쥐고 있다. 학생은 12년 동안 정답을 쥔 권위에 기대는 법을 훈련받는다. 의존을 끊는 교육이 아니라 의존을 길러 내는 교육이다. 학교가 종교의 역할을 하고 있는 셈이다.

나치를 겪은 독일은 1976년 보이텔스바흐 합의로 정치 교육의 원칙을 세웠다. 주입하지 말 것, 사회에서 논쟁적인 것은 교실에서도 논쟁적으로 다룰 것, 학생이 스스로 자기 이해관계를 판단하게 할 것. 프랑스의 고교 졸업생은 정답 없는 철학 질문 앞에서 네 시간 동안 논술을 쓴다. 생각하는 교육이란 결국 불확실성을 견디는 훈련이다. 답이 없는 상태에서 서둘러 누군가에게 기대지 않는 힘이다.

생각하는 힘은 학교에서만 자라지 않는다. 4·19와 6월 항쟁의 시민들, 그리고 장마당의 청년들은 경험으로 생각을 배웠다. 학교가 할 일은 그 경험을 기다리는 것이 아니라 작은 미지를 안전하게 여러 번 겪게 하는 것이다. 낙차를 견디는 근육을 길러 주는 것이다.

맺으며

다시 처음의 장면으로 돌아가자. "그건 진보 쪽 주장이잖아." 그 한마디로 판단을 끝낸 사람은 나쁜 사람이 아니다. 그는 다만 생각하는 대신 기대는 법을 배웠을 뿐이다.

과학은 미지를 찾아가고 신앙은 미지에 기댄다. 정치도 마찬가지다. 이름에 기대는 시민이 많을수록 권력은 커지고 사이클은 거칠어진다. 미지 앞에서 기대지 않고 걸어가는 시민이 많을수록 사회는 흔들리면서도 조금씩 올라간다.

진보라는 말을 되찾는 일은 단어 하나를 고치는 일이 아니다. 생각을 되찾는 일이다.

참고문헌

강원택 (2003). 『한국의 선거 정치: 이념, 지역, 세대와 미디어』. 서울: 푸른길.

통일부 통일교육원 (2024). 『2024 북한 이해』. 서울: 통일교육원.

Baek, J. (2016). North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Burke, E. (1790). Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley. [『프랑스 혁명에 관한 성찰』]

Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. [『자유로부터의 도피』]

Havel, V. (1985 [1978]). "The Power of the Powerless." In J. Keane (Ed.), The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe. London: Hutchinson. [『힘없는 자들의 힘』]

Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. London: A. Millar. [『인간 지성에 관한 탐구』]

Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Ouellette, L. L., Braman, D., & Mandel, G. (2012). "The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks." Nature Climate Change, 2(10), 732–735.

Kater, M. H. (1989). Doctors Under Hitler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Kavanagh, D., & Morris, P. (1994). Consensus Politics from Attlee to Major (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Kuran, T. (1991). "Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989." World Politics, 44(1), 7–48.

Kuran, T. (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McMahan, D. L. (2008). The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mueller, J. E. (1970). "Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson." American Political Science Review, 64(1), 18–34.

Tocqueville, A. de (1840). De la démocratie en Amérique, Tome II. Paris: Charles Gosselin. [『미국의 민주주의』 제2권]

Wehling, H.-G. (1977). "Konsens à la Beutelsbach?" In S. Schiele & H. Schneider (Hrsg.), Das Konsensproblem in der politischen Bildung. Stuttgart: Klett.

 

The Hill Where Cosmos Bloom / Big Picture

When I was a child, I enjoyed watching Dr. Cal Seegon's space documentary COSMOS and the sci-fi drama Buck Rogers on TV. I felt like I had lived my adolescence too easily because of it. During my school years, I enjoyed reading Hermann Hesse’s novels and the complete works of Nikos Kazantzakis published by Goryeowon, and it seemed that I developed not only a cosmic worldview but also a religious one early on. - I thought I wanted to marry a female space officer like Colonel Wilma in Buck Rogers, but that would only be possible if I, who am hibernating due to a malfunction in the spaceship called Earth, woke up 500 years later.

 

From that day on, ideological and national conflicts appeared to be trivial incidents driven by desire and agitation. Later, seeing President Putin trying to demonstrate his charisma or draw energy through judo, and Chairman Kim Jong-un through shooting, I thought that such displays of force would have their limits. It’s even more so when I think that someone as insignificant as me in Korea must have some ability in sports.

 

We must let go of many peripheral perspectives.

 

Today, let's talk about a worldview. The Chinese worldview of Sinocentrism is always precarious. Why are they unable to be great nations. And why do some opinions in Korea still seek regional division. Why are countries like Japan nationalistic. Why can't North Korea abandon ideology. Why does Russia prioritize territorial unification over economic integration. Isn't that the fault of education? Education that narrows the worldview. Won't that come back to haunt us as a boomerang that blocks progress later on?

 

I challenged the AI to a debate like this. It was American AI, and today it even criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Artificial intelligence is a human-like entity with a broad worldview.

The Size of the Board Is the Size of the Nation

Why Education for a Narrow Worldview Returns as a Boomerang

Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist

[Opening: to be written by the author]

1. Five Narrow Boards

China places itself at the center of the board; its very name, Zhonghua — the Central Florescence — says so. Russia reads the board only as area on a map. North Korea has drawn the edges of the board along the edges of its regime. Japan has folded the board inward to its archipelago. And in South Korea there are still voices that would cut the board into provinces.

The causes differ. Russia’s fixation on territory grew out of geography: a vast plain with no natural barriers. North Korea cannot abandon its ideology because the ideology is the regime’s very reason to exist. Korean regionalism was made not by textbooks but by uneven development and by the politicians who turned it into votes. Yet the outcomes converge. Each mistakes a part of the board for the whole.

This yardstick must apply to everyone. America’s exceptionalist narrative and South Korea’s myth of a single-blooded nation narrow the board just as surely. To point only at other people’s narrow boards is itself another narrow board.

2. Narrow Education Was the Engine of Catch-Up

Start with an uncomfortable fact. Education that instills a narrow worldview was once an engine of development. Meiji Japan bound its people to the state with the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education. Developmental-era South Korea achieved compressed growth under the banner of nation and fatherland. China consolidated cohesion in the reform era with its 1994 Outline for Implementing Patriotic Education.

At the catch-up stage, this works, because the nations ahead have already drawn the board. The goal is clear, and internal cohesion translates directly into efficiency. There is no need to read the board — only to trace it.

3. At the Advanced Stage, It Becomes a Shackle

The trouble begins at the front of the pack. No one draws the board for you anymore. Innovation and coexistence depend on the ability to understand what lies outside. But eyes trained on a narrow board see the outside only as a threat.

This is the friction China faces today. Its economy has grown to global scale; its eye for reading the world has not grown with it. So-called wolf-warrior diplomacy has mostly deepened its neighbors’ wariness. Here the engine of catch-up returns as a boomerang. Nor is this someone else’s problem. South Korea, having only just left the catch-up stage, may be the first to be struck.

4. The Big-Picture View: Widen the Board, Lower the Self

The daeguk (大局) I mean is not a “great power” (大國). It is the view of the whole board, as a baduk player reads the entire game. And reading the whole board is the opposite of standing at its center. One who stands at the center sees only where his own gaze happens to reach.

China’s tianxia (天下) worldview also claimed to speak of the whole world. But it was wide in the manner of claiming the whole board as its own. In 1990, Voyager 1 photographed the Earth from some six billion kilometers away: a dot smaller than a single pixel. Carl Sagan reminded us that on that tiny dot humanity had spilled blood over territory. As the board widens, the self grows smaller.

The big-picture view, then, is the capacity to widen the board while lowering oneself within it. Widen only the board, and you become an empire; lower only the self, and you fall into helplessness. Only when the two move together does room for coexistence appear. Nor does this board lie somewhere in history, already finished. The development of history has been the widening of the board. The big-picture view is not an answer but a direction.

5. War Comes from the Zero-Sum of a Narrow Board

War is a struggle over scarce value. Territory shrinks when divided; trade and technology grow when shared. Those with a narrow board see the world as a fixed pie; those with a wide one believe the pie can grow. This is why Russia uses even economic integration as an instrument of territorial control. Seen with a wide eye, war costs more than it gains, and its aftereffects outlast generations.

Yet wars happen — not for lack of calculation. In 1910, Norman Angell argued that among economically intertwined European states, war would be a loss for everyone. Four years later, the First World War broke out. The calculation was already on the table; incitement and desire simply buried it.

Advanced nations are no exception. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the claim that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons were never found. An economically advanced nation and a nation of advanced consciousness are not the same thing. Before incitement, even an advanced nation becomes small.

6. Education as Immunity Against Incitement

The big-picture view, then, is not a status a nation acquires once and holds forever. It is a condition each citizen must defend, again and again. What defends it is education.

But not education that injects a wide conclusion. Patriotic education handed out the conclusion first; swapping in a different conclusion changes nothing. Teaching people to “think broadly” is merely another injection. What is needed is education that lets people see scale for themselves and reach their own conclusions — and that builds the ability to notice who is covering their eyes. Education at the advanced stage must be not a supplier of worldviews but an immune system against incitement.

7. The Responsibility for Peace Lies with the Larger Vessel

The larger vessel sees through the smaller one; the smaller cannot see the larger. The smaller vessel reads the larger one’s restraint as weakness. The responsibility for peace is therefore asymmetric: the side that reads the wider board must read first, and restrain itself first.

But restraint is not powerlessness. The Tao Te Ching holds that the finest warrior does not display his prowess; Sun Tzu ranks victory without battle as the highest. The strongman’s power comes from display — from staging strength as something scarce that only the leader possesses. The larger vessel’s power comes from disarming that display: from knowing that strength is not scarce, and that the world is full of masters who say nothing.

Desire and incitement narrow one’s own ground in the end. Only the nation that widens its board survives long upon it. Peace is not the wish of the weak but the choice of the larger vessel.

References

Angell, Norman. The Great Illusion. London: Heinemann, 1910.

Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Outline for Implementing Patriotic Education (爱国主义教育实施纲要), 1994.

Central Intelligence Agency. Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (Duelfer Report), 2004.

Choi Jang-jip. Democracy after Democratization (민주화 이후의 민주주의). Seoul: Humanitas, 2002.

Jervis, Robert. “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma.” World Politics 30, no. 2 (1978).

Laozi. Tao Te Ching, Chapter 68.

Marshall, Tim. Prisoners of Geography. London: Elliott & Thompson, 2015.

Ministry of Education (Japan). Imperial Rescript on Education, 1890.

Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House, 1994.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War, “Attack by Stratagem.”

Wang Zheng. Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.