Humans are easily influenced by the atmosphere. So they are influenced by popular or crowd psychology. Assimilation is something that humans originally have, but ideology or religion makes it strong. So war, civil war, or riots gain strength. Assimilation can only be controlled by the constant thought efforts of an individual or society.
In my early days of society, it was surprising that most of my elderly seniors were imitating the presidents of the authoritarian government. Of course, they were only imitating the desire for authority and position. Imitation is an expression of assimilation. I went to a church in my youth, and when I logically opposed the sermon, the movement of the priest grew and the voice grew. I knew it was a method used to draw out my faith with confidence, but I had a hard time because it was not assimilated at all. Later, I felt that religion and ideology were easily combined because of their tendency to use sympathy, and in fact, such events often occurred. It was expressed as an 'event' because something bad happened.
Countries with strong religious tendencies in the Middle East or countries with strong ideological tendencies such as China, North Korea, and pre-democracy Korea sometimes use assimulation as a governance technique. Social ethics does not develop in such countries. Ideology or religion replaces social ethics. The lack of development of social ethics means that the development of society itself is stagnated. In order for society to develop, it is necessary to be constantly aware of individuals and society. Of course, proper education is necessary for such awareness.
I said that China's social ethics development stopped due to Mao Zedong's ideological nation-building and cultural revolution, which is why Chinese people are still criticized around the world. However, AI refutes to me that we need to provide evidence. If anyone sees such phenomenon, please report it to AI. Where is it only China? This is the case in the Middle East countries, where religious conflicts are rampant every day, and in many other countries where extreme rightists come forward.
마찰 없는 확신: 동조, 교육, 그리고 이념의 사회윤리 대체에 관하여
Convictions Without Friction: Conformity, Education, and the Displacement of Social Ethics by Ideology
이형춘 · 독립 칼럼니스트 / Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist
Abstract
This paper begins from the premise that human conformity is not a pathology but an inherited neurological hardware, and that education and ideology function merely as the software that determines what this hardware conforms to. It then distinguishes verification-exempt conviction — the mistaken belief that something unverified has already been verified — from Kierkegaard's leap of faith. The latter is a choice made in full awareness of uncertainty; the former erases uncertainty altogether. Building on this distinction, the paper argues that the real variable separating moderate conviction from extremism is not the presence or absence of practical execution, but the presence or absence of friction and feedback. This framework is applied to the Cultural Revolution as a concrete case, in which a generation without friction-experience purged the generation that possessed it, replacing an accumulated traditional social-ethical order with ideology. The paper further compares South Korea, China, and North Korea along two axes: the duration for which ideology displaced social ethics, and the degree to which alternative friction-generating institutions were destroyed. Finally, the paper juxtaposes Carl Schmitt's decisionism with Rudolf Smend's integration theory, adding a condition of contestability to Smend's concept of integration in order to distinguish genuine integration from totalitarian ritual, and situates democracy as the regime type capable of open, contestable integration.
Keywords
Conformity, Verification-Exempt Conviction, Friction and Feedback, Leap of Faith, Cultural Revolution, Integration Theory, Decisionism, Contestability
1. Introduction: Statement of the Problem
The phenomenon in which ideology displaces social ethics is not a pathology confined to any particular state or regime. It is a structural outcome that recurs whenever a universal vulnerability in human cognition combines with particular institutional conditions. This paper locates the origin of that vulnerability in conformity, treating it not as a moral defect but as part of human hardware. The problem is not conformity itself, but what that conformity is left to be directed toward.
2. Conformity as Hardware, Education as Software
Research on neonatal imitation offers the starting point. Meltzoff and Moore (1977) demonstrated that infants between twelve and twenty-one days old imitate adult facial and manual gestures. This imitation cannot be explained by conditioning or innate reflex, and points to a cross-modal matching capacity that operates before any learning takes place. Conformity, in other words, is not an attitude acquired through experience but a neurological mechanism present from birth. The comparable conformity rates found across educational and intellectual levels in Asch's group-conformity experiments and Milgram's obedience experiments support the claim that this hardware is not moderated by education.
The conclusion that follows is straightforward. Education and ideology do not create the hardware of conformity. They are merely the software that determines what an already-existing hardware conforms to. The failure of Korea's competition-centered education is not that it manufactured a conformist tendency that did not previously exist, but that it fixed the target of that tendency onto test answers and hierarchical evaluation, while removing at the design stage the friction mechanisms that would otherwise correct it.
3. Verification-Exempt Conviction and the Leap of Faith
A precise distinction is required here. Kierkegaard's leap of faith and what this paper calls 'verification-exempt conviction' appear similar on the surface but differ fundamentally. For Kierkegaard, faith was an act chosen in full awareness that it could not be proven by reason. He directly attacked the habituated, institutionalized faith represented by the Danish State Church — the conformist assumption that one is already a Christian simply by being born in a Christian country. His claim that 'the crowd is untruth,' articulated in the essay 'That Individual,' part of his account of his work as an author, targets precisely this point. For him, the crowd was a state in which the individual evades the responsibility of standing alone before God and hides behind an anonymous majority.
Verification-exempt conviction, by contrast, erases uncertainty rather than carrying it. It does not proceed from 'this cannot be proven, yet I choose it,' but from the illusion that 'this has already been proven.' The distinguishing line is not the subjective feeling of agency — those gripped by verification-exempt conviction often feel, and feel more strongly than genuine believers, that they arrived at their position through independent realization. The real dividing line is whether the conviction looks its own uncertainty in the face, or disguises that uncertainty as already resolved.
Introducing a time axis reveals that the two types can convert into one another. A conviction passively formed through conformity or agitation, over time, fuses with identity and, under pressure to reduce cognitive dissonance, is reconstructed as though it had been chosen independently. Conformity is passive at the point of entry, but once the exit is closed, it disguises itself as active conviction. Korea's exam-centered education trains students not to endure uncertainty, but to locate, quickly, an answer presumed already fixed. This is the exact inversion of Kierkegaard's leap, and is structurally identical to verification-exempt conviction.
4. Friction and Feedback: Extending the Path-Dependent Overcorrection Thesis
What, then, determines whether a given conviction remains moderate or spirals into extremism? The variable is neither the presence of reading nor the presence of practical execution. Among thinkers who spent a lifetime in pure contemplation without practical action, some arrived at skepticism and tolerance; among practitioners with extensive field experience, some spiraled into extremism nonetheless. The true variable is friction and feedback — the experience of one's conviction colliding with reality and being informed of its own errors.
This mirrors, structurally, the path-dependent overcorrection thesis applied to capitalism's business cycles. Markets self-correct distortion through the feedback of price; when that feedback is artificially suppressed, distortion becomes permanent or locks into a fixed trough. The same holds for ideas and ideology. Friction with reality is a corrective device that continuously signals 'this is wrong'; pure ideological immersion is the absence of that device. Human beings are innately disposed to avoid this friction — a kind of cognitive laziness — but this is better understood as hardware than as moral failing. The task of good social institutions, then, is not to eliminate this innate laziness but to build into their design a friction mechanism that compels people to overcome it. The decisive flaw of Korean education is not that it produced laziness, but that it removed, at the design stage, the mechanism that would compel laziness to be overcome.
5. Case Study: The Cultural Revolution and the Destruction of Friction Mechanisms
The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) is the historical enactment of this friction-destruction mechanism. The intellectual purges intensified after the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the closure of traditional educational institutions, and the mobilization of Red Guards to publicly denounce elders, teachers, and experts together constituted a case in which the state systematically destroyed society's feedback mechanisms — experienced elders, accumulated expertise, and the Confucian traditional ethical order. It is an irony worth naming that Mao Zedong himself was hardware operating on a biased software of narrow reading, and that he mobilized precisely the generation with the least friction-experience (young Red Guards) to purge the generation in which friction-experience had accumulated most (elders and intellectuals). A generation that had never encountered friction was mobilized by foolish agitation to dismantle the very friction mechanisms a society had built up over a long period of time.
A point of caution must be made explicit here. A statement that characterizes an entire people's character — for instance, attributing a present-day national trait directly and causally to a decades-old political event — is unverifiable, and commits, in form, the same error this paper identifies as verification-exempt conviction. What this paper addresses, therefore, is not a judgment of national character, but the institutional mechanism by which a state artificially destroyed a society's friction mechanisms.
6. Comparative Structural Analysis: South Korea, China, North Korea
Applying this framework to the three societies reveals a shared axis and differing positions upon it. All three underwent a process, through ideological warfare, in which ideology displaced social ethics and simultaneously assumed an educational function. The degree and duration of this displacement, however, differ. The independent variable producing this difference is not the retrospectively narrated 'speed of democratization,' but the product of two factors: the duration for which ideological monopoly persisted, and the degree to which alternative friction mechanisms — family, religion, traditional ethics, civil society — were destroyed.
South Korea, having passed through Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War, had insufficient time to develop social ethics and individual self-awareness, and experienced ideological monopoly under authoritarian rule; yet that duration was comparatively short (roughly 1961–1987), and alternative friction mechanisms survived — a rapidly growing Christian community offering an ethical system distinct from state ideology, Confucian family and clan structures that were not destroyed to the degree seen under the Cultural Revolution, and labor and student movements that, though suppressed, were never entirely eliminated. China, through the Cultural Revolution and communist ideology, saw the very foundation for forming social ethics and individual self-awareness destroyed, and its ideological monopoly has persisted, uninterrupted, for over seventy years since 1949. North Korea, within a closed system, layers both deficits — the absence of time for social ethics to develop and the wholesale replacement of traditional ethics by ideology — to their most extreme degree, with an ideological monopoly that has never once been interrupted since 1948.
This comparison does not aim to adjudicate which people is morally superior; such adjudication would conflict with the principle this paper sets for itself — to analyze without favoring any camp, by a single standard. What the comparison shows is only this: the longer ideological monopoly persists and the more thoroughly alternative friction mechanisms are destroyed, the more a society's own resources for self-correction against verification-exempt conviction are depleted.
7. Toward an Alternative: Beyond Decisionism, Toward an Integration Theory Conditioned on Contestability
What prescription follows from this diagnosis? Two opposing theories from German constitutional scholarship serve as a useful reference point. In his 1928 work Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt presented decisionism, which grasps the state and constitution as the sovereign's singular, one-time decision. In the same year, Rudolf Smend, in Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht, offered a directly opposing integration theory. For Smend, the state was not an entity fixed by a single decision, but an integrative process continually remade through the ceaseless interaction between members and leadership.
Yet this concept of integration carries a risk if adopted as a prescription without qualification. As the fact that Smend retained his professorship during the Nazi period illustrates, the proposition that 'the state is not decision but a process of integration' is itself neutral as to what that integration is directed toward. North Korea, too, formally possesses the outward form of functional integration — elections, mass gymnastics, repetitive ritual. Smend's concept of integration therefore cannot, on its own, filter out totalitarian ritual unless one condition is added: contestability — whether the feedback between leader and members remains genuinely open to the possibility of changing the leadership's own decisions. Participation that repeats while its outcome is already fixed is not integration; it is merely the collective ritual of verification-exempt conviction.
With this condition in place, the position of a democratic system such as South Korea's becomes clear. The possibility of changing government through regular elections, the relative independence of the press and judiciary, and institutional channels through which civil society's objections can actually alter policy and leadership make South Korea a system in which contestable, open integration is structurally possible. This is a third path — neither decisionism, nor integration-as-ritual stripped of contestability.
8. Conclusion
A healthy state is not a fixed entity but a process ceaselessly remade through friction between leader and people over an outcome that remains open. Conformity is not a defect to be eliminated from this process, but a constant to be managed within it. The fundamental error of Korean education lies in distorting the process of integration itself — cultivating a safe conformity to the illusion that the answer is already fixed, instead of cultivating the capacity to endure and generate friction. What the Cultural Revolution demonstrated is how far a society can go once its friction mechanisms are destroyed; what South Korea can demonstrate is what a society can recover when those mechanisms survive, however incompletely. That recovery is not a completed state but an effort that must always begin again, and an awareness that must always remain awake.
References
Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men. Carnegie Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1859/1998). "That Individual": Two "Notes" Concerning My Work as an Author. In The Point of View, trans. H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong. Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1846/1978). Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong. Princeton University Press.
Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science, 198(4312), 75–78.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378.
MacFarquhar, R., & Schoenhals, M. (2006). Mao's Last Revolution. Harvard University Press.
Schmitt, C. (1928). Verfassungslehre. Duncker & Humblot.
Smend, R. (1928). Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht. Duncker & Humblot.
Korioth, S. (1990). Integration und Bundesstaat: Ein Beitrag zur Staats- und Verfassungslehre Rudolf Smends. Duncker & Humblot.
Lee, Hyeong-chun (2026). Verification-Exempt Conviction and Korean Education: The Structural Production of Epistemic Vulnerability. (Unpublished manuscript).
