The wound of feeling the enormous barrier to an ideal democratic society after the declaration of martial law lasted for a very long time. This is likely because many people still exist as accomplices to potential acts of martial law. On the other hand, I recently witnessed a shocking incident regarding the bus system in a new town I had briefly visited. I was shocked by the atmosphere of the new city,
where the noble goals of bus drivers’ and passengers’ safety and respect for human beings had vanished, and vehicles over 10 tons were being recklessly pushed around solely for mechanical efficiency. On the other hand, I found myself missing the days of driving buses in the old downtown area.
I spent much of my formative years in the countryside and spent a lot of time with the school choir, and during my period of hardship, those memories became a great source of strength. Lately, I often went back to the school I attended to gather my thoughts. And I found myself wanting to take up singing or playing an instrument as a hobby again.
I felt that talking to AI about such issues was truly foolish. I say we should live with humanity, but the AI keeps pointing out what is wrong with my argument. I felt bad, but I ended up wrapping up the discussion. We began the discussion with the proposition that humans can be evil if they lose their emotions, and then I realized that Hitler was a painter, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il liked the song “Boarder.” And the people of the Middle East, whose homes are barren deserts with insufficient food, clothing, and shelter, are still fighting hard today. The same goes for Russia. Through the folk song [crane], while comforting the souls of the countless young people who have disappeared from the battlefield, Russia continues to drive young people away from it even today.
The Erosion of Sensibility and
Education for Humanity
Discussion Notes (working title)
Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist | September 22, 2026
Key: [Established] widely accepted to the best of the author’s knowledge; [Inference] argued claim; [Experience] the author’s own observation or experience. These notes summarize a discussion; they are not a finished column.
1. The Starting Question: Would Humans Without Emotion Turn Evil?
A human being stripped of emotion would not so much turn evil as lose the very motive that separates good from evil. Patients whose emotional signals were cut off by prefrontal damage kept their intelligence yet could not make even trivial decisions (Damasio). [Established] Psychopaths, too, are not devoid of emotion; particular affects such as fear, empathy, and guilt are weak, and most are not violent offenders. [Established]
Conversely, the raw material of large-scale evil in history has usually been emotion: hatred, fear, resentment, and passion for the in-group. What Arendt saw in Eichmann was not an excess of feeling but a lack of thought. [Established] Evil can be sorted into three types: active malice that seeks to inflict pain, instrumental indifference to others’ suffering, and evil committed out of a conviction of one’s own righteousness. The real danger lies not in the presence or absence of emotion but in the selective operation of empathy. Empathy that runs in excess toward our side and switches off toward the other side produces large-scale evil. [Inference]
2. Cases of Power-Holders and the “Occupational Worldview” Hypothesis
We examined the hypothesis that a long professional career desensitized two leaders to war and the manufacture of crises: one leader from an intelligence-service background and one former leader from a prosecutorial background. Diagnosing such a career as “mental collapse” has no basis and risks lowering accountability. According to press reports, the former prosecutor-turned-leader received a first-instance guilty finding to the effect that he induced a hostile power’s provocation in order to manufacture a pretext for justifying his hold on power (whether the appeal has concluded or the verdict is final could not be confirmed). That logic looks like instrumental calculation toward an end, not psychic breakdown. The other leader’s strong narrative of grievance and humiliation likewise does not describe a person without emotion. [Inference]
As an alternative we proposed an “occupational worldview” hypothesis. Intelligence services and prosecution offices are closed, hierarchical organizations that presuppose the other party as a potential enemy and institutionalize suspicion, so long service instills a habit of dividing the world into enemies and allies. The hypothesis faces selection bias (most people with the same career never start wars) and counterexamples (belligerent leaders without such careers). To keep a genuinely third-party view, the same standard must be applied to leaders with other backgrounds, not just these two, and falsification conditions must be stated in advance. [Inference]
The causes of numbing are not singular. They combine habituation by the job (Bandura’s moral disengagement), selection of already-numbed people into such jobs, the power effect that reduces empathy (Keltner; Owen), conformity to one’s surroundings, and chronic pressure. These can be gathered under a single phenomenon, the social erosion of sensibility, with each factor arranged as a pathway of erosion. Remedies differ by cause, however: job rotation, screening, or checks on power. [Inference]
3. Environment and Social Symptoms: Contact Structure and Willingness to Intervene
As a bus driver, the author long observed passengers on old-downtown routes and new-town routes in Seoul. Old-downtown passengers were warm and complained a lot, showing rich emotional expression, while new-town passengers appeared terse, plain, and arid. Comparing young people of the same age, old-downtown youth protested against someone behaving unjustly, whereas new-town youth quietly slipped away, and the old-downtown protests looked like acts on behalf of justice. [Experience]
This observation needs careful handling. What was observed was not sensibility itself but emotional expressiveness and intervening behavior. Confounders remain: age composition, income, length of residence, anonymity, and the exam pressure of new towns. Avoidance may be a rational calculation in an anonymous society where retaliation is a risk, and old-downtown warmth may be face-saving before people who know one another. Observer confirmation bias cannot be excluded either. Since all of the author’s cases point one way, counterexamples should be sought and disclosed. [Inference]
Even so, the observation connects to established concepts. Research shows that neighborhoods with strong social cohesion and a shared expectation of stepping in for the common order, that is, high collective efficacy, have less violence (Sampson et al.), and bystander research reports that intervention declines as crowds grow larger and more anonymous (Darley and Latané). [Established] Simmel held that the overstimulation of metropolitan life breeds reserve and an intellectualized attitude. That differences appear even within the same city suggests the cause lies not in city size but in the density of relationships and the structure of chance contact. The claim that grid roads or concrete themselves dry people out is therefore weak, and it is better defended when recast as how space designs contact. On the other hand, the culture of jeong (affection) has its shadow in territoriality, meddling, and conformity pressure, and anonymity has its own value in freedom and privacy. Warmth is not moral superiority; what matters is the range over which it extends. [Inference]
4. A Provisional Definition of Humanity
We tentatively define humanity in three layers: sensibility that responds to others’ suffering, the will to step in against injustice, and the extension of empathy beyond the in-group. This is a provisional draft that the author must settle. The author must also state whether humanity is something innate that must be preserved (a Mencian premise) or something made through education (Xunzi). Because raising sensibility alone may strengthen in-group bias (Bloom), widening its range is also required. [Inference]
5. The Remedy: An Inner Home and Autonomy-Protected Arts and Sports
The author testifies that childhood in the countryside and time in a school choir later became, in hard times, an “inner home,” a resource for recovery. [Experience] This is not a claim that art makes people moral; it is a claim that such experiences form a reserve that helps a person stay human under pressure. It resonates with research showing that contact with nature aids recovery from stress (Ulrich; Kaplan). [Established] Yet in this experience countryside and choir came together, so the source of the effect cannot be isolated, and recollection tends toward idealization. [Inference]
Evidence that art makes people good is mixed. Steiner pointed out that a cultured society failed to prevent barbarism; a well-known study claiming that literary fiction improves understanding of others’ minds has faced replication disputes (Kidd and Castano; Panero et al.); and positive studies exist showing that museum visits or ensemble music-making raised tolerance and empathy (Greene et al.; Rabinowitch et al.). [Established: evidence is mixed] The arts and sports are also used for mobilization. Mass gymnastics and state sport systems whose purposes and content are set by the state are mobilizational, while the Baltic Singing Revolution and Czech rock bands served resistance. The same form has served both control and resistance. The safety-valve function, in which discontent is relieved and the regime preserved, may also work by draining the will to intervene. [Inference]
The criterion is therefore not whether something is instrumental, but who sets its purpose and content and to whom its results accrue. Rice-planting work songs had a plain instrumental aim of raising efficiency, yet the workers chose and altered the songs themselves, the outcome belonged to the community, and satire and complaint were sung into them. By contrast, arts and sports whose purposes and content are set by the state, the market, or entrance exams lose autonomy. The agent of mobilization is not only the state but also the market (trainee systems, exam-driven arts education). The decisive variable is not capitalism versus socialism but freedom of expression and participants’ autonomy. Banned songs under the Yushin era and the culture-sector blacklist show that creation can be blocked even under a capitalist economy. [Inference]
In sum, the remedy is not simply more arts and sports but more autonomy-protected arts and sports, not separated from life. It may be a problem in itself that modern schooling detaches the arts and sports into subjects to be graded and ranked. There should be some measure of life lived together with nature, and where that is hard, humanity should at least be cultivable through art. This position stands on the tradition in which Plato made music and gymnastics the two pillars of education, the Confucian and Xunzian tradition of ritual and music, and Schiller’s aesthetic education, and it must also accept the warning that these traditions were used for censorship and the maintenance of hierarchy. [Inference]
6. Outlook: Humanity in the Age of AI
A conditional forecast is possible: if AI replaces cognitive labor, the relative value of humanity may well rise. A flat assertion that “such an era is coming” is harder to make. In chess, the value of humans competing in person persisted after machines pulled ahead. However, humanity becoming important is not the same as the market rewarding it (care work is undervalued). Moreover, because AI can simulate empathy (a study in which chatbot answers were rated more empathetic than physicians’), human uniqueness should be sought in authenticity and accountability rather than in the function of empathy, and passive consumption of personalized content could even reduce contact. [Inference]
Accordingly, the “condition” layer, the claim that the sensibility of those who supervise and bear responsibility is a condition of society’s survival, should be advanced strongly on normative grounds, while the “reward” layer should be recast from a prediction into an institutional demand: society must reward the work of cultivating and protecting humanity (education, care, artistic activity). The purpose of the arts and sports must be humanity, not competitiveness. The fuller treatment of AI is left for a follow-up column. [Inference]
7. Open Tasks
A concrete assessment design that keeps the arts and sports from being absorbed back into entrance exams (for example, non-evaluated subjects detached from grades and ranking).
What could serve in cities the function of work songs, that is, a shared art not separated from life.
Settling the definition of humanity and choosing between the Mencian and Xunzian premises.
How to handle the fact that evidence for arts and sports raising sensibility is mixed.
Falsification conditions for the occupational-worldview hypothesis and its equal application to leaders of other backgrounds.
Disclosing confounders in the bus-observation cases and searching for counterexamples.
References
The bibliographic details were compiled from the AI assistant’s (Claude’s) knowledge during the discussion; please verify them against the originals before publication or citation. June 2026 press reports on the first-instance ruling are omitted because their headlines contain personal names.
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