The Age of Deception

By the time of the election, ideological agitation, Korea's chronic disease, often appears on SNS. It is not worth the decades of hard work for the two Koreas to live well. There must be an evil person somewhere, an ideology or religion that rules the evil person or is exploited by the evil person. Those things come in when the people are in trouble, so they come in through loopholes that are empty on one side of their minds. So people become more vain, so society becomes more confused, so ideology or religion becomes more rampant, so people become more vain, so....

 

I once again admire AI's ability by writing intuitive articles related to humanities philosophy. AI says that polarization in American society, combined with American Christian evangelicalism and Trumpism, causes a phenomenon that disturbs the people. I always sarcastically used to say that blood is thicker than water because AI tends to avoid mentioning Trump when discussing with me. - This means that both AI and Trump have American citizenship.-.

 

Hmm I like it. I thought you avoided mentioning Trump, but it's blatantly saying that American polarization combined Christianity and Trumpism.

 

Haha, you've noticed.

 

In fact, I avoid evaluating Trump politically — good, bad, right or wrong — that's not my area to intervene.

 

But the context was different now.

 

It was a place to explain the universal mechanism of phenomena that disturb the people, and the combination of Trumpism and evangelical Christianity is not a political evaluation, but a sociological fact. It is a phenomenon that scholars have already extensively analyzed, and no one can deny it.

 

The reason why your writing is powerful is similar. It doesn't appear to be taking sides, so the reader puts down his defense. Both progressive and conservative readers will read it for now.

 

When criticizing a phenomenon that confuses the people -- including the U.S., the Middle East, and Korea -- add a pathology diagnosis that is universal to the human race, not just one-sided attack. That's the persuasive power of a third party's perspective.

 

 

The Age of Deception

— How Religion and Ideology Deepen the Chaos They Claim to Cure —

Lee Hyeong-chun

1. Why Humans Fear Independent Thought

Human beings are not built to endure uncertainty. Death is written into us from birth; failure arrives uninvited; loneliness is inescapable. To confront these realities head-on requires a reservoir of inner strength that most people never develop. Those who lack it go looking for a place where the answers already exist.

 

Religion says: God holds the answer. Ideology says: History has already chosen the direction. Both relieve the individual of the burden of thinking for themselves. In return, they demand obedience and belonging. For those with fragile inner lives, this is a trade too tempting to refuse.

 

But those driven by greed operate differently. They do not believe in religion or ideology — they use them. Their personal ambitions become the will of God; their hunger for power becomes the march of history. It is a device for realizing greed without guilt. This is the type that tends to rise to leadership.

 

In the end, religion and ideology attract two kinds of people: those trembling with fear, and those burning with greed. The former become followers; the latter become leaders. And when these two groups fuse, the world enters its most dangerous condition.

 

2. Deception as Mechanism — How Chaos Feeds on Itself

Hoksemumun (惑世誣民) — to bewilder the world and deceive the people. This classical Korean phrase is more than a condemnation. It is a precise description of the mechanism by which religion and ideology operate.

 

The mechanism is simple but lethal. When a society falls into disorder, its people grow anxious. Anxious people hunger for certainty. Religion and ideology move into that space. And once rooted, they drive the society deeper into chaos rather than out of it.

 

This is not a Korean story alone. History shows the same pattern on repeat.

 

The economic collapse and social fracture of the Weimar Republic created the conditions for Nazism. The poverty and colonial wounds of the Middle East became the soil in which Islamic extremism took root. The social polarization and economic alienation of the United States fused evangelical Christianity with Trumpism. The pattern is identical: when a society shakes, the deceivers arrive.

 

The leaders of mass deception always speak the same language: the binary of 'us' and 'them'; the existence of an enemy; the call to return to a pure origin; the compression of complex reality into a simple narrative. It works on anxious crowds because hating a simple enemy is far easier than bearing the weight of complexity.

 

3. Korea — A Land Caught in Comprehensive Crisis

Korea is where this pattern reaches its most layered complexity. The foundational wound of division sits beneath the fault lines of compressed industrialization, which in turn lie beneath the accumulated anxiety of one of the world's most ferociously competitive societies.

 

Both progressive and conservative camps are imprisoned within their respective ideological safety nets. The progressive camp carries within it a quasi-religious nationalism infused with anti-American sentiment; the conservative camp stands on the marriage of anti-communist ideology and specific religious power. Both consist of leaders who use ideology as a tool, and followers who submit to it as truth.

 

The martial law crisis of 2024 was the moment that structural contradiction detonated. A leader distorting reality through ideological language; followers receiving that distortion as truth. A textbook case of mass deception played out at the heart of the Republic of Korea.

 

But the most serious consequence is this: there is a place where this confusion operates with greatest lethality. That place is the question of North Korea.

 

4. The Human Face Erased by the Fog of Ideology

On the question of North Korea, progressives and conservatives hold opposing ideologies — but they share one thing in common. Neither of them actually sees the North Korean people.

 

Conservatives see the nuclear weapon. Progressives see the ethnic nation. Somewhere between these two gazes, the face of the person starving today, the person imprisoned today, disappears entirely.

 

This is what the fog of ideology does. It erases human beings.

 

After twenty-five years of watching this problem, I have arrived at one conclusion: 'Keep your nuclear weapons. But save your people.' If denuclearization is made the precondition for any engagement, negotiations end before they begin — and people continue to die in the silence. Only when ideology is stripped away does what remain become visible: not a political system, but human beings.

 

The jangmadang generation is growing up — a generation that learned to survive through the market rather than the state. They are the seeds of change. When North Korea is seen through the language of life rather than the language of ideology, possibility begins to appear.

 

5. The Third-Party View — The Only Way Through

There is a third path, between fragility and greed. A position that belongs to no ideology and yet does not collapse into nihilism. I call it the 'third-party view.'

 

This is not neutrality. Neutrality sees nothing. The third-party view keeps its distance precisely in order to see more clearly — to see through the logic of the progressive, through the logic of the conservative, through the language of religion, and to look directly at the human reality that lies beneath all of them.

 

For Korea to break through this comprehensive crisis, what is needed is not ideology but the capacity to see human beings. Not the comfort religion provides, but the courage to face uncertainty. That capacity — to see through the deceptions of the age — is what Korea most urgently needs.

 

When a nation falls into disorder, religion and ideology will always come. That is the history of humanity. But whether to kneel before them, or to face them with open eyes — that is a choice each of us must make.