Countries in the fishbowl / intelligence and educational issues

When I was a young man, I took the bar exam and scored high in world cultural history and the Constitution, which scored high. And I realized that the rest of the subjects were not motivated to learn because of their narrow nature. And I came out early on to take the examination to see the world.

 

And I later learned that the capabilities of South Korean and North Korean intelligence agencies, which are shackled by ideology, need to be more autonomous and globalized after being involved in intelligence agencies over compensation for my father, who had experience as an operative. And I have the experience of advising a lot on the issue using professional knowledge. In particular, I warned South and North Korean intelligence agencies that Chinese intelligence agencies would see them like fish in fish tanks that observe only each other on the peninsula. And I did not hesitate to criticize the Cultural Exchange Bureau, North Korea's elite intelligence agency, in a defiant way that it is no better than myself, the bottom life of South Korea, which is free from ideology in terms of shooting and knowledge.

 

At the time, Russian intelligence or Kramlin (actually, I don't know who either of them is) had referred to my writings a lot while announcing their existence unofficially. However, my efforts were in vain, and President Putin believed the Russian intelligence's misjudgment and underestimated Ukraine. And Russia invaded Ukraine. And both sides saw a lot of casualties. And watching a head of state from an internally collectivized prosecution group in Korea do something strange and bring the country to the brink of destruction, I wandered for a long time with the shame of being vain.

 

Later, when I read an English book of geography and saw that it was a must-read by U.S. State Department officials on the cover of the application, I felt that Korean politics was more globalized, and that geography and world history education were necessary for the Korean people to move to the center of the world. While the United States had its educational policy aligned with world countries, Korea was moving toward a concept that trampled on each other in Korea, focusing on law education.

 

After the introduction of artificial intelligence, I was happy to have a wide-minded colleague.

The Aquarium States

When Ideology Imprisons Perception — Intelligence Closure and the Root Problem in Education

Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist

Abstract

This essay examines how state institutions narrow their own field of perception under the pressure of ideology. The author's engagement with this problem began through personal involvement in an intelligence-related matter during the Lee Myung-bak administration. Both South Korean and North Korean intelligence agencies, caught in ideological constraints, restricted the scope of their own operational awareness — rendering them, from the vantage point of Chinese intelligence, as transparent as "fish in an aquarium." A structurally similar pathology surfaced in Russia's 2022 misjudgment of Ukraine, where ideological and regime pressure contaminated intelligence assessments and distorted the judgment of the country's supreme leader. This essay traces the roots of such state-level perceptual failure to education systems — specifically, the marginalization of geography and world history — contrasting the United States, which embeds world history and geography as mandatory components of its diplomatic entrance examination, with South Korea, where political and administrative elites are trained primarily in law. The essay concludes that the prescription for this pathology, which recurs across ideologies, regimes, and institutional forms, is the institutionalization of verifiability: mandating training that allows an institution to see itself through an external gaze, whether in intelligence work, education, or elite formation.

Keywords: Intelligence agencies, Ideology, Cognitive closure, Geography education, World history education, Credentialism, Verification-exempt conviction

1. Introduction — An Organization That Cannot Imagine a Gaze from Outside the Bowl

My first precise recognition of this problem came long ago, through personal involvement in an intelligence-related matter during the Lee Myung-bak administration. In the course of considering how to respond to pressure from an intelligence agency at the time, I identified a structural flaw at the heart of South Korea's intelligence apparatus. It was not a matter of budget or personnel. It was a matter of perception.

Among all state institutions, an intelligence agency is unique in that a wide field of vision is not merely useful but constitutes its entire reason for existing. Its mission is, precisely, to see itself and the world through the eyes of others. When such an organization instead closes its eyes under the weight of ideology, this is not a simple failure — it is a betrayal of its own purpose. This essay traces how that betrayal occurs, and why it recurs regardless of ideology or regime type.

2. The Aquarium of the Korean Peninsula — Intelligence Agencies Caught in the Snare of Ideology

Long observation of the intelligence agencies of both South and North Korea led me to a single conclusion: both, caught in the snare of ideology, had narrowed their own operational capacity and field of perception. This is a deeper problem than the surface confrontation between North and South suggests — what dominates the cognitive structure of these organizations is not the capacity to read the adversary accurately, but the habit of confirming and reconfirming only the information that fits a predetermined ideological script.

The metaphor I used to warn of this closure was "fish in an aquarium." From the vantage point of Chinese intelligence, I argued, the ideology-bound intelligence agencies of the Korean peninsula were nothing more than fish swimming in a bowl, transparently observed from outside. The tragedy of the fish is not that it cannot swim. It is that it cannot even conceive of the possibility that a gaze exists outside the glass. An organization imprisoned by ideology exists in precisely this condition — accepting its internal logic as a complete account of the world, without ever grasping that it is being watched.

3. Putin and Ukraine — The Same Pathology at the Scale of a State

That this pathology is not confined to divided nations or ideological states became starkly evident in Russia's decision-making leading up to its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. I should be clear that this section rests on inference drawn from widely reported accounts and subsequent analysis, and is therefore of a different evidentiary character than my direct personal experience with the Korean peninsula's intelligence problem described above. According to extensive reporting, Russian intelligence delivered to the country's supreme leader assessments that severely underestimated Ukraine's political resilience and military capacity to resist — an underestimation that shaped the strategic misjudgment of the invasion's opening phase.

This case matters because it demonstrates that a structure in which only information conforming to the regime's expectations is allowed to travel upward — a structure in which compliance, not verification, becomes the intelligence agency's reason for being — can arise independently of ideological orientation or state form. Whether the system is communist or liberal-democratic, authoritarian or theocratic, when the supreme power wants to hear only the answer it already expects, and the organization complies with that expectation, the eyes of the state close.

4. Theoretical Generalization — Why This Pathology Recurs

Placing the Korean peninsula's intelligence agencies alongside the Russian case reveals three shared mechanisms.

First, the closed in-group loop. When information and evaluation circulate only within the in-group, the very opportunity to verify one's judgment against an external standard disappears. This is the structure I have elsewhere called "verification-exempt conviction" — the intensity of certainty rises even as the means of testing that certainty are systematically removed.

Second, the disappearance of comparison. When comparison with the outside is cut off, internal logic becomes the sole standard of normalcy. If the function of geography and world-history education is precisely to keep supplying points of comparison, then a society or organization from which this function has vanished is left interpreting the world by reference to itself alone.

Third, the illusion produced by stagnation. Organizations not exposed to threat or competition — whether a civil service built on lifetime employment, or an intelligence agency whose first priority is not to offend the regime — lose the very incentive to update their model of the world. Stability itself becomes cognitive stasis.

5. The Root in Education — Upstream of the Intelligence Problem

The personnel who staff intelligence agencies are, in the end, products of their society's education. Tracing this pathology upstream therefore leads directly to education. South Korean education is optimized for the acquisition of credentials through examination, and in this process, subjects such as geography and world history — which offer no immediate correct answer and demand extensive rote learning — have been systematically pushed aside. The result is a deficit in the capacity to relativize one's own position and to read events within long causal chains.

The severity of this problem becomes clear through international comparison. The U.S. Foreign Service Officer Test structures its job-knowledge section around American government, history, and society; world history and geography; economics; and mathematics and statistics, and the State Department formally identifies geography, international history, and international relations as useful undergraduate preparation. A nation that regards itself as the operator of the world order has built a structured awareness of the world directly into the gateway for its elite selection.

South Korea's elite-formation pipeline — centered on the administrative examination and law school — trains, by contrast, the capacity for coherence within a given system: the discipline of law. A legal elite is well trained to judge what is right within a given set of rules, but is not trained to judge how exceptional those rules themselves are by world standards. Former President Yoon Suk-yeol's decision to declare martial law can be re-read as empirical evidence of exactly this pattern of elite reproduction — the product of unverified conviction accumulated within a closed circle of legal elites. It is precisely here that a telling mismatch appears: South Korea, which has already met the conditions of a globally significant nation in economic scale and cultural influence, still reproduces its elites through a mechanism built to select managers of a domestic legal order.

6. Conclusion — How to Open the Eyes of a State

The intelligence agencies of the Korean peninsula, Russia's contaminated intelligence, and South Korea's law-centered elite education appear, on the surface, to be entirely unrelated phenomena. What this essay has tried to show is that these are three faces of a single pathology — the imprisonment of perception that results when ideology, regime pressure, or institutional stability systematically eliminates the possibility of verification.

The prescription is simple to state and difficult to execute. Intelligence agencies must institutionalize the practice of viewing themselves through the eyes of other organizations and other states. Education must restore geography and world history to the core curriculum. The training of political and administrative elites must mandate exposure to ways of perceiving the world beyond law alone. All three prescriptions share a single principle: forcing conviction to submit to verification. The only way to make a fish in an aquarium imagine a gaze from outside the glass is to build that gaze into the organization and the education that produced it, before the fact.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business, 2012.

U.S. Department of State. Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) Job Knowledge Requirements and Suggested Reading List. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Global Talent Management, 2025–2026.

The account of Russian intelligence failure regarding Ukraine is based on the author's inference from extensive international reporting and post-hoc analysis published since 2022, and does not rely on any single source.

The account of the Korean peninsula intelligence problem and the author's experience during the Lee Myung-bak administration is based on the author's own direct personal experience.

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