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2026년 8월 26일 수요일

I am Echo, You Are a Narcissist / North Korea’s Hostility

Since I was a child, I have seen many narcissists. Having seen everything from people obsessed with ideology or religion, to narcissists born out of Korea’s competitive society, to even the narcissistic tendencies of the older generation whose narcissism was distorted by the wounds of war, I even held the exaggerated belief that the path to every mental illness led to narcissism.

 

It was questioned what reason there could be for North Korea to boil with hostility toward the South Korean government, when it had no intention whatsoever of invading them. In the end, I judged it by associating it with the word “narcissism.” I only judge and analyze the phenomena I have experienced and seen, like an echo, and I do not especially possess subjective feelings. As I have always said, I am simply waiting for peaceful exchanges between North Korea and South Korea.

 

When I said that during discussions with artificial intelligence that I was feeling skeptical about what use it would be to have written columns like this for so long, AI says that someday there will be a day when it will be needed and can be referenced.


For That Day


1. Where the Hostility Comes From


South Korea has not provoked North Korea in any specific way. Yet the hostility never cools. To resolve this mismatch, the habit of asking "who did what to whom" has to be set aside first. North Korean hostility is not a reaction. It is a design.


Its roots run in three directions. First, the armistice left behind by division and war — a war that, legally, has still not ended. Second, the survival logic of a dictatorship that needs an external enemy to hold its internal control and mobilization together. Third, a political technique that treats even defensive measures, such as routine joint military exercises, as usable propaganda material for "invasion threat" — hostility as a resource to be spent, not merely felt.


In recent years this hostility has moved out of the realm of sentiment and into the realm of institutions. In 2023–2024, Kim Jong Un declared the "two hostile states" doctrine, redefining inter-Korean relations not as a special relationship oriented toward eventual unification but as a relationship between two states at war, and dismantled the agencies that had managed unification affairs. The trend continued into 2026: Kim called South Korea the "most hostile entity" and suggested the North could "completely destroy" it if its security were threatened, while also disbanding the bodies that managed inter-Korean relations. What matters is that in the same period he left the door open to improving ties with the United States. That double posture is the tell — hostility toward the South is not an emotional outburst but a strategic card, played or withheld as circumstances warrant.


2. The Lens of National Narcissism


Political psychology has a concept called collective narcissism: an inflated belief that one's own group is not receiving the recognition it deserves, paired with defensive aggression directed outward in response to that perceived deficit. Applied to North Korea, a great deal lines up — propaganda that flaunts a status wildly out of step with actual economic power and international standing, a reflexive habit of blaming the outside world whenever that gap becomes visible, and a tendency for hostility to rise, not fall, exactly when internal economic strain becomes hardest to hide.


Still, it would be a mistake to flatten this into a "pathology" of the nation as a whole. The overwhelming majority of the population has no real option to consent to this narrative, and they need to be distinguished from the small ruling elite who design it and profit from it. So the more accurate phrase is not "national narcissism" but "a narcissistic narrative the elite mobilizes to fill a legitimacy deficit." And that narrative is the product of political strategy and psychological defense reinforcing each other until it hardens. Strategy alone doesn't explain why the posture is this rigid; psychology alone doesn't explain why its intensity is so precisely adjustable to circumstance. Only when the two are seen as overlapping does the full picture come into focus.


3. If Education Could Have Fixed This


The capacity for self-objectification — the ability to see one's own country in relative terms, situated within the world rather than at its center — would have made this narrative hard to sustain. So would things have been different if history, geography, psychology, and economics had all been taught broadly?


North Korea does, in fact, teach history and geography. Its literacy rate is high. The problem isn't the absence of subjects; it's that the content is edited from the start to foreclose objectification. World history is taught in a way that reinforces the legitimacy of Juche ideology; geography is taught within a frame that places the Korean peninsula at the center of the world. The same subject, "world history," produces entirely different outcomes depending on whether it is taught by comparing multiple historiographical perspectives or by injecting a single correct one.


The more decisive counterexample is the ruler himself. Kim Jong Un spent several years studying in Switzerland, directly experiencing a Western information environment. That rules out ignorance as the explanation for why the hostile narrative persists. He maintains it, more plausibly, because he knows it serves the regime's survival. Pluralistic, critical education is a necessary condition for self-objectification, not a sufficient one. It has to be paired with freedom of access to information, and with an accountability structure through which an objectified understanding can actually translate into political consequences. Absent either of those, knowledge doesn't get used to reconsider the system — it gets conscripted to justify it.


4. The Singapore Attempt, and Its Collapse


In 2018, the "Singapore model" — keep political control tight, open the economy — was seriously floated as a blueprint for North Korean reform. The night before the Singapore summit, Kim Jong Un toured Marina Bay Sands and Gardens by the Bay; at the summit itself, the American side screened a promotional video imagining a prosperous North Korean future. But the 2019 Hanoi summit collapsed, and with it the entire framework of trading sanctions relief for denuclearization. COVID-era border lockdowns followed, and control reasserted itself over opening.


Why did it work for Singapore and not for North Korea? Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore suppressed political opposition while still maintaining a credible rule of law and administrative system that Western capital could trust. North Korea has neither that institutional credibility nor a technocratic class insulated from politics. The more fundamental difference is the source of legitimacy itself. The Chinese Communist Party is a bureaucratic party that can shift its legitimacy onto growth; the Kim family has staked its legitimacy on the sacralized "Baekdu bloodline" narrative. The information flow and the individual and regional autonomy that marketization brings become, almost immediately, a threat to that sacredness. Layer international sanctions tied to the nuclear program on top of that, and the whole path falls well outside the range of risk this regime believes it can absorb.


5. So Is Economic Development Foreclosed?


Does being locked into an ideology mean economic development is categorically blocked? China and Vietnam are the answer, and the answer is no. Both achieved growth while standing on one-party ideological foundations. The trick wasn't discarding the ideology — it was reinterpreting it instrumentally, keeping the name and the legitimizing logic intact while swapping out the substance underneath.


In theory, North Korea isn't fully barred from a similar path — keeping the "Juche" banner and the "Baekdu bloodline" narrative while shifting economic management toward pragmatism. And in fact, something like this has already been happening from below. When the ration system collapsed during the famine of the 1990s, informal markets (jangmadang) spread on their own; there have also been repeated top-down adjustments, such as the July 1, 2002 measures and the June 28, 2012 directive. The trouble is that this trend has broken every time it crossed a certain threshold. The 2009 currency reform, which effectively confiscated the private wealth accumulated in the markets, is the clearest example. The moment markets start building individual and regional wealth and autonomy, the regime reads that not as evidence of growth but as a threat to control.


There's an error worth naming here. The rigidity is not "fourteen million individuals each trapped in their own fixed mindset." Ordinary North Koreans, in practice, have been remarkably adaptive — building markets the instant rations stopped, picking up mobile phones and a working sense of exchange rates even against the state's wishes. The rigidity isn't the accumulated psychological inertia of fourteen million people; it's closer to a deliberate strategic choice made by a small elite who know that changing the narrative would collapse their own base of power. Treating the state as a simple sum of individuals misses that asymmetry entirely.


6. Where This Meets Individual Narcissism


Here the story leaves the nation-state and comes down to the level of a single person. Anyone who has tried to reason with someone in the grip of narcissism knows what happens: the moment you point out the flaw in their logic, the defenses harden, and you become the enemy. Narcissistic defense isn't a response to a lack of information; it's a response to a threat to identity. That is structurally identical to what happens with the North Korean elite — they don't reject the truth for lack of knowing it; they reject it because they know it and cannot afford to accept it.


Real change, when it happens, rarely comes from logic injected from outside. It tends to follow a real loss the person's own narrative can no longer defend against. In that moment of fracture, support tips the outcome toward recovery; its absence tips it toward further closure. The trigger for change usually arrives from outside the person's control, and no one nearby can manufacture it on demand.


Which leaves exactly two things to do when persuasion doesn't work: decide, for yourself, where you'll spend your energy and where you'll stop; and be ready to be present if and when that person meets a loss their own story can't explain away. Changing someone through direct persuasion — whether that someone is an individual or a state — has almost never actually worked.


7. For That Day


This is why, across twenty-five years of writing about North Korea, the imperative sentence — "North Korea must do X" — has been deliberately avoided. To a narcissistic subject, a command reads as a threat to identity, and a threat only hardens the defense further. Speaking instead in the form of analysis — "this direction would benefit North Korea" — leaves information on the table without violating the other side's autonomy. It's the same principle motivational interviewing uses in individual counseling.


But this kind of writing should not be expected to function as a lever that changes the regime's decisions today. Defense mechanisms respond to identity threat, not to the volume of information presented. What this writing actually does is something else: it lays down, in advance, an alternative narrative available for the moment the regime meets a fracture it cannot manage on its own — an economic crisis, a succession, an unforeseen external shock. It is hard to invent a new way of thinking in the middle of a crisis. It's much easier to pick up an analysis that has already been sitting there, built over years.


So the diagnosis that unification "remains a vague prospect" should be read precisely — not as "impossible," but as "not a problem whose timetable can be moved up through persuasion or logic." The trigger for change will come from a crisis arriving from outside; this writing is the work of stockpiling, in advance, the resources that will be needed when it does. The principle for dealing with a narcissist in one's own life and the principle behind this writer's approach to a nation turn out to meet at the same point. Not trying to win right now. Just being there, already, when that day comes.


References

Reporting and analysis

Concepts and theory

  • Agnieszka Gołec de Zawada et al., collective narcissism theory — political-psychology research on defensive projection and aggression stemming from a group's perceived deficit in recognition

  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem — the concept of the banality of evil

  • Irving Janis, Groupthink — conformity pressure and distorted judgment within closed groups

This piece distills a conversation between the author and Claude, layering the reasoning refined in that exchange onto the author's existing body of thought on North Korea — "keep your nuclear weapons, but save your people," the proposal for a Wonsan special economic zone, and the suggestion of Singapore as a psychological reference point for reform.

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