About 30 years ago, realizing that my young mind was also in turmoil due to my parents’ war trauma, I immersed myself in exercise. Even with my father nearing the end of his life by my side, I did balance training, walking while keeping my eyes closed. I adopted the training method used by Park Jong-gil, who served as chief of the Blue House security office when the confrontation with the North Korean regime was at its peak, to defeat North Korean shooting hero Colonel So Gil-san at the Asian Games. And much later, I did more balance training on skates. Since I used it mainly to pull myself together rather than to compete, and because the North Korean issue has been on my mind, it was truly effective.
I exercised by skating, shooting, swimming, and weight training, but at times I even did manual labor in a blast furnace for the sake of exercise, so I truly longed for the immersion I had in sports. I was glad to be able to reform myself, who was extremely weak and prone to illness. Today, we discussed artificial intelligence, as well as ideological or religious immersion and immersion in exercise. We also exchanged views on the war and the recent state of martial law.
How an Intellect Cut Off from Feedback Collapses
On Flow, Fanaticism, and Korea's 2024 Martial Law
Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist
1. On the Ice
I went skating for the first time in a long while. The moment I stood on the ice, my worries fell away. The next morning I felt reborn, as if my mind had been formatted.
The reason is simple. Ice does not lie. Get your posture wrong and you fall. To stay upright you must pour all your attention into the present moment, and the worries that had been circling in your head lose their footing. The body drags the mind back into the here and now.
There was a time when I threw myself into shooting, skating, swimming and weight training to keep my composure. Looking back, the four share one trait: no human being is the judge. The target speaks through the point of impact, the ice through a fall, the water through your breath, the barbell through its weight. None of them cares about my beliefs or my rank. They do not flatter, and they hold no grudges.
2. Flow and Fanaticism: One Longing, Opposite Directions
Could it be, then, that fanatical attachment to ideology and religion, and even war itself, springs from a human longing for this kind of absorption?
The suspicion has grounds. Eric Hoffer argued that people who hurl themselves into mass movements want less the doctrine than an escape from themselves. Durkheim called the shared exaltation of ritual "collective effervescence." J. Glenn Gray and Chris Hedges recorded soldiers who missed the intensity of the battlefield for the rest of their lives. Even my own phrase, "reborn," is the language of religious conversion.
Yet the two run in opposite directions. In the flow Csikszentmihalyi described, self-consciousness vanishes for a while, and when it ends the self returns stronger. The fanatic surrenders the self for good. Exercise clears the memory; fanaticism replaces the operating system. After exercise the same person comes back, only lighter. The fanatic does not erase the past but reinterprets it: "I was living in darkness then." The past survives as evidence to be renounced, and sometimes as fuel for hatred of an enemy. And it is not the person who installs the new system, but the doctrine and the organization.
The decisive difference is where the feedback comes from. The ice gives feedback from outside reality. Fanaticism receives its feedback from inside a group that shares the same faith. So when reality says "you are wrong," the loop does not break; it tightens. Flow breaks the loop. Fanaticism swaps it for a larger one.
Voluntariness is no test. The fanatic, too, believes he chose freely. The difference lies in what one chooses to stand before. I chose to stand before a reality that would knock me down. The fanatic chooses to stand before an authority that affirms him.
3. When the Educated Break
We tend to assume fanaticism is the affliction of the unintelligent. The truth is closer to the reverse. Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog documented a striking overrepresentation of engineers among violent Islamist militants. Dan Kahan and his colleagues found that on politically charged questions, people with stronger numerical skills were more adept at reading data to fit their side's conclusion. Intelligence does not correct judgment; it serves as its defense attorney. That is why, when an educated mind breaks, the damage is worse.
The martial law declaration of December 3, 2024 is a case in point. The then president branded the opposition's string of impeachment motions and budget cuts a "legislative dictatorship" and invoked "anti-state forces." The grievance had political substance. But the leap from there to deploying troops skipped any reality check. The National Assembly voted to lift martial law within hours, and in April 2025 the Constitutional Court removed him from office, ruling that the declaration failed the constitutional requirements. He explained himself with perfect internal logic; those watching were driven to despair.
This is my own interpretation, but a lifetime as a prosecutor may have shaped that habit of mind. A prosecutor fixes a conclusion and then stacks up evidence to prove it. Carry that habit into politics and the other side becomes not a negotiating partner but a defendant. Add the condition of supreme power. At the top, no one tells you when you have fallen. Inside a circle of loyalists and a closed information ecosystem, all feedback comes from within. It is the same structure as fanaticism.
Still, this case must not be filed away as one man's madness. Pathologizing an opponent makes the explanation easy, but it hides the fact that this mechanism works on everyone. Clever people among the critics of martial law can fall into the same trap on issues dear to their own camp. The problem is not one man's mind. It is intellect cut off from feedback.
4. Precedent as Collective Habit
Just as individuals have habit loops, so do nations. The Korean military had two precedents of success: May 16, 1961 and December 12, 1979. Soldiers seized power by force, and won. Where they should have fallen, they did not. Wrong feedback becomes habit.
But there is also a precedent of punishment. In 1993 the military's private faction, Hanahoe, was dismantled, and in April 1997 the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo for mutiny and insurrection. The argument that "a successful coup cannot be punished" collapsed. It was a format at the level of the state.
The soldiers mobilized in December 2024 probably carried both habits: the old habit of obedience, and the memory of seniors who obeyed and were punished. Some commanders testified before the National Assembly that they did not carry out orders to drag lawmakers out of the chamber, and many observed that troops on the ground moved reluctantly. Their inner thoughts cannot be verified. But that hesitation can be read as feedback from thirty years earlier, finally taking effect. Looking at the same history, those who declared martial law remembered only the first precedent; many of the soldiers they mobilized remembered the second as well.
5. Is Time a Cure, or Forgetting?
Time heals. But time without institutions is not a cure; it is forgetting. Chun and Roh received special pardons in December 1997, eight months after their convictions became final. The loop cut by punishment was half reconnected by pardon. The message left behind was: you will be punished, but you will walk free in the end.
So the loop must be cut for a long time, and through institutions. When Germany rebuilt its armed forces after the Nazi era, it adopted the principle of the "citizen in uniform." German military law provides that soldiers need not obey orders that violate human dignity, and must not obey orders that would constitute a crime. And Germany did not declare this once and move on; it has repeated it through military education for decades.
In Korea, too, the martial law crisis prompted proposals to codify the right to refuse unlawful orders, to tighten the requirements for martial law and parliamentary oversight, and to restrict pardons for insurrection. They all point one way: to lay honest ice in advance beneath the feet of any soldier facing an unlawful order.
One skating session changes your mood. Composure settles into the body only through repetition. A single format changes how you feel; repeated training changes who you are. A nation is no different.
Conclusion: Intellect Alone Is Not Enough
The intellect is far too good at defending itself. The body keeps us in touch with reality, but even that is not enough, for a well-disciplined body can become a more obedient instrument of orders. We need honest ice in layers: a reality that knocks us down, people who tell us we are wrong, and institutions that can topple even power.
An intellect cut off from feedback will collapse. The trouble is that it never collapses alone.
Note on sources: The skating and exercise experiences are the author's own. The declaration and lifting of martial law, the Constitutional Court ruling, and the 1997 Supreme Court judgment and pardons are matters of public record. The interpretations of the prosecutorial mindset and of the soldiers' hesitation in 2024 are the author's inferences. This column does not assess how far post-martial-law reform proposals have been enacted.
References
Constitutional Court of Korea. (2025, April 4). Decision 2024Hun-Na8 (Impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol).
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Durkheim, É. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1912)
Gambetta, D., & Hertog, S. (2016). Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gesetz über die Rechtsstellung der Soldaten (Soldatengesetz) [German Legal Status of Soldiers Act], § 11 (Obedience).
Gray, J. G. (1959). The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Hedges, C. (2002). War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: PublicAffairs.
Hoffer, E. (1951). The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Dawson, E. C., & Slovic, P. (2017). Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1), 54–86.
Supreme Court of Korea. (1997, April 17). Decision 96Do3376 (en banc) (Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo: mutiny and insurrection).
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