North Korea has been very hostile toward South Korea these days. Because such Korea writes the same words and says the same things. In other words, the fate of the North Korean government could be determined by South Korea through 'conformity' that goes beyond mere practical interaction. Even if the North Korea–U.S. negotiations unfold and South Korea is sidelined, I will not shed a tear, not even if I die. Because I understand every situation. South Korea will have to wait patiently. If North Korea simply comes to the negotiating table with the United States, everyone in this world will be better off.
When discussing AI, you should not get dragged into trivial details. Because artificial intelligence has no political sense. In other words, AI does not understand human psychology.
The Fear of a Shared Language
Conformity, Courage, and Why the Non-China World Is the Larger One
Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist | October 2026
1. The Power of Unanimity, and the Power of One
In the 1950s, Solomon Asch ran a simple experiment. Participants had to pick which of several lines matched a reference line. The answer was obvious to anyone. Yet when a planted majority confidently gave the same wrong answer, participants went along in roughly a third of the critical trials, and about three in four betrayed their own eyes at least once.
Less remembered is the other finding. When just one person broke ranks, conformity collapsed — even when that dissenter gave a different wrong answer. Conformity draws its power not from the size of the majority but from its unanimity. A single crack frees everyone.
2. Why People Conform Faster to Evil
Human beings sense before they reason. The senses seek pleasure, and they prefer pleasure that arrives now. The pleasure of joining in wrongdoing is immediate: the laughter of shared ridicule, the warmth of belonging, the relief that someone else is the target. Neuroscience has linked the satisfaction of watching an envied person suffer to the brain's reward circuitry, and the same circuitry responds when people punish a norm-breaker.
Goodness has its pleasures too, but they arrive late, quietly, and alone — and the cost must be paid first. Evil pays out at once and sends the bill to someone else. That asymmetry in time decides the speed of conformity.
The most dangerous evil wears the robe of justice. Those who join a witch hunt see themselves not as villains but as enforcers of righteousness. If evil came wearing its own face, people would follow it far more slowly.
3. Cowardice Is a Narrow Calculation
In a company with a serious grievance, employees stay silent. They have not lost their reason; their reason is working precisely. Speak up and you are marked; speak up and nothing changes. Organizational researchers call this "organizational silence."
A line often attributed to Peter Ustinov holds that courage frequently springs from a lack of insight, while cowardice usually rests on good information. It is witty, and half right. Rushing into danger without seeing it is not courage but recklessness. As Aristotle argued, courage lies between cowardice and recklessness. The courageous person holds the same information as the coward and chooses differently.
Nor is the coward's information truly good. It is merely narrow. It weighs the penalty at the next performance review with great precision, but leaves off the scale the cost of an organization rotting in silence, and the cost of betraying oneself. Cowardice is a narrow, precise calculation; courage is a wider one. Whoever breaks the silence accepts discomfort. He weighed the discomfort of speaking against the discomfort of silence, and found the latter heavier.
More frightening still is when reason itself takes evil's side. What Hannah Arendt saw in Eichmann was not madness but the face of a functionary diligently calculating his career.
4. The Calculation of Those Who Know the End
What widens the calculation? I found my answer at the side of a dying family member. We all walk the same road in the end. The position, reputation, and security we struggle to protect will be let go regardless. As the Buddhist teaching of emptiness (śūnyatā) holds, once we see there is no fixed thing to cling to, the fear of loss loosens its grip. What remains is to do one's best, by one's own will, as a being born into a body.
Awareness of death does not automatically produce courage. Social psychologists report that people reminded of their mortality often cling harder to their group and turn harsher toward dissent. Death avoided makes us shrink; death accepted sets us free.
We must not cling to results, but we must have a goal. A life is like a ship setting sail. A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not what ships are built for. Columbus sailed because he had a goal: India. Yet he died believing he had reached Asia. A goal launches the ship; attachment to the expected result blinds the eyes.
5. What Kim Jong-un Fears Is a Shared Language
Now put the same question to Pyongyang. At the Ninth Party Congress in February 2026, Kim Jong-un announced a "final, momentous decision" to fix relations with South Korea as those between the most hostile of states. He dismissed Seoul's conciliatory gestures as a deception and vowed to exclude the South from the category of compatriots forever. In March, before the Supreme People's Assembly, he formally designated the South as the most hostile state — while leaving the door to Washington open, on condition that his nuclear status be accepted.
Why this obsession with severing ties? Part of it is calculation: to sweep Seoul, the persistent voice of denuclearization, off the table where nuclear status is negotiated. But deeper lies fear. What the regime fears is not South Korea's army but its language. Pyongyang has enacted, one after another, the Law on Rejecting Reactionary Ideology and Culture, the Youth Education Guarantee Law, and the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Law. Speaking in a South Korean manner is itself punishable. The law confesses what the regime fears.
A neighbor who shares your speech and script is a channel of conformity. The North Korean system rests on a vast unanimity, and as Asch showed, unanimity falls to a single different voice. Ideology appeals to reason; South Korean dramas and songs seep in through the senses. If the senses come before reason, the outcome of that contest is not in doubt. If Kim senses this, even dimly, sealing the door is rational from where he stands.
This is the old strategy of yuanjiao jingong — befriend the distant, confront the near — but inverted: not to conquer the near neighbor, but to push it away. And the South is dangerous not merely because it is close and large. China is larger and just as close, yet it is no enemy. South Korea is close, large, and the same. That is the problem.
6. Sequence Is the Answer
How, then, should unification come? I believe it must come after North Korea has built its own economy. There is no reason for both Koreas to suffer before then. That is why I have offered economic counsel to the North for so long.
The sequence runs like this. Washington and Pyongyang draw closer; sanctions ease; the North opens. Its economy reaches a certain level. Only then can Kim stand before the mirror, and only then can the South draw slowly nearer. The regime survives, and China finds no gap through which to intervene. That is why South Korea being bypassed at a US–North Korea summit is the second-best outcome. Not the best — but a road opens.
There is a danger to watch. If Washington and Pyongyang cap only the long-range missiles that threaten the American homeland and leave untouched the forces aimed at the South, second-best becomes, for Seoul, second-worst. Seoul may sit outside the room, but it must watch the table.
Nor is a unification pulled together by conformity necessarily a good one. East Germany collapsed amid longing for the West, yet after reunification many East Germans felt like second-class citizens. North Koreans must be able to walk toward unification at their own pace.
7. China and Russia: The Same Division, Different Arithmetic
The worst variable in this picture is China. A unified Korea allied with the United States reaching the Yalu River would be a security threat to Beijing. But the problem is not only security arithmetic. China's hegemonic drive grows out of one-party dictatorship. Democracies have mechanisms for correcting bad policy. America erred in Vietnam and Iraq, but its own press exposed the errors, and public opinion and elections changed course. China has no such mechanism; the character of the regime becomes the conduct of the state. This is not a verdict on 1.4 billion Chinese people. Our judgment of people who cannot choose their own government must be the same as our judgment of the people of North Korea.
China also carries an old worldview: dì dà wù bó (地大物博) — a land so vast and rich it needs nothing from outside. In 1793, the Qianlong Emperor answered a British trade mission, in effect, that his empire lacked nothing. Half a century later, that confidence was shattered in the Opium War. Today's China still depends on the outside world for oil, food, and advanced semiconductors. The gap between believing oneself complete and actually depending on others is what breeds miscalculation. Believing it grows alone, China sees its neighbors not as partners but as followers.
Russia is different. Russia needs the Korean Peninsula. The development of its Far East, and the route by which Siberian gas and rail reach the sea, run through Korea. In the 1990s, through the "Brown Bear" (Bulgom) program, Moscow repaid Soviet-era loans to Seoul in weapons, building up South Korea's own arsenal. Its transfer of military technology to the North today is, in Putin's arithmetic, simply giving to both sides. Since the 2024 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, I read Putin's design as drawing the North closer to Moscow than to Beijing, so that the whole peninsula might eventually serve as a partner in Russia's postwar revival.
But what Russia wants is two Koreas, not one. A peninsula that cooperates without unifying lets Moscow deal with each side separately and keep things on its own terms. China prefers division because it needs a buffer; Russia, because it wants leverage. Russia is useful for easing the North's dependence on China, but it is no partner for unification.
Even so, Russia's structure ultimately points away from China. Around eight million people live in the Russian Far East; across the border, about a hundred million live in China's three northeastern provinces. That Russia now looks subordinate to China is a temporary product of war and geography. The structure is pressing for change.
8. Diversification, and the Gathering Against China
Russia is hostile to the West, and Europe is no longer as close to America as it once was. The world is entering an age of diversification. But this scattering will not last. If a scattered world gathers again around one axis, that axis is China. America is, for the most part, a hegemon guarding what it already has; China is a hegemon dreaming of what it does not yet have. A dreaming hegemon unsettles its neighbors, and unease breeds alliance.
In the future, the world will divide into China and the non-China world.
9. The Non-China World Is the Vast and Abundant One
China holds about 6.4 percent of the world's land area and roughly one-sixth of its population. Add Russia's resources, America's technology and finance, India's population, Europe's institutions, and the manufacturing of Korea and Japan, and the non-China world is far vaster and richer than China. The moment China believes itself a complete world, it makes an enemy of a larger and more complete one.
The power of conformity is strong. But unanimity falls to a single dissenter, and narrow calculation loses to wider calculation. Pyongyang behind its locked door and Beijing that would grow alone will face the same question in the end: remain a ship tied in harbor, or set sail.
The non-China world is dì dà wù bó. And in the end, what is right prevails.
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