By Jon Huer
Korea Times Columnist

Looking at the way feelings are produced and expressed in Korea and in America leads me to conclude that the two, although going by the general rubric of ``feelings,'' are completely different. Risking over-generalization but compelled by the benefits of insight, I am inclined to go forward with the conclusion.

Many observers, both Korean and foreign, say Korea is an ``emotional'' society. But what kind of emotion?

The most obvious we can say is that Korea's emotion is deep seated, connected to the ancient psyches and histories of Koreans as a tribe. It encompasses the fullest range of sorrows and delights, tragedies and triumphs, and tribal memories and personal episodes. Although such emotional experiences could be universal and true of all humanity, Korea's emotion is particularized into something unique called ``Korean.''

America's feelings are wholly different from Korea's. Unlike Korea's emotional responses to its inner substance that is indescribably deep and subconscious, America's personal responses to its reality are highly ``psychological.'' Immediate and sensory, America's psychological reactions are mass-produced according to the rational, cutting-edge rules of scientific psychology for a human-resources-management purpose here and now. As such, it renders itself to fairly easy and simple analyses by psychologists, researchers, and efficiency experts.

Korea's emotion is an unfathomable swamp and vexes any attempt at analysis. It is so complex and tangled that application of modern psychology, both psychiatric and psychoanalytic, would shed little or no knowledge about it. There is nothing like it on earth that could be logically analyzed or empirically generalized into some coherent system or structure of explanation. To be able to explain or understand it as a common human experiential component is to try to turn oneself into a ``Korean,'' which is clearly impossible for an outsider. Koreans themselves profess to neither understand nor be able to explain their own emotional response or process to someone who is not a Korean. All that they can say, when asked to explain, is: ``We are Koreans.''

To observe how unique Korea's emotional expressions is to observe it as a communal theatre. In fact, when foreigners observe Koreans in emotional rituals, either a wailing mother or a candle-light protester, it is as if the wailers and protesters try to follow certain ``protocols'' of emotion, to show their own properly ``Korean'' emotion; failing to do so is a terrible breach of all that is Korean and acceptable at large. On the other hand, the head of a Korean family whose members had been wiped out in an accident involving a military plane in San Diego, California, showed no tears, much less wailing, when he met the media with a statement. In Korea, one must wail, writhe, and beat the floor with fists, to be properly in mourning.

Korea's emotional responses, although displayed as individual feelings, have little of the personal. Whenever we see a woman in mourning, say, after her child was killed in a traffic accident, we are witnessing not a person whose misfortune happens to be upon her personally at the moment.

Rather, we are witnessing all of Korea, all of the Korean Tribe, all of Korea's history and culture and existence, all of what makes up Korea's whole, in that particular theatre. As the woman wails, every Korean who witnesses it wails together with the victim, as if the whole nation, the whole tribe understands the inner sorrows and pains of the wailing mother.

You will not see a single Korean who rolls his eyes, giggles at the over-dramaturgy, or shrugs her shoulders and go on with her business, unaffected. On this stage of tribal drama and ritual, one Korean's pain, however accidental or capricious or illogical, is shared by all Koreans in their collective hearts.

Although Korea's emotional experiences take place in the present, they are in reality a continuous bookkeeping of the past.

Koreans do not identify their present life experiences without making some form of reckoning with their past events, experiences and feelings. Every event in present-day Korea, emotional or otherwise, is thus a continuously subtracted, added, multiplied, and divided re-writing of Korea's past.

Let's say, Samsung invents a new computer memory chip that multiplies its storage capacity, and the media duly announces this achievement. Even this sort of routine accomplishment would be meaningless to most Koreans unless it is somehow applied and connected to Korea's collective past, as an avenging tool, as a vindication, as a re-aligning and re-balancing instrument of past debts, slights and wrongs against Korea.

Thus every step forward that Korea makes at the present is merely an act of re-juggling Korea's past in the positive. Every step backward, such as a decline in GDP or a setback in some international sporting event, on the other hand, adds to Korea's Book of Emotional Reckoning.

Deep in their hearts, virtually all Koreans measure their present, personally and together, against their past. A parent who devotes her whole life to her child's academic success is doing so, not necessarily for her child's future, but Korea's past. Hence every such triumph by Korea is an emotionally traumatic yet satisfying step in the erasing of the past wrongs and evils done to Korea.

Psychology of American society

Technically speaking, virtually all emotional displays by Americans are artificially manufactured kinds, a product of manipulative techniques and stimulus-response within the cause-and-effect sequence. The techniques of psychological stimulus apply to all facets of life in American society and every nook and cranny of Americans' psychic life. They may apply to selling beer and DVDs; they may be used in presidential campaigns and ideological formulas; they may be adopted in Hollywood and Disney products; they may underlie the foundations of spiritual processes, such as the New Age responses.

Accordingly, it is safe to say that there is very little that is ``emotional'' about Americans' psychological displays. Virtually all aspects of America's psychic responses are predictable, programmed and anticipated.

With few exceptions in ``failed'' techniques, if you invest 1 million dollars in a particular psychological project or campaign, say, you want to increase blood donors among the high-school youth, all things being equal, you will get 1-million dollars' worth of increase in the responses. Most advertisements are safe investments in psychological manipulations because they do predictably produce results commensurate with the investment.

If Americans seem quite enthusiastic about the Super Bowl, we notice that the enthusiasm cools off to a zero-level almost instantly upon its ending. The rise and fall of American psychological responses were no more dramatically observed than during the period following September 11.

America went into a frenzy of psychological reactions, all according to the pictures and commentaries that were carefully calibrated by the media producers, we now know, all according to the maximum stimulus-response and cause-and-effect psychological techniques.

The oddest thing about America's psychological substance, as opposed to Korea's one-nation-based emotion, is that the whole psychic process in American social character is a particularistic response to a particular situational stimulus. If it is X at the moment that is on the media, America's psychology is all about X; if it is about Y, it is all about Y. The two phenomena have no ``sequential'' connections.

If it is a bestseller about angels and demons one week that's all the rage, the best-selling moves to something wholly unrelated to the rage the week before. Most Americans have not the faintest idea what was the rage only the week before, or often, hours and minutes and moments before. It is almost as if America's psychic repository goes through a moment-by-moment ``delete'' in order to accommodate the next batch of stimulus data. Little or none remains in the American deposits of psychic memories once they are replaced by new ones (nothing like Korea's Han). That makes America's cultural landscape constantly subject to fresh ideas and obsolete memories.

Theoretically, then, and unlike Koreans, Americans can be psychologically ``manufactured'' and ``de-manufactured'' at the will and capacity of its Psychology Industry. Many national issues ― those of war and peace, healthcare plans, racial and gender matters, education and environment, taxation and budgets, so on ― can be and are decided by the manipulative techniques of the Psychology Industry. One advertisement expert once said that even the Devil himself could be made into a most-beloved figure in America if the right techniques and budget were available for the campaign.

Although millions of Americans are experiencing the moment's psychological products at the same time, the experiences are neither ``American'' in the sense that it identifies all Americans as one, nor communal in the sense that those who experience the psychological stimulus form a community of hearts and minds. As such, all so-called psychological experiences in America are processed independently in the stimulus- response factory of cause and effect sequences, wholly unrelated on the human level to other such factories and sequences of other Americans. All those who are watching the Super Bowl, although millions are going through the same stimulus-response process, might as well be alone at the stadium or in front of TV, as there is no human-to-human context in the experience.

The writer can be reached at jonhuer@hotmail.com.

Kim Yu-na & Jack Kemp As of now, two names are in the media as examples of Korea's emotion and America's psychology, to sum up our thoughts: Kim Yu-na and Jack Kamp, respectively. Yu-na Kim is a world-class figure-skater from Korea; Jack Kamp, who was once a vice presidential candidate in America, has just died. To most Koreans, Yuna is not just a figure-skater; she is a ``Korean'' figure-skater, with the accent on ``Korean.'' When she falls on the ice, all of Korea groans and feels the pain; when she triumphs, all of Korea rejoices. As she is the daughter of the Korean Tribe, through her heroics, many of the past wrongs, injustices and pains Korea suffered collectively are reckoned with and re-written in their collective memory book. Apart from Korea, Yu-na as an individual athlete, does not and cannot exist. Jack Kamp, to most Americans, is nobody in particular. In the comings and goings of celebrity faces and names, he strikes no particularly memorable pose. Upon his death, we will remember nothing of him if the media present nothing of him; we will remember him mildly if the media's presentation is medium effective; we will weep over his death if the presentation is moving and touching enough. All this has nothing to do with Jack Kamp the celebrity-politician, nor with our innate emotional capacity or memory for him. It all depends what Psychology Factory our Feeling Producers would put us through. Two questions arise: Can Koreans be manipulated into responding to manufactured emotion, a la American style psychology? On the other hand, can Americans be induced, by some yet-unknown process, scientific or historical, into experiencing an authentic, tribal and human emotion? Observing both societies closely, I would say the first is more feasible, as its advertisement becomes more effective and ``meaningful'' in Korea's inner life, which has hitherto been reserved exclusively for its inherited emotion, than the second. America's psychic map is now more of a scientific and mechanical process than anything that resembles authentic humanity, as an Oprah is more likely to provoke our next emotion than a Valley Forge or another September 11.