Korea's entitlement pathology

By Jason Lim

Remember the Macadamia Nut rage incident in December 2014 when the eldest daughter of Korean Air’s chairman, Cho Hyun-a, was accused of throwing a tantrum at flight attendants and forcing a pilot to turn one of the airline’s planes back to the gate at JFK, all because she didn’t like the way the nuts were served to passengers in the first class cabin?

At the time, this became a huge deal in Korean society, with the majority condemning her behavior as beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior, even for the superrich scion of one of the royal “chaebol” families of Korea. Cho even served some jail time and was forced to resign from all official positions within the airline.

If only she would have waited till 2016 to go nutty; her behavior might not have seemed so bad in light of what her counterparts are doing. More recently, it seems that the Korean superrich are outdueling one another to earn the title of the cruelest and most clueless when it comes to dealing with their employees.

Kim Man-sik, the founder of Mong-go Food Company, was accused of habitually insulting and assaulting his chauffer, leading to an apology on the company’s webpage and resignation from his honorary chairman position.

Lee Hae-wook, the vice chairman of Daelim Industrial and heir apparent, was also accused of habitually insulting and assaulting his chauffeurs, even forcing them to drive with the right side mirror folded. Allegedly, he did this because he doesn’t like the chauffer catching a glimpse of him in the side mirror. According to some reports, he went through more than 40 chauffeurs in the last year, firing and kicking them out of his car at random locations.

Not to be outdone in the chauffer abuse category, Chung Il-sun, president of Hyundai BNG Steel and one of the grandsons of the late Hyundai Group founder Chung Ju-yung, was reported to have a 140 page manual on how his chauffeurs should cater to his every whim, including how to precisely fold his underwear and place different workout items in his gym bag.

Of course, you don’t have to belong to one of the royal families to be abusive. Jung Woo-hyun, chairman of the Mr. Pizza chain, was questioned by police for his alleged assault of a security guard in early April when he apparently struck the sixty-year old security guard twice for locking the front door of the building without realizing that the chairman was still inside inspecting one of his newly opened restaurants.

As expected, the public reacted with righteous anger at such incidents and pundits decried such behaviors, urging the superrich to respect their employees and treat them with respect. What they don’t admit is that such behavior is not the exclusive province of the rich. Money-based sense of entitlement and privilege is a Korea-wide social disease that has infected everyone.

Anyone who has worked in retail in Korea can attest to the unreasonable behavior that many customers – as the paying party – feel entitled to impose on store employees. Every year, we see CCTV footage of well-to-do shoppers outrageously abusing department store employees for imagined infractions, even forcing valet drivers to kneel on concrete lots to beg for forgiveness. No wonder that Koreans call these retail workers and customer service agents, “emotion laborers,” because they have to keep their natural emotions in check even when facing dehumanizing abuse at the hands of the customers.

And it’s something to be expected. The Miracle of the Han is usually considered to be the greatest achievements in modern Korean history, transforming the impoverished country into one of the richest in a single generation. But such a dizzying, headlong journey to capitalism and industrialization can’t be without side effects. And one of the biggest is the tendency to equate wealth with worth.

When wealth becomes the score of one’s worth as a human being, such behavior is inevitable. The wealthy become the new aristocracy, remaking the larger society into a bubble that caters to their interest and continued privilege, while the rest become a dispensable commodity to serve their needs. Not unlike how it was in Joseon. No wonder they feel justified in abusing their employees. In fact, their employees should be grateful for having the opportunity to make a living while learning perfection from their betters.

And as children of the abusers become abusers themselves, such abusive behaviors by the “payer” against the “payee” are reproduced and amplified at every level of society. It’s not one or two bad actors from the superrich class that exhibit such behavior. Rather, it’s pervasive in both belief and action throughout Korean society. It’s a social pathology.

Admittedly, it’s not just Korea that suffers from such tone-deaf behavior based on money. But the speed and scale of Korea’s capitalistic rise have outstripped any opportunities for the adoption of compensating social controls to modulate such behavior, making Korea’s symptoms much more visible, crass, and widespread.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. Reach him at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes or @jasonlim2012.