Birds of a feather clump together

By Jason Lim

Two things happened this past week ― one in Korea and one in the U.S. ― that brought to life interesting insights into how folks make sense of their worlds.

First, in Seoul, a 28-year-old female employee of Seoul Metro was killed by a 31-year-old former male colleague who had stalked her for a long time. The perpetrator had to quit work last October after facing allegations of stalking, harassment, and voyeurism against the victim. The court rejected a request for an arrest warrant last October because it determined that there was little risk of the perpetrator fleeing. However, the victim had to file a police complaint again this past January because he continued stalking her. He killed the victim the day before he was set to be sentenced. Tragically, the court apparently didn't consider in its arrest warrant decision the risk of the stalker harming the victim.

This brutal crime happened in the context of a rise in sociopolitical tension between young men and women in Korea. Although Korea is still plagued by the lowest gender equality rating among the OECD countries, there is a rising, collective resentment by young men in Korea over the perceived advantages that women purportedly enjoy that tilt the playing field in their favor, a dynamic that has played a significant role in recent national elections. At the same time, several high-profile stalking murders by men against women lent credence to the accusation that authorities are just not taking violence against women seriously enough (cue, the refusal to grant an arrest warrant in the latest case).

A Seoul city council member walked into this minefield with a verbal grenade. Councilman Lee Sang-hoon from the ruling party was quoted as saying, "The perpetrator reacted violently in a variety of ways because the victim wouldn't reciprocate his positive feelings towards her… he is a young man who is just 31 years old. He must have worked and prepared hard in his own way to get employed by Seoul Metro… regardless of the perpetrator or the victim, their parents' hearts must be broken." Lee is being rightfully pilloried for his insensitive remarks. Most criticize them as empathizing more with the male perpetrator rather than the female victim due to some misguided sense of male chauvinism.

While true, I also view his remark as a window to his underlying worldview that is more parent-centric than anything else. He comes off looking at child-rearing like an attempt in project management that has unfortunately breached its timeline because of some unforeseen accident. The brutal killing is a mere externality that derailed all the efforts that have been put into reaching that all-important milestone: a desirable job. This naturally leads to Lee's concern about how the perpetrator's parents must be suffering. That this logical leap isn't questioned illustrates the underlying assumption in Korean society that regards a child to be not only an extension but a possession of the parents to own and manage.

Second, in the U.S., the release of the preview of the upcoming remake of the much loved "Little Mermaid" featuring Halle Bailey, a Black actress, triggered a swarm of criticism that the central character of Ariel shouldn't be played by Bailey since it's not "accurate." Glossing over the fact that the Little Mermaid is not real but a product of Hans Christin Anderson's imagination, some argued that the Little Mermaid should be white since Anderson was Danish; the Little Mermaid should be white because it's based on a European tale; the Little Mermaid should be white because of tradition. After all, the original Disney animation featured a white, red-haired Ariel. While I can't think of a bigger waste of time than arguing the appropriate human racial classification for an imaginary character of a species that never existed, I also wonder what underlying assumptions are driving the obvious discomfort that some feel over this casting choice.

This discomfort isn't too far different from what we have witnessed since the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media giants. Despite their instant, global reach, we have seen social media lead to a clumping of people, politics, opinions, truths, and even facts. All of us has a certain mental taxonomy of how the world should be classified and ordered. We also have a specific mental understanding of how the world should work. We have a mental calculator of what or who's worth and how much privilege and comfort our efforts should buy us. We then take these mental constructs and project them upon the world as a sense-making framework.

And we desperately need the world to make sense. We can't deal with the mental chaos and confusion if what we see doesn't fit neatly into our mental framework, which is a constructed amalgam of our assumptions, biases, preconceptions, and the like of how the world and people should behave. Words like tradition or heritage are masks for the cultural frameworks that allow for our mental constructs to be hugged and feel catered to.

The first law of social media is that the birds of a feather flock together. Actually, we've seen them clump together into a sticky, incestuous mess. The real tragedy is that clumped birds can no longer ascend into the sky; clumped humanity can no longer soar into the future.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.