Hell Joseon comes home to roost

By Jason Lim

This past week, Lee Jun-seok, 36, became the youngest ever to take the leadership of a main political party. Lee will now lead the conservative main opposition People Power Party (PPP), as it tries to win back the presidency next year. While Lee's been around for about 10 years ever since he was recruited by former President Park Geun-hye basically as window dressing for her appeal to younger voters, he has held his own since then against much more experienced and well-heeled politicians. Nevertheless, nobody expected a Lee victory this time around, especially against two well-entrenched veterans of party politics.

His meteoric rise can be seen as an extension of the narrative that brought defeat to the ruling party during the April mayoral by-elections, and overwhelming disapproval of the status quo by the young male electorate against the current system. It was this same demographic that propelled Lee's victory this time around. It's almost as if the "Hell Joseon" that has been brewing over the last decade has come home to roost and caused this seismic disruption in the political landscape.

If you recall, "Hell Joseon" was the term popularly coined several years ago to describe the hopelessness of Korea's young people in which, as Se-Woong Koo wrote in Korea Expose, "being born in South Korea is tantamount to entering hell, where one is immediately enslaved by a highly regulated system that dictates an entire course of life. Onerous education and service in the abusive military are the norm, and the only goal for the young is to become servants of the mighty corporations that rule the realm from its heart."

Koo further wrote, "The Hell Joseon discourse embodies despair and hopelessness of the most extreme variety, the idea that the South Korean state cannot be redeemed through effort. In fact, effort ― 'noryeok' in Korean ― is one of the most hated words in the Hell Joseon lexicon, seen as part of an insidious tactic of the ruling class to trick the population into continuing to believe that work is meaningful, mobility possible, and justice alive."

Koo's take is not the only definition of Hell Joseon, but it's interesting to juxtapose the younger generation's distaste of noryeok against Lee's main ― and successful ― message in this election, and also the name of his book: "Fair Competition." Lee has been quoted as saying that the role of politics is to create a playing field where everyone gets to compete in a perfectly fair environment. So, young people are not against the idea of noryeok per se; they just believe that their noryeok is wasted against a system that has already picked its winners and losers based on family background. They want a world where their noryeok matters again and will be rewarded fairly.

This imagined world is what Lee is promising, and it's difficult to argue against it in a free and capitalistic society. It's also not new. It has another, older name: meritocracy. It's a system of social hierarchy in which privilege, status, wealth and power are allocated not by social origins but by individual merit. And in the modern era, especially in Korea, individual merit has traditionally been measured by academic achievements. This system also has a more familiar Korean name: Park Chung-heeism. The link to Park Chung-hee is ironic in that some pundits are declaring Lee's victory as a complete and final break from the original Park's spiritual hold on the conservative party. But actually, it's a full embrace.

Lee is peddling basically the same upward mobility narrative that gave meaning to the Miracle on the Han River era, where everybody who worked hard could get ahead, especially if you studied hard enough to get into college. The underlying premise of meritocracy held during this era until its inevitable dissolution. As wealth increasingly reflects success based on talent and effort (merit), and those possessing them marry each other, then society will eventually and inevitably split between the haves and have-nots, and skew the originally level playing field. The field gets even more skewed and aristocratized when rich parents use their wealth and privilege to gain unfair advantages for their children, which is, after all, human instinct.

Lee is now promising to bring back the level playing field so that the meritocracy narrative is valid again. His enormous challenge is that Korea is not a devastated country in the aftermath of an all-out war, after which everyone started out pretty much the same. Wars and disasters have a way of leveling the playing field. Today's Korea already has an aristocracy that is a well-entrenched social class and will resist being made into a scapegoat or sacrificial lamb as a part of Lee's attempts to revive the validity of the meritocracy narrative.

So, it is essentially a creative destruction problem for Lee. Is he up to the challenge? Who knows. But one thing is for sure. At least a significant portion of the electorate is desperate enough to give the new, young guy a try.

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