Leaders Who Order War Without Feeling the Battlefield
Opening the livestream on April 8, 2026, I spoke about Trump’s invasion of Iran and the reckless remarks that followed. Watching a leader who created a place where lives are lost perform like a showman, I wanted to put a rifle in his hands and place him in the middle of the war. If missiles and bombs were falling around him, he could not laugh or angrily threaten to turn a country into wasteland.
In most wars, including the war between Ukraine and Russia, leaders do not charge with the infantry. They value their own lives while treating other people’s children like pawns on a board. A proper leader is not one who moves pieces from far away, but one capable of imagining the terror felt by schoolchildren, teachers, and ordinary civilians inside an explosion.
We must not entrust people’s lives to someone unable to feel the terror of a battlefield.
Who Would Have Died If the Coup Had Succeeded?
I connected the attempted coup under Yoon Suk Yeol’s government to the same problem. We must imagine how many people would have been suppressed, injured, and killed had it succeeded. A person who endangered people to preserve his power offers every excuse when he stands trial and hears his own punishment discussed. Only his own life and freedom remain precious; others become numbers on a sheet.
Law, the military, and large organizations are frightening. Once an individual becomes an organization’s enemy, the sacrifice can be enormous. Bureaucratic organizations make puppets who execute orders without thought and package obedience as virtue. We must therefore examine not only one leader’s character but also the organizational culture that enabled such commands.
Do not look only at the coup’s failure; see the people who would have been sacrificed if it succeeded.
Soldiers Must Criticize Orders Too
After the insurrection, Korean society suddenly demanded a difficult responsibility from soldiers. Whether a low-ranking soldier or an officer, each person must judge whether an order from above is right rather than obey automatically. An order to block the National Assembly or use violence against citizens must be refused. A uniform does not transfer one’s capacity for judgment to a superior.
Yet schools from elementary level through university did not teach when to obey and when to refuse authority. It is contradictory to train obedience and demand critical citizens only in an emergency. Critical thinking is not a tool pulled out on the day of martial law; it must become a habit through ordinary education and life.
Do not follow orders without thought. Judge them critically.
Buddhism Used as an Instrument of Power in Silla
Critical thought is unwelcome in an authoritarian society. When Silla adopted Buddhism and promulgated legal codes, the ruler’s Buddhism functioned as a governing rule about what to keep and obey. The language “follow my command” acquired religious authority.
The Buddhism I describe, however, contains freedom from authority, questions, and doubt. It asks why someone is king, whether past-life merit legitimizes royal power, whether souls and an afterlife truly exist, and why people wage war and commit massacres. Such questioners become the most unwelcome people to rulers who wish to bind society.
When Buddhism sanctifies commands from power, it has already lost Buddhism’s questions.
The Misery Made by a Society Teaching Only Competition
Even in an age of everyday AI, superstition and blind obedience remain abundant. Schools and society did not teach critical, rational, and skeptical thought; they repeated only that one must make money and win. A person who never learns “we” and “together” becomes accustomed to a capitalist ideal that worships successful individuals and treats those left behind as refuse.
For me alone to be rich and powerful, someone else must remain poor and below. If everyone could have the same thing, it would not be an object of envy. Competition produces losers, inequality, loneliness, and misery, creating a society with high suicide rates and declining intimacy. Behind every story of individual success, we must ask who is supporting the bottom.
The dream that only I will succeed requires someone else to fail.
Anti-Intellectual Politics Turning Charlie Kirk into a Holiday
Hearing that the U.S. Congress had advanced a bill making the day Charlie Kirk died a national holiday, I criticized it sharply. The Senate was nearly unanimous and the House also agreed to honor a figure associated with opposition to gun regulation, white Christian nationalism, and women’s submission. I saw this not simply as mourning one person but as a scene revealing the American rightward turn and anti-intellectualism.
The best spirit Christianity can offer is love, peace, and judging neighbors by conduct rather than group membership. Dividing whites and nonwhites, citizens and immigrants, Christians and other religions into ranks, while threatening to bomb other nations into primitive conditions, is the opposite. Impeaching Trump alone cannot solve a problem if the culture and Congress that produced him remain.
This is not only one president’s problem; it is the problem of the legislature and culture that made him possible.
Oligarchy Under the Name of Democracy
Looking at the U.S. Senate, House, and government, I called the system closer to oligarchy than democracy. Korea is becoming more democratic, but a small political elite still monopolizes decisions. Citizens elect representatives, yet those representatives act according to private interest and party strategy rather than the public’s will.
Before an election they promise to become servants of the people; after winning they ignore the voters. When politics requires great wealth, poor people cannot become candidates, and those with money, elite education, legal careers, and business backgrounds occupy the legislature. The existence of voting does not mean the people’s will enters policy.
Electing a representative and being represented by that person are different facts.
The Voices of Poor People Missing from Parliament
Parliament contains few people who directly represent the lives of the unemployed and poor, disabled people and workers, teachers and teenagers. Middle-aged members of the establishment, lawyers, businesspeople, and children of local notables dominate. They often cannot know ordinary people’s feelings because their life conditions differ, even before personal malice is considered.
I argued that the number of legislators should increase, not decrease. Concentrating authority among fewer members raises the value of each vote and allows lobbying and party interest to replace reality. More groups should enter, investigate, study, and debate. Reducing the number may strengthen existing legislators rather than improve efficiency.
A parliament without poor representatives will not automatically represent poor people.
Pay Them Properly, but Make Their Wealth Transparent
I also opposed increasing legislators while cutting their salaries. Full-time service to the country requires adequate pay and staff, especially if poor people are to participate without fear of losing a livelihood. Near-unpaid politics becomes an aristocracy open only to those already wealthy.
Instead, wealth and conflicts of interest must be fully transparent, and representatives must be barred from taking profit through other routes. They must not buy land with advance policy information, bend roads and railways toward their interests, or receive payment for bills and projects. Removing privilege is different from removing fair compensation for labor.
Do not eliminate legislators’ salaries; eliminate hidden money and conflicts of interest.
Technology Opening Direct Democracy
Smartphones, personal media, and rapid polling create a foundation for direct democracy that was impossible in the past. Important national issues could be publicly debated, information disclosed, and citizens authenticated to express their decisions directly. The assumption that elites must make every difficult decision for everyone is weakening.
Legislative votes should also be public so voters can know who supported each bill and impose accountability. Not every matter can be settled by a simple referendum, but government and parliament should move toward hearing citizens more often and making decision-making transparent.
When technology can reflect the public will more directly, there is no reason to preserve oligarchic habits.
Feng Shui and Auspicious Graves Are Superstition
Asked about feng shui, auspicious sites, and graves, I answered that they are superstition from alpha to omega. Claims that an ancestor’s grave determines descendants’ prosperity, or that Blue Dragon and White Tiger landforms deliver fortune, are human imagination. Sunlight, humidity, and drainage affect habitation, but they need no mystical language of energy and veins.
If claims that mountains turn their backs on one another and cause betrayal at the Blue House influence state decisions, this is more than a hobby. I called people who sell such claims to rulers frauds. Stories about blocked geomantic veins and iron stakes destroying national energy are equally unsupported imagination.
We must distinguish a healthy physical environment from superstition that graves determine descendants’ fate.
The Danger of Pretending to Wisdom Without Criticism
Pretending to wisdom without critical thought combines fraud and fantasy. Lofty terminology, old texts, mountains, and directions may sound profound, but one question—“What is the evidence?”—can make the claim collapse. I warned that frauds crowd around feng shui and auspicious sites.
A single sentence cannot refute every detailed feng shui claim; we must inspect precisely who said what. Yet the general structure is clear when unverifiable energy explains real outcomes and promises future fortune. The more a statement sounds like wisdom, the more firmly a question should be attached.
When a claim sounds impressive, ask for its evidence first.
Where Politicians Without Empathy Come From
War-making politicians, coup-seeking rulers, and prosecutors who intimidate citizens cannot be explained only by personal evil. Parents, schools, organizations, and social culture helped them grow, succeed, and be recognized as elites. High scores and obedience were valued above empathy and justice.
If prosecutors investigate relatives and acquaintances to threaten and fabricate, the problem is a bureaucratic culture rewarding that conduct, not merely several individuals. Selecting people by memorization and grades and then calling them smart elites makes selfish and rotten conduct look like ability. We must see what kinds of humans institutions and culture manufacture.
An elite without empathy may not be a sudden monster, but a result we trained.
Schools Where Children Never Learned to Play Together
Korean education splits students into individuals and makes them compete rather than cultivating solidarity and empathy. It ranks them through admissions, ability, neighborhood, and parental wealth. When a child’s mind is filled with the need to outscore others, cooperation and critical thinking will not appear by themselves.
When children play together, even the clumsy child learns relationships within a common game, and “we” arises naturally. Ranking and drilling them before they mature turns friends into rivals. Schools are not the whole problem, but we must begin by changing education that repeats society’s authoritarian hierarchy.
We cannot suddenly demand community from children who never learned to play together.
Violence Committed with Money
Society calls it competition when giant capital opens a cheap large shop beside a small PC café or a discount supermarket destroys a traditional market. I asked why hitting people with money is not considered violence. Destroying another person’s livelihood through capital becomes a success story because it is not legally classified as physical force.
People envy rather than fear the power and look at billionaires as emperors. A higher-ranking soldier bullying a subordinate and a politician ordering a citizen to state his rank share the same root. The belief that wealth and title determine human height continually produces authoritarian personalities.
We must ask whether using money to destroy a person’s livelihood is also violence.
A Right-Wing Society Before Right-Wing Individuals
It is too narrow to ask only why people in their twenties moved right. Their parents, competitive schools, labor markets, and housing systems were already right-wing. A culture forcing individual survival and valuing private assets above shared well-being naturally produces people who know only the individual.
When wealthy districts support forces that attempted a coup, ignorance alone is not enough to explain it. Not every wealthy person is the same, but a class culture can treat success as personal merit and accept the destruction of democracy when it protects private interest. I denounced this harshly while admitting the limit of my own poor background, which can turn the wealthy into an alien enemy.
Before cursing an individual’s politics, examine the society that normalized it.
Religions Quietly Permitting One Another to Sell Superstition
Professors and scientists who believe superstition, religious leaders who sell it, and merchants of prophecy, fortune, karma, and rebirth retain influence because religious institutions stopped criticizing one another. Each sells its God and hell, Buddha and Avalokiteshvara, karma and rebirth, or funeral rites, while silently agreeing not to challenge the others’ business.
The problem is therefore not one monk or one fraud. Their stage is a culture that suspends questions in the presence of religion and leaves inhumane, irrational claims untested. When the majority does not think critically, absurd public speech can coexist with authority.
Criticism disappears when religions agree to overlook one another’s superstition business.
See the Conditions That Made the Individual
We cannot blame society for everything. Individuals remain responsible for their actions. Yet we must also examine parents, schools, associates, organizational culture, political economy, and geopolitical conditions that helped someone become an authoritarian, prosecutor, or religious fraud.
Punishing one person while preserving the same system will produce a similar person again. Blaming only structure and erasing choice is also wrong. Dependent-origination thinking does not select either individual or conditions; it sees how they form and reinforce each other.
Hold the person responsible, and change the structure that repeatedly manufactures that person.
The Monetary Economy as a Circle Game
I compared capitalist money to a circle game in which someone is eventually left holding the cloth. A country’s persistent export surplus presupposes deficits and poverty elsewhere. When money carries interest and more must be repaid than was issued as principal, someone must borrow again and the money supply expands. Someone is pushed out of the circle.
Access to large loans is also unequal. Developers and asset owners, rather than poor people, borrow enormous amounts through project finance for land and housing. New money reaches the wealthy side first and raises asset prices. Without asking where money originates and who receives it first, we miss the structure of growing inequality.
In the game of circulating money, someone is always left holding the cloth.
The Claim That Welfare Causes Inflation
It makes no sense to say that returning tax revenue to citizens causes inflation while spending it on corporations does not. If existing tax money is merely allocated differently, the total money supply does not automatically grow. Prices in scarce sectors may rise with demand, but that is not identical to monetary expansion.
A serious account of inflation must include bank lending, credit creation, and enormous flows into asset markets. Condemning small support to ordinary people as “printing money” while ignoring large financial and development credit is class-biased. We must ask whose money is singled out as the problem.
Distinguish returning existing taxes to citizens from creating vast amounts of new money.
International Politics and the History of Extraction
Wealthy European countries and the United States increased production through science and industry, but they also accumulated wealth by extracting from colonies and foreign populations. Steel, electricity, agriculture, and services alone cannot explain today’s gaps. Great powers repeatedly put interest before justice and interfered in other countries’ divisions and governments.
I did not criticize capitalism to idealize communism. Actual communist states invoked the people while becoming dictatorships. An ideological label guarantees no good society. We must examine concretely which institutions concentrate power and silence citizens.
Judge both capitalism and communism by how power actually works, not by their names.
Personal Media Pressuring Power
In the twenty-first century, controlling the state and several large media companies cannot silence every voice. Personal video, livestreams, and rapid sharing spread antiwar protest and criticism around the world. Opposition becomes visible in real time and returns as pressure on leaders pushing war.
Personal media does not always speak truth; it also accelerates superstition. Still, multiplying channels for questions and criticism is important. The need is not merely more channels, but citizens able to distinguish evidence and question the flood of information.
The harder it is to silence everyone, the more important our ability to judge what to believe becomes.
AI Breaking the Loop Between Labor and Consumption
When AI replaces human labor, it shakes the basic cycle of the monetary economy. People are employed, earn wages, and buy cars, computers, food, and rice. If companies stop employing people, consumers stop receiving money. Production remains possible while buyers disappear.
Some denounce basic income as communist rationing. Yet when Elon Musk or an AI executive says money must be distributed in an automated age, the same structure suddenly sounds futuristic. Different words do not create a different system. We must debate now how to handle labor-market collapse and concentrated wealth.
Ask first why basic income and rationing sound like entirely different words.
Basic Income Does Not Automatically Reverse Power
Basic income can support survival, but it does not automatically solve extreme inequality and power relations. Owners may control production, data, and AI while everyone else receives only subsistence money. It can harden into a system saying, “You will receive food money, so do not challenge my property.”
I harshly told Elon Musk to distribute his existing fortune before advising others not to save. A technological optimist who cannot examine his own power and bias may design a new aristocracy while promising universal happiness. We must discuss not only the amount distributed but who owns and decides.
Distributing survival money and distributing power are not the same thing.
Becoming Another Person Is Nearly Impossible
As a poor person, I cannot fully understand the wealthy, and the wealthy struggle to understand the fear of poverty. Officers do not easily feel what enlisted soldiers feel; men and women, teenagers and people in their fifties cannot simply occupy one another’s minds. We see the world from caves formed by experience and status.
We still cannot abandon empathy. We must try, even once, to imagine a different set of conditions. The effort may never become complete understanding, but it slows commands and judgment and makes dialogue possible. I called this one of the most important practices in Buddhist study.
The effort of empathy begins by knowing how difficult it is to become another person.
Look at Your Own Feet
During the broadcast we checked the Zen phrase “jogogakha”: look at the ground beneath your own feet, and examine your own mind before discussing others. I criticize society harshly, but I must admit my limitation when poverty leads me to turn the rich into an alien enemy. My anger cannot substitute for every fact.
Looking inward is extremely difficult. We reach conclusions, assume they are all correct, and forget how our conditions narrow our vision. Looking at one’s feet does not mean abandoning social criticism. It means including the critic within the field of criticism.
Before looking at others, look at the ground beneath your own feet.
Deprivation Can Close and Open Thought
When survival consumes all time and effort, little room remains for deep thought. Yet we cannot conclude that wealthy countries and individuals produce more philosophy. Continuous success can make people mistake success for proof of merit, while failure and deprivation may reveal the power of conditions and chance.
We also discussed a skeptical magazine founder who began doubting faith after the death of a beloved partner. Faced with a good person dying from illness, he asked why a good God would allow it. Suffering does not automatically produce wisdom, but it can fracture a world previously accepted without question.
Deprivation can steal room for thought and also break beliefs that once seemed obvious.
Bhikkhus and Epicurus’s Small Community
Bhikkhus did not philosophize because they were wealthy. They renounced abundance to think and practice, asking only for food and clothing. Their choice reverses the claim that wealth is a prerequisite for thought.
Epicurean pleasure also did not mean luxury and excess. It meant a small community satisfied with simple food, friendship, and conversation, refusing to spend life pursuing greater wealth and power. It resembles the bhikkhu’s life in finding tranquility by reducing desire rather than multiplying pleasure.
There is freedom in being satisfied with less, beyond the pleasure of owning more.
Metacognition Prevents Dogmatism
Closing the broadcast, I returned to the core connecting politics, economics, and religion. The range of empathy differs greatly, as does the distance across which someone can include a starving stranger within “we.” Above all, stepping outside one’s own position is almost impossibly difficult.
Knowing that fact prevents dogmatism. Without metacognition, we live inside the illusion that every conclusion and word of ours is correct. Korea can look like paradise in its wealth and safety while still lacking equality, empathy, and freedom from authority. We must see both strengths and deficiencies and continue questioning instead of covering them with belief.
Metacognition begins by knowing that I am a person who struggles to step outside my own position.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.