Why Speak of Liberation Again Amid the Insurrection Crisis?
I began this discussion on January 8, 2025. It was a time when Yoon Suk Yeol, whom I call the ringleader of the insurrection of December 3, 2024, had not yet been arrested or properly punished. I was furious as I watched the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials retreat helplessly after going to execute an arrest warrant. A new warrant had been issued, and I sincerely hoped that this time the arrest would be carried out properly. We know how the police have treated socially vulnerable people. The law and public authority should therefore be applied to the socially powerful in exactly the same way they are applied to the socially vulnerable. Is that not justice?
For the moment, let us set aside the social system, justice, and questions of right and wrong. I have recently been speaking about liberation. Yet today’s title concerns Kim Keon-hee’s Dior bag and a skinned cow. You may wonder what these have to do with liberation. I want to view the people and events in this situation from a somewhat different angle. I am trying to see a more fundamental problem. Liberation begins with understanding myself and understanding the world. The actions of Kim Keon-hee, Yoon Suk Yeol, and the people around them became events shared by the entire nation and part of the history of civilization. Using them as material, I want to ask how we can escape our delusions.
The Transactional Thinking Revealed by the Dior Bag
After becoming the president’s wife, Kim Keon-hee accepted an expensive luxury Dior bag. Put the legal judgment and its interpretation aside and consider it through ordinary personal common sense. If I were the president’s wife and somebody visited me and left me an expensive item, could it fail to feel like a solicitation or bribe? Imagine that you were the spouse or child of a high official, or the president’s son. If someone approached, flattered you, and pressed something into your hand, would you not think that person wanted something in return?
Common sense can differ from one person to another, so it alone cannot settle the matter. Even so, when someone gives me something to win my favor, it is natural to infer that the person wants to receive something from me. We call this a transaction. I have rice and you have meat. I want your meat, and you want my rice. We then assess the value and decide how much meat you will give for a bowl of rice. A transaction comes into being when both sides want something.
A Worldview Is My Thought Projected Onto the World
This brings us to an important human trait. Human beings project their own thoughts onto the world. I want to call the projection of my thinking onto the world a worldview. There is no need to treat the word as something grand. Each person sees the world through the religion, values, experience, and standards in which that person is immersed, then projects that gaze onto the world.
People living in 2025 do not share a single worldview. Some live within a Christian worldview that believes in God, heaven, hell, angels, and a final apocalypse. Even among people called Buddhists, worldviews differ according to how they regard the Pure Land, Amitabha Buddha, Maitreya Buddha, Avalokiteshvara, the efficacy of prayer, sacred relics, rebirth and souls, heaven and hell. Different worlds are seen even under the same name of Buddhism.
The Islamic cultural sphere at war with Israel also sees the world within the worldview of the Abrahamic religions. Islam and Christianity share many elements of their origins, so in a sense this is a fight between siblings, but being Abrahamic does not make them all the same. Even within Christianity, denominations differ in how they view Jesus, God, and the Virgin Mary. When I look differently, I project differently onto the world, and the world consequently looks different. What I am immersed in and the values by which I live change my judgments and actions.
A Thought Experiment, Not a Claim to Know Kim Keon-hee’s Actual Mind
If Kim Keon-hee readily accepted something offered to her even after becoming the president’s wife, I see a belief at work that accepting it was permissible. She accepted the gift because she inhabited that sort of worldview. Hers would not be the worldview of a person who could receive a car worth 100 million or 10 billion won with no price attached and simply say, “Thanks, goodbye.” If a person accustomed to transactions—giving something and receiving something—continues to grab what is offered even after becoming the spouse of the head of the executive branch, we may infer an underlying worldview that other people also exchange favors and goods in the end, whatever innocence they display in public.
Someone may say, “How could a first lady accept a bag like that? It is wrong both legally and in the circumstances,” draw a line, and declare her incomprehensible. But if that is all we do, we may never understand the person. Understanding here does not mean approving the act as right or forgiving it. We cannot directly know another person’s actions and inner mind, so what I am saying is itself an inference and a thought experiment.
I am not claiming to know Kim Keon-hee’s actual mind or the truth inside it. I am trying to infer how she sees the world and, through her case, describe how human beings project their own thoughts onto the world.
This is therefore not a declaration that establishes facts. Looking at the Myung Tae-kyun affair and several other events, I am inferring the standards and reach of these transactions. If you ask why Yoon Suk Yeol and Kim Keon-hee, whom I criticize for trafficking in public offices, did such things, my answer is that they live within that sort of worldview.
The Error of Seeing Others as the Same as Myself
The problem is that people assume others will be like themselves. I am a man. Can I truly understand a woman’s actions and mind, her physical and mental condition? I have never lived with a woman’s body and mind. I have no choice but to draw an analogy with myself and ask, “What would it be like if I were in that situation? What would that feeling be like?” Because I do not know precisely, I must talk, listen, and ask. We are different.
Most people, however, imagine that the person in front of them has the same experiences, body, worldview, and consciousness. A person who thinks, “Everyone is like that. If people have a good position or want something, they give something under the table and secretly do favors,” sees everyone else that way too. Just as a man may project himself when viewing a woman, if we make no effort to understand differences, conversation stops and actions become incomprehensible.
Such difference is not confined to divisions of sex, nation, race, region, and historical period. Even people of the same sex living in the same place project their worldviews onto each other. Very few truly understand another person, and doing so is extraordinarily difficult. If Kim Keon-hee was accustomed to transactions and thought that she could continue them as the president’s wife, she acted according to that very worldview.
The Skinned Cow and the Shamanic Ritual
Let us take the problem of transactions one step further. At some point before Kim Keon-hee and Yoon Suk Yeol reached the presidency, a figure known as Geonjin Beopsa appeared. I am ashamed even to call him beopsa. The word is used in Buddhism, yet shamans unrelated to Buddhism appropriate words such as beopsa and bosal. They even dress their organizations and signs as if they were Buddhist. I therefore call him not “Geonjin Beopsa” but “Geonjin the fraud.”
He reportedly conducted a shamanic event in a certain region, staging a ritual with an entire skinned cow placed on the altar. The names of Yoon Suk Yeol and Kim Keon-hee were attached above it. That cow was an offering used in the ritual. It plainly reveals transactional thinking: offer something and receive something in return.
A Sacrificial Rite Is a Transaction Offered to a God
Christians say that Jesus was nailed to the cross and died to atone for humanity’s sin and original sin. This too is a sacrificial rite, a ritual offering, and a trade. Its structure is that Jesus was offered to God and humanity received something. I do not regard that as divine or sacred. It is profoundly human thinking projected onto God, the world, and Jesus.
“God will be as I am. God too will want something. I must offer something before he gives me something.” This is how people project their thoughts onto the world. Escaping such a worldview is harder than it seems. Shamanism ordinarily demands some price, and the ritual with a skinned cow contained the structure of sacrifice intact. The form varies, but the structure I am describing appears widely across religions, myths, and shamanic practices.
Even when human beings imagine some great entity, they assume it will be humanlike. It is similar to how I, as a man, have no choice but to infer a woman’s experience by using myself as a reference point. People imagine that gods also want things, give only after receiving, and respond to payment. In the end, this is human imagination.
Desire Projected Onto Souls, Relics, and Prayer
Consider belief in souls and ghosts. If people imagine that the dead become souls or ghosts, they also imagine that those spirits want ancestral rites, are affected by incantations and offerings, and desire something. The standard for that judgment is myself, a living body. Because I must eat to live and have things precious to me, I project similar needs onto souls and ghosts. Both the belief that souls exist and the thought that they want something from me are projections of human thinking.
When people hear that a true-body relic exists and that praying before it will miraculously fulfill wishes, they plead fervently and display utmost devotion. They think that if they offer time and feeling, money, strength, and effort, their wish will be granted in return. Unless they examine their own thinking critically, however, they do not even know what they have projected.
A person who has repeatedly heard from childhood that “something will hear your wish,” that “prayer works,” and that “if you want it earnestly, it will come true,” cries out in a desperate moment to something learned to be great or sacred and makes a wish. That is human. People project their wishes onto the world and imagine that something capable of hearing those wishes actually exists. We must therefore ask: What do I believe, and what do I want?
Offerings and Transactions Within The Tale of Sim Cheong
The same structure appears in The Tale of Sim Cheong. Sim the blind father hears that an offering to a temple could prompt a Buddha to restore his sight. Buddha, temple, and offering all appear, but the core is payment. Does a Buddha accept the price of an offering and cure someone’s eyes? To obtain the three hundred seok of rice to be offered at the temple for her father’s sight, Sim Cheong offers her own body. The central arc of the story is that she hands herself to people seeking a human sacrifice for the Dragon King to calm the sea, then throws herself into the water.
Here too we find sacrifice, offering, and transaction: something must be offered before the Dragon King will calm the sea. I say this firmly. There is no Dragon King, no god, and no Buddha who will grant your wishes. Such beings are projections of your wishes, creations of your worldview, your imagination and premature conjecture.
As South Korea became like a paradise of shamanism and superstition through President Yoon Suk Yeol, Kim Keon-hee, Myung Tae-kyun, Geonjin Beopsa, Cheon Gong, and others, Christian, Buddhist, and other religious circles criticized what they saw. Yet we do not reach the root if we criticize only shamanism while preserving as sacred the gods and transactional worldview created by our own religion. If we speak plainly and go to the root, this is the conclusion.
They are all the same. There is no god. Do not project your wishes onto the world.
Look to Causes and Action Instead of Prayer
People nevertheless want something that will hear their wishes. They pray with the thought, “I wish something would grant my desire.” But nothing exists to do that. What, then, should we do with our earnest wishes? Some things do not happen no matter how desperately we want them and no matter how hard we try. Yet we must do our utmost where action is possible. Will a door open when I have not knocked? Can I expect rice when I have planted no rice seedlings in the field?
We must make an effort and act. The world operates through relationships between causes and results, so to obtain a desired result we must do the work corresponding to its causes. Yet we must not delude ourselves that creating a cause guarantees that its result will return to us one hundred percent. The world does not operate through me alone. Countless conditions act together, so sometimes the result does not come even when we do our best.
Observing My Worldview Is the Beginning of Liberation
To escape delusion and see the world as it is, we must ask questions. How should I live today? What influence do I have on the world, and what kind of world influences me? What should Korean society do? What influence did Yoon Suk Yeol and Kim Keon-hee have on the world, and what influence from the world led them to live as they do? How should we educate people from now on, and in what direction should we move?
I must understand her and him, understand us, society, history, and religion, and ultimately understand myself. Only by understanding myself can I understand them. What do I want? What am I projecting onto the world? How do I see the world, what do I want to become, and what do I want to do? What do I believe I ought to do?
I must critically examine my thinking, what I have been immersed in, what I believe I know, my standards and my images. Observe my actions, moods, emotions, standards, views and worldview, my body and surroundings, society and nature. Observe, raise doubts, and think critically. In this way, I hope you recognize your projections and premature conjectures and escape your delusions.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.