Learning Liberation From Yoon Suk Yeol?
I earnestly hope that the insurrection launched by Yoon Suk Yeol will end quickly and the country will stabilize. Other experts are already discussing national and historical judgment, legal decisions, and punishment at great length. I raise a different question here. “What on earth does Yoon Suk Yeol have to do with liberation? Can looking at Yoon really help me become liberated? What are we supposed to learn from him?”
The core of today’s discussion is to take Yoon as a cautionary example, let an external event provoke a question, and then turn that question inward. If the emergency martial-law crisis caused by the ringleader of an insurrection raises no question in us, liberation will be difficult. We must first ask “Why?”, examine the judgment that produced the event, and then look back to see whether I too absolutize my thoughts in the same way.
Can the Eighty-Five Percent and the Eleven Percent Understand Each Other?
Speaking as of December 16, 2024, when I recorded this video, I cite a Gallup Korea survey conducted from December 10 through 12. Eighty-five percent evaluated Yoon’s administration negatively, while eleven percent supported it. Even though I judge that he launched an insurrection and inflicted tremendous psychological and material harm on the country and its people, roughly one person in ten still supported him. Another survey might have shown a further fall, and people can always change their minds, but about ten percent remained at that point.
Someone on the opposing side may say, “Why would anyone support such a foolish person? Why believe such nonsense?” and think the ten percent utterly incomprehensible. Yet from the supporters’ perspective, the other ninety percent are equally impossible to understand. The fact that people still supported someone who declared emergency martial law and attempted military dictatorship should make us raise a question. The instant we say, “They are simply foolish,” the inquiry ends.
Do Not Close the Question With the Answer “Low IQ”
Foolishness can be defined in many ways. IQ bears the name intelligence quotient, but it does not guarantee or encompass the whole of human intellectual ability. Someone selected particular elements for a particular need and decided to call them intelligence; that too was a human inference. I confess that the last IQ score I remember receiving in high school was not even one hundred. Can that fact alone establish that I have low intelligence? A low IQ and low human intelligence are not the same statement.
With Yoon too, we must distinguish being unintelligent from being foolish. According to the history I recount, he entered Seoul National University College of Law with the class of 1979 and passed the bar examination in 1991 on his ninth attempt after eight failures. It is difficult to define human intelligence, but by the conventional measure of memorization and test-taking ability, it is hard to call him unintelligent. I am not certifying that he possesses excellent intelligence. I am saying that the simple explanation of low intelligence is insufficient.
Nor can we say that the ten percent supported him because of low IQ. Philosophers, professors, and scientists may have been among them, while a minister of national defense and military generals were among those who joined the insurrection. If we stop with the answer that all of them were stupid, we leap from what we cannot understand to a quick conjecture, conclude the matter, and treat that conjecture like fact. The question is severed at precisely that point. The foolishness I am seeking lies elsewhere.
How Did Having a Girlfriend at Christmas Become a Standard?
I ask what standards human beings use to judge and decide. I recall a winter around 1994 or 1995, when I was a third-year university student. One might ask what a member of a Buddhist student association had to do with Christmas, yet Christmas and year-end in South Korean society came with carols, sparkling lights, and music. Immersed in that atmosphere, I became conscious of having no girlfriend and felt somewhat depressed, thinking, “Why don’t I have a girlfriend? Heaven for singles, hell for couples. Couples can go to hell.”
A judgment preceded the change in emotion, and a standard preceded the judgment. The idea that one ought to have a girlfriend, boyfriend, or romantic partner at Christmas had been embedded in my unconscious. When I viewed reality through my private common sense that a male third-year student should have a girlfriend, her absence felt like something had gone wrong, and I judged myself depressed. In Buddhist language, such a standard and way of viewing the world is called a view. We judge by the values, ideas, and common sense in our minds, and those judgments even change our emotions.
The Comic-Book Shop Before Midterms and the Sparrow at the Mill
I also liked comic-book shops, comic books, martial-arts novels, and fantasy fiction. With midterms two days away, I might see a comic-book shop on the way to study at the library and feel my mind waver. “I need to study, but let me look for just a moment.” Just as a sparrow finds it hard to pass a mill, I found it hard to walk by because the thought that the shop and time spent reading there were good had been embedded in my mind.
If I passed without doing what I wanted, I felt bad and stressed; entering and doing it felt comfortable and good. The judgments in our lives work in the same way. The most important question, then, is “Where did the standard for my judgment come from?” Neither the standard that comic-book shops are good nor the standard that having a girlfriend at Christmas is good was originally present within me.
A person living in Africa 2,500 years ago could not have thought that a comic-book shop or a girlfriend at Christmas was desirable. I lived in a society of the 1900s and 2000s in which Christmas and comic-book shops, publishing and drawing, martial-arts and fantasy novels, distribution, and authors all existed. The object first existed in society; I then experienced it; the good experience remained in memory and became a standard. Experience comes from outside. Standards concerning girlfriends, comic-book shops, money and success, poverty, attractive height and faces, what is right or wrong, and what one ought to do all enter through society and experience in the same way.
The Time Yoon Lived Through and His Standard of “Justice”
I now apply the same structure to Yoon. He was born in 1960. I mark the Korean War in 1950, the armistice of July 27, 1953, and the passage of seven years between that armistice and his birth. I describe him as born while society was being rebuilt after the war and many children were being born. He entered Seoul National University College of Law in 1979 and lived through the period of the Gwangju Democratization Movement on May 18, 1980, the following year.
I also recount an anecdote that his father advised him, while he was considering studying psychology, that law would be an easier and more convenient path for realizing justice. I explicitly reserve judgment on whether this story was true. It may have been only something said for appearance, and they may not have thought about justice inwardly at all. If it was true, however, the point is that both Yoon and his father possessed some standard for what justice meant. Whether that standard was actually right is another question.
He graduated from law school, spent years preparing for the examination, and passed the bar in 1991. In the chronology I recount, Roh Tae-woo was president then, and Kim Young-sam became president in 1993. I say that death sentences were handed to the people I call the insurrection ringleaders, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, yet because the administration was in effect the product of political collusion, they were eventually pardoned and lived on unharmed. I also note a historical judgment that the absence of proper punishment made the 2024 attempt at martial law and military dictatorship possible. I then set even that judgment aside from the present core.
The Environment of Prosecutorial Power and Lightning-Fast Anger
What I want to see is how standards of judgment enter a person within the time and place that person inhabits. Yoon too acquired standards of what was right, correct, and good from outside. I directly call his father “a pro-Japanese collaborator” and describe Japan as having paid for him to study there before sending him back to Korea. I argue that growing up with such a father contributed to Yoon’s own Japan-friendly disposition. The content accumulated in his mind also continued to form through his years as a prosecutor, the people he met, and the power he exercised.
As president, he flew into lightning-fast rages and called the Democratic Party pro-North leftist forces trying to overturn the state. I criticize him for treating even people who did not obey him as bad men. He was trying to carry through his own justice. But did he ever question that standard? The world seen from the position of a prosecutor “using power while crushing other people,” the people he met, and the words he heard may have formed his mode of thought and view of history.
I make clear that I have never entered his actual mind. From the words he used, his ministers and followers, and several visible aspects, however, we can faintly infer the kinds of thoughts he held. The problem is that he treated learned thoughts and standards as himself and his own truth, then became furious when they were denied. My thought may be wrong, because every standard behind that judgment came from external experience.
Sexual Norms and the Labels “Old Maid” and “Old Bachelor” Are Conditioned Too
Suppose you hear that middle- and high-school students engage freely in sex. One person may instantly judge it promiscuous, wrong, and impermissible; another may be indifferent; a third may call it natural. I say that European and American societies have become more open than in the past, while someone in South Korea might react, “What promiscuous nonsense—boys and girls over seven should not sit together.” I am not issuing a moral verdict about which side is right. I ask why each person came to hold that standard.
Would someone living 2,500 or 4,000 years ago, or in a time before written records, have invoked that exact rule about boys and girls over seven? The standard became embedded because a person lived in a society and period where the phrase existed and among people who said it. We call this being conditioned. From birth, and even from the womb, we undergo external experiences through our five senses and accumulate standards in the brain. If everyone around me treats the separation of boys and girls as natural, I too naturally learn that it is. This is why we must ask again, “Why must it really be so?”
I remember that even in the 1990s an unmarried woman over thirty was called an old maid and an unmarried man over thirty an old bachelor. I ask who now uses the old-maid label for a woman over thirty, adding that I do not know whether some people still do. Thought changes with society and experience. Put differently, we become conditioned differently. A standard that entered from outside cannot possess absolute value.
Standards Inside a Narrow Cave and Motives I Cannot Know
Without understanding this, the belief that “the Democratic Party is a pro-North leftist Communist Party of bad people trying to overthrow the country” can become embedded and turn into fact. A person who saw, heard, and learned within such a circle of people and environment may live inside the narrow cave of his own perspective, believing that all his experience is right and that his standards are truth and reality.
Even so, I do not claim to know Yoon’s actual motive. I say I do not know whether he genuinely experienced such ideological certainty or merely thought, “I want my own way, but these people will not listen. I will launch a military coup and do as I please.” If, as in the anecdote about his father’s advice, the desire to realize justice was deeply rooted in him, then we must ask what justice and injustice meant in his mind. Under his standards, an opponent is judged a pro-North leftist. If he was filled with such thoughts and never once questioned them, that is precisely a problem of liberation.
Is My View Really Right?
Buddhist liberation begins by asking, “Are my standards and my view really right?” Someone who has learned that a comic-book shop is good finds it difficult to pass even when other work awaits. Just as a sparrow flies toward a mill, we become conditioned by repeating good experiences and judging them good.
An animal that hears a bell each time it is fed will salivate at the bell even before the food appears. It was an experiment on a dog, but I say the same trait applies to human beings. We possess mammalian traits like a dog and, more broadly, the traits of living beings. We learn particular situations, learn from them, and become conditioned.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.