Panmunjom Declaration, three years later.

Today (Tuesday, April 27th, 2021) marks the third anniversary of the inter-Korean summit between President Moon Jae-In of the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), which led to the Panmunjom Declaration. In all, the Korean leaders met three times. Two more times in 2018 - in May on the North side of the border village, and then in Pyongyang in September.

The Declaration was signed just ten miles away from where I write this blog now. The photograph above was taken a couple of days ago from the roof of my house, and shows in the distance the mountains of North Korea. Over to the far left somewhere lies Panmunjom, the only place where the DMZ shrinks to just the MDL - the Military Demarcation Line - which at Panmunjom is indicated by the raised line of bricks over which the leaders stepped back and forth on that momentous occasion. Whenever I gaze at these mountains I feel I’m getting a glimpse of a parallel universe.

I remember feeling really exuberant three years ago.The April summit was the first such meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas in 11 years, and in the Panmunjom Declaration they pledged to commit to the ‘complete denuclearization’ of the peninsula, to improve inter-Korean relations, and to officially end the 1950-1953 War (there is only a ceasefire, not an official peace treaty). It seemed this might be the start of a serious reconciliation. President Trump’s meetings with Kim, also at Panmunjom, and later in Singapore and Hanoi, were obviously just bluster and hype. But I thought the meeting with President Moon did seem to augur well for the peninsula.

Dream on!

The whole damn episode seems to have been bluster and hype. Today, we’re back to ‘business as usual’ which means no diplomatic business. Meanwhile, North Korea seems to be firing off missiles again, edging closer to dangerous nuclear capacity, and slumping further and further into poverty and isolation.

The emphasis of late from the leadership beyond the blue mountains I can see from my roof-top is on ‘self-reliance’. This builds on the single contribution of North Korea to communist ideology: juche. This officially means that North Korea must proudly shake off all lingering subservience, and the concept derives from a blending of communism and Confucianism mostly. North Korea must follow its own unique path, relying solely on its own strength under the guidance of the leader.

So, while we might think ‘self-reliance’ means ‘every man for himself’, or at least, that it is the community networks that will help people survive, in the absence off any possibility of the state being a source of material support, this isn’t really what the term means. The people of North Korea have been programmed to see the entire world through the eyes of the Party, to rely on it not so much for the kinds of things we in the ‘free’ world expect a state to provide, but more in the way a religious cult provides a water-tight reality within which to exist safely quarantined from the unpredictability and otherness of the world. This is what juche, self-reliance, means.

One of the saddest things about Suki Kims’ charming memoir of teaching elite boys in a school in Pyongyang, ‘Without You, There is No Us’ (2014), is how it reveals that even the mental universe of the privileged sons she teaches (and comes to love) is pathetically impoverished by the fact that they are wholly reliant on the web of lies spun by the Party in order to control all levels of society.

But what is even sadder is the fact that these boys seem to genuinely believe the nonsense.

This is especially clear evidence that we humans live through the coherent stories we believe in, not through facts, and that even a seemingly from the outside absurd story, like the one that has turned the Kim family into demi-Gods, can have a compelling hold. But we’ve also seen this truth in the ‘free’ world too recently, with the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory. What QAnon shares with North Korea is precisely the capacity to produce a plausible narrative - ‘plausible’ not in relation to objectively verifiable facts but rather in relation to its internally coherent plausibility. What is especially odd about such narratives is the extent to which for those outside their spell, they seem patently absorbed. But this, surely, is part of what makes them compelling to this under their spell.

As a result of de-briefing  American  POW’s after the Korean War an American psychologist named Robert J. Lifton developed the theory of ‘totalism’.  He argued that, on the evidence of what the Chinese attempted to do to the GI’s, any ideology - any set of emotionally charged convictions about humanity and its relationship to the natural or supernatural world - can be taken by adherents in a direction that Lifton termed  ‘totalistic’.  This tendency, he argued, is most likely to occur  in relation to ideologies that are most sweeping in their contents, and most ambitious or messianic in their claims -   like believing in a virgin birth, a classless society, or QAnon. And when ‘totalism' happens, you get  an exclusive cult. The important point, Lifton wrote in his book ‘Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. A Study of “Brainwashing” in China’ (1961) is that for ‘totalism’ to prevail a believer must have made a deep investment in their belief. They must have committed themselves to it heart and soul. Furthermore, they must exist within a shared community of the same beliefs, a community of intense social and psychological support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer can withstand the force of all the disconfirming evidence, but when this believer is a member of a group of similarly convinced people who give support  to one another, then their belief will very often be maintained. Indeed, against all the good evidence that may be amassed to contradict their beliefs,  the community of believers often responds not by giving up on their beliefs but by actively attempting to proselytize.

Lifton’s ‘totalism’ addresses the nature of the more extreme stories we live by. But surely we can’t exempt ourselves. We may not be ‘totalistic’, but we certainly live our lives in relation to the coherent narratives we adopt or weave, and not in relation to the kinds of objective facts science reveals to us.