Juche Realism and False Optimism

My interest the art of North Korea derives in part from a broader fascination in how the mass media create reality-proof delusions. This is especially interesting right now in relation to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how the Russian state has sought (quite successfully, so it seems) to control the Russian people’s perceptions of the war. To those outside the deception, it seems hard to believe that people can be so gullible. But as several commentators have pointed out, the alternative to existing within the reality manufactured by the state is too dangerous and harrowing, too radically at odds with the kind of reality in which people can bear to live. People prefer the delusion, which at least offers consolation and security, and allows them to continue to have a sense of self-efficacy and confidence.

The close links between Russia and North Korea in terms of shared ideology have been underlined by Kim Jong-un’s recent congratulatory message on Russia’s Victory Day. But in the case of North Korea, the disconnect between the reality as we on the outside see it and the one ordinary North Koreans perceive through being fed on a mono-diet of ‘Juche’  and racist propaganda is even more extreme. Nevertheless, the same basic psychological mechanisms are surely at work in the North Korean people as innate only other authoritarian regimes, but in democratic societies like the United States, where conspiracy theories are rife..

In this second post on North Korean Juche Realism, I consider just what thoughts and emotions the North Korean people  are buying into, and why.

A young Kim Il-sung contemplates the future. An example of Juche Realist painting.

Another Juche Realist masterpiece.

Juche Realism shares an important social function with religious art. It ensures social cohesion through images that rise above time and chance. It binds together through transforming the unspecifiable, pervasive, and uncontrollable state of existence into a specifiable, identifiable, and controllable state of named fears and offers the promise of protection.

Juche Realism is aesthetic experience manipulated to create a permanent condition of collective dispositional optimism. This is achieved through ritualistically ‘aestheticizing’ life, in the sense of keeping life’s inherent uncertain and fearful dimensions at bay through turning life into something idealized that can be safely viewed from a distance.  Optimism is channeled along four avenues indicated by psychologists. It aestheticizes the optimism that comes with feelings of social coherence by depicting the world as comprehensible. As a result, the North Korean people feel strengthened by being able to make total sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. It aestheticizes the optimism of social hardiness by depicting stressful circumstances and re-casting them only as opportunities for certain growth and strengthening. It aestheticizes social preparedness by focusing only on readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. Finally, it aestheticizes the optimism of self-affirmation. For example, many paintings depict the North Korean people as inherently superior, casting historical achievements of the pre-modernized Korean people and of the DPRK and its leaders in a manner that has not historical veracity but fosters a sense of confidence and pride in the present, thereby making decision-making more efficient and collectively directed.

Juche Realism is a ritualized fantasy space in which the three core positive life-goals are satisfied in the present: the desire for survival, the desire for attachment, and the desire for mastery. By depicting imagery of encounters with and management and self-regulation of fearful and potential despair-inducing situations, Juche Realism encodes collective feelings of trust, calm, safety, protection, and successful survival.

Through images of trust and openness, and total love of the leader, it encodes the confirmation of ‘sociopolitical’ bonds and attachments. Through signs of absolute efficacy, power, and control, it encodes ‘sociopolitical’ security and mastery, and implicit within this is the wish-fulfilling certainty of the DPRK’s triumph over time. Especially through faith in the skill, wisdom, and power of the leader, the North Korean people can adapt to circumstances in the present and to display a remarkable degree of social cohesion.  The regime uses three basic defences against the encroachments of a reality that would inevitably presents challenges to this positive illusion. It uses externalizing explanations by placing the blame for bad or failed outcomes on factors outside the DPRK, such as the United States, The Republic of Korea, or Japan. It uses variable explanations by casting setbacks or problems as temporary rather than endemic and likely to continue in the future. Thirdly, it uses specific explanations, in that it describes failure as occurring in only one context rather than as systemic.

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The brutality of the Japanese colonial era and the horrors of the Korean War set the stage in the DPRK for the emergence of a nation obsessed with national myths of persecution, suffering, and endurance. The state’s dogmatic intransigence demanded in the cultural sphere the rote reiteration of fantastical narratives. Juche Realism is a form of ideologically tailored visual illusion that breeds dependency and instils over-confidence in the level of control the Kim regime has over the past, present, and, above all, the future. It creates a ritualized virtual reality in which the world appears better than it is. In this sense, Juche Realism serves to artificially bolster self-esteem in a situation in which the people have actually lost all individual agency, all genuine social value. In the dystopic reality of the DPRK the ‘sociopolitical’ self is the happy hostage of the state’s absolute power.  All action is determined by externalized forms of interaction coordinated by the state. Juche Realism forces the North Korean people into supine and dependent roles which to those beyond its zone of hegemonic influence are reminiscent of the submissiveness of a child to a parent.  The Kim leadership is cast as all-powerful parent, capable of granting the wishes of the children who please them. But behind the façade of optimism constructed by Juche Realism lies the reality of a brutal totalitarian regime, and the North Korean people also know that any deviation from the allotted ‘sociopolitical’ role within the state ideology of delusional optimism will be ruthlessly punished by the all-powerful father. The marriage of art and power which obliges North Korean artists to work within the absurd and demeaning constraints of Juche Realism’s simplistic messages of optimistic edification places what is produced, however technically accomplished and expressive, at the antipodes of genuinely ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ art. Its ‘realism’ cannot be discovered beyond the works themselves. It cannot be described in terms that are not blatantly at odds with what anyone outside the DPRK knows about the world. Because the ‘truths’ of Juche Realism are not susceptible to present inquiry, any desire to have genuine knowledge about the outside world must be crushed. There can be no progress, because the regime would be incapable of surviving any change that progress brought. But, when a gust of contradictory reality somehow does finally find its way past the facade, and it becomes clear how greatly the leadership has failed to match its grandiose claims, the disappointment and disillusionment of the North Korean people will be rapid and devastating.

Kim, Father and son, do a bit of sailing.

NOTE: The images in today’s post are reproduced from (top to bottom) 1. Min-Kyung Yoon, ‘North Korean Art Works’, Korean Histories, 3.1, 2012; 2. and 3. Min-Kyung Yoon, “Reading North Korea through Art’, Border Crossings. North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection, ex. cat., Hatje Kantz/Kunstmuseum Bern, 2021, 72 – 95.

Which one are you?

Marina Ovsyannikova interrupts the Russian state television news to protest against the war in the Ukraine. A still grabbed from the video available on The Guardian’s website ((https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin)

When I saw the photograph above, I was led, perhaps like you, to ask myself an uncomfortable question: in such a situation, which one of these two people was I more likely to be, the newsreader or the woman holding the anti-war banner?  

Of course, I would like to think I’d be the latter, that I would have the principles and the guts to risk my comfortable future, perhaps even my life, because I believed in standing up to the orchestrated state aggression being perpetrated in my name. But what are the psychological and statistical odds that this really is the case?

Evidence coming from schoolyard to totalitarian regime shows that most people do not take risks like this anti-war protester, Marina Ovsyannikova. They will be like the newsreader, Ekaterina Andreeva, or the cameraman, the programme producer, the editor, the make-up lady. They will be silent. They will not rock the boat. They will  maintain the status quo. But of course, they will not admit that this means they are also complicit in horrible levels of violence and oppression going on.

We humans all basically want three things: to survive, to feel attached to others, and to have a sense of control over our lives. We will do almost anything to guarantee we don’t die, are not alone, and our secure existence is guaranteed into the future.  To ensure we get them, we are obliged to conform with the status quo. This inevitably entails compromising our innate sense of what is just and fair. For it seems a tragic fact of life that, while we all know instinctively what is right, we are willing to turn a blind eye to get the sense of security we need.

The most obvious reason not to speak out is fear. It’s clear that Putin will ruthlessly punish anyone who steps out of line. This fear if often freely admitted, but other times, rationalized excuses are offered.  A very common one is: “I have a family.” Another is: “What’s the point, protest is useless?” Another is:  “I am resisting in subtle ways, I am only  ‘playing the game’ just for now.”  A news report by Denis Kataev in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin)  added a specific example: ‘A source I know at VGTRK, the state media holding company, has said that many others at the main news programme were considering resigning, and the mood among remaining employees was nasty. They said: “If we didn’t have our mortgages, we would quit too.”’ Other excuses can feign or rationalize a commitment to the status quo: “I believe that, were it not for Putin, Russia would descend into anarchy. OK. I don’t agree with everything he does. But the alternative would be much worse.” Some - the weirdest of all, really - are fellow-travelers who are there out of ideological or religious conviction. Despite all the evidence that can be marshaled against the version of reality and truth to which they adhere, they will remain faithful. Indeed, evidence, or reasoned argument, are not significant determining factors. The ‘leap of faith’ is also a leap into fantasy.

But actually, all these dissembling alibis or motives are based on one sort of optimistic fantasy or another. An optimistic fantasy has two broad features: narrative structure, in the sense that we construct a plausible story-line, and an egotistical ideal, a way of maintaining self-esteem. The optimistic fantasy makes the story we tell efficacious (I am the bread-winner, and have people who depend on me.”) They help us imagine that some  - enough - of our desires have been satisfied (“After all. I have a family, live in a society which offers mortgages and well-paid jobs in the media.”). But optimistic fantasizing inevitably detracts from one’s ability to turn intention into action, and distracts from the ability to form plans responsive to real-world obstacles. It also disposes one to expect that things will improve, and that reality is better than is actually is.

This means we are all inclined to approach situations having already decided to shield ourselves from anything that could puncture our vulnerable sense of security. We cushion ourselves from unwelcome facts.   We will explain terrible events so that we can put  distance between them and us, and circumscribe their impact on us. In other words, we make excuses to lessen the impact of current and potential awfulness.

To this end, we externalize the awfulness by placing the blame on factors beyond our immediate social world and outside our control.  We tell ourselves that we really can’t do anything about it, and that we have more tangible and real responsibilities - a mortgage to pay, children to raise, grandparents to care for. We evaluate the awfulness going on around us as just temporary. We say that things will improve.  We conclude that, actually, things are really not so awful here and now. The awfulness is happening in some other places and to some other people. It doesn’t concern me.

Does this mean we are mostly all cowards? Probably. Life is about getting by, after all. We can’t all be heroes. But we are mostly not bullies or tyrants. We are, however, complicit with bullies and tyrants, because  by trying to keep our head down and being shallowly optimistic we make the bullies and tyrants possible.

So, I suppose this means I’m the newsreader.

But why did Marina Ovsyannikova do what she did? What turned her from a complicit cog in the tyranny machine into a heroic protester, a beacon of light?Apparently, according to another news item I read, a Russian colleague confided that up till that moment Marina Ovsyannikova had mostly been interested to talk about her dogs, clothes, and home.  She was definitely not a member of Pussy Riot. In her video statement she admitted she was someone who had played along, worked quietly for the state media propaganda machine, served the status quo. But something had forced her to stop making excuses or staying in the mental shallows so she could enjoy life’s little pleasures. What was it?

Interestingly, in the video she released Marina Ovsyannikova mentioned that her father was Ukrainian and her mother Russian. So, the war had a very personal dimension. It struck her as not just a war, or even a civil war, but as a repudiation of who she biologically and culturally was as a human being. In other words, the war was not an abstraction, something that could relatively easily be dealt with through dissembling. It was horribly personal.

This fact made me think of something I’d recently read which the American philosopher Richard Rorty wrote about Martin Heidegger in an essay from 1990 called ‘On Heidegger’s Nazism.’ Rorty asked himself what would have stopped Heidegger being a Nazi and behaving as he did. Another kind of thinker might have searched for some ideological, philosophical, or spiritual leverage. But Rorty asks us to imagine something very tangible, something very human:

Imagine that in the summer of 1930 Heidegger suddenly finds himself deeply in love with a beautiful, intense, adoring philosophy student named Sara Mandelbaum. Sarah is Jewish, but Heidegger barely notices this, dizzy with passion as he is. After a painful divorce from Elfride [his real-life wife] – a process that costs him the friendship of, among other people, the Husserls – Heidegger marries Sarah in 1932. In January 1933 they have a son, Abraham.

The point is that, had such a love affair actually happened, Heidegger would almost certainly not have given his support to the Nazis and condoned their antisemitism. If Heidegger had been personally involved in the tragedy of the Holocaust through love of a Jewess, and so gained intimacy through her with her culture, he would have been unable to have the beliefs and opinions he did regarding the racist nationalism of the Nazis. In other words, for something to really affect us it needs to be personally felt. It is very unlikely that we will be willing to sacrifice our secure lives for something abstract. And the chances are, if we did feel driven to action by some abstraction, we would be tempted to act in precisely the manner of those we thought we were opposing, because our actions do not come from empathy and compassion but from impersonal principles. Only when we act from genuine compassion, from personal experience of the Golden Rule - ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, or ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ - can genuine resistance to oppression be launched.

This means that one of the primary ways in which the powerful maintain their power is by alienating us from each other. How do they do this? There are plenty of tools at hand. Some are very old, like a religion that teaches that only those who believe in our God are worthy of compassion. Or like a political ideology, which teaches that only our race or our class or our nation is worthy.  If one was to be especially gloomy about the human prospect, one might argue that it is almost impossible for people to extend the net of compassion much further than immediate biological family, or at most, their tribe. One might then conclude that being human means being aggressively sectarian. But then, the fact that almost all world traditions have sooner or later come up with a variation on the Golden Rule, suggests that this is being too pessimistic. For example, the xenophobic bully-God of the Old Testament was superseded by the Christ of the New Testament who said, “love they neighbour as thyself.” (Not that Christianity has in practice done very well on that score.)

In the modern age, the mass media have greatly extended the means through which the powerful can divide and rule us, making the Golden Rule difficult to live by, even as communication technology has turned the world into a ‘global village’. It has also created new kinds of warring tribe. The Internet and social media, in fact - all the visual communication media - have probably helped make us more compassionate. Images are more emotive. More conduits for empathy. Think of all the pictures from Ukraine, and how they create affective bonds much more effectively than words. But information overload breeds indifference, and greatly facilitates those who for one reason or another want to bully and cause pain. And images can be a poor basis for genuine compassion: because they work on our emotions, they short-circuit of rational faculties. The Golden Rule is not just about feelings. It is a considered, rational principle based on empathetic experience.

So, it is especially poignant that Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state television. Because the media can be used to expose the powerful as well as protect it, those who crave absolute power can truck no genuine freedom of speech. Here is Denis Kataev in The Guardian article:

The programme she protested on, Vremya, is a legacy of the former USSR. It is perhaps the most prestigious news show on Russian TV. For millions, it is part of a daily habit for years, even decades, to watch the big evening news at 9pm.

Fitting for its Soviet beginnings, it has been an ideological weapon for decades, shoring up the government with strict pro-regime coverage. It is not subtle. The hosts look like robots, or Soviet or North Korean broadcasters. Just watch when Ovsyannikova makes her shocking move. The host Ekaterina Andreeva doesn’t even bat an eyelid. It doesn’t compute. I’m not sure she even sees herself as a propagandist, just a person with a social mission. This didn’t fit into it, and she – along with all the others – had no response.

If the Golden Rule is ultimately the only genuine way to fight tyranny, then that means the more cosmopolitan - the more open - a society is the more likely it will be to recognize that justice must be extended to all. At the very least, a cosmopolitan society will act to ensure that there are checks and balances in place to hinder those who want to divide and rule ruthlessly.