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.

Shallow Pessimism

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.

In my post from March 16th, I ended by asking the question why is it we – by which I mean intellectual progressives - seem to enjoy ruthlessly deconstructing everything and finding our society “rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch”, to quote again the philosopher Richard Rorty. In this post I’ll explore a possible answer.

Yes. Western culture and society is very far from perfect. But around the time Rorty wrote his essay – the 1980s – the west lost confidence in its humanistic belief that the future will necessarily be better than the past and the present. It lost a special kind of social hope. But this loss of faith was already well under way by the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche declared: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Albert Camus’ concept of the ‘absurd’ perfectly capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1940s and 1950s. The absurd is an experience so visceral Camus said it can hit anybody in the face at any time. The ‘sweet indifference’ of nature, as he calls it at the end of ‘The Outsider’ - challenged both religious faith in  divine purpose and humanist faith in the inevitable melioration of humanity guided by the light of reason that aimed to replace it.

The process of disillusionment speeded up at the end of the Cold War, which pretty much definitively put paid to the Marxist utopian dream of a ‘classless society’, a social hope that had sustained many radicals for most of the twentieth century. But there was also an increasingly pervasive loss of confidence in the liberal democratic dream of the welfare state, as well.  Both ideals, which are traceable to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, were now judged to be deformed birth, because, as Nietzsche had already announced over one hundred years earlier,  the Enlightenment itself  - the whole basis of modernity - was a sham.  One only needed to look around to see that the  so-called democratic ‘system’ was permanently rigged to let a tiny percentage of greedy and insecure people accumulate a huge amount of wealth and power, and that there was profound crisis of meaning, a slide toward nihilism.

In the past two decades, the recognition of existential meaninglessness and of failure to bring about social justice has  been joined by the disaster of climate change. This situation now means that, quite literally, there will be no better future. The future we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren will almost certainly be worse than this present one is. Just how much worse its going to be depends on the amount of residual faith you can muster in a narrative of social hope that still attempts to build a rickety bridge - using alternative sources of energy, probably - to a less than terrible future.

But why aren’t we as a society genuinely responding to these awful truths? Why are we going to war and binge viewing shows of Netflix? Because mainstream society, the status quo, is based on keeping it all at arm’s length through incessant optimistic messaging, designed to shield people from the truth.  It disguises the loss of the hopeful dream of a better future by replacing it by shallow optimism. Western society hasn’t imploded. Instead, in genuine hope’s it place there was installed a shallow kind of optimism. What’s the difference?  As I noted in a previous post, optimism implies wish-fulfillment with the aim of pacifying the present, while hope involves imaginative responses to reality and faces up to the real and potentially cataclysmic challenges the uncertain world inevitably presents. This shallow optimism is generated mostly through the mass media, which throughout the twentieth century become more and more efficient and skillful in cranking out the kinds of positive messages that serve to distract people from a tragic reality. Hollwood is called the “Dream Machine’, and has played an especially significant role. But the emergence of the consumer society with its fetishization of consumer products, it’s subliminal message that to shop is the way to give life purpose (As Barbara Kruger has it in one of her artworks, ‘I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM’), its assumption that it’s alright to be selfish and to horde, to strive for happiness without caring about anyone else, meant that shallow optimism in the form of countless distractions and pointless goals managed to paper over the fact that we have lost faith in a better future for everyone. The value in the short term of optimism for society is that it brings a sense of social coherence by making everything seem comprehensible and controllable. As a result,  people feel strengthened through being able to make sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. Optimism encourages  the idea of hardiness, making a stressful circumstance seem an opportunity for growth and strengthening. It helps ensure preparedness by encouraging readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. It also brings self-affirmation  making decision-making in the present more efficient and collectively directed.

But all this comes at a high price. The façade of optimism has permitted the west to  maintain its global supremacy and sense of self-efficacy and self-assurance while it has been rapidly collapsing from within. Optimism is a debased and less challenging substitute for the genuine hope that is almost no longer within reach. For, as Terry Eagleton writes in his excellent book Hope Without Optimism (2015): “the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined.”

Which leads me back to the problem with the progressive’s default attitude of perpetual social critique.

Isn’t it simply the flip side of the west’s shallow optimism? Isn’t it shallow pessimism?  For it surely can’t be genuine pessimism. After all, some of the most audible advocates of cultural critique - the tenured professors at prestigious universities - occupy extremely comfortable niches within society, and carry on their day-to-day lives pretty much like everyone else – like all the dumb optimists, in fact.

Just as shallow optimism is a way of shielding oneself from failure and misfortune, so too is shallow pessimism. It simply embraces the failure, disillusion, and disappointment in advance so as to forestall the risk involved in having one’s hopes dashed.

Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ6ec4V6AJ4