On
Monday, December 16th
2013, The Korea Herald
published an editorial
about the country’s state of youth unemployment.
According
to the editorial, although statistical
studies seem to show that Korea’s labor market conditions are
improving (the
country’s overall unemployment rate has decreased by 0.1 percentage point to 2.7 percent),
the
unemployment rate for those aged from 15 to 29 increased by 0.8
percentage points from a year earlier, hitting 7.5 percent in
November.
The
total number of young people who are unemployed could very well be
higher as official unemployment figures do not count discouraged
workers.
Ironically,
this increase in the number of unemployed young people is contrasted
by the fact that many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
suffer from a chronic shortage of workers.
To
be sure, there are certainly structural problems in the Korean
economy that has exacerbated Korea’s high level of youth
unemployment. One of the main culprits behind it is the
supply-demand mismatch in the labor market. In other words, there
are far too many young people who are far too highly educated for
jobs that do not exist for them.
Case
in point, about 33.2 percent of Korea’s youth were
college-educated in 1990. In 2008, 83.8 percent of Korea’s youth
were college-educated.
Compounding
the issue is the increasing
rate of the minimum wage, which makes employers less likely to
employ young people with little to no experience and prefer those who
are older with previous work experience, and unionization that
protects older workers from having to compete for their jobs with
younger aspirants.
There
are certainly things that the government can do to alleviate the
youth unemployment rate such as reversing course on its minimum wage
policy and making it easier for employers to fire striking workers.
Furthermore, the government can try to adopt and tinker with other
successful policies such as Germany’s
apprenticeship system, which helps to ease young people’s entry
into the job market by lowering business’ costs for employing them,
while successfully avoiding the currently practiced internship
system, which essentially compels younger people to perform menial
tasks that usually have little to do with the actual jobs that they
are interning for while usually not getting paid in the name of
gaining (dubious) experience.
However,
those are only attempts at trying to solve the problem’s symptoms
rather than its causes.
One
of the underlying roots that plague Korean society, not unlike other
countries with advanced economies, is that there is a dangerous
disconnect between the demand for blue-collar work, the kind of work
that does not necessarily require a college degree, and the number of people who are willing to fill these positions. This is the
result of the Korean people’s tendency to demonize such kinds of
work.
The
fact of the matter is that, as mentioned earlier, SMEs
do suffer from a chronic shortage of workers, particularly for
blue-collar
jobs. Due to the kinds of higher education that people prefer
(with a tendency to prefer service-based jobs in chaebol
companies) and their avoidance of other skill sets, such as welding
or farming, this near nation-wide behavior has resulted in a skill
gap; meaning that there are jobs that cannot be filled by Koreans.
It
is a self-inflicted injury. In their desire to save face or conform
to society’s collectively held image of what a successful person
ought to look like, parents either force and/or socialize their
children into going to college. And when they do go to college, they
usually do so by taking out student loans that these future graduates
might not be able to repay when/if they fail to get the jobs that
they were promised but turned out did not actually exist. And this
is the problem.
This
is certainly not to say that it is undesirable to have an educated
youth. It is certainly preferable to have an educated population to
one that isn’t. However, when the motivation behind the desire to
get a college education is in order to be eligible for “better”
jobs rather than simply to attain higher education, then there is a
problem.
In
the field of economics, there is a type of good that is known as a
Giffen good.
The law of demand states that when the price of a good increases, the
demand for the good then correspondingly decreases as people begin to
seek other alternatives or substitutes. A Giffen good is a good that
defies the law of demand because it is a type of good whose demand
continuously increases even when the price of the good continuously
increases. Economists have long argued with one another over the
question of whether or not Giffen goods actually exist. Though
higher education does not meet the exact requirements of a Giffen
good, it does appear to be the closest thing to a Giffen good out
there in the market.
The
existence of a Giffen good can only come through cultural norms.
There are, indeed, plenty of alternatives to a typical college
education (when it is being used as a diploma machine in order to be
used as resumes for jobs). One can pursue a technical education, or
as mentioned earlier, seek apprenticeships. Furthermore, considering
the fact that most jobs provide on-the-job training to their new
employees and the fact that only
a small fraction of college graduates ever get to work in a field
that is related to their major, and that most college graduates (for
one reason or another) cannot
seem to find work nowadays, it would appear that a college
education is a bane rather than a boon for young people. All of
these reasons suggest that, if this were a normal market, the demand
for college education ought to fall, and fall drastically. However,
there is no visible sign to suggest that that is about to happen any
time soon.
In
other words, this Giffen good, this non-dissipating demand for higher
education, is an aberration.
That
parents wish to see their children live better lives than the ones
that they had is certainly an understandable sentiment. In fact, it
could be argued that not wishing for that would a reprehensible
violation of one of the fundamental laws of nature. However,
parents, as well as the rest of society, are failing future
generations by imposing on them a myth – the myth that a college
education guarantees “better” jobs.
As
long as this myth remains unchallenged, neither Korea nor any other
country will be able to rid itself of the problem of high levels of
youth unemployment or the ever-increasing number of discouraged young
workers.
It
is true that Confucianism, or whatever modern version of Confucianism
that still remains, has been turned into everyone’s favorite
punching bag when analyzing Korea. Though Confucianism has many
faults of its own (many of which can be found here),
blaming Confucianism for many of modern-day Korea’s problems is
akin to blaming Puritanism for many of modern-day America’s
problems. Though it is true that much of Korean norms are still run
according to Confucian ideals, albeit in increasingly diluted doses,
Korean society has changed so much, especially since the 1950s, that
blaming “Confucianism” for Korea’s societal ills just seems
quaint.
It
was difficult to disagree with TK until this point. From that point
on, however, TK’s position that Korea’s problems are caused by
modernity is nothing short of asinine.
Although
TK says that it is important not to idealize the past by bringing up
the fact that Korea’s historical caste system and patriarchal
values hardly made pre-modern Korea a Utopian society, it quickly
becomes evident that this is nothing more than cheap lip service as
he then immediately says:
“But
it is hard to deny that traditional Korea has certain charms that
modern Korea lacks. There was no constant competition or striving
that stressed people out – simply people efficiently doing what
they had to do to produce more than what they needed, and enjoying
their lives in the free time.”
It
is a similar rationale, if it can be called such a thing, that I have
heard from many Renaissance Fair-goers whose knowledge of the actual
history of Renaissance-era Europe was either non-existent or
rose-tinted.
But
what is modernity? The dictionary definition of modernity is simply
this: The
state or quality of being modern.
And just which aspect of modernity does TK disdain so much? It’s
clearly not the automobile or the light bulb that he despises.
What
TK despises is the over-competitiveness that modernity seems to have
brought about in people because, as he says, “modernity – whose
essential ingredients are industrialization and market economy –
demands incessant competition” while on the other hand, “in the
traditional economy, the one and only goal is sustenance.” He then
goes on to say that “the essence of modernity is to turn humans
into resources. Market economy and industrialization, operating
together, dehumanize, commodify and objectify humans.”
Modernity,
whose essence TK calls ‘toxic,’ supposedly turned people into
commodities, whether we are talking about 1960s sweatshop workers or
modern-day public educated white-collar workers or record-setting
plastic surgery rates or equally record-setting declining birth
rates; and that therefore “it is only a slight exaggeration to say
that every social problem in Korea is ultimately reducible to
commodification.”
In
other words, TK doesn’t despise the wealth or the technological
progress that have been brought about by modernization. What he
despises are “industrialization and market economy,” otherwise
known as capitalism.
When
TK says that Koreans have been commodified, what he is saying is that
individuals, through various means of socialization, have been turned
into easily replaceable unthinking automatons. But does capitalism
really turn people into commodities?
Firstly,
it has to be recognized that one of the fundamental philosophical
ideas behind capitalism is voluntary action. In a capitalist
society, based on the concept of mutual benefit, people are free to
cooperate or not cooperate with one another as their own individual
interests dictate; being coerced to cooperate or otherwise is the
very antithesis of capitalism. Under such a system, in order for an
individual to survive or thrive, the individual has to rely on
intellectual thought. Whether an individual chooses to cooperate
with others or not, the individual is acting upon his/her own
rational judgment. As such, freedom and rational thought are
necessary ingredients for capitalism to exist.
Secondly,
considering the voluntary nature that capitalism requires,
capitalism, or modernity as TK calls it, demands the best of every
individual and rewards individuals accordingly. Why does capitalism
demand the best? That is because voluntary trade with others
necessitates mutual benefit. What that means is that in order to
trade with others, others must recognize that my work, whatever it
may be, is objectively valuable and vice versa. It is this mutually
beneficial trade, which forbids mediocrity, that allows a society’s
standard of living to rise – even for those who do not take part in
this act.
Thirdly,
it would be supremely idiotic to claim that capitalism does not
require competition. However, no one competes solely for the sake of
competing. Competition has never been nor will it ever be the end
goal of capitalism. Competition is nothing more than one of the
by-products of productive work that is required to raise a society’s
standard of living.
The
fact of the matter is that competition as it exists under capitalism
is entirely different from the Hobbesian nature of competition found
in the animal kingdom – bellum
omnium contra omnes – which
TK seems to equate as being one and the same thing. In the animal
kingdom, competition means to eat or be eaten; mate or risk seeing
the end to one’s genetic line. Under capitalism, competition is
merely a process that is required for the creation of new and
additional wealth. For example, the effect of the competition
between farmers using horses and those using tractors was not that
the former group died of starvation, but that everyone had more food.
The creation of new and additional wealth, which was brought about
by competition, is what allows even the farmers who ‘lost’ the
competition to find employment elsewhere.
Is
this what TK thinks is akin to commodifying people?
Fourthly,
of course the one and only goal of traditional economy was
sustenance. Mere sustenance or subsistence was the one and only goal
for the majority of pre-modern Koreans because both the law and
cultural norms of the time forbade ambition.
Pre-modern
Korea was a feudal society that was steeped in an inherently unjust
caste system. It was a society that allowed the aristocratic Yangban
class to thrive on indentured servitude and the
slave labor of the lower classes while they enjoyed being “scholarly
gentlemen.” It was a society that forced the vast majority of
women to learn (if they got any kind of education at all to begin
with) nothing else besides how to be an obedient wife and how to
birth sons.
With
the exception of the privileged few, whose privileges were the result
of the pure accident of birth, pre-modern Korean laws, both written
and unwritten, were designed specifically to eliminate ambition
because a people with little to no ambition are much easier to rule
over. When people are prevented from having ambitions beyond mere
subsistence under the penalty of law, when the law does everything it
can to suppress the mind, bare subsistence becomes the only goal worth
achieving. In other words, the law forced individuals – people
with rational minds, dreams, hopes, and ambitions – to lead lives
that were no better than that of mindless cattle.
Capitalism,
on the other hand, rewards merits and punishes mediocrity. It is a
system that allows an intelligent and industrious poor man to reach
heights that even the kings of old dared not dream while at the same
time forcing the squandering rich to some day seek minimum-wage jobs.
What
did pre-modern Korea reward? It rewarded those who were fortunate
enough to be born as boys to a Yangban family. The sheer accident
that was their birth allowed them to possess unearned wealth and
political influence. As for everyone else, the sentence they
received for the sole crime of being born as everyone else was a
lifetime of subsistence farming and manual labor.
TK’s
nostalgia for Korea’s pre-modern past, which he has clearly
romanticized despite claiming otherwise, is comparable to some
Americans’ idealized fancies of the Antebellum South. Just like
the latter, it is equally ludicrous and obnoxious.
That
Korean society has its problems is not in question. Its high suicide rate is a troubling indictment on how little Koreans value life.
That there is such a wide income/political power gap between those
who own or run the chaebol companies and everyone else speaks volumes
about the corrupt nature of politics; how the Big Government/Big
Business relationship is a symbiotic and parasitic
one where a select few are protected from the marketplace at the
expense of everyone else. Koreans’ record-setting penchant for
going under the knife for plastic surgery shows that Koreans have
very low self-esteem and that there are many Koreans who seem to gain
their self-esteem through the approval (or disapproval) of others
rather than from within themselves.
The
many problems that plague Korean society can trace their roots to
moral, psychological, ethical, cultural, political, and economic
causes that were not non-existent in pre-modern Korean society. The
fact that other countries that practice very different beliefs and
cultural mores share the same problems that plague Korea goes to show
that it is probable that people from other countries and other cultures face the same sets
of moral, psychological ethical, cultural, political, and economic
problems that plague Koreans. By merely observing that those other
countries also practice capitalism without bothering to go into
detail the possible faults that lie within people’s values system,
TK committed the logical fallacy that is known as post hoc ergo
propter hoc.
As
I said earlier, however, TK doesn’t despise the automobile or the light bulb. He recognizes that capitalism has helped to bring about
“unprecedented wealth (albeit distributed unevenly), advanced
medical science and greater knowledge about the world around us.”
He’s no Luddite. As such, even if it were somehow possible, he
does not agree that it would be desirable for people to go back to a
pre-modern era.
TK
accepts reality for what it is. He merely wishes that people could
go back to a pre-modern era without having to give up all the
“unprecedented wealth (albeit distributed unevenly), advanced
medical science and greater knowledge about the world around us”
that we have achieved through capitalism.
What
that means is that TK wishes that people could enjoy the bountiful
fruits that they have earned through capitalism without the necessity
of practicing capitalism. He wishes that people could enjoy
“unprecedented wealth (albeit distributed unevenly), advanced
medical science and greater knowledge about the world around us”
without the freedom
and rational thought that are necessary
for them to exist.
It
is a wish for the impossible. That is why TK needs to rely
on moral and intellectual uncertainty – “Would Koreans really
want to go back to the way things were, three centuries ago? They
are also exceedingly difficult, and their scope is far greater than a
single national culture or tradition.” – to give a false
profundity to his irrational desire. It is the only way he can
intellectually deceive others as well as himself.
All that being said, however, I recognize that I ought to be fair and give some consideration to the fact that I could be wrong. Capitalism and modernity could possibly be as evil as TK says they are. If they are as evil as TK claims, however, I will gladly march to hell while whistling a happy tune.
As
I read the August
publication of Groove Korea
Magazine, I came across a column that was titled “The Fear of
Becoming a Housewife,” which was written by a Ms. Megan Harper, an
American woman who had recently married a Korean man.
In
the column, Ms. Harper says that despite her husband’s claims that
he understands her refusal to take on a traditional housewife role,
her husband “simply could not imagine a home in which the husband
and wife share household duties.”
She
then goes on to say that in order to understand where her husband was
coming from, she attempted to analyze her mother-in-law, an older
Korean woman who, unlike Ms. Harper, has embraced the role of a
traditional housewife. In fact, Ms. Harper says that it was hard for
her to hide her discomfort when she sees “her mother-in-law prepare
a beautiful dinner that her husband has half-eaten before she even
has a chance to sit down.”
However,
Ms. Harper herself claims that her column was not intended to be a
social criticism. It was merely her attempt to share her
experiences, especially her “unexpected limit in understanding that
arises from her own gender role expectations.” She then goes on to
say that as it was futile for her to judge her mother-in-law, she
would strive to respect her for the sacrifices she has made while
using her own life to demonstrate equalized gender roles.
Ms.
Harper’s column was full of humility, understanding, acceptance,
and political correctness. In other words, it was absolutely insipid.
Throughout
the entire yawn of a yarn, it was obvious that Ms. Harper took great
pains to tiptoe around cultural sensitivities. My question is this:
Why? Was she afraid that she was going to offend someone because her
topic came close to what could have been an insightful criticism of
traditional Korean mores? What makes tradition so sacrosanct that so
many people, even those who get trampled by it, deem it beyond
reproach?
Tradition
is almost always defended on the principle of upholding the status
quo, regardless of whether it is right or wrong. Traditionalists
almost always defend tradition not because it is right, but because
it was chosen by our ancestors; not because it is good, but because
it is ancient. In other words, traditionalists’ sense of values
are not dictated by reason, but rather practices that they have
inherited from an age that has long since been dead. Their view of
the world is one that is based on anti-reason and as such, they have
no right to even hold a pretense of intellect.
If
not that, was Ms. Harper pulling back her punches because she was
being sensitive to racial norms? After all, she is American, not
Korean (Ms. Harper never stated her ethnic background. As a result,
when I say “Korean,” I am referring to Korean as an ethnic group
as well as a unique political group, which is different from, say,
Korean Americans). Was she afraid of coming off as an Ugly American,
telling off an entire people how their millennia-old traditions are
backward and nonsensical?
If
that was the reason, then though Ms. Harper herself may not be a
racist, she has certainly embraced, at least in part, some of the
beliefs that racists hold dear. Specifically, the notion that only a
member of the tribe is allowed to criticize tribal practices; that an
outsider ought to learn to hold his/her tongue, at least in the
presence of the Native Borns. This
is an idea that claims that a person’s rights are not inherent but
based on privileges that are made available only to certain people
based on factors that are beyond anyone’s control – the pure
accident of birth. It is an idea that attempts to invalidate the one
attribute that distinguishes human beings from all other living
species – his rational faculty, while championing the one attribute
that threatens to send Mankind back to the caves that our ancestors
once dwelled in – tribalism.
Or
was Ms. Harper being demure with her criticisms because she didn’t
wish to come off as being too brash? If so, then I cannot help but
question a culture that emphasizes the importance of humility
considering the fact that, once stripped off its false virtue,
humility is nothing more than an excuse that is given for cowardice.
What is humility if not a self-cheating lie to desert
the battle for one’s joys and principles, to refuse to fight for
one’s own happiness? What is humility if it is not the antithesis
to pride, the real virtue that allows people to live like actual
human beings?
Ms.
Harper’s inability or unwillingness to pronounce moral judgments on
others while all too willingly blaming herself for her “unexpected
limit in understanding that arises from her own gender role
expectations” is the consequence of moral grayness – the notion
that the world cannot be neatly categorized into black and white, as
the whole world is but a mushy gray. Once again, however, this idea
is nothing more than an excuse for cowardice that is masquerading as
humility.
Gray
in itself is a combination of black and white. If there were no
black and white, then there can be no gray. In the field of
morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and
what is evil. When an individual has ascertained that one
alternative is good and the other is evil, there can be no
justification for choosing a mixture of the two; only excuses.
In
effect, when an individual fails to pronounce moral judgments, what
the individual is actually doing, consciously or subconsciously, is
declaring: “I will not cast the first stone. Please keep that in
mind when it comes time for my judgment.”
Whether
Ms. Harper knows it or not, she entered an intellectual battle. When
one enters any intellectual battle, big or small, public or private,
one’s sole criterion of judgment ought to be nothing more than the
truth, a truth that is based on the
recognition of the facts of reality –
not anyone’s approval or disapproval. In other words, one needs
moral certainty.
Without
it, no battle can be won; least of all a battle for an entire
culture’s future.
WARNING:
The following blog post contains a lot of spoilers. If you have not
yet seen Snowpiercer and wish to do so without having the plot
given away, then do not read this.
Snowpiercerhas
been called a sci-fi action film. It’s hardly sci-fi. If people
insist on referring to it as a sci-fi film, those people will have to
admit that it is based on awful sci-fi. The movie begins with the
premise that Mankind finds a way to combat global warming with a
man-made chemical that is used to cool Earth’s atmosphere. And
cool Earth’s atmosphere it does. So much so that the whole planet
undergoes a new Ice Age period, thus leading to a mass extinction of
life as we know it. At least until the very end of the movie when a
polar bear appears on-screen, thus throwing that whole “mass
extinction of life as we know it” plot right out the window.
That
the audience is expected to believe that scientists would not have
tested this Earth-altering chemical ad nauseam before it is unleashed
into the stratosphere is ludicrous. Even more laughable is the fact
that the audience is told to believe that the one thing that not only
survives but also supports what is left of humanity in this freezing
hell is a train that is running around the world non-stop.
Snowpiercer
is
a good sci-fi film just as much asAnimal
Farmis
a reliable farmer’s almanac. That being said, just like Animal
Farm
is a beautiful allegorical story, so is Snowpiercer.
Some might say that Snowpiercer
is a lousy allegory because it doesn’t resemble the real world that we
live in today. Those critics are not wrong. The movie doesn’t
match the world that we live in today. However, Animal
Farm
didn’t resemble real-life 1940s English society that the English
used to live in either.
I
watched Snowpiercer about two weeks ago, and when the movie
ended, two thoughts occurred to me. The first thought that happened
to me was that I had just witnessed a rare find – a film that
respected the audience’s intelligence. The second thought that
occurred to me was that most people are seldom ever
honest about what we know and almost always dishonest about what we
don’t know. In other words, most things that most people claim to
know, especially in regards to the social sciences (such as politics,
economics, and philosophy, themes that this movie touches on), are the pretense of knowledge.
As
such, because this movie operates on the assumption that the audience
is intelligent, and then proceeds to touch on themes that are,
unfortunately, subjected to mind-numbing subjectivity, the conclusion
that I reached was that there were going to be many people who were
going to watch this movie through the lens of very dumbed
down current event stories
that they might have watched on the news.
That
there are only a small
numberof
movie reviews for Snowpiercer
that claims that the central theme that the movie focuses on is class
warfare, a far too simplistic overview, is most likely due to
the fact that Snowpiercer
has yet to be shown in movie theaters outside of Korea just yet.
It’s only a matter of when before harebrained newspaper columnists
who see themselves as enlightened populists decide to hail this movie
as a rallying call for the Occupy Movement. Yes,
class warfare is undoubtedly one of the topics that the film explores
but there is so much more than what meets the eye.
Like
Animal Farm, what
Snowpiercer does is to challenge totalitarianism and all of
the little despotisms that exist within it. Taking on the position
of opposing authoritarianism while not living in a totalitarian state
hardly seems edgy. However, another more subtle criticism that the
movie deals with is the morality (or the lack thereof) of political
leadership regardless of what stripe it comes in. More on this
later.
Throughout
the whole movie, there isn’t a single element that has not been
somehow affected by the totalitarian nature of the train’s
leadership. From the very beginning of the movie, the audience is made to dive right into the deep end of the tense environment that surrounds the tail section of the train – the claustrophobic Dickensian world that is home to the train’s poorest
inhabitants. Crammed into a tight, squalid space, these individuals,
including the movie’s main protagonist, Curtis (played by Chris
Evans),
live, if it can be called that, a miserable existence.
Revolution
is boiling beneath the surface and it doesn’t take long for the
audience to sympathize with the tail-enders; as the audience’s
blood is churned and made to call out for bloody revenge when we see
an anonymous guard brutally smashing his rifle’s butt into the face
of an unarmed elderly woman. Considering the real-life events that
have unfolded around us, such as theArab Springand
the variousanti-austerity
proteststhat
we have seen throughout Europe and the United States, it becomes easy
for people to root for the tail-enders, while at the same time
jumping to the conclusion that the movie is about the oppressed 99
percent fighting for justice against the tyrannical 1 percent.
People
who claim that this movie is an allegorical indictment of the
inherent injustice that exists in capitalism are missing the point of
not just the film but the very nature of capitalism itself.
Many
anti-capitalists would jump to tell anyone who is willing to listen
that income mobility that is claimed to exist in a capitalist economic system is a myth – that one’s economic fate is
predetermined by the socioeconomic status that one is born into and
has no opportunity whatsoever to move up that proverbial ladder. The
fact that there are immigrants
who arrive in developed countries with
very little
money and very little knowledge of the local language, but
nevertheless, persevere and rise in those societies or that many of
their children excel
in school and go on to obtain professional careers and establish
businesses do not seem to detract those anti-capitalists from
their religion.
The
fact that economic classes exist in capitalist societies is
undeniable. However, the anti-capitalists’ insinuation that the
members who make up those classes are static is nothing less than
willful ignorance.
Whereas
the thing that anti-capitalists claim to fight against does not
actually exist in real life societies that practice capitalism, it
does exist in Snowpiecer’sworld.
In Snowpiecer’sworld,
one’s socioeconomic fate is preordained by the tickets that
everyone had purchased (or not purchased) before the train embarked
on its non-stop seventeen-year journey – fist class, economy, and
freeloaders. Even the children of those who are born on the train,
long after the events that initially took place for this story to be
set in motion, are forced to live in the stations that their parents
had first found themselves in. “The people at the front of the
train are the head, and those at the back of the train are the feet,”
claims Mason (played byTilda
Swinton),
one of the movie’s deliciously evil antagonists, who hisses with
authoritarian finality, “Know your place, keep your place!”
The social system that the train operates on is based on a medieval feudalistic system, which is enforced by brutal violence. This is hardly a
capitalist society.
When
people watch this movie without thinking more deeply into it, it
becomes easy to assume that it is about a war between the haves and
have-nots, a situation that capitalism purportedly permitted to
exist. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Capitalism, by its very nature, requirespolitical
freedom, which includes, among other things, the opportunity for
socioeconomic mobility. Snowpiercer
was not an indictment of capitalism, but rather an indictment of
tyranny.
In
another sign that this movie’s challenge is toward tyranny rather
than capitalism, the audience is shown how the tail-enders receive
their food. During mealtime, the tail-enders who are constantly
hungry and malnourished are assembled by the guards and counted each
time so that they may be rationed the appropriate amount of food –
brown gelatinous bars, which are simply referred to as protein bars.
It is later revealed that none of the tail-enders was informed what
those protein bars were made of – mashed cockroaches (the movie
never explains where all those cockroaches came from).
In
the real world, since the mid-nineteenth century, the countries in
the world where famine occurred have been the countries that were run
by tyrannical regimes that attempted to control, distribute, and
ration food and farming based on political decisions. Robert
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe,
the Kim Dynasty’s North
Korea,
Mao Tse Tung’s China,
Mengistu
Haile Mariam’s Ethiopia,
Mohamed
Farrah Aidid’s Somalia.
In the past one hundred and fifty years, every single famine that
the world has witnessed has been the result of, to use a
euphemism, political mismanagement.
However,
toward the end of the movie, it is later revealed that the tail
enders’ diet did not consist of only these mashed cockroach bars.
When Curtis explains his motivation for wanting to take his
revolution all the way to the front of the train, he reveals that
there was a time when he was forced to eat human flesh.
In
the frantic early days when the train was about to begin its journey
as it raced against the oncoming Ice Age, the tail-enders who didn’t
buy a ticket but were fortunate enough to board the train were left
with no food to eat. As a result, when hunger set in, they began to
cannibalize each other. Curtis mentions that he knows what human
meat tastes like and that “babies taste the best.” He confesses
that when Edgar (played byJamie
Bell),
his second-in-command, was a baby, Curtis almost killed and ate him
but was prevented from doing so by Gilliam (played by John
Hurt),
the tail-enders’ elder leader and Curtis’ mentor and
father-figure, who cut off his own hand for the hungry tail-enders to
eat in exchange for letting Edgar live. It was only after many
people had been cannibalized and had voluntarily amputated their own
limbs to feed each other that they were provided rationed protein
bars.
In
Snowpiercer,
the train is the country, which is ruled by a tyrant; the people
forcefully imprisoned in their stations under the penalty of death.
The people’s malnourished state and their being forced to eat bugs and
each other is a story that we have seen far too many times on the
news (here,
here,
here,
here).
As Curtis recounts his past experience in having eaten human flesh,
he says that though it makes intellectual sense for the tail-enders
to show gratitude for being allowed to board the train and live,
considering the hell that they were forced to live through, it was
impossible to feel one iota of gratitude. It is impossible not to
sympathize with him.
Another theme that the movie touches on is how the train’s
leaders treat the tail-enders. Early
on in the film, a mysterious, plump looking woman who wears a bright
yellow coat, in stark contrast to the sooty grey that surrounds the tail end of the train, enters the scene with several armed guards.
Carrying a simple tape measure, she measures the height and width of
two small children and wordlessly whisks them away to the front of
the train. Before the woman can take the two children away, however,
one of the child’s parent throws his shoe at the woman, reminding
the audience of a similar event that occurred in real lifewhen
a desperate man hurled his shoe at the most powerful man in the world.
Such
lawlessness, of course, cannot go unpunished. The train’s inventor
and chief engineer andDear
Leader, the mysterious Wilford (played by Ed
Harris),
sends Mason to punish this act of rebellion. Before the
shoe thrower’s sentence can be carried out, a punishment which
appears to be a method that the Saudi government would have adopted
had the Arabian peninsula been covered in permafrost as opposed to
sun-scorched sand, Mason gives a speech, which the audience feels has
been given to the tail-enders many times before. In the first sign
of Wilford’s cult of personality, not unlike the kind of praisethat
is showered on North Korea’s Kim Dynasty, Mason offers glory to Wilford, stating that he is merciful and kind. Therefore,
any sort of rebellion against such mercy and kindness is that much
more magnified and thus cannot go unpunished. “Know
your place, keep your place.”
It
is later revealed toward the end of the movie that the woman in the
yellow coat took those children to the front of the train to
work as slaves. Wilford explains that in the train’s
seventeen-year journey, parts have needed to be repaired and replaced.
However, in that time, pieces that are required to keep the train
running have “gone extinct” and that, therefore, small children
are needed to crawl into tight spaces that no adult can squeeze into
to manually repair the train. In other words,
the tail-enders are treated no better than cattle. They’re fed
just enough to be kept alive, they are “disciplined” when the
need arises, and they are used as beasts of burden.
As
for Mason, she offers a microcosmic view of what abusive political
power can do to a human being. No one in the world is born evil. As
such, Mason must have, at one point in her life, been a sweet,
innocent, and good-natured child. Had Mason possessed any of these
characteristics, however, none of it was present by the time she
makes her first appearance in the movie. Mason is shown wearing
large spectacles that give her an insect-like appearance, sports a
thick Yorkshire accent, and her imperious lips
appear perfect just to issue orders.
Everything
about Mason – her looks, her dress, her mannerisms, her speech –
shows that she is the end product of having possessed despotic power
over the lives of others for an extended length of time. She is cruel,
mean, petty, and expects the people that she stomps on and treats
like trash to be grateful to her. It is the price that tyrants have
to pay – sacrificing their humanity for power, and reason for
delusions.
The movie could have offered just a simple solution – “The tail
enders succeed in their revolution and once the tyrant and the haves
have been taken out, all the tail-enders whose rights as human beings
had been stripped away live happily ever after.”
But
once again, the movie treats the audience like intelligent adults.
In a short scene, after Gilliam listens to Curtis’ plan on how he
plans to lead his ragtag group of revolutionaries to the front of the train,
he slowly and cryptically asks, “And then what?” It is a deep
philosophical question that has no easy answers. However, Curtis has
no time for all that. “We kill Wilford,” he says without
hesitation, as though somehow that is the solution to all of their
problems.
But
that is a question whose weight has been far too understated in this
movie – “And then what?” This same question is currently being
asked in Egypt and other Arab nations. So the mob finally fought
back and showed the world thatHosni Mubarakwas
nothing more than a paper tiger. And then what? So the mob got back
together and showed the world thatMohamed Morsiwasn’t
even half the paper tiger that Mubarak was. And then what? Judging
from what we see on thenews,
it hardly seems that the Egyptians have found their happily ever
after fairy tale ending.
As
Curtis and his ragtag team of revolutionaries fight their way into
one car after another, they begin to see whole new worlds that the
tail-enders had not even known to exist in their wildest dreams. And
with each progression they make, the more decadent the scenery
becomes. Initially, we see a whole train car that has been fitted to
serve as a horticultural orchard that grows fruits. In another car,
the entire car is used as an aquarium that the front enders harvest
twice a year that they may eat fresh fish while at the same time
making sure that the fish are culled in moderation to avoid
population crashes. This theme gets explored again later.
In
other cars, people enjoy Swedish saunas, and in others, they binge on
alcohol and drugs as they rave the night and day away. However, the most surreal car that the revolutionaries enter is the school car.
In this car, which is designed as a preppy grade school classroom, an
overly cheerful and hyper teacher (played byAlison Pill)
leads about a dozen or so students in their lessons. However, the
studies have less to do with maths or grammar but instead focuses on
singing adulatory praise for Wilford; again, not unlike the education
that we find in tyrannical regimes like in North Korea (here,
here,
here).
Although
this movie is undoubtedly an allegorical tale that criticizes tyranny,
and not capitalism as anti-capitalists would have people believe, it
is difficult to know for sure what kind of economic system exists on
this train. We never get to see a trade transaction. We see food
being rationed out, which implies that production is centrally
planned but the scene where the decadently rich binge excessively on
alcohol and drugs indicate that, assuming that production is centrally
planned, there is an underground economy of sorts that circumvents
the central planning authority, which seems impossible considering
the fact that they are all on a train which no one can get off of.
What
we do know for sure is what had been hinted to us earlier at the
aquarium scene and later spelled out toward the end of the movie –
population control is enforced and based on Malthusian
principles that would have madePaul R.
Ehrlich
proud.
What’s
important to remember about the aquarium scene is that the fish in
the aquarium is culled in moderation twice a year so that the upper
class may enjoy eating fish while avoiding crashing the aquarium’s
fish population. When Curtis finally meets Wilford for the very
first (and the very last) time at the engine room, whose design
looked like a minimalist version of a Plaza Hotel suite, Wilford
reveals that Curtis’ revolution had been planned and orchestrated
all along by him. Throughout the movie, Curtis receives notes from
an anonymous source from the front of the train, which goad him to
keep fighting on. It turned out that the person who sent Curtis those notes of encouragement was none other than Wilford
himself.
So
why would Wilford foment a violent revolution that is aimed at
himself? He explains that he did so to ensure that the
violent proletarian revolution would occur. This would compel both the
tail-enders and the upper class to kill off one another. That way, the population of the train, both the tail-enders and the elites of the upper-class section, would be kept in check. Wilford reveals to Curtis
that he had to make this choice because he could not wait for natural
selection to take its course; had he done so, the exponential
population growth would have outpaced the arithmetical level of food
production, which would have caused everyone to slowly starve to
death.
In
the real world, Malthus limited his apocalyptic prediction to limited
food production. However, even though those predictions
were proven to be false even within Malthus’ own lifetime, his
views never really went away. In fact, neo-Malthusianism has been
the rallying call for
many of the world’s modern-day environmentalists, such as the
aforementioned Paul
R. Ehrlich who
made a similar (debunked) prediction in his 1968 bestseller, The
Population Bomb.
In
his book, he predicted that hundreds of millions of deaths would occur per year throughout
the 1970s and he insisted that the only way to avert this catastrophe
was through mass population control “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
However,
as we all know, instead of the global-scale famine and widespread
death that Ehrlich
predicted, the 1970s witnessed a modern
agricultural revolution,
which continues
to this day.
Despite a doubling of the world’s population, food production
continues to grow as technological innovation creates more and more
food on each acre of farmland. As mentioned earlier, the people in
the world who suffer from starvation and famine suffer not because of
a lack of food but because of, again with the euphemism, political
mismanagement.
In
the real world, Malthus, Ehrlich, and other similar-minded people
have been debunked. But what about aboard the Snowpiercer?
Does Malthus’ apocalyptic prediction bear any weight for the
train’s inhabitants? Sadly, yes. Firstly, food production can
only occur on the train, which, unlike fertile farmland, cannot be
expanded or tilled. Secondly, and more importantly, as the only
human beings left on the planet are all located inside the train,
trade with the outside world is impossible. What that means is that
food production is clearly limited and that the train’s inhabitants
have no choice but to be self-reliant.
In
some ways, the situation that the train’s inhabitants find
themselves in is similar to North Korea’s juchesystem,
an ideology which all but destroyed North Korea’s economy and
social systems. Considering the heavy security apparatus that
Wilford employs (which bears parallels to North Korea’s million-man
army)
who mostly carry rifles that have no ammo (which bears parallels to
North Korea’s ammunition
shortage)
whose job it is to pacify (which bears parallels to North Korean
soldiers being used to terrorize
the people into submission)
the hungry tail-enders (who bear parallels to North Korea’s hungry
citizens),
the fictional world of Snowpiercer
bears
striking resemblance to the Malthusian reality that is North Korea’s
juche ideology.
Under
such conditions, not only does the culling of people become possible,
it becomes necessary. It is the full blossoming of Jeremy
Bentham’sutilitarianism,
the philosophical school of thought that calls for “the greatest
good for the greatest number,” which when one thinks about it, one
begins to realize that it is one of the most vicious slogans ever
foisted on humanity. Utilitarianism is a horror because it never
defines “good” except that it is whatever is good for the
greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good
for the greatest number? And why does numerical superiority
immediately mean that it is good? It is a horrific philosophy, but in North Korea and aboard the Snowpiercer,
its horrors take a backseat to its necessity.
The
difference between the leadership that oversees the Snowpiercer
and their real-life counterparts in North Korea is that the former
was forced into its predicament by a rapidly changing climate that
was no longer conducive to human survival whereas the latter
voluntarily chose to create its own hell. Differences in matters of
choice aside, however, it does not change the fact that both leaders
are guilty of overseeing the mass murder of their own peoples. This
was the movie’s stance on Mathusianism; it is a philosophy that
legitimizes mass murder and one that is only possible in a tyrannical
regime.
Lastly,
the movie touches on the morality of the two leaders of the train –
Wilford who rules with an iron fist from the front of the train and
Gilliam who preaches (and practices) self-sacrifice from the back of
the train. Of the two, Wilford is easier to analyze.
When
Wilford and Curtis meet for the first time, besides admitting that
Curtis’ revolution and all the previous revolutions that came
before were pre-planned efforts at keeping a check on the train’s
population, Wilford tells Curtis that everyone on the train has their
place; it just so happens that Wilford’s place is at the front of the train. He then says something remarkable to Curtis. While wearing what appears
to be a silk robe and cooking a steak dinner in his engine room,
which, again, looks like a minimalist version of a Plaza Hotel suite,
Wilford says to the clearly exhausted, soot-covered, malnourished,
and bleeding Curtis that he, too, has to bear a cost for being at the
front of the train; that contrary to what Curtis might think, Wilford
isn’t very happy with his lot in life either.
The audience could easily sneer at the irony of Wilford’s self-pity.
However, I doubt that Wilford was disingenuous. In fact, Wilford is likely the most self-aware and honest character
in the entire movie. Unlike Mason, Wilford doesn’t suffer from any
kind of delusions. He knows what he wants, and he knows the price
that he has to pay for it.
What
he wants is power; he simply wants to rule. The cult-like manner in
which his henchmen worship him is proof of this. He is not destined
for happiness, and he knows this. He simply wants to rule. To rule, Wilford had to design the
world that he wanted. It wasn’t just the train that he designed.
He designed a world of obedience – a world where the thought of
each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess Wilford’s
thoughts. A world where no man will hold a desire for
himself but will direct all his efforts to satisfy Wilford’s
desires. However, Wilford’s thoughts and desires, and everyone
else’s desire to fulfill his thoughts and desires is nothing more
than a circular logic. He wishes to rule, and they want to be ruled.
And the wheels of the bus go round and round.
But
to get what he wants, he has to pay a price. The price that he has
to pay is that he has no purpose except to keep the people, the very
people whom he despises, contented. He has to lie, flatter, praise,
and inflate their vanities and vulgarities. He has less independence
than even the mediocrities that he rules over. At least his henchmen
rule over the tail-enders and torture them for whatever sadistic
pleasure that they derive from it. Wilford, however, is far too
intelligent and self-aware to stoop to that level of stupidity and
barbarism. He merely uses people for the sake of what he can do for
them. It’s his only function. He has no other private purpose.
It’s the price that he has to pay for power.
Gilliam,
on the other hand, is a more complicated case study. Contrary to
Wilford’s regal appearance, Gilliam looks disheveled and wears
what appears to be sackcloth. In some ways, it’s what I have
always imagined John
the Baptist to look like. Furthermore, due to his message of
self-sacrifice, which he also practices, at least an arm and a leg
have been voluntarily amputated to feed the tail-enders before they
were provided with their mashed-cockroach protein bar rations. His
arm has since been replaced by what looks like a crook handle from an
umbrella while his leg has since been replaced by a broomstick.
For
all intents and purposes, Gilliam seems to be Wilford’s polar
opposite. However, during Wilford’s fateful meeting with Curtis,
it is revealed that both Wilford and Gilliam were actually friends
and had been cooperating with one another from the very beginning;
Wilford running things from the front of the train and Gilliam from
the back of the train. Though they seldom met face to face, it is
revealed that they spoke to each other regularly on the phone in the
middle of the night. This was how Wilford knew to send those notes
to Curtis to incite his revolution. This is when we realize that
Gilliam and Wilford are not actually polar opposites, but, in fact,
are mirror images of one another. They are the two sides of the same
coin.
In
essence, whereas Wilford was demanding that everyone sacrifice their
thoughts and their desires to his will, Gilliam was demanding that
everyone sacrifice their thoughts and their desires to each other.
The difference is to whom people are being commanded to sacrifice.
However, it doesn’t change the fact that people are being
ordered to make sacrifices. And it stands to reason that where
there’s sacrifice, someone is collecting sacrificial
offerings. Where there is service, someone is being served.
The man who speaks of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters, and he
intends to be the master.
However,
Gilliam’s idea of ruling over the masses is more perverse than
Wilford’s. According to Gilliam’s notion of self-sacrifice, the
world that he envisions is one where the thoughts and desires of each
man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thoughts and
desires of the man next to him who in turn will have no thought or
desire of his own. It is a world where everyone is subjugated to the
will of everyone else. It is a world where people are slaves to each
other, a world that does not even offer the dignity of serving a
master.
Wilford’s message was that the individual has no rights; that the Führer,
him, is all that matters. In the order that Wilford offers, no
private motive is permitted. The only motive that he permits is that of service to him.
On the other hand, Gilliam’s message is that the individual has no
rights; that the collective is all that matters. In the order that
Gilliam offers, no private motive is permitted. The only motive that
he permits is that of service to the masses.
Both
men fixed the game from the very beginning. Heads – sacrifice.
Tails – sacrifice. It doesn’t matter whether they give up their
soul to the Führer
or to each other, so long as they give it up; so long as the people
accept that self-abnegation and self-denial are considered
uncompromisable and sacred values.
Self-sacrifice,
however, cannot continue to exist without a leader to collect the
alms. In the real world, traditionally, there have been two kinds of
leaders who collected these alms. As different as they were,
however, like Wilford and Gilliam, they have always been but mirror
images of each other. The leaders have always been either God or
Society. The people who reaped the alms for the leaders could not,
however, be mere mortals. We are mere mortals, and no one
knows better than us just how imperfect that we can be. The reapers
had to possess a certain kind of moral or political authority over
the rest of us. As a result, they have been given various names over
human history – Priests, Commissars, Kings, Parliamentarians, etc.
So
long as individuals are not free to choose to live our own lives the way we see fit, it doesn’t matter whether we serve God or the
Führer
or the Proletariat. At the end of the day, we are all just slaves waiting for our turn to be called to the altar.
That
is the ultimate question that Curtis had to answer. Is the human
race worth saving if we’re nothing more than slaves to each other?
The only correct answer is “No.”
After
the train is destroyed, we see that all the main characters, the
good, the bad, and the ugly, are all dead. It’s all well and good.
All of those characters’ hideous morality was the end result of a
putrid philosophy. No good could have possibly come out of their
survival.
The
only two survivors are a young boy and a slightly older girl, two
characters who were born on the train and whose total combined screen
time couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes. With the train
and its contents destroyed and everyone who had been on board dead,
the odds of survival are overwhelmingly stacked against these two
young children.
However,
whether or not the human race survives is irrelevant. What is
relevant is that they are free and that their survival depends
on their own independent minds. This is the movie’s final message: the importance of freedom; damn the odds.
From what I have read online, not only has this movie yet to be released outside of Korea, there isn’t even a release date. Furthermore, according to Collider.com, the Weinstein Company, which owns the rights to distribute Snowpiercer in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, wants to cut twenty minutes from the movie, mainly from the bits that give character details, ‘to make sure the film will be understood by audiences in Iowa... and Oklahoma.’
Though I am not sure how this movie will change when it is released in the rest of the world, I sincerely hope that the changes will not detract too much from the movie’s overall philosophy. This movie is unique because it is intelligent and because it treats the audience as though we were intelligent. To lose that would be to sacrifice what makes this movie special in the first place. And that would be a terrible shame.
EDIT: February 8th, 2014
It has just been announced on IGN that the director’s cut of Snowpiercer, and not the cut version that Harvey Weinstein wanted,will be released in the US. Although there is no word yet about a US release date, it seems that it will only be a matter of time before it is announced.
Bong Joon-ho, the director, appears to have stuck to his guns and refused to compromise on his basic principles. Had he done as Weinstein wanted, and cut twenty minutes from the movie’s more serious story-focused portions, the film would have probably dissatisfied everybody. Mr. Bong could have focused only on his immediate financial earnings and done as was asked by Weinstein, but he instead chose to remain faithful to his vision, his truth. He could have compromised; tried to be all the things that were demanded, but both he and the movie might have ended up being nothing more than a disappointment to everyone.
This speaks volumes about the man’s integrity. As an individual, the best compliment that I can offer him is, despite the world that we live in today, where virtual information is so easily transferable, to say this is one movie that I have paid to watch in the theater and will pay to watch again when it is released on Blu-ray.
