A Society Tempted by the Cheese in a Mousetrap

Vaccine Passes: The Noose of a Totalitarian Society

Whose fault is this, really?

A few days ago, after the vaccine pass policy for children and adolescents was blocked by the judiciary, social conflict surrounding the vaccine pass policy has only intensified further. In court, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, as the defendant, argued that the purpose of the vaccine pass policy was to protect the unvaccinated. Just as expected. Many who watched the trial were probably baffled. Not “ending COVID,” not “easing the burden on the quarantine system,” but out of nowhere, “protecting the unvaccinated”...

It feels eerie, like watching a horror movie. It is as though one is watching a psychopathic killer in a horror film say expressionlessly, “You can’t go anywhere anymore. You can’t do anything. I won’t let you go until you take this shot I’m giving you.”

The concept of “protection” requires the consent of the person who is to be protected. The logic that someone must be protected even when they refuse such protection is nothing more and nothing less than totalitarian political thought itself. We will protect you from capitalist exploitation; we will protect you from the crisis of economic depression; we will protect you from the threat of communism—throughout 20th-century history, political power has never failed to invoke protection as a justification for expanding its own power.

All despotic regimes claim that, in order to realize justice, they must protect their people from injustice and from threats. There are no exceptions. Has politics ever openly put forward an ignoble goal as its justification? Even imperialism claimed justice as its cause.

It is simply that one person’s justice is another person’s threat. Here too, there are no exceptions. The moment justice is “forced” on others, all misery is practically foretold. Why impose one’s own beliefs, one’s own sense of justice, on other people?

Watching the discriminatory measures against the unvaccinated in the recent vaccine pass policy, people are only now beginning to wonder how, in the 21st century, South Korea has come to show signs of the state and society moving in such a totalitarian direction.

Is this really the result of some dark conspiracy by a hidden force seeking to control Korea? Or is it that the intentions of a ruling group, tempted to use the COVID crisis as an opportunity for long-term rule, are gradually coming into view? Or did things simply end up this way after many twists and turns, even though no one intended it?

What is the root cause of this social situation? It has to do with the selfish nature of human beings. At the root lies the desire to be protected without wanting to pay the price for it. Those who cry out that the state must protect individual health, that the state must be responsible for individual happiness, that the state must be responsible for individual education, fail to see what lies behind it. They fail to see the basic fact that all protection by the state is accompanied by restrictions on individual rights and freedoms.

The reason it cannot be otherwise becomes clear through philosophical reflection, but to put it simply, it is no different from a mouse staring only at the cheese on a mousetrap and rushing to eat it. That mouse is inevitably caught in the totalitarian noose of the trap. Inside every human being coexist contradictory, unholy, ugly instincts alongside rational, sacred, and noble ones. And the moment that cheese is eaten, the totality of that person’s character is ultimately split, and half of the self’s desires are imprisoned.

When people think of Hitler’s totalitarianism or Stalin’s reign of terror in the 20th century, they tend to treat such dictators as monsters or demons driven by some evil desire to seize control of society. They think what matters is preventing the rise of another such “mad” dictator, and they grow enthusiastic and reassured by politicians who smile and speak of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Not at all. Contrary to what people think, dictators—Kim Jong Un included—are by no means insane, nor are they necessarily evil men. They think in an extremely rational way. In order to seize power, or to maintain it, they merely seek to use the means they find easiest to exploit.

The easiest means to exploit is one of the traits in human nature most vulnerable to political assault: the human desire for comfort, for protection, for consolation. If one wishes to satisfy such desires, one can pay for them and buy them. That is how it works in the realm of the economic market.

But in the political market, politicians do not talk about money. They invoke the basic human right to pursue happiness and say that something as trivial as money should not stand in the way. Yet the sums of money they manipulate are astronomical budgets, incomparable to the petty transactions in which individuals buy and sell tteokbokki or hamburgers, cars or cell phones.

People know this, in fact. They get PCR tests for free at screening clinics and receive vaccinations for free, but they know it is never truly free. Politicians casually decide to do this and do that, presenting social goals as political justifications as though they were spending their own money, but together with disaster relief payments, the COVID crisis has already consumed astronomical economic resources.

Looking at all the policies the government has implemented since the COVID crisis began, one realizes that it has spent the budget as recklessly as if money were raining down from the sky. Yet it is hard to find any citizen seriously facing up to the gravity of this situation. Everyone clamors for more support. Everyone cries out for more protection, asking why the protection is so unreliable, demanding more certain protection; asking why the support is so unreliable, demanding more definite support, and insisting that “the government take a more responsible stance.” It is a very familiar refrain.

I do not think the root cause of the unchecked state power represented by the recent vaccine pass policy, and of the infringement on individual rights and freedom, is government or politicians being incompetent or ignorant. Conspiratorial forces and hidden power groups are not the root cause either. Not at all. Totalitarianism can arise perfectly well without any such groups.

The fundamental cause is the selfish and irresponsible attitude of the people living in this country, the people who make up this society—the masses. When people keep crying out for more protection, more support, and more responsibility from the state, it would be more surprising if no country became totalitarian.

From the outset, all dictatorship and all totalitarianism emerge because the majority of that society wants them; they are not created because some group of aliens or psychopaths suddenly appears. If a dictatorial society has been formed, if a totalitarian state has been established, the main culprit is always the collective desire of that society’s masses. Society and the masses always deny this obvious fact. And they direct their arrows at the dictator, at those in power, at shadowy conspiratorial forces behind the scenes.

For example, in Korea, where nearly everyone owns a car as an essential item, the principle of pedestrian priority is completely absent. Korean drivers are always overbearing on the road. They honk at any time and all the time, shouting for others to move aside because they want to go faster.

There is no consideration, no patience, no respect. In a society like this, I would like to say to the intellectuals who congratulate themselves by analyzing K-quarantine as a great achievement accomplished by all citizens acting as one in a spirit of community that this is merely wishful thinking. The reality of Korean society is one that readily exposes vulnerable individuals to violence. More fundamentally, it is moving in the direction of an irresponsible and selfish society seduced by anything free.

K-quarantine? Its essence is nothing more and nothing less than the spectacle of an entire society, half out of its mind, running around in masks and clamoring for vaccines because it does not want to catch what is, at most, a mere cold.

From the beginning, it was the public that cried out when there was a shortage of masks. It was the public that complained about the lack of vaccines. Naturally, in a democratic political system based on universal suffrage, no political group can ignore such demands.

The same was true abroad, and in Korean politics as well: whether ruling party or opposition, all have rushed forward under the banner of “Wear masks!” and “Get vaccinated!” Of course, one truly important question was missing. Why should we wear masks? Why should we get vaccinated? Society as a whole showed no interest whatsoever in these fundamental questions.

Throughout the 20th century, medicine and hygiene advanced, and people lived on with the complacent belief that there was no need to ask or examine such questions—that one simply had to follow the advice of public health experts. But there was debate among the experts from the beginning. It was only that no politician and no media outlet dared convey controversial opinions to a terrified public steeped in simplistic thinking and unwilling to think.

The truth is closer to this: COVID is not as dangerous as it is said to be. In the cases recorded statistically as so-called “COVID deaths” through testing in hospitals, whether before or after death, the overwhelming majority were cases not of people who died of corona, but of people who died with corona.

This is laid bare by the double standard shown by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency toward people who died after vaccination. In such cases, it took an extremely conservative medical approach in order to avoid recognizing any causal relationship between vaccination and death by any means possible. If it had tried to determine causality between COVID and death from the same pathological-anatomical perspective, then even lung tissue examinations would not have been enough; it would have had to analyze the cause of death of every single COVID death for weeks or months to determine whether the coronavirus was truly a more important cause of death than all other causes.

Of course, it did not do that. Therefore, all the various COVID death statistics that the media have used to blur the issue by citing percentages of COVID mortality are merely numbers fitted in advance to a predetermined conclusion: that “COVID is a very dangerous disease, a deadly disease.”

The beginning of this train without brakes was last fall’s compulsory mask-wearing. A great deal of time has passed since even the most basic right of a human being as a living creature—the right to breathe freely—began to be restricted. After all this time, the excuse that no one knew it would come this far no longer works. If even the right to breathe properly is not recognized, what political rights or individual freedom are left to discuss? Korean society has simply moved in an entirely natural direction.

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Original title: 쥐덫에 놓인 치즈를 탐내는 사회

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2022-01-27

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=9&idx=24515