A diagnosis of a social disease of South Korea

Lack of objective analysis of the situation may be one most critical problem in South Korean society.

The society is now heading in the direction to a people's democracy (not liberal democracy), ignoring the rule of law and the principles of classical liberalism (the free market and private autonomy based on personal property rights).
And this will make the people become more and more shameless, exclusive, materialistc and mean in the situation where their economy rapidly sinks.

South Koreans do not accept the empirical reality of human history: nationalism does not lead to pride but shamelessness, while socialism does not lead to utopia but hell.
Maybe this is also related to the fact that world history is generally ignored in education, while only Korean modern history is emphasised with such an exclusive focus on the nationalistic meanings of its independence movements and the democratic meanings of its political protests in the last century.
This has resulted in the current dominance of speculative reasoning of its own history, and the society is only concerned with judgmental interpretation of individual's motivation.

The blind nationalism and the strong socialism are the inevitable result. 

There are academic articles on history which say that South Korea should stop the ongoing anti-Japanese nationalistic behaviours.
They consider that Koreans, whose economic and social situations before the 20th century were much worse than most South Koreans think they were, were significantly benefited from the more advanced systems of Japan during the first half of the last century, and that South Koreans, after the Korean War, were helped from Japan in varied routes, both individual and governmental, during the second half of the century.

I agree with their argument and the historical facts.
But I think that the cause of the gap between the two nations should be found in the different histories of the market of the two nations rather than national differences.
In short, the Korean history of the market is incomparably short and distorted, and the dogmatic Confucianism of Joseon dynasty might have contributed to this.
Its society (especially the peasants) was deprived of chances to develop many virtues in the moral and intellectual aspects.
Anyway, in my eyes, it is all about human nature that is related to the market and the relationship between individualism and collectivism.

The mass (or crowd or mob or whatever people call themselves 'collectively') tends to be ignorant and immoral.
This is not a shocking news.
It is not a radical or inconsiderate view either, though it may sound so.
Rather, many philosophers and political thinkers both in ancient and modern times have indicated this phenomenon throughout history.
The meaning of the Western political history, in a sense, is said to be lie in the efforts to institutionalise political systems that can control the barbarity of the mass who were always ready to exploit democratic ideology for nothing but the expression of their collective selfishness.

The point is that, unless rule of law and the fundaments of classic liberalism are established, democracy is highly likely to be deteriorated to autocracy either by a tyrant or by the mass, as was proved historically in many socialist or totalitarian states.
Also, this is what is happening in South Korea these days.
The 'democratic people' of the republic are collectively rushing in a wrong direction, unchecked by reasonable self-reflection, and they are projecting their social hatred, which has been agitated by the media, onto the model capitalist states like Japan and the US

They do not know what they are doing.

From the first floor of the main library, Edinburgh University, on a foggy day