I mean, social psychologists like Ernest Becker have said that all culture really is an effort to give significance to our lives.
And I live in South Korea, where everybody is led to believe that by amassing as much money and consumer goods as possible they give their lives meaning. And that ideology really excludes about 90 percent of the people from success, which is why I think in South Korea you have one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
And it’s kind of ironic that in North Korea, where the standard of living is so much lower people do seem to feel more of a sense of belonging to the community. And maybe this is one of the reasons why we haven’t seen emigration or escape from North Korea in anything like the numbers that you would expect from a ruined economy.
"B.R. Myers director of the International Studies Department at Dongseo University in South Korea
