When a Society Forgets Why It Exists

Not long ago, medical students across South Korea collectively walked out of their classes — not in protest of injustice, nor in solidarity with the marginalized, but in defiance of a policy that could disrupt their projected income stream. This wasn’t an isolated case of professional anxiety. It was a symptom of something far deeper: the erosion of philosophical and ethical consciousness in a society where personal success has replaced public service, and profit has eclipsed principle. In South Korea — and much of the modern world — the elite have become technicians of their own survival, no longer leaders of moral direction. The system works, but the soul is missing.

The System is Working — But for What Purpose?

South Korea’s rapid rise from poverty to prosperity is one of the most remarkable national transformations of the 20th century. In just a few decades, the country went from war-torn devastation to global economic leadership, a process that demanded intense discipline, sacrifice, and national coordination. At the heart of this miracle was education — not just as a developmental tool, but as a cultural religion. For generations, it was accepted that academic achievement was not only the surest path to success, but also the moral obligation of every child to their family, and by extension, their nation.

That legacy remains — but it has metastasized. Education is no longer a ladder of mobility; it’s a battlefield. Children enter hagwons (private academies) before they can form full sentences. Adolescents are conditioned to see peers not as collaborators, but as competitors in a high-stakes sorting system. School is not a place to cultivate thought, curiosity, or citizenship. It is a relentless training ground to survive a test that determines one’s social rank for life.

On the surface, the system appears successful. South Korean students rank among the highest in global literacy and math scores. University admissions are ruthlessly competitive. Talent flows into key sectors with machine-like efficiency. But beneath that surface lies a deeper cost: the erosion of human interiority.

Few students emerge from this system asking “Who am I?” or “What kind of life is worth living?” Instead, they are taught to ask: “What school did I get into?” and later, “What job will give me the best salary-to-status ratio?” This is not education. It is calibrated social engineering, designed to produce compliant, optimized, economically productive individuals — not reflective, ethical, or socially grounded ones.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum warned that a society without a humanistic education produces “useful machines rather than complete citizens.” South Korea's system has indeed been useful — it has produced global CEOs, world-class doctors, high-tech innovators. But as the pressure mounts and the mental health of students collapses under unrelenting expectations, we must ask: useful to whom? For what? At what cost?

A system that never teaches young people how to ask "why" will eventually raise generations who don’t know how to question anything — not inequality, not injustice, not even their own exhaustion. And that is a price no nation can afford, no matter how efficient the machinery.

Professionalism Without Philosophy

A society shaped by narrow definitions of success inevitably produces a professional class that mirrors those definitions. In South Korea, entry into elite professions like medicine, law, and politics has long been seen not only as a mark of intelligence, but as a symbol of personal victory. These are not merely jobs; they are social thrones, earned after surviving the brutal gauntlet of exams, rankings, and sacrifices. And yet, once inside, too many of these professions begin to resemble enclosed ecosystems, defined more by internal preservation than public responsibility.

The recent medical student protests are a glaring example. Faced with a government plan to increase the number of medical school admissions — in response to an ongoing physician shortage — thousands of students and practitioners responded not with reform-minded dialogue, but with mass walkouts and collective defiance. The opposition was not grounded in concern for patient care or system efficiency, but in a fear that the economic value of their degrees might be diluted. This wasn’t activism. It was gatekeeping.

And it revealed something uncomfortable: for many, the identity of “doctor” has shifted from being a vocation to a scarce asset class. The prestige of the white coat now functions as a financial firewall. The goal is not to treat more people, but to protect the market share of those already inside. And the education that prepared them — relentless, hierarchical, and metric-driven — never taught them to ask who might be left outside.

In the legal field, a similar moral thinning has occurred. The practice of jeongwan yeyu — the preferential treatment of former judges and prosecutors when they return to legal practice — has long plagued public trust in the justice system. The courtroom becomes less a place of impartial judgment, and more a backstage negotiation between networks of influence. The law, instead of being society’s ethical compass, risks becoming a marketplace of leverage.

These dynamics are not exclusive to Korea. They are symptomatic of what happens when technical expertise is divorced from philosophical grounding — when professions are taught how to operate, but never why. As sociologist Richard Sennett wrote, “A failure of character is built into the ethos of modern professionalism.” That failure is now visible: smart people without moral clarity, powerful people without a sense of service.

Politics, perhaps the most consequential profession of all, has become the most performative. With each election cycle, party lines blur, convictions vanish, and candidates rebrand their positions to match polling data. Policies are not pursued for their ethical merit, but for their potential to trend. The system incentivizes visibility, not vision.

In all these cases — medicine, law, politics — the same pattern emerges. Talent is filtered through competition, rewarded with status, and then left untethered from meaning. The result is a class of elites who are technically brilliant, but ethically unmoored. They serve systems, not societies.

Technological Homogenization and the Death of Desire

In earlier eras, culture was shaped by geography, language, and local tradition. But today, in the digital age, we are no longer divided — we are synchronized. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix have fused billions into one algorithmically curated experience. Though this hyper-connectedness promises diversity, it has in practice created a monoculture of consumption — one that subtly standardizes how we think, what we want, and even who we believe we are.

South Korea, both a pioneer and a product of digital globalization, sits at the center of this convergence. It exports cultural products admired globally — K-pop, dramas, fashion, aesthetics — and yet imports an even more powerful force: a globalized template of identity. The country that once fiercely protected its local traditions is now a mirror to the world — shiny, filtered, and curated.

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard once warned, “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Today, platforms flood us with content, but strip away the quiet required for depth. Identity is no longer cultivated — it is uploaded. A life is not lived but presented. We do not ask, “Who do I want to be?” but rather, “What will perform well?”

What’s most unsettling is that this isn’t perceived as coercion. There is no dictator. There are no chains. There are only choices — too many, too fast, too guided by unseen code. As Debord noted in The Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Today, our sense of self is constantly refracted through likes, filters, trends — creating a culture where we no longer interact directly with the world or each other, but through images that stand in for reality.

In such a system, even rebellion feels staged. The digital self is never fully authentic because the performance is constant, and the platform never forgets. Our desires are not entirely our own — they are formed by what is most visible, most rewarded, most replicated.

Psychologist and media theorist Sherry Turkle, studying how technology reshapes human connection, noted that we now “expect more from technology and less from each other.” It’s not that young people lack imagination — it’s that their environments are engineered to optimize performance over presence. Connection is instant, but often hollow. Expression is constant, but increasingly scripted.

In a world where every moment is captured, curated, and judged, silence becomes rare, solitude becomes threatening, and authenticity becomes a luxury. We are informed — but are we wiser? We are connected — but to what, and to whom? And more urgently: are we still capable of imagining a life not designed by code?

The State as a Self-Defensive Machine

In a functioning democracy, the state exists not only to manage society, but to reflect and reinforce its values. It serves as the arena where justice is institutionalized, dignity protected, and collective aspirations negotiated. But in late-capitalist governance — and in South Korea especially — the state increasingly functions less as a steward of the public good and more as a self-preserving entity, invested in its own continuity over its moral purpose.

The architecture of the modern Korean state is efficient, technocratic, and deeply rational — but also deeply cautious. It moves with the agility of a corporation, and often with the conscience of one too. Major reforms — whether in real estate, education, healthcare, or labor rights — stall not for lack of need, but for fear of backlash. Political capital, not ethical responsibility, is the dominant currency.

One glaring example is the persistent deference to elite interest groups. When organized professional bodies — such as doctors, prosecutors, or developers — resist structural reform, the state frequently caves under pressure, fearing electoral consequences or economic instability. Policies become diluted, compromised, or delayed indefinitely. Power bends to power — not to justice, equity, or democratic will.

In this context, even constitutional values become negotiable. Rights are not upheld as inviolable principles but traded in the marketplace of political calculus. What was once the terrain of collective vision has become a chessboard of short-term maneuvers.

Citizens, meanwhile, are not treated as co-authors of the democratic project, but as data segments, polling figures, and PR audiences. Public discourse is carefully managed through optics. Communication is streamlined to avoid controversy. Governance becomes less about action, more about narrative containment.

The irony is that Korea, a nation built on rapid structural transformation — from dictatorship to democracy, from poverty to prosperity — is now paralyzed by its own system. The very institutions that once enabled swift national rebuilding now operate with bureaucratic fragility and institutional self-censorship.

As political theorist Wendy Brown notes, in neoliberal states, the role of government is not to resist markets, but to imitate them. Efficiency replaces ethics. Risk management overrides moral clarity. The result is a hollow state — administratively powerful, philosophically vacant.

Trust in institutions erodes not because people reject the idea of governance, but because governance itself has ceased to embody shared meaning. What remains is the shell of democracy: elections without deliberation, reform without redistribution, leadership without accountability. The state survives — but it no longer leads.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If our schools train competitors instead of citizens, if our elites serve their class before the common good, if our identities are curated by algorithms, and if the state manages optics instead of ethics — then what kind of society have we become?

The signs of exhaustion are everywhere. Burnout is no longer episodic; it's structural. Distrust in institutions has turned from cynicism into numbness. Many no longer believe in progress, but merely in survival — getting through the day, securing their position, playing the game.

But a society cannot sustain itself on silent resignation. And critique, on its own, is not enough. What we require now is moral imagination — the ability to envision life beyond the machinery we’ve inherited. That begins with small but radical acts: the refusal to conform without questioning, the courage to desire something other than success, the choice to pause, to think, to ask.

This is not an argument against ambition, intelligence, or excellence. It is a call to reintegrate conscience into competence, to remember that skill without ethics is just a form of power, and power without responsibility corrodes from within.

Rebuilding meaning does not start in ministries or ministries or lecture halls — it begins at the level of personal reckoning. We must ask ourselves:

Who am I outside of my function?

What does it mean to live well in a world that tells me only how to live efficiently?

Can I recover a sense of purpose that isn’t algorithmically delivered or socially prescribed?

The answers won’t come easily. But the act of asking is itself a form of resistance — against the reduction of life to data, against the colonization of thought by systems that no longer serve us.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that the greatest danger in modernity was not evil in its classic form, but thoughtlessness — the slow erosion of judgment under layers of bureaucracy, routine, and performance.

In this moment, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to think deeply, feel fully, and live deliberately— not in defiance of the world, but in defense of what it means to be truly human within it.