My much-missed hero, Christopher Hitchens, nailed it.
No wonder The Great Leader wept with desperation recently as he begged the linings of the country’s uteri to thicken.
Why reproduce? Why do anything?
********************
Yes, yes, of course: South Korea’s fertility numbers are even worse. But there’s a difference between living in an advanced society full of competing possibilities for women, and living mouth to mouth in a squalid gaping hole.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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Notes of a Neophyte
December 13th, 2023 at 12:17PM
One might wish for a third option here. Maybe a country that has both freedom and a future? I believe South Korea has one of the highest rates of suicide and depression in the world.
December 13th, 2023 at 1:46PM
South Korea is fourth highest. The highest rate of suicide is among the elderly, followed by students pressured to succeed or dishonor their families.
December 13th, 2023 at 2:15PM
Add a culture of “shame” and the continued stigmatization of seeking help (add guns to the latter and you get our macho/highest suicide states: Wyoming, Montana, Alaska) and you get S Korea’s peculiarly toxic mix.
December 13th, 2023 at 6:04PM
Maybe. They also have a less shameful view of suicide itself, at least in some circumstances, so it’s complicated. But either way, one could also hope for a society that is not like either Korea. How to avoid becoming the north is pretty clear, but I am more interested in what’s eating the south.
December 13th, 2023 at 7:54PM
Found this, from an American who has lived/taught there for decades.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2023/05/782_351806.html
‘Korea is an incredibly competitive society. To survive, university students and young adults have to work long hours, study, obtain various qualifications and certificates, save up an often unobtainable amount of money for a house, stay beautiful, and manage their social relationships. Survival is not easy. Thus, in order to help them do this, they have found certain solutions: one of which is to abstain from dating, marriage, or having children. Because this brings with it a lot of financial and emotional burdens as well as the impacts on the women’s physical health.
The low birthrate is a solution to a problem created by the current environment. It is only when it is seen in that way can governments or analysts really begin to understand or address it. Of course, in true Hegelian-Marxist fashion … the newly created solution which emerges contains inside it inherent contradictions. The solution becomes a new problem and thus the dialectical process repeats and culture moves forward. New solutions are required and new cultures are created. The solution young people in Korea have found to the challenges of modern life will soon become a problem and a new culture will be required.’
December 13th, 2023 at 9:29PM
Yes, many people have suggested these as causes of the low birthrate, plus sexism. None of this screams flourishing society to me. Despotism is bad, but so is mass anomie.
December 13th, 2023 at 11:03PM
If he’s right that there will be an inevitable self-correct, this ain’t so bad.
I think mass anomie overstates it, though. Korean popular culture has an impressive global impact; a lot of writers, directors, musicians there look impressively expressive, even if some of what they express is sadness/resentment and yes anomie.