Thanks for the repost! This was a fantastic and informational podcast tackling some very complex issues 🙂

A well done podcast, raising so many issues. First I would say this, about the only thing in K Drama that seems exaggerated to me is the drinking, albeit apparently that is not so. Bullying, often under the umbrella of class, as a persistent theme, has never in my mind been something I could doubt as being an issue for South Koreans.
It simply takes up too much of the popular discourse. The best K Drama I have ever seen, My MIster, has it both as a feature of its young protagonist beginning in her youth and its more elder protagonist, more subtly, in an office situation. Right now I can think of four recent or ongoing popular dramas presented on American Netflix, Run On, Sisyphus, Vincenzo, and Navillera, which deal with the issue of bullying. Run On and Navillera deal directly with bullying of young and talented grown young men, with physical assault with intent to end careers of an athlete and a dancer respectively.
Sisyphus has as a villain whose in-home bullying as a child and then later society wide ostracization of being an artist without exceptional talent leads him to wish a kind of revenge on the world and all of humanity with an abject cynicism considering the personal selfishness allowing for individuals to turn away in complicity, and he does so then for the purposes of his own power and wealth. The whole show is dynamized by outsized weaponry, and punctuated with ridiculous and gratuitous amounts of gunplay.
The wonderfully entertaining Vincenzo puts forth early on the concept that the only way to defeat a bully/monster is to be armed with an even bigger monster. Or as one character puts it, he is scum, but there is one thing he hates, and that is even bigger scum. The whole show lionizes the Mafia, not very nice people, and the audience vicariously revels every time the good monster gives the bad monster its comeuppance. It is, as I say, terrifically entertaining, and so hyperbolic and absurdly funny in places that show does not in some ways take itself seriously, the escape hatch, but in the response it evokes from its audience, myself very much included, one can easily see just how warped our cultural views are.
In my country, we all just witnessed a four year long political melodrama in which a political leader was (and still is but to less effect) lionized for his unrelenting bullying, while his wife carried on a public campaign against bullying in schools and online. His followers in recent elections sported bumper stickers hoping for his reelection just to make those opposed to him cry. Literally, that was a slogan on bumperstickers. And after losing the election, he tried to bully legislators and officials in individual states to alter the results in their state elections. And followers went so far as to try to physically intimidate the national legislators, threatening the lives of some, and physically attacking members of law enforcement, twisting concepts of patriotism and liberty to justify their behavior.
It does not take rocket science to understand that in almost every society on earth, ruthless bullying has its payoffs. If, as feminists point out, we live in a rape culture, I would argue that given there are only seventy five years of recorded history in which human beings were not at war with one another, even rape culture is folded into war culture, human history the history of bullying.
What is more, one can also argue in today’s world, what with social media, psychological bullying may well have become even more insidious in many ways than physical bullying. South Korean culture has had many features to it that I am amazed as a witness to it, their drama does not elide. Historical shows do not hesitate to discuss slavery, caste, exploitation of the poorer people. I just watched an extraordinary movie, The Fortress, with Lee Byung Hun, about the Qing invasion of Korea during the time immediately preceding the period featured in Chuno, and it does not fail to expose how badly the ruling class treated its soldiers conscripted from the local peasantry, starving them, freezing them, sending them out to be killed by a much larger marauding army. There are a number of features of K Drama that I enjoy but one of them is the ability to try to come to grips with human cruelty in a realistic manner, even in melodrama. While it has its villainous villains, and we must admit, human history does most certainly as well, it also can depict the human context in which even decent people do horrible, horrible things.

I am sure, South Korea, has its particular contexts as were discussed in the podcast for middle school aged bullying, and its particular behaviors in which it arises. Like a lot of human cruelty, just because it has always existed does not mean we cannot evolve. Confucius was the first person I know of to put forth the golden rule; Buddha expressed the absolute requirement of compassion and generosity towards others, and Jesus preached doing unto others as one would have done to oneself, and to treat each individual as if that person were Jesus himself. This is an age old project we are working on.

All that said, I think celebrity idolization only goes to point out how much contemporary society lives their lives as a second hand affair. Certainly criminal behavior should lead to some form of legal reprise, but being so obsessed with the purity of actors or singers that one would ruin careers over misbehavior when still a child strikes me as simply another form of bullying, and the idea that it is worse for some actor to acknowledge his or her misbehavior, express remorse, and a desire to address that than to deny it outright and start up a series of lawsuits demonstrates to me how psychologically messed up we are as a society. We tolerate the audacious, and do not forgive honesty.

We are each charged to do the best we can with this life. All of us make mistakes, some egregious. It strikes me as a fool’s errand to idolize anyone, and that includes political and religious heroes, let alone entertainers. And our task in the contemporary world with all its AI gigabyte surveillance and instantaneous karmic judgments, some leading to even worse than loss of career and livelihood, is how to both live decent lives and find some sort of tolerance of human frailty without giving license to cruelty.