Without You, There Is No Us
I recently read the book Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim, which is about her time teaching in North Korea. Kim went undercover as a teacher in the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, which is the only place in North Korea with foreign teachers. The book is almost entirely about her interactions with her students and her time in the school; as it is a totalitarian regime, Kim isn’t allowed off the campus save for a few closely controlled excursions. The title of the book comes from a song about a former North Korean leader, praising his role in the formation of their country as a founding saviour, yet as deployed by the author, it has the twist of being an explicit recognition of a totalitarian regime, recognising that the people are the way they are, both individually and collectively, because of him.
The students are among the elite in the country, and, to me at least, the book was about the ideological experience of North Korea. The students both seem to believe that North Korea is a wonderful place while also knowing that they are being closely monitored and must say certain things. Kim tries to sprinkle crumbs here and there to help them realise that much of their knowledge is a lie, with mixed results, and she reflects that sometimes this seems like a bad choice because such a realisation will do them no good.
The thing about totalitarianism – to add some knowledge I have that isn’t in the book – is that it is about the inside of people’s minds. The boys/young men written about in Without You, There Is No Us seem to genuinely adore their Dear Leader and believe that North Korea is the best place in the world. Whereas authoritarianism is about controlling external freedom, totalitarianism is about controlling thoughts. It goes beyond just that people cannot talk freely in public, as the effect is that subjects cannot even think freely. Thinking doesn’t really work in abstracted isolation, and the way we think is also heavily influenced by all of our social relationships whether positively or negatively.
Despite this, some of the boys do slip up and admit that they have seen things which they shouldn’t, such as NBA games, or eaten food imported on a black market. This is the ‘doublethink’ that Orwell describes in his book 1984: the boys know that knowledge is closely controlled but also believe their North Korean society is wonderful. Suki Kim also describes how easily they lie to her, realising that all these boys have ever known is lies, so the distinction between truth and lie is fairly irrelevant. Whether something is true does not matter.
This is actually the same psychological phenomenon as in many ideological views, that there is a belief in a belief and consistency with that ideology is more important than truth.
Reflecting on Ideology
The book, as well as being quite a depressing read, got me thinking again about ideology. This is a familiar topic to me: as well as the various bits of political theory I have studied and political work I have been involved with, which is mostly about trying to change people’s minds, my jurisprudence coursework during my undergraduate degree was about totalitarianism and law (and it won a prize, which I’m usually on the fence about whether I should mention). I was also reminded of the documentary The Act of Killing, a slightly bizarre film about perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia who are voluntarily being interviewed about the atrocities they committed while under the impression they are making a different film.
It’s very easy to think that ideology is something that happens over there, to other it. Yet this is the wrong conclusion to draw from such things. In our general cultural knowledge, we always want to see ourselves as superior and above that. The obvious lesson from Nazi Germany – that ideological atrocities can happen anywhere, to anyone – is usually lost on us; we instead think about how we are superior to Germans because we won the war and because of foolish English superiority complexes, instead of recognising that we, too, might be susceptible to cultural indoctrination, or even that we are subject to it and have, for example, not reckoned with the legacy of our empire and the many atrocities committed as part of that. Even when we do study slavery in the British Empire, it is usually spun in a way that is about our abolition of it, how we triumphantly opposed an evil without recognising that we were a significant cause of this evil. Similarly, in the USA people seem to generally believe that they live in the best and most free country in the world. American exceptionalism is not just a view taken by the leaders who place themselves above international law and think that injustices are something that only others commit, but seems to me – admittedly an outsider – to be part of the cultural water that US Americans swim in.
In my view, the typical understanding of ideology in society is mistaken. Ideological control is not a binary that either happens or does not happen, and which consequently does not happen to us. Rather, ideological and social worldviews are on a spectrum of intensity, and an inherent part of the human experience is that we are subject to them. Just because the UK isn’t a totalitarian ideological regime doesn’t mean that there aren’t ideologically worldviews that affect and constrain how we think. For example, we might not have a Dear Leader, but the way we think about ‘the economy’ does have a lot of similarity with that type of thinking. This is the idea that developed through critical theorists such as Gramsci (as far as I know, he did it best/first), explaining how the power system in society is perpetuated through cultural hegemony. To explain it I’ll just quote and adapt a few lines from his wikipedia page:
“Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling class use cultural institutions to maintain power. The ruling class, in Gramsci’s view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the “common sense” values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Cultural hegemony is therefore used to perpetuate the existing status quo power relations.”
Ideology In Our Society
So, reading about ideology in North Korea had me thinking about ideological social norms in our own society, which for me is specifically within England, but much of this is shared in places like the USA, Canada and some western European countries. And there are many. Instead of going into any detail, here’s a quick list:
- Eating meat and animal cruelty. Most people unthinkingly eat an abundance of meat from animals kept in cages who are treated horribly and had lives full of suffering.
- While climate change is accepted as a big problem, there are not yet huge shifts against things which seem to be quite basically immoral such as short-haul flights for holidays or food that gets transported all around the world.
- Various gender norms which are ingrained in our society. And racial norms. And all of the other systems of oppressions which are social norms.
- Capitalist greenwashing, where ‘eco-friendly’ things are used to sell products. The nonsense is usually that a product might be less harmful but it is still harmful.
- The whole economic system of working 9-5 hours for someone else without much agency or control over the work that is actually done or how the profits of the work are divided.
- The individual productivity grind work ethic that we use to push ourselves to always be working etc etc.
There are many others, of course, but that’s a taster. In my view, this is what the takeaway of reading about an ideological society such as North Korea should be: a reminder to challenge all of the harmful ideologies that have so much power over our lives.
What Do We Do
It is possible to think independently and critically, but it almost always comes after we absorb the normal views of the society we live in. Thinking and learning is not something that happens in abstracted isolation, but instead it is part of our social experience. In living with others, all learning and thinking includes absorbing and responding to the standard mainstream views.
The main way to counter this is critical thinking: reflecting and challenging ideas and norms and making sure that we can justify them in a principled way, instead of just by repeating a collective ‘common sense’, and welcoming others challenging our beliefs. Yet critical thinking should not just be individual but also collective. We have to teach critical thinking, encourage it collectively, and ultimately have it as part of our collective social norms. Of course, a ruling class or existing system will not encourage this; it is part of the ideological worldview of the society we live in that despite it being somewhat obvious that critical thinking is important, it is not really a significant part of our education system or society. That the current Conservative government have cut libraries and school funding and are going after universities is but one example, though I would also add that this isn’t straightforward blue bad red blue thing, as it isn’t like the previous Labour government or current Labour leadership is all that different in this regard.
Perhaps there are some cultures or communities where unthinking ideological reproduction is not the norm, and critical thinking is the norm. You might think that this is the norm in science or philosophy, for example, except that which this is the theoretical case, it seems to me that most progressive or radical thinkers were actually shunned from the mainstream for their challenging views instead of being welcomed. And, of course, there are many examples of counter-cultural ‘critical thinking’ that get swept up in their own ideology. Certain political groups end up being dogmatic instead of principled, such as trotskyist cult groups, or the general anti-5G or anti-vaccine groups, or whatever the collective term is for anti-feminism or pro-white supremacy who think that they are the ones going counter to the mainstream. We have to challenge only hegemonic views and also counter-hegemonic views which claim to be challenging the norm but are actually perpetuating nonsense.
I’ll stop there instead of sliding into a Long Essay attempting to classify different types of ideological beliefs. The conclusion is: we must be on our guard in what we think and perpetuate, we must welcome challenge, we must learn together and create better social common senses.