Rock, Scissors, Paper does not begin to describe the differences between South Korea and the US. The two societies are based on fundamentally different religions and social philosophies – the one Confucian and the other individualist and Christian. It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of that basic divergence, and the countless differences to which it leads. But Korea and the US share one very important similarity: they are both dealing with assaults on the foundations of their cultures and traditions, and they will both have to decide how much they can change before they cease to exist as themselves and become something else entirely.

Fifty-four years ago, the Korean War left South Korea economically and physically broken. Much like Britain after World War II, South Korea, although the victor (sort of), was in ruins. It was viciously scarred from all the fighting and lacked the natural resources or industrial capacity to recover quickly — and continued that way until 1961, when it was forced into the industrial age by Park Chung-hee. Park introduced massive reforms in South Korea that changed it from an agrarian, pastoral economy into an industrial, export-oriented economic powerhouse in less than fifty years. This rapid industrialization and modernization has made South Korea a major player on the world stage, but it’s caused widespread social confusion and cultural tension at home. Many of the changes that saved the country were taken from the West (especially America), and clashed with the Confucian philosophy and morality that under girds Korean society.

Confucian society prizes family, tradition, and stability over everything else. This brings benefits as well as costs. Some of the benefits are that Korea is a very safe society, where the elderly are highly honored, and where children are dutiful, diligent, and respectful. The seediest areas of Seoul, a city of over 10 million, are safer than many US or European suburbs. The costs are that society is rigidly hierarchical, creativity is usually not nurtured or is actively discouraged, and the individual’s happiness and goals are completely subordinated to those of the family. Students memorize information but don’t learn how to think independently. Adults often choose careers they dislike and work a hundred hours a week in them, and children spend seventeen or eighteen hours a day studying in schools and academies, because their efforts will benefit, or will increase the prestige of, their families. When South Korea changed itself to become the 12th largest economy in the world, however, it superimposed many aspects of Western culture onto its own native culture — and in several basic ways, Western culture and Confucian culture are mutually exclusive.

Western society, in contrast to Confucian society, prizes the individual, free thought, and dynamic creativity over everything else. South Koreans eagerly accepted Western technology and media and imitated superficial elements of Western lifestyles, apparently unaware of the lesson of Rev. Dimmesdale: no one can wear two faces for any considerable length of time without becoming confused as to which is his real face. The more South Korea shared in Western culture, the more South Koreans (especially the youth) began to take on Western patterns of thought. They began to ask questions no good citizen in a Confucian society should ask: What do I want? What is the best for me? Am I happy? Once they began to ask these questions, they began to chip away at the foundation of Korean society, which requires individuals (both children and adults) to sacrifice unquestioningly for the good of their families.

Today the lessons their traditional culture teaches them and the lessons the culture they try to emulate teaches them are increasingly at odds. As a people they face a massive existential crisis, and the strain has begun to show: South Koreans now kill themselves at a higher rate than the people of any other industrialized nation. Thirty-three Koreans a day killed themselves in 2006. For young men between twenty and thirty, suicide is now the most common way to die. For the elderly – without work, but no longer the beneficiaries of the same level of honor and respect their parents enjoyed, and sometimes even bereft of children to support them – suicide is an increasingly attractive option. The data seems to suggest that Korea cannot remain where it is as a culture and survive: it must either return to its Confucian roots or fully embrace the Western culture it has hitherto only superficially accepted. But there is the rub: if it fully embraces Western culture, Korean culture as it has existed for well over a millennium will die.  There will be a culture thriving on the southern half of the Korean peninsula, but it will not be what we now call Korean. The only way for Korea to exist as Korea is to return to its Confucian roots. The question is: do Koreans even want – and do they have the psychic reserves and the strength of will – to do that?

Americans must answer the same questions. The virtues of personal responsibility, merit-based achievement, and a commitment to the freedom of thought form much of the heart of American culture. Over the past forty-five years, however, many Americans have begun to question or criticize these basic virtues.

Some people now question the American conception of individual responsibility as part and parcel with personal freedom. For example, the presidential candidates vying for our votes speak often about health care and their concern that all Americans have health insurance. Given the unconscionably high cost of health insurance in the US and the high number of uninsured, this discussion is entirely appropriate.  The candidates do not speak, however, about addressing these problems in a way that maximizes individual responsibility, only about doing so in a way that maximizes individual security. Several of them look to Western Europe or Canada for examples of how to best transfer responsibility for this decision from the individual to society. Their focus is on how individuals can be insulated from risk or from negative consequences, even if those consequences are caused by their own decisions.

Many people, especially educators, openly disregard the importance of merit-based achievement, preferring instead to focus on increasing students’ self-esteem and feelings of self-worth, or on including students with certain racial and sexual profiles instead of increasing students’ measurable skills or abilities. The recent storm over Michigan’s voting to abolish affirmative action in public jobs and state universities strongly suggests that opponents of Michigan’s decision were often less concerned with ensuring that the most meritorious students or job applicants were chosen than with ensuring that the students or job applicants with the correct racial or sexual backgrounds were chosen. Merit frequently did not prominently factor into the discussion among proponents of affirmative action.

Finally, the freedom of thought, the concept that citizens have the right to voice their views, however controversial or unpopular, without others unduly restricting them, is often turned on its head in today’s culture of speech codes and lawsuits over offensive expressions. The idea that the burden is on those who would restrict people’s speech to prove their case and that people have broad (though not unlimited) latitude to speak their minds has been reversed in many areas of society, most notably in the university. Now the idea is that people have a duty to censor themselves so as not to offend others, and that the burden of proof is on the speaker to prove that he had no illicit intentions when he spoke.  It makes one wonder how famous American agitators such as Wendell Phillips would have fared in an environment so hostile to free thought.

Americans, like South Koreans, face an existential crisis of a cultural magnitude. To be sure, the crisis in the US is not quite so severe as that in Korea – yet. Given sufficient time, however, the changes in American society over the last forty-five years that are fundamentally at odds with America’s culture and tradition (yes, such things do exist) will present Americans with a basic, unavoidable choice. They will have to decide whether to go forward, finish the changes they have begun, and cease to exist as the America they have been, or to go back, renounce the changes they have pursued, and embrace their traditionally American culture. The same questions will loom then for Americans as they do now for Koreans. Will they even want to go back and become what they were? If they do, will they have the psychic reserves and the strength of will to take up such a challenge? And, most importantly, should they?