The collapse of government

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The collapse of government

Published: 12 Nov. 2024, 19:48

Park Sang-hoon
The author is a political scientist.

Our politics is nearly in a state of anarchy. The president has become a laughingstock. The executive branch is incompetent and the judiciary has lost credibility. The ruling and opposition parties are full of hostile rhetoric without substance. The National Assembly is unable to lead a responsible debate on the major issues of our society. Instead of the separation of powers, the three branches of government appear to be collapsing together.

Who should do politics? The most essential criteria are the skills and qualities to run the government. Even if you aren’t popular, you can be in charge of a government in case you have the required skills and qualities. On the contrary, if you are popular without skills and qualities, you become a leader who can turn into a tyrant. In that sense, it is fortunate that the current president is not a populist even though he has neither the skills nor the qualities to smoothly run the government. President Yoon Suk Yeol treated politics too lightly. He thought the act of governing would be easy.

The English word “government” comes from the ancient Greek word for steering a ship into a beautiful and safe harbor. At the time, the people treated a community as a big ship, deeming the act of governing as an effort to coordinate the various functions to keep it sailing. The pursuit of wisdom needed to govern was called “eros.” This means that acquiring and mastering the skills to govern well was considered the most exciting thing to do. Great governance has always been praiseworthy.

Democracy is a system in which elected politicians are divided into ruling and opposition parties and compete for the legitimacy of running the government and governing. Do our politicians strive to develop the skills and qualities to do the job? Do they love politics and find governing an exciting activity? And do they make the necessary preparations to make a better community? The answer seems to be no.

Those who turn politics into a fight with no alternatives are wearing us down. The politicians divide us once, and then we are divided once again in front of the macho politics of using misogynistic mockery surrounding the spouses of the president and the opposition leader. We are tempted to demand the presidential office, the National Assembly and the judiciary to shut down by staging a rally on the streets to tell them to end everything.

In his book “Politics,” Aristotle talked about the good politics humanity must aim for if it wants to live a purposeful life. He also discussed many examples of bad politics, and one of the most interesting is his discussion of why the city-state of Sparta had collapsed. Aristotle’s main reason was that the society was governed solely by the ethics of warriors — in other words, the passion for struggle. A warlike society favored only those citizens who could fight or pay taxes and didn’t allow women an equal role in the public sector.

As disgruntled lower classes were oppressed, wives became obsessed with amassing wealth while chastising their husbands for neglecting their families. Inequality deepened and the birthrate fell. Populations and national powers dropped, but the city-state encouraged births by giving money to its people instead of resolving inequality.

Chasing after extravagant lives Spartans became corrupt. Elected officials were bought with money and flattery while rulers made cronyism-based appointments. The people hated paying taxes. Aristotle concluded that Sparta remained strong while at war, but when the war was over, they were destroyed as they didn’t know how to make good use of leisure. The Spartans failed to learn how to run a society peacefully through politics.

Aristotle’s explanation suggests a lot to today’s Korean society. We are all different from each other, and a society is divided not only by occupation and income, but also by education, hometown, gender and generational differences.

To prevent these differences and conflicts from leading to hostility and hatred, we entrusted our sovereignty to elected politicians to run our public affairs. We hoped that by entrusting them with the governing function of making, enforcing and applying laws, we would create a freer and healthier society. But the outcome is the opposite. Even our unions and employers have learned how to run capitalism peacefully through negotiations, but our political parties and politicians are still incapable of having dialogues and making coordination and compromises. The more we think about it, the more we wonder. Why and for whom are they doing politics?

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.