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The president’s three deadly addictions

Published: 15 Dec. 2024, 19:56

Kim Jung-ha
The author is an editorial writer of the JoongAng Ilbo.

President Yoon Suk Yeol unequivocally presented himself to domestic and international audience as a wrongdoer ill-guided by his misconceptions during his defiant and most explicit public address last Thursday. Many people would have somewhat sympathized with his loathing and condemnation of overreaching abuses by the majority opposition party. Still, few would agree that the political setbacks justified his descent to the extreme aberration of resorting to a martial law decree associated with military coups.

He claimed he deployed soldiers to the National Assembly as a “symbolic” reminder of the havoc the main opposition party caused to the nation. Did he think our soldiers are toys? Could he not imagine the public’s aversion to the politicization of military force? What has happened to the president’s mind? It seems this can be attributed to his three addictions.

The first is an addiction to power. Yoon was famous in his prosecutorial career for not letting go of his target until he got his indictment. He sent high-profile figures — including former and sitting presidents — to prison, feeding a strong confidence in the might of his power as a prosecutor. He could have come to believe that there was no one he could not overwhelm.

In his book “The Winner Effect: How Power Affects Your Brain,” Ian Robertson, a professor of psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, claimed that power can be as addictive as cocaine in the way it increases dopamine in the brain’s reward system to give extreme short-term pleasure and long-term addiction. Too much dopamine or an appetite for power can disrupt normal cognition and emotion to lead to gross errors of judgment and imperviousness to risk, not to mention huge egocentricity and a lack of empathy for others.

Yoon, under intoxication of power, must have hallucinated that he could get away with anything. He pushed to relocate the presidential office and residence without a decent public debate, ousted a ruling party head he did not like and enlarged the enrollment quota for medical schools without a road map and countermeasures against protests.

His ego and frustration could have reached a boiling point when the main opposition got in the way of every step he had made after its landslide win in the April parliamentary election. In the mind of a power addict, the options of dialogue and compromise cease to exist. He must have regarded the martial law declaration no differently from filing an arrest warrant. His bizarre idea of intimidating and repressing the opposition party full of “criminals” with military force underscored the gravity of his addiction to power.

Yoon’s second addiction is YouTube. The president reportedly relies more on YouTube channels to learn global news than traditional print and TV news. He personally advised his aides to watch his favorite channels. YouTube, a platform dependent on subscribers, hardly can provide objective and balanced perspective. Because it caters to a restricted audience, its contents are mostly sensational, skewed and unverified. Watching rightist channels could have released his stress. While traditional media mostly find faults in state management, these channels attribute all the setbacks to pro-Pyongyang antistate forces threatening the free democracy order.

A compulsive watcher of biased YouTube contents can live in a fanatic world dominated by conspiracies. Yoon’s belief in the conspiracy of a foul election in April can be explained by his reasoning of sending troops to the National Election Commission (NEC) premises to seize their servers in fear of hacking. He went into details about the skepticism he beholds in the NEC. In the aftermath of the Itaewon crowd crush in 2022, he told then-house speaker, Kim Jin-pyo, that there was a possibility that it was fabricated by a “certain force.” He has watched too many trashy YouTube videos.

Then there is the alcohol addiction. Yoon has been a heavy drinker for decades. Frequent alcohol intake damages brain regions including the frontal lobe, responsible for pivotal human functions including restrain, reasoning and decision-making. When the frontal lobe weakens from excessive and lengthy alcohol consumption, one can lose control over their emotions and temper. The symptoms can continue even without drinking. Yoon should have had treatment for alcohol use disorder. Then he could have saved himself from a dreadful and epic pratfall. He has caused colossal harm to himself and his nation due to his alcohol-induced misjudgment. He should cut down on drinking in the new year.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.