A Sociobiological Analysis of North Korea

Reviewing "The Real North Korea"

I recently read The Real North Korea, a book from last decade discussing the origins and contemporary state of North Korea. As the book says,

Until the late 1950s, North Korea was essentially just another “People’s Democracy,” a term the newly established pro-Soviet regimes chose as a self-description. In the late 1950s things began to change. What emerged as a result was a unique state that had almost no equivalents in 20th-century history—a truly fascinating topic for any cultural anthropologist, historian, or sociologist.

Yes, not only might those fake fields be interested, sociobiologists might also be very interested in how North Korea works!

I see many of my theories reflected in North Korea. I will discuss these one at a time, but first, a summary of North Korea itself. North Korea is depicted as basically being to Orwell what Atlantis was to Plato, except this state is real. It seems to use 1984 as a guidebook more than it does Marx.

North Korea: The World’s Nearest IngSoc State

North Korea, as far as we know, basically stopped short of making Newspeak in its implementation of Orwell’s 1984. Almost all of the other points, it has allegedly implemented. These include:

• Memory-holing news

  • Finally, in a truly Orwellian twist, the North Korean authorities took

    care to isolate the populace not only from the foreign media but also from the official publications of earlier years. All North Korean periodicals and a significant number of publications on social and political topics were regularly removed from common access libraries and could only be perused by people with special permissions. With periodicals the removal was done automatically, with all newspapers published more than 10 to 15 years ago being made inaccessible for the laity. This rule was obviously introduced to ensure that the changes in the policy line of the regime would remain unnoticeable to the populace. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, the government did not want the average North Korean exposed to the paeans Kim Il Sung used to deliver to the great Soviet Army and Comrade Stalin during the 1940s. Nor did they want them aware of the harangues against “Soviet revisionism” that were common in the Korean press of the early 1960s.

• Blatant lies

  • Much in line with this old approach, in 2011 the North Korean media

    published a worldwide rating of happiness. It stated that the happiest

    people live in China, with North Koreans coming in second (obviously,

    they were so moderate in their claims because by that time North Koreans became aware that China had much higher standards of living). Needless to say, the two lowest places in this curious rating were taken by the United States and South Korea.

  • See claims about the Leader being a superhuman, etc.

• Omni-present surveillance

  • Claims 1 in 50 people are informants.

  • Kim Il Sung’s regime was brutal, but one of its most peculiar features was emphasis on the prevention of ideological deviation rather than open state terror. People who expressed ideologically unwholesome ideas were first dealt with through the institutions of “organizational life” [everyone belongs to the Party or a party-run union] and/or the inminban [longhouse system headed by a woman where local neighbors spy on each other and report all neighborhood activities to police] system. A majority of the people were fully aware that they could be the object of surveillance at any moment, so they knew better than to break the rules or express the slightest doubts about official ideology. Nonetheless, political persecution was still very much a part of life in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. Aft er all, with all the advantages of unceasing surveillance and control, arbitrary arrest and the institutionalized use of violence were also important for maintaining internal stability.

• Trial-less forced disappearing for unknown political violations / camps

  • There are some indications that as a rule, a political criminal in North

    Korea is not even present at his/her own trial and does not know the

    term he/she is supposed to serve. The person is normally intercepted by the security agents at work or on a street, taken to an interrogation facility (they are not allowed to notify anybody at the time of arrest), and then shipped to the camp. This is a major difference with the USSR, where even in the worst times of Stalin-era purges, a mock trial—lasting 10 minutes or less—was deemed necessary to keep up appearances.

  • To start with, the system is unusually secretive. The macabre tradition

    of show trials, so typical of Stalin’s Soviet Union, was discarded by North Korea’s policy makers long ago. The last show trial in North Korean history took place in December 1955, when Pak Hon-yoˇng, founder of the Korean Communist Party and most prominent first-generation Communist, was sentenced to death as a spy of Japan and the United States. From then, Kim Il Sung’s victims began to disappear without a trace; the government simply did not bother informing the public that some prominent dignitary was found to be a lifelong South Korean saboteur or American spy (if such reports were issued at all, they were classified and targeted only lower reaches of the elite, not the population at large). In some cases, the disappearance did not mean death—years later, the person would make a sudden comeback, without any explanation of his/her long absence.

• Leader worship

  • From pg. 33, all North Koreas must have portraits of the Kims in their house, and everyone wears a Kim badge.

  • In an emergency, statues and portraits are to be protected whatever

    the cost, as any sacred object should be—and North Koreans are reminded that they must safeguard the images. For example, in 2007 the official media widely reported an incident that allegedly occurred in August of that year. During a severe flooding, Kang Hyong-kwon, a factory worker from the city of Ich’on, was trying to make his way to safety through a dangerous stream. While leaving his fl ooded house, he took the two most precious things in his life—his five-year-old daughter and portraits of Leaders Generalissimo Kim Il Sung and Marshal Kim Jong Il. Suddenly overwhelmed by the current, he lost grip of his daughter, who fell into the swollen waters, but still managed to keep hold of the sacred images. The media extolled North Koreans to emulate Kang Hyong-kwon, a real-life hero.

• Leader manufacturing (most of Kim Il-Sung’s official description is not an actual person but rather an entity made up by the Party)

  • As part of this systemic manipulation, the official narrative does not

    admit that Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union on a military base in the vicinity of Khabarovsk. Aft er all, the successor to the Juche Revolutionary Cause and future head of the ultra-nationalist state could not possibly have been born on foreign soil! North Korean propagandists therefore invented a secret guerrilla camp that allegedly existed on the slopes of Mount Paekdu in the early 1940s, claiming Kim Jong Il was born there.

  • Official propaganda established that the Kim family had played a major role in the last 150 years of Korean history. For example, in the 1970s schools began to teach North Korean students that the March 1st Uprising of 1919, the largest outbreak of anti-Japanese, pro-independence sentiment, started in Pyongyang (not in Seoul, as actually was the case) and that its major leader was, of course, Kim Il Sung’s father Kim Hyoˇng-jik. They also claim that Kim Il Sung, then merely seven years old, took part in the March First rally. In real life Kim Hyoˇng-jik, like a majority of the educated Koreans of the era, was indeed sympathetic toward the independence movement and was even briefly detained for participation in anti-Japanese activities. Nonetheless, he was by no means a prominent activist, let alone a leader, of the nationalist movement.

• Party monopoly with stricter demands on the outer party

  • To simplify the picture, virtually all North Koreans are expected to join the Party Youth organization at the age of 14; a minority of them might then join the ruling Korean Workers’ Party. Contrary to rather widespread belief, party membership in itself is not a privilege: actually, the KWP rank and file is often subjected to even stricter demands than the general populace. However, during Kim Il Sung’s era, party membership was much coveted by the upwardly mobile and ambitious, since it was a necessary prerequisite for any social advancement (only KWP members were eligible for promotion in nearly all cases).

• Manufactured total war

  • The whole society is militarized in the eternal war against South Korea which never concluded.

  • North Koreans are told South Korea is under American occupation and there is a continuing war there. In math textbooks you get stuff like this: On page 138 one can find the following question: “South Korean boys, who are fighting against the American imperialist wolves and their henchmen, handed out 45 bundles of leaflets with 150 leaflets in each bundle. They also stuck 50 bundles with 50 leaflets in each bundle. How many leaflets were used?”

• 3 rung class system

  • One of the truly unique features of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was a

    reemergence of hereditary groups, each one having a clearly defi ned set of privileges and restrictions. In this regard, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was surprisingly reminiscent of a premodern society, with its order of fixed and hereditary castes (or “estates” as they were sometimes known in premodern Europe). Starting from 1957 the authorities began to conduct painstaking checks of the family background of every North Korean. This massive project was largely completed by the mid-1960s and led to the emergence of what is essentially a caste system. This system is known to the North Koreans as songbun . According to the songbun system, every North Korean belongs to one of three strata: “loyal,” “wavering,” or “hostile.” In most cases people are classifi ed in accordance to what the person or his/her direct male ancestors did in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Now that you have a picture of North Korea, we can talk about its sociobiological foundations.

War & North Korea’s Founding

In my model of the founding of autocracies, I locate their genesis in bloody war, which kills off dissenters, performing hard eugenics on the population, enabling a deviant regime. Importantly, these wars tend to be between two large halves of the “fighter class” and the elite class, meaning all these regimes start off at least somewhat popular (violence and accidental eugenics can take them in difference directions though). They tend to come around at the peak of cycles of polarization, wherein memes might act to amplify genetic differences between the left and right half of the gene pool.

We see indeed that North and South are, in this case with outside help, split into left and right, the North being the Communist left. Genetic killings and migration began immediately.

Guided and assisted by the Soviet advisers, between 1946 and 1950 North Korea quickly went through a chain of reforms that were standard for nascent Communist regimes of the era. In the spring of 1946 radical land reform led to the redistribution of land among peasants, while also sending a majority of former landlords fleeing South. Around the same time, all industries were nationalized, even though small independent handicraftsmen would still be tolerated until the late 1950s. In politics the local incarnation of the Leninist Party, known as the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP), began to exercise increasingly thorough control over society.

In spite of the Christian family background of Kim Il Sung and many other Communist leaders, Christians were persecuted with great ferocity. Like landlords, many former entrepreneurs and Christian activists chose to flee South across the badly guarded demarcation line. Nobody bothered to collect exact statistics, but the number of North Koreans who had fled, South between 1945 and 1951 was approximately 1.2 to 1.5 million, or some 10–15 percent of the entire North Korean population. Among other things, this exodus meant that the potential opposition exiled itself, inadvertently making the emerging regime more homogenous.

According to GPT, if you truncate the top 15% of a standard normal distribution, the new mean is -.27. So this immigration could have caused a shift to the left of .27 SDs. That’s like 4 IQ points. This is already dysgenics, and this doesn’t even address all the internal killing.

North Korea confirms that, as I predicted, these autocratic regimes are literally changing the gene pool; this is how they operate. I suspect gene-meme correlation caused behavioral variance to expand, sparking war, and then one of the sides will win and establish something quite a ways away from the old center after all the killing is over. That seems to be what happened here.

I also hypothesize in my war model that only the fighting and elite class matters. In North Korea this seems to be deviant from the masses, to maintain its complete power. The author of the book agrees that these are the classes of people who run North Korea, as predicted by my war model.

Th elite constitute only a small part of the population—if we include the security police, elite units of the military, and mid- to high-level party functionaries as well as their families, [I separate these into leading elites (mostly cognitive) and lower fighters (willing to live as a soldier)] the total is likely to be one to two million people or some 5 to 7 percent of the entire population. However, these people know how to handle arms, have an organizational infrastructure, and, on balance, they are also better informed and have more social skills than humble commoners. Th ere are also good reasons to suspect that they have already made some preparation for guerilla war, so a fair amount of arms are at their ready disposal (and they might make good use of the army arsenals as well).

Elite deviance and wealth

In my model of elite vs. mass power, I hypothesize that elite power is proportional to the percent of wealth they control. North Korea obviously is described as completely dominated by the elites, without any true elections, and no freedom of speech, with the Party elite determining the party line you are put to death for if you don’t follow. This party line is exploitative of the masses, letting them starve to death while the upper class lives in relative luxury.

In contrast, in the US there are real elections, freedom of speech, decentralized information distribution (in the beginning, the US had myriad newspapers, which were cheap, local, and easy to run. At the height of informatic centralization, there were still several companies responding to market incentives in an economy where the masses held most of the wealth. Now we have the internet.), and extensive welfare where elites work hard and a lot of their money goes to a mooching underclass, the complete opposite of North Korea. As predicted, the underclass actually owns 70% of the wealth; the US is the true dictatorship of the proletariat.

The authors describe the results as “mind-boggling.” The estimated Gini coefficients, a standard measure ranging from 0 to 1, with 1 being the most unequal, range from 0.63 in 1998 to 0.86 (2002-03). As the authors observe, if these trimmed sample “estimates are to be believed, one might consider North Korea as the country with the most unequal distribution in the world.” … As Kim and Kim observe, “even more alarming, of course, is the strong possibility that even these unusually high values of Gini coefficients are likely to understate the true state of income distribution in North Korea.”

The State literally owns the whole economy, so the small group that runs the State (elite) owns all the wealth.

Keeping the revolution going

If autocratic regimes start by killing off all of the biodiversity among meme generators to achieve a deviant meme pool for the peasants, then we predict them to try to close off the society from ideas they can’t control. We see this in North Korea.

A few times a year, specially assigned police patrols, accompanied by an inminban head, conduct a midnight random check of households, just to make sure that all people spending the night there have registered themselves properly. Additionally, they check the seals on the radio sets, making sure the tuning system remains disabled, so that the set cannot be used for listening to foreign broadcasts.

North Korea was the only country that banned the use of tunable radios in peacetime. From around 1960 onward, all radios officially sold in North Korea had fixed tuning, so that only a small number of official North Korean channels could be listened to. If one bought a radio in a hard currency shop or brought it from overseas (which was legal), the owner had to immediately submit the radio to police, where a technician would permanently disable its tuning mechanism. Since a technically savvy person can easily repair a radio that has been set to one station, all privately owned radio sets had to be sealed. During the above-mentioned random household checks, the inminban heads and police were required to make sure that these seals remained unbroken.

In the late 1960s, the authorities undertook a massive campaign aimed at the physical destruction of the foreign books (largely Soviet and Japanese) that were then privately owned by the North Koreans. In libraries, all foreign publications of a nontechnical nature were (and still are) to be kept in a special section, with only people possessing a proper security clearance allowed to peruse them. Remarkably, no exception was made for publications of the “fraternal” Communist countries: Moscow’s Pravda and Peking’s People’s Daily were deemed to be potentially as subversive as the Washington Post or Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo .

Th e North Korean authorities were aware that dangerous information could penetrate the country not only via media like radio or print but also through unsupervised personal interactions between the North Koreans and foreigners. They therefore took care to reduce such interaction to a bare minimum. North Koreans have always been aware that close contacts with foreigners outside one’s clearly defined official duties would be seen as dangerous.

When the present author lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1980s, we Soviet exchange students had to deal with an impressive array of restrictions placed on our daily lives. Sometimes these restrictions (like, say, a ban on visiting movie theaters) were hard to explain, but the overall underlying tendency was clear: authorities strove to eliminate possibilities for uncontrolled interactions between ideologically contaminated Soviet students and North Koreans. We were not allowed to attend classes together with North Korean students. We could not visit private homes, nor could we go to certain museums. In an interesting twist, foreigners were not allowed to enter into the catalog rooms of major libraries. Needless to say, most adult North Koreans would avoid personal contact with us.

Ongoing regime dysgenics

The songon system relates to marriage, keeping the genetically untrustworthy away from positions of power.

Songbun is inherited through the male line; the present author knows one family whose wife is a descendant of revolutionary guerrillas and hence has an exceptionally good songbun. Nonetheless, her husband is the progeny of a minor landlord, and hence children of the couple (incidentally, one of the most perfect, long-married couples I’ve seen in my life) were not eligible for admission to good colleges. Such unequal marriages were unusual: like any other stratified society, in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, the young and, especially, their parents were not enthusiastic about “marrying down.” Marriages, therefore, were usually concluded between the families of roughly equal social standing—and, indeed, countless times my North Korean interlocutors cited songbun as an important, even decisive, factor in the choice of a marriage partner.

On top of all the usual culling, North Korea is well-known for practicing family-based culling. If one family member commits political thought crime, the whole family is imprisoned. This is a dysgenic measure to prevent anti-communists from breeding. This behavior is predicted by our knowledge that politics is fundamentally genetic.

The North Korean regime has outlasted similar regimes, perhaps because of its emphasis on dysgenics.

Mutational load?

Autocracies are high vril, and mutational load seems to lead to Baizuoism and low vril democracy. Mutational load may not be acting in North Korea, if there is enough culling of mutants through state dysgenics and famine, which is routine in North Korea.

Interestingly, the top may be less protected, as the case of Kim Jong Nam shows. He was very fat and liberal until he was poisoned in an international airport on the orders of Kim Jong Un. Thus, North Korea may have to fall from the top, and not the bottom like the European Communist nations.

As for the relation between mutation and North Korea’s founding, it is unclear. It is possible mutational load increases communism when starting from the highest basedness, but as it progresses it transforms into liberalism. It is still imperative for a Communist country, once established, to not allow mutation to continue and to instead breed people into the Communist median and ideal — not too far right, not too far left.

More research is needed on what Communism is. There could be a second dimension at play here as well — Communism may be moderately left on a social conservatism scale but far to the left on another scale, some sort of autocracy scale perhaps. Maybe these scales are independent but both are acted on by mutational load. Thus, Communism is a high vril, moderate left wing movement. This seems to fit, Communist regimes were never very black, gay, and feminist and were always high vril. North Korea must keep its population moderately left, which is beginning to look right for Westerners, and also high vril, or the autocracy will run out of steam as most elites and fighters will not want to engage in proactive dominating violence.

Conclusion

While in some regimes, the masses are delegated power, it may be helpful to conceptualize this as delegation only in understanding how something like North Korea can exist. Democracy exists when the high IQ and conscientious elites and the fighters want to give the masses a share of the wealth and the vote (political formula can be conceptualized as the agreement between elites and fighters — masses are often burnt). We see this in America — elites never lament the sorry state they’re in, with hobbit rule over everything. They love it. They really are democratists to their core.

In North Korea, the situation is different; an elite-fighter conglomerate that had no qualms about enslaving everyone killed all of its competition 70 years ago. It didn’t change, and it has kept its gene pool (and meme pool, for what it’s worth) clean, outlasting other similar high vril (vril=dominating the masses) regimes. This social organism of elites and fighters must be conquered from outside or must degenerate from the inside.

The example of North Korea fits sociobiological theories very well. This indicates that we are indeed on the right track with this body of knowledge. Truly, without concepts like elite deviance, elite meritocracy, the war model, political genetics, and gene-driven meme pools, the killing, culling, and extreme autocracy of North Korea makes little sense. It’s very hard to explain with “culture” or “dialectical materialism”, which are pretty much the only competing explanations (and even these don’t rise to the level of mathematical, empirically tractable theory, and one is outmoded).