hankyoreh

What the big media cartel is going out of its way to emphasize in the “Minerva affair” is the man’s personal particulars: his age, education and occupational status. One major daily ran a first page headline that read “A Fake Takes Korea for a Ride” and went on about how he is unemployed, attended a technical high school and a junior college, and that he studied economics on his own. The basis for calling him a fake (gajja), then, was his less than glorious education, and it treated his writings like some sort of mutant virus for the same reason.

The prosecution’s announcements and news reports however, had the effect of exposing Korea’s ruling elite for the shallowness of their academic elitism. Their claim is that since Minerva graduated from a two-year institution he is therefore a non-expert, which means his predictions and analyses are fake, even if he is right, and are a virus infecting society. They seem to be saying that only people with prestigious degrees have the right to speak about such things. You can finally make sense of why a presidential administration full of individuals rich in Gangnam real estate, who attended Korea University, who go to Somang Church, or who are from the Yeongnam region is trying maximize the socioeconomic disparity in education so that only the “haves” can enjoy the most prestigious education.

It has, in fact, been some time since academic elitism (hakbeol juui) started being used as a tool for control by the mainstream elite. Nothing else works quite as well as a tool for hereditary inheritance of wealth and position, and for firming up the walls between the classes, as the lines that define those in society by their alma mater. The cliquish media have long endeavored to tie up the minds of the lower and middle class with belief in this academic elitism. And in 2005, Assemblywoman Jun Yeo-ok, then spokeswoman of the ruling Grand National Party, was naively honest enough to have attacked then President Roh Moo-hyun for only having attended high school.

If the person they’ve arrested really is Minerva, it is they who need to feel the most ashamed. How pathetic their analyses, predictions, and proposals must have been, despite their power and glorious education, for the general public to have been so enthusiastic about the alternative proposals coming from this man. If anything, his low level of education shows you how the country has talented people like him rotting away untapped because of their educational status and how greedy and inept the country’s power elite really is.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]