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realized two things that made me want to write the pages you now hold in your hand: first, that many of my fellow Americans have lost the ability to appreciate the glory of this country the way I do, and second, that many of them are not able to recognize certain threats the way I can.
When I clarify that I’m referring not to the quality of life or system of government, of course, but to the control of institutions by a small class of people eager to punish dissenters, it doesn’t help—they still look away in embarrassment.
When you hear stories about the apathy and cruelty that ordinary people find themselves resorting to in socialist systems, don’t judge them: A human being alienated from her family and facing starvation has been robbed of her capacity to connect with the world around her.
I had to close the book on her, and step into a different life: one dedicated to human rights, and improving the lives of people suffering under tyranny. A life of meaning. A life that would make my father proud.
(In North Korea, malnourishment and the attendant lack of vitamins and minerals has resulted in millions of people genetically identical to their South Korean neighbors being significantly shorter on average, by as many as three to five inches.)
Even if I was “traumatized,” what would be the point of having survived it only to have to pay someone else to complain to about it, rather than turn it into something positive?
In many American schools and universities, it is no longer acceptable to allow different ideas to compete with or openly challenge one another.
That’s why the subversion of critical thinking is so dangerous. It is the mechanism by which humans lose their faculties as individuals and succumb to groupthink, which is a precondition for every totalitarian society on Earth, and which ultimately felled my father.
In a word, that isn’t what happened. It turned out that the purpose of a conference like Women in the World was not to mobilize financial capital and political power among people who are fortunate enough to possess it in order to help people suffering in places like China and North Korea; it was—if there was any point at all—to passionately discuss the suffering of women in America.
I started to believe, as I still do now, that the only way to think for yourself is to ignore the mainstream media, and largely forget the daily news cycle, and connect instead with the great minds of the past, who know all of our problems better than we do ourselves.
There is a reason why the great books of Western civilization are all banned in dictatorships.
I remember him telling me then that the benefit of reading books, if you could find them, was that you could learn common sense, which you don’t get taught in classrooms, because they are filled with propaganda.
In others, I feel that Someone above dealt me this hand, and expects me to do something with it beyond enjoying myself. He expects me not only to count my blessings but to share them.
At one point in the evening, when I meekly ventured to share who I was and why on earth I’d been invited to attend this event with them, I was asked never to mention them in any of my speeches or in any public forum, due to their relationships with China.
“post-feminism”: the idea that gender itself is nothing more than an ideological construct invented by men to oppress women.
This often caused them to live lives of almost comical hypocrisy: “There is no difference between men and women, marriage is antiquated, and children are a burden. Why don’t any of these men want to be exclusive with me or even just call me back?”
In the midst of arguing that gender is a construct, complaining about “toxic masculinity” and “mansplaining,” declaring that the idea of a “protector” or “provider” is sexist, that marriage is outdated, and that children rob you of your freedom, no one seemed to stop and wonder if they might be personally responsible for their own unhappiness.
But I just figured that any man who would be frightened of commitment would probably also be too frightened to be responsible or loving, and therefore not worth my time.
As Viktor E. Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and great psychiatrist, notes in his masterpiece, Man’s Search for Meaning, “If you find a why, then you can bear any how.”
Happiness is not material success or recognition or even comfort. It’s becoming a parent, being a good daughter, being a good friend, and lending a helping hand to anyone less fortunate.
As many wise people have pointed out, happiness is a choice. My mother once told me that without gratitude, happiness is impossible. “When I ask God for happiness,” she said, “he tells me instead to learn to be grateful.” She (and He) was right.
We live in a physical world, and our bodies are part of that world; as such, almost everything we experience takes place within the confines of our brain. It is our brain that is in charge of our relation to the external world, and that interprets the world and our experiences in it.
Thankfully, the brain does not have “a life of its own”—it is actually one of the most controllable organs in our bodies, as long as we’re aware of it.
That’s why I strongly believe that the great majority of the suffering we experience is actually caused by ourselves and the decisions we make (or don’t make). In other words, feelings of devastation mostly come from the way we think about “the problem,” rarely from the problem itself.
The third and biggest element in human suffering is actually unnecessary suffering—the type that is within our control to stop and that is our own doing in the first place.
A certain degree of suffering is natural, even essential, to human life—but the only way through, the only path for righting the ship, is to be completely, entirely at one with yourself: to be authentically you.
Along these lines, “wokeness” now appears to be just an obnoxious rhetorical style that helps cover for something else: a coercive system administered by governing elites that demands adherence to an ever-expanding corpus of basically random sets of laws and regulations designed to keep the lower classes in check.
But the true aim of anticapitalism is not justice or social betterment—it is to narrow the boundaries within which people are capable of thinking for themselves. The freedom that capitalism grants to individual human beings to think and act for themselves, thereby accumulating wealth, is the reason it is under increasing suspicion in America today.
The answer is obvious, but the “wealth gap” is still demonized in America, as if the space that allows for upward mobility should itself be shrunk, leaving no room whatsoever for each generation to do better than the last.
dangerous neighborhoods remain dangerous. This suggests that the priority is never to actually improve the lives of individual people and families, but to simply increase the number of people who depend on new and existing government programs because they have nowhere else to turn.
The family remains the foundation of American society, the single most important institution in the life of children, far more so than any government agency dedicated to child education or welfare.
The destruction of the family creates more government clients.
The dirty secret about left-wing attacks on capitalism, the family, and meritocracy in America is that they’re regarded as quite the hilarious joke in China—which is happy to watch Americans devalue and degrade every source of strength they have.
The real power of cancel culture is the fear that it instills in the minds of millions of ordinary people, convincing them to think twice about expressing themselves freely or else risk having their lives destroyed by real and/or online mobs.
At the end of the day, this is the object of cancel culture in America: to deprive people of the right or ability to express thoughts that run counter to official narratives, so that eventually, they won’t even know how.
prioritizing the law over our own feelings. And it means defending the rights of individuals—even ones we disagree with—from the mob.
In other words, we must take the path of resistance. Like the pilgrims, we must take the road that makes us uncomfortable, that is uncertain and frightening, if that’s what the truth demands. Because that is the only road to freedom.
China is also at the forefront of science and technology. It is the global leader in payments, online retail, and infrastructure like high-speed rail, and will likely soon dominate consumer electronics.
Looking at qualitative indices of freedom, the only countries that cumulatively scored the same as or worse than China were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (the “Axis of Evil”) plus Cuba and Turkmenistan.
Ancient China was responsible for some of the greatest innovations in the history of mankind—paper, printing, gunpowder, alcohol, tea, umbrellas, rockets, and paper money all trace their existence to Ancient China.
It is estimated that Mao—his rule, his policies, his government, his leadership—is personally responsible for up to 78 million human deaths. “Socialist paradise.”
What gives their captives the power and control they need to keep them enslaved is a single threat: “If you don’t do what I tell you, I will report you to the police.”
The fact is, a large segment of America’s elite classes and most productive industries have been purchased by the Chinese. Big Tech, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the universities are all dependent on Chinese money and markets to keep their profits trending upward.
It also became painfully clear that U.S. industry had outsourced the most basic capabilities to China: America, the most technologically advanced industrial country in history, could not even make its own masks or ventilators.
The fact is, America’s China policy is not even really made by the American president anymore. It is made by the lobbying and interest groups and oligarchical classes that are dependent on the Chinese market, regardless of the effect on ordinary American workers and consumers.
All regimes are capable of violence and abuse. But more than torture or imprisonment or corporal punishment, it is the mental enslavement of Kowon that remains for me the embodiment of socialism.
Today, there is very little countrywide consensus on any political or cultural matters. What’s more, the internet, social media, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle have exposed the corruption and incompetence of many of our political and cultural elites, to the point where most Americans no longer have any faith or trust in their elites. This in turn has led to historically low levels of voter participation in local and state politics, declining rates of church attendance and religious belief, and plummeting rates of family formation. Unwilling to take responsibility for any of these
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My American friends and colleagues often speak of the importance of “taking care of yourself” and “putting yourself first,” and I don’t necessarily disagree. But it’s not enough to “do you”—it’s just as important, if not more so, to have purpose, to set an example for your children, and to devote yourself to something bigger.
No amount of therapy, dieting, meditation, or “self-care” can do what meaning can do.
The sheer abundance of material comfort had made me a bit soft and irritable in ways I never was before; the emphasis on individuality, “finding your own voice,” and “living your own truth” made me a little less instinctively compassionate for other people than I had been; and I’d gotten into the habit of complaining when things didn’t work, or when people made mistakes, or when events didn’t go my way.
