Conspiracy and Contrivance

"Where tyranny becomes law rebellion becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith

"The rich man's primary dilemma is how to extract money from those who have none." Dave MacCannell

You can quote me on that. 

You've seen the sentiment of Jefferson in the pages and posts of this blog before and you've seen that quote by Adam Smith. I think it's one of my favourites because of the delicious irony of the "Father of Capitalism" laying down the all time best burn on capitalism! This post will be about one tiny part of capitalism.

Capitalism is an unsustainable cycle and the end of the cycle will be marked by rebellion because those in charge of trying to sustain the unsustainable must revert to tyranny. The sign that we are approaching the end, and that very tyranny is when the rich have impoverished the poor to such a state that they now have to devise tyrannical ways to extract money from those who have none. This sounds like an impossibility but, credit where credit's due, wealth is a great motivator and from greed have ingenious enterprises arisen. In short, the rich have figured out how to get money from people who have none: give them the (false) hope of getting some. If that's not tyranny, what the hell is?

I have used this example before on this blog but it was an eye-opener to be sure! In China there are great hoards of people, sometimes euphemistically labelled "migrant workers," who go from job to job hoping that they will eventually find one that pays. They work a month for a company, (and in China this is rarely a month worth of 9-5) hope that at the end of the month there will be pay, but if not they move on and try again. They don't have legal recourse, nor the time to pursue it. They go from one exploitative employer to another, many dying during the process. This is China's major contribution to the "global economy" and don't kid yourself, we all take advantage of it. In fact most countries have imported the idea. I worked for a company called Hwasheng in China and every month they hired a different girl to help me with visa issues, translation, and general settling into China. Not one of these girls were paid. At the end of the month the old girl would leave and a new girl would arrive. The most curious part about it was that none of them ever seemed that upset or rebellious. Maybe, like Korea, the younger generation in China has been trained well not to stand up for themselves to delay the end of the Chinese iteration of capitalism, but it'll happen. 

Lotteries, scams, cons, politics, dreams, myths, rags-to-riches stories, Disney movies, they are all designed to give the destitute hope of rising out of poverty and maybe even becoming rich someday. But there are pithy aphorisms that keep the poor in their place. The rich invest most of their money and spend the rest. The poor spend all of their money and invest the rest. Or, the rich buy assets while the poor buy liabilities they think are assets. In truly capitalist countries the worlds of the rich and poor are so far removed from each other as to prohibit even a rudimentary understanding of the other. I've just used the word "invest" but wouldn't have the slightest idea how to go about doing it and the vast majority of the really really good investment opportunities wouldn't even be open to my broke ass. 

I'm no expert on most of these scams and schemes but I'll tell you one in which I am experienced and becoming more and more privy to the diabolical inner mechanics of: education. What is education if not the dream of improving ones station in life through learning? Nobody goes to university just to get smart. They go expecting to obtain knowledge and skills that can make them money. Who clings to education as hope for the future more than the poor? And who but the downright despicable exploit this hope?

Imagine if you will a school... Well, not exactly a school. In fact not in any tangible way is it a school by educational standards. In fact, let's start again...

Imagine there's a wedding or some such social occasion. By pure chance this wedding is attended by some highly unscrupulous people who have somehow lucked into positions of wealth and power. They might be inheritance wealth, flim flam or mafia wealth, it doesn't much matter. They engage in what Adam Smith calls that seldom encountered diversionary conversation with each other. As dependable as the natural phenomena that make the world go round, the conversation between businessmen swings around to contrivance and conspiracy. They want to do the unthinkable: they want to hijack the good names of others to untarnish their own. They want to do something so unprincipled that the public will believe they are principled. They want to build a lucrative business by cheating people, but they want that business to appear as something honourable. They want to get rich and become reputable at the same time. One of the wedding guests suggests they become "educators." It was so successful after the Korean war when Korea was a poor country and the citizens of Korea wanted to rise out of poverty that they shouldn't have too much trouble selling the idea to some other poor countries like, for instance, Bangladesh or Nepal. The sweetest part of the deal is (thank you China) there are lots of businesses in Korea who don't want to pay the wages that privilege has caused Koreans to expect. Why not get these students jobs too? Restrictions on international students working while studying have eased significantly due to some tenacious lobbying by fellow businessmen. These kids are so broke and 5 thousand won and hour looks like so much money to them, they'll jump at midnight shifts gutting fish or waiting tables for abusive bosses who pay way less than minimum wage. And by being such a valuable source of cheap labour in the community, business irregularities might be overlooked by regulators if, say a law or two might be fractured. 

"What kind of laws one might ask? Well first of all we will need to attract good, reputable teachers in order to look legit, so we'll offer them a contract of 20 hours a week. A lot of universities allow teachers to get away with working this little or even fewer hours but not our 'school.' We'll add more hours to the teachers' duties once they are trapped in the country and have signed contracts for a full year. We'll give them abstractions like on-call hours and nebulous rules like give every student as much counselling as they require and we won't clarify anything - certainly not in the contracts - but we'll create an atmosphere of militaristic unquestioned authority and cultivate fear and intimidation by giving public official warnings for violations of these ambiguous rules. OUR teachers will work Korean hours, not the lazy hours foreign professors enjoy, and we'll even include a clause in the contract that says we won't pay them for these hours whether they exceed 40 a week or not."

"But isn't that illegal?" 

"They signed the contracts agreeing to it. And besides, with all the low cost labour we bring, who's going to split legal hairs here?" 

"BRILLIANT! But what if one of the teachers challenges the rules or even the laws?"

"We'll fire them. For a foreigner the legal recourse is so convoluted and even the government agencies to contact are so bogged down with purposely complex rules and regulations, most of which are difficult or impossible to find in English, that only a friggin' idiot would challenge us. Besides, we pay so little that they'd run out of money before they could complete that challenge. Why, we won't even have to pay the legal one month of pay in lieu of notice. It'll take more than a month for the teacher to get the government to do anything and that's only if the teacher can figure out how to do that."

"I don't usually say this but I'm kinda glad I came to this social event! Screw the teachers, screw the students, and screw the law, we're gonna make a pile of money outta this!" And a round of cigar smoking, pretentions drink drinking, and self-congratulatory back slapping ensues. 

Bent on Walking Straight Lines

 Not too long ago while coming home from Quiz night in Songtan I heard a girl who was descending one of the requisite calisthenically yo-yoing staircases in most transfers between Seoul subway stations trying to conceal her sobs and it caught my attention. Before we get to the girl, I recently read that Koreans walk 10,000 steps a day

and found in the description the partially satisfying explanation of why. The explanation included walking aps and hiking popularity in Korea but the real reason I vibed with was BMW. Bus, metro, walk. I had to put my own comment on the Facebook post, which has since gotten a few likes, that said something like go anywhere in Seoul by subway and if you have two or more transfers - there's yer 10 grand. And although there are escalators and even the moving sidewalks in many of these pilgrimages between subway lines, they are often under repair or just turned off. In a country so image-conscious I don't think it's a stretch to say that the subway lines are purposely made to involve superfluous stepping and when the average weight of Koreans rises above a certain level, ambulant assistance devices are "repaired" or turned off and worse still in summer the air conditioning on trains is turned down. Paranoid Uncle Dave again? Maybe... but if it's not already the plan, if someone shows this post to Lee Jae Myung, it might soon be. Transfers between subway lines will be lengthened and maybe scattered along them will be fitness stops like on the hiking trails with pull-up bars, sit-up benches, and other exercise equipment. Koreans will start a fad (and buckle up Adidas/Nike/Reebok/Puma/Under Armour and Lulu friggin' Lemon, you're about to get Korean fadded!) and transit takers of all sorts will get decked out to the nines in their fitness attire. Speaking of the Korean hiking popularity... they are something to see! 

There is no gadget, or accessory that the avid Korean hiker won't buy, for double its worth, just in case they might need it on their next hike. I've been on 2K fun walks in the park and seen ajummas and ajoshis like the ones pictured with their backpack radios playing bongjak music and their tin cups tinkling while carabinered to their Everest-worthy packs along with other supplies or the latest Labubu. They don't go halfway. So get ready Korea for subway sweatin' to the oldies. Leotards, pony tails, spandex, headbands, and leg warmers that'll make Seoul Station look like a 1980's Bally Total Fitness. 

And I'll get no credit. The person who read this will claim it as his/her own patriotic idea, be paid millions to become minister of fitness in the country, and Korea will show the world how they cleverly keep their citizens slim and trim. It wouldn't be the first time I've made other people rich...

But back to the girl. I tried not to let her notice I noticed. It's something I see more frequently than I'd like and being pretty close to the very real suffering adolescents go through in Korea, I have a soft spot for them. Most countries start piling on the pressure for PISA tests when the kids are around 14. Here they are trophies to be compared to others by competitive parents their whole lives. Trophies to be shown off, or failures. Overworked and underplayed was the very first impression I got of the kids in this country and it's the same in Japan and China. Everything is better when you run it like a business, right? So how 'bout raising kids that way? Spend, even OVERspend, but only if the shareholders get good ROI and always stay ahead of the competition. 

Of course there was no way I could have known that this was what the girl was crying about even though the dreaded Suneungs had just taken place and this year's were exceptionally evil! The suneungs are the college entrance exams, an 8-hour test that basically decides if you were worth giving birth to and if you should bother to try to succeed any more. EJU's in Japan, Gaokao in China. Suicide statistics are hidden all over Asia so as not to have these educational abscesses excised like they should be. And if you think you've seen cheating... like the hyper-capitalist system that inspired them, these "standardized" tests are LOUSY with cheating. And why not when the exams are the epitome of difficulty for difficulty's sake? And, of course, it's always the kids of the wealthy who can afford instruction not in getting smarter, but in how to BEAT these diabolic exams that have an unfair advantage. The English part of this year's suneung is a good example:

If you watch the above video, read the comments. I read one from a Korean guy that said this test just made the multi-billion dollar after-school industry sometimes called the "shadow" education of Asia, a lot more money. 

As Fate would have it, I stopped on the subway platform right in front of a bench and waited by the doors. The crying girl sat on the bench and I heard her sobbing, sniffing, and tapping away on her cellphone. Then I got on the train and she sat directly across from me. Now I could SEE her face. Her face was not pretty by Korean or any standards but she reminded me of many students I had had in Korea who were not the beauties this society provides with so many advantages. This made me empathize even more thinking of the bullying some of my favourite female students had to put up with from the popular kids and wondering if this wasn't part of her sorrow. She convulsed with a fresh sob and I saw impossibly large and lava-like tears slide down her cheeks before she covered her shame with her hoodie hood and fought back the next round of convulsions. I sincerely wanted to sit beside her and squeeze her with an avuncular arm softly consoling her with wise placation spoken in Korean but language deficiency and social mores about "creepiness" prevented me. 

She got off the train before I did. I will never know what caused her heart to break that day and she will never know I even cared. Neither sat right with me. For the rest of the night and even in my dreams that night I questioned whether I was right to do nothing. I questioned whether society should put so much pressure on such young kids. I questioned whether we should really call ourselves "civilized" when we have created such a fear of UNcommon sexual deviance that it precludes common courtesy and compassion. I thought of parallel stories I could write in which I just gave her a silent hug and she went on to a happy life or I did nothing and she lost all hope and spiraled into depression. I also thought of how I would never know if she would live a happy life or not. Worst of all I wondered if she might become one of the hidden suicide statistics of Asia. 

Just yesterday I found myself walking down a narrow Korean sidewalk in the anodyne, give little offense, stranger in a strange land being a good ambassador style that I have found necessary in streets, grocery aisles, subway stations, hiking trails, bike paths, roads, pretty much anywhere Koreans move themselves from place to place. It's a constant source of annoyance and it has graced the pages and posts of my railings before that Korean people, and to be fair, most people in Asia, seem bent on walking in straight lines. (self chuckle) Bent on walking straight lines. That is just subtly contradictory enough to be a book title or a sweeping statement that could be used to sum up a large group of people like the kind George Carlin described when he said, 

An old couple, one that might don untold fortunes worth of hiking paraphernalia to go for a hike and see the colours on one of the mountains of Korea on a fall weekend were walking a trifle straight-linedly toward me. As is my still unabashed proclivity, I got out of their way. Now, the sidewalk was not even wide enough for two but they did not abandon fully abreast formation as they advanced on my position. I could see no sign of that changing. So I did not just move over on the sidewalk, I had to move over to where the telephone and lamp posts were and actually put one foot off the curb and onto the street that was bumper-to-bumper with automobiles. As I did so out of fantastically unacknowledged courtesy my shoulder bumped against a lamppost. On the lamppost was a sign that had been hung with a metal clamp and the clamp was tightened with one screw. The screw held the two razor sharp sides of the clamp together. It was a cold day and I had on my newly purchased winter jacket the left shoulder of which now has a gash that will either have to be sewn or will get larger and larger until the jacket needs to be thrown out.