What Does Post-Cold War Thinking Mean?

Moon Jae-in seems fixated on South Korea’s “geopolitical” role, but I will address that point another time. This time, however, we could see just how instinctive and outdated Moon Jae-in’s thinking is.

In Escape from Freedom, Frankfurt School psychologist Erich Fromm opens the book by saying, “The history of modern Europe and America centers on the effort to gain freedom by breaking the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound human beings.” In my view, the “Cold War mindset” that persisted for half a century after World War II appears, after all, to be an extension of that “effort to gain freedom.” In both the Constitution and people’s patterns of behavior, Korea too seems to think and act according to an undefined Cold War mindset—that is, according to capitalist ethics.

Meanwhile, did the people living under Soviet influence during the Cold War actually want a totalitarian state? In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek points out that “the feeling of oppression in totalitarian states is… generally far less pronounced… because people are made to think that the policies of the totalitarian government are what they themselves want.” Perhaps former President Moon Jae-in may think that Koreans prefer totalitarianism.

Moon Jae-in seems to have used the phrase “Cold War mindset” to mean a negative and outdated way of thinking. I, by contrast, would propose something new: that the very fact that the free world ultimately won the Cold War is itself evidence that the free world’s logic behind the “Cold War mindset” was correct.

I propose the full-fledged revival of the “Cold War mindset.” The only system humanity has discovered so far in which people can be most fully human, most peaceful, and most prosperous is the “Cold War mindset.” In other words, the “Cold War mindset” is the way of thinking of liberalism and capitalism.

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Original title: 탈냉전적 사고는 무엇일까?

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseo Toron Moim

Date: 2023-07-05

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=2&idx=25865