Keeping up with the Kims

I have been increasingly disturbed over the rash of suicides reported in the Korean news since we've been here (at least 10, by my unofficial count). I'd thought that maybe my impression that there were a lot of people killing themselves here was mistaken, that we just happened to come here during a fluke suicide surge. I thought wrong. Suicide is now the fourth leading cause of death in South Korea (and first among men 18-29). Apparently it's getting hard keeping up with the Kims.

I read an interesting article in the LA Times that lays out what I think, based on my limited time here, is a good hypothesis for the recent surge in suicide rates in the Land of Morning Calm. The explanation goes like this:

Korea's rapid change from an agricultural society forty-five years ago to an urban industrialized society in the '90s didn't allow it time to change from a traditional society where social status is everything and the competition to increase one's family's fortunes through one's children is unrelenting and horribly intense. This meant that Koreans worked hellish hours and made enormous sacrifices for their children, whom they constantly pressured to spend more hours studying. As long as Koreans' material fortunes continued to improve -- as long as their incomes increased -- they could be optimistic that their hard work would translate into increased social status. Then came the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when South Korea's economy collapsed, and took most Korean families' incomes with it. That episode, which Korea has only just recovered from, shattered the optimism most people had that their hard work would mean higher status. Without such assurance, Koreans increasingly don't know why they're working so hard (and by "so hard" I mean parents regularly working 80-90 hours a week, and kids regularly spending 14-15 hours a day in school); they just know that they have no idea how else to live. They have to achieve social status, and the only way they know to do that is to work harder, only that strategy is proving increasingly less effective. And so the insane pressure they live under and their shattered optimism have combined to create an existential crisis among increasing numbers of Koreans at all levels of society. Faced with confusion as to why they have to live the way they do, and desperately seeking any effective means to escape the crushing competition for social status, more and more Koreans now decide that death is the best option.

So South Korea now has one of the world's highest suicide rates and one of the world's lowest fertility rates. Sounds like a good recipe to not ensure national survival.

It could be worse, though.

Just imagine what the situation would be like if there had also been a massive influx of displaced Muslims looking to out-breed, convert, or blow up the indigenous population over the past 20 years, as there has been in France and Britain. Those two countries are only now coming to grips with their Islam problem, and they weren't doing Muslims who'd moved there any gratuitous favors like knocking themselves off at record rates along the way. In South Korea? They'd be like 70% of the population by now and would have long since made sharia a way of life from Seoul to Busan. So, Koreans aren't having kids and the ones they do have are killing themselves at alarming rates. But at least they can still be Buddhists or Christians or atheists without fear of being killed for apostasy.

Like I said, it could be worse.