The autogenocide of the elite
I don't have time right now to flesh this out, but I just read this disturbing statistic on The Marmot's Hole:
While Korean international students and Korean-American students account for about 10 percent of all students in the Ivy League, studies show that they comprise more than 60 percent of suicides in the Ivy League.
The figure itself comes via my old employer, The JoongAng Daily.
A month of two ago I finished Jared Diamond's "Collapse," and was struck by how often the pressures of complicated societies led to their own extinction. The chapter on Easter Island is by now almost famous for its effectively eerie description of a society destroying itself. On Easter, the competition to become "big men" drove the villages to erect larger and larger stone monuments, each requiring more and more logs to be put up. What started out as a lush and fertile island shriveled up once its forest cover disappeared, and the people starved.
Somehow I feel we're seeing something similar in Korea.
That's interesting, but I'm not sure I see it. The Easter Islanders were stuck on their island. Koreans can leave anytime they want.
Posted by:KoreaWorm | April 23, 2008 at 07:52 AM