In 2022 I had the opportunity to attend a two-day conference in Colorado hosted by the Objective Standard Institute.
Although there were many powerful speakers, the one whose story captivated me the most was Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector who in 2007 managed to escape her totalitarian country at age 13 after her father was sentenced to a labor camp. (His “crime”? He was trading sugar, salt, and other spices against the law.)
After making her way to China, Park was sold into slavery but was able to escape again, this time to Mongolia. She eventually made her way to South Korea, and then—in 2014—the United States.
Hearing Park’s trials almost brought me to tears. What was amazing was how positive her outlook on life was after enduring such hardships, personal loss, and deprivations.
‘Untethered From History, Unshackled From Reality’
The human rights violations in North Korea are well known. The communist country has notoriously used starvation as a weapon to subjugate its people for decades and maintain an iron grip on power. More than a decade ago, the U.S. Census cited reports (pdf) estimating as many as 3 million people had died of famine in the country during the 1990s.“In school, we sang a song about Kim Jong Il and how he worked so hard to give our laborers on-the-spot instruction as he traveled around the country, sleeping in his car and eating only small meals of rice balls,” she wrote. “‘Please, please, Dear Leader, take a good rest for us!’ we sang through our tears. ‘We are all crying for you.’”
Park would eventually come to know that everything she was taught in school about equity, communism, and North Korea’s “Dear Leader” was a lie. Living in the United States has also given her a new appreciation of the virtues of freedom and capitalism.
‘Blind to the Prosperity Around Us’
Park’s book couldn’t be better timed. Though capitalism has ushered in unprecedented human prosperity, it’s a reality many Americans are blind to, particularly younger Americans.“We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. ... These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average.”
“People are like ‘why are kids so depressed it must be their PHONES!’ But never mention the fact that we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic [with] record wealth inequality, [zero] social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world ... [you] have to be delusional to look at life in our country [right now] and have any [amount] of hope or optimism.”
Yeonmi Park isn’t blind to these realities. She’s seen hell up close.
If people truly want to understand what hell looks like, they should buy a copy of Park’s new bestselling book. It will likely offer some much-needed perspective.
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