North Korea’s new god

North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-il is reported to have picked his youngest son as a successor, and the mandatory worship has already begun:

In recent weeks, North Korean diplomats abroad have been told to begin to pay homage to Kim Jong-un and some schoolchildren have reportedly been including his name in their songs.

Many believers might argue that such misplaced devotion is a likely consequence of suppressing the true religious instinct.  It’s not immediately obvious to me, however, why it’s better to worship a non-existent, or, to put the most optimistic spin on it, an invisible entity about whom we know nothing, than a concrete human being.  It is not the case that worshipping an absent deity is less prone to producing fanatical and murderous excess.  At least with a living being we know what we’re getting. 

Maybe it’s worship itself that is a little anachronistic in this strenuously democratic age.   The attributes of, and requisite attitudes towards, God appear to me to be a holdover from ages when emperors and tribal chieftains held absolute power.  I myself am not as fervently hostile to the European monarchies and aristocracies as I know I, as the beneficiary of American dynamism, should be.  I feel too much in debt to the artistic legacy that those alleged parasites supported and bequeathed to us.  But most Americans have nothing good to say about the power of lords and kings.  Several conservative commentators, such as Curtis Sliwa, called President Obama a toady for complying with royal etiquette while visiting the Queen of England.  But why then genuflect to the King of Kings in heaven, or kiss the ring of his lordlings on earth? 

Could we conceive of a democratic god or divine assembly?  Or is prostration before an imaginary supreme being wired into us, regardless of the evolution of our political forms.

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17 Responses to North Korea’s new god

  1. gs says:

    ‘Could we conceive of a democratic god or divine assembly? Or is prostration before an imaginary supreme being wired into us, regardless of the evolution of our political forms.’

    1. Iirc Terry Pratchett’s “Small Gods” features a very minor deity which leaps from insignificance into a major place in the pantheon. The book ends with the deity agreeing to be the god of a constitutional religion.

    2. To the limited degree that I understand Taoism, its ‘deity’ does not care about being worshipped. Maybe anthropomorphic gods cannot be democratic because they are modeled on human despots.

  2. kurt9 says:

    Koreans are a fairly stubborn, intransigent people. The best way to model North Korea is to think of it as the nation-state version of a cult. Cults tend to end badly (remember Jim Jones in the late 70’s?).

  3. Kevembuangga says:

    Maybe it’s worship itself that is a little anachronistic in this strenuously democratic age.

    Unfortunately it could very well be that the worship of “something” is an emotional need for a large part of the population.

  4. John says:

    I guess given the choice, I would rather people worship a god than another person. The values of the god generally reflect the values of the community. (There are few religions where the main god has totally different values from the community that worships the god.) Therefore, god worship is to some extent a communitarian act whereupon a person is reenforced with the values of the community. Also, to an extent, the god takes on the values of the individual doing the worshipping.

    So, you can use the same “Wisdom of the Crowd” argument that is used in favor of democracy. You are usually better off having political decisions made by consensus than by having a single person make all the rules–unless I get to make the rules :). A person who takes orders from his god is actually following his own conscience plus the rules of the community. Like they said in the Federalist Papers, the more factions, the better. A king who rules by divine right has no checks on his power.

    I agree that the ultimate problem is the human need to worship anything at all, but I don’t see an easy way around this problem.

  5. kurt9 says:

    Murray Rothbard has talked about how the concept of original sin is irrelevant to Man and the State. If man is inherently good, then everything is fine. If man is inherently evil, then it makes no sense to put some men in charge of everyone else.

  6. Ivan Karamazov says:

    god, or just alpha-male?

    Heard an interesting comment once, on a documentary about apes in the wild. They said that one of the common observed behaviors was that everyone (else) in the tribe was constantly stealing glances at the alpha male. Said another way, the alpha male is the one everyone is constantly looking at. Perhaps we have an instinct to look at the alpha male, and perhaps, as an unintended consequence, those we frequently look at trigger some unconscious affirmation that that person has heightened importance and status.

    If something like this is true, it would help explain the undeserved weight we seem to give to TV and movie people. We are constantly looking at them.

    And it would explain why dictators and human ‘gods’ always seem to make sure their picture is EVERYWHERE. They don’t need to know WHY that is important, to know that it seems to help/work.

    This was also my big disappointment in the Bush’s. They rarely let themselves be “seen”, and thus missed, I believe, the unconscious reenforcement of their leader status ( if the instinct is indeed there as it is in the apes). And notice how Obama is not making that mistake.

  7. Athena says:

    @Kevembuangga
    Yes, SO unfortunate-especially when you consider all those universities that THOSE religious people founded in Europe.

  8. Reeds says:

    “And it would explain why dictators and human ‘gods’ always seem to make sure their picture is EVERYWHERE.”

    And yet YHWH says “Make yourself no graven image.” Hrmmm…

  9. tom says:

    Shucks, I just saw Brian Williams kowtow to The Chosen One on national TV today. He did everything except tug on his forelock and click his heels.

    I can just imagine what Katie Couric would’ve done. I’m sure she would’ve bowed just a little deeper.

  10. Dblade says:

    I’m not sure how a God can be democratic, if that same God created everything in space and time. To be democratic is at base to be equals at least in type-we aren’t democratic with foxes and geese. Worship is more of a valid response because of the inequality. After all, we aren’t keeping the universe going or are capable of making universes. We also aren’t even of the same order to claim equality or even I wager a rough comprehension of God to be able to do much else than be in awe.

    With people, its absurd because we very much are the same. Some people are smarter, stronger, or more charismatic, but these are just degrees in type. The church of Elvis always must be tongue-in-cheek, because to any self-reflecting adherent all their founder did was sing a mean rock song. I think that’s why the only real human religious figures worshiped are always tied to God in some way, because they have to transcend being human for it to stick.

  11. Lisa says:

    @gs
    If you’re really interested in a democratic god, check out a 12 step meeting in your neighborhood. Here you have this “Higher Power”, where the tradition is unity based on the recognition that everyone has a unique “Higher Power”. It is an anonymous, vibrant force for freedom from slavery to appetites in the United States today.

    The alternative to that slavery has to be commitment to something better than those appetites, the intuitive balance between my real needs, my whimsical wants, and my prior commitments to others.

    I suppose it is evident from all this it comes from a knee-jerk believer.

  12. Chaz706 says:

    The concept of deity excludes democracy. Gods rule not by edict or decree but by being the desire of their worshipers. Thus, Gods are jealous, larger than life, something more than man. They are an ideal in a sense of their abilities or their features that make them an object of worship. Perhaps it is how they look upon their worshipers with benevolence, or how they command the elements of the earth. Perhaps there’s a penalty for not worshiping this deity. Perhaps this deity is enshrined in an idol or not… or perhaps a man claiming himself to the the proxy of a deity.

    But Gods rule their subjects in a much different manner than man. Perhaps then this is why men aspire not to be revered as Kings but Gods. And this is why they’re so dangerous. If only all men who aspired to govern learned the lesson of King Canute. Who after trying to command the sea to calm itself in vain, he turned to his subjects and said that all things were subject to God.

  13. Kevembuangga says:

    @Athena
    all those universities that THOSE religious people founded in Europe.

    Oh, sure!
    That WAS the worshipping which provided the incentives to create and fund universities, really…
    And the worshipping of “ancient wisdom” like Aristotle and Early Church Fathers brought a lot of usefull scholastic “studies”, endless hair splitting about the sex of angels, among the highest acomplishments of mankind indeed.
    Too bad Galileo was the party pooper!

  14. Kevembuangga says:

    @kurt9
    If man is inherently good, then everything is fine. If man is inherently evil, then it makes no sense to put some men in charge of everyone else.

    If you stick to the same simplistic good/bad dilemma as the religitards you are not going to come out any better than them on ethical conundrums.
    Looking for the good/bad value of anything is akin to the old joke “Did you stop beating your wife?”
    It’s missing several dimensions, in-group/out-group distinction (and degrees…), good/bad for WHAT, good/bad for WHOM, long-term/short-term, etc… (probably many more I miss).

  15. Dave says:

    “Could we conceive of a democratic god or divine assembly?”

    Sure. 52.9% of American voters had no problem with conceiving it.

  16. Ploni says:

    The question was:

    Several conservative commentators, such as Curtis Sliwa, called President Obama a toady for complying with royal etiquette while visiting the Queen of England. But why then genuflect to the King of Kings in heaven, or kiss the ring of his lordlings on earth?

    The idea is that you bow down before your superior, not your equal.

    The attributes of, and requisite attitudes towards, God appear to me to be a holdover from ages when emperors and tribal chieftains held absolute power.

    And vice versa. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” That was the famous opening sentence of the title essay of Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, which spawned a whole field of study. Interesting if true.

  17. Chris says:

    So, you can use the same “Wisdom of the Crowd” argument that is used in favor of democracy. You are usually better off having political decisions made by consensus than by having a single person make all the rules–unless I get to make the rules :).

    But, in practice, most religions don’t have individual freedom of conscience – God’s will is what the Pope says it is, or what the Bible says it is. (Or both, and pay no attention to the inconsistencies.) A multiplicity of religions with individuals free to change or abandon them at will seems better, but religions also try to deter abandonment through terrorist threats of murdering the apostate on earth, or torturing him eternally in the afterlife, or both.

    @#8: Yeah, but his *symbols* are still all over the place. Maybe it doesn’t have to be representational to have the psychological effect – flags, for example, might work the same way. (The implications of this idea for religious displays on government property – why *is* it that believers aren’t content to display their religious displays on church property, or on the believers’ own property? – are interesting.) It’s just that few humans have a symbol other than their own likeness or name.

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