한국의 지식인과 좌파 이데올로기

Abstract

These days anti-intellectualism is getting popular in South Korea, a knowledge-based society all of whose members can express and share their thoughts and emotions of the world, with the spread of internet and smart-phone. From results of doing a literature review and a participatory observation to figure out implications with the attitude against the intellectual as a trend, this paper shows that the intellectual myth, referring to 'a gadfly of their society,' got cracked in habits of the heart deeply rooted among ordinary people. It means that South Korea falls into a situation of social divisions, that the hardship of daily livings, compounded with the widening of income disparities, makes people rely much more upon the intellectual in finding a way out, and that a breach of what people trusted in the intellectual, such a perfidy opposite to preserving the common good and unity of society through rediscovery of sharing traditions, leads them to deny the whole learned population as a collective discontent. One of the causes that bring about a denial of the existence of intellectuals is the social system of Korea in which knowledge has been structured as a pivotal tool of gaining power positions. For it forces the majority of intellectuals become 'a worldly fame pursuing type.' This is verified by the fact that the intellectual belonging to 'the type of a pioneer of the time' has been very rare throughout its entire history. Leftist intellectuals are no exception, as exemplified by toadyism of their stick to the authenticity of Marxism, by elitism of the vanguard party doctrine not with, but for, the working class, and by arrivism of using as a means to get into the dominion group their career of struggles against the government. And there also have not been any attempts by them to clear away such chronic usages as nepotism, groupism, college rankism, authoritarianism, and the like. The anti-intellectual trend therefore must be read the demand of this time that each of the people becomes all an intellectual by deeply reflecting upon how the intellectual's sense of entitlement, operating covertly both in false-consciousness of the spokesperson for the weak and in political institution of the mouthpiece for the people, transforms knowledge into ideology, drives society into ideological struggles and divisions, and hinders the development of history.