I know those who read my articles prefer when I write my own articles, without showing LLM chat transcripts. What I have found in conversations over the years isn’t that the answers I offer are interesting to someone else, but the types of questions I ask are more interesting.
This article will start with my words, but end with a related chat with Gemini.
In the 2020s I did a deep-dive on anti-racism, which led me to anti-colonialism, and a different understanding of the society I grew up in. This is specifically the Dominion of Canada institutions within the Great Lakes region in the south-of-49th parallel region of the province of Ontario that was named after Lake Ontario in 1867 (The term “Ontario” is most commonly linked to the Wendat word ontarí:io or various Haudenosaunee languages using the word kanadario—meaning “great lake,” “beautiful lake,” or “sparkling water”).
Throughout my life, I observed that other people found my questions interesting. I would ask questions about things they took for granted. Some people found that fascinating, and other people found it annoying – some even got angry as they incorrectly guessed the motivation of being argumentative.
As part of the Indigenous Studies I came across the concept of “worldviews”, and that opened up for me to finally understand how it is that I saw the world entirely differently than the mainstream society around me.
A worldview (also world-view or world view) or Weltanschauung is a fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society towards the world around them and its workings, encompassing an essential part of the individual’s or society’s knowledge, culture, and point-of-view. When two parties observe the same real-world phenomenon, if their worldviews differ, one party may perceive elements or make assumptions that the other does not, leading to differing conclusions, despite the shared empirical point of reference.
Why talk about “Western” worldviews so much?
The dominant worldview in the society I live under is considered “Western”, as the Dominion of Canada was formed under settler-colonialism with a specific French Empire, Dutch Empire, and British Empire history.
As I have a more relational way of thinking, it is quite logical for me to discuss how I exist in relation to specific worldviews:
Given I live under the institutions of Canada, Western European settler-colonial (French, Dutch, British), I have a relation to those institutions and their identity, values, culture and worldviews.
Given my ancestry, Scottish, Irish and French worldviews.
Given where I live, worldviews of nationalities domestic (Indigenous, given relationship to colonialism) to this region such as the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and various unaligned nations.
Given who I married, worldviews from South Asia – specifically Hinduism.
A Worldview logical fallacy
I regularly run into this problem, so I want to address it here.
Likely a majority within the West grant “honour by association” to ideologies that are associated with the West. There is then a false-binary applied that claims that those who do not grant that “honour by association” must be instead granting it “guilt by association”.
In their minds, someone needs to be either “for” or “against” something, as opposed to simply not caring about that specific thing.
Whether an ideology is or is not “Western” didn’t matter to me, as that was not part of my own identity even if it is part of the identity of the institutions of Canada.
I did not go on a journey intending to disagree with ideologies that are regularly grouped within Western European “Enlightenment” or Western European “Liberalism”. I didn’t even know what “Enlightenment” was, or an accurate idea of what “Liberalism” was, when I started to notice patterns.
I did deep dives into problems I perceived. I didn’t superficially stop at economic systems like “Capitalism” or “Socialism”, but go further to where those ideas came from (and if the problems I notice are in any relevant way different in those economic ideas), as well as the ideological context of these systems.
I came to a series of ideologies I didn’t agree with (Anthropocentrism and thus Anthropocentric notions of property, Androcentrism, Individualism, Universalism, linear time and the myth of progress, etc), and still wondered why the society I lived in was stuck in these (IMO foreign and outdated) ideologies.
Ahh — worldviews attached to personal identity, and “honour by association” granted by people within certain worldviews for any ideology that is associated with “their” worldviews.
Today’s set of questions were observed in other chats on Substack. While I know the theory behind Western European “universalism” which can help us to seek out universal truths, in reality within specific cultures (including the mainstream Western culture that Canada exists within) pre-existing social hierarchies ended up meaning that it was taken as some axiom that every other culture is pretty much the same as Western culture (and anything different is pathologized).
I regularly see this with those who subscribe to specific ideologies common within Western cultures discussing Capitalism vs Socialism/Marxism/Communism. They will take these discussions out of the context of everything else (dismiss all other variables, incorrectly believing they are extraneous), and believe that the “conclusions” they have come to are somehow “objective” or “universal”.
What their discussions expose is actually how deeply they treat specific ideologies as axioms, with their discussions not actually exposing much about the topics they believe they are discussing.
Given Korea regularly comes up in these conversations, and I am a fan of K-drama from South Korea (Rina and I just watched Teach You A Lesson), I wanted to post Gemini’s answers to some quick questions.
Russell
I asked a few questions at the regular Google search prompt, and the AI mode there. I’m curious to bring that into the context of this thread.
Is north korea considered socialist?
Do the simplistic terms of “Capitalism”, Socialism, Marxism, Communism apply at all?
How do these simplistic terms apply to South Korea?
Gemini
The search engine output illustrates a classic paradox in standard Western political taxonomy: it acknowledges that labels like “socialist,” “communist,” or “capitalist” fail to describe the Koreas, yet it continues to use those exact Enlightenment-derived categories as the primary tape measure.
Bringing this into the context of our broader conversation highlights how both North and South Korea challenge Westphalian and Enlightenment political frameworks.
1. North Korea: Neo-Confucian Family-State disguised as “Stalinism”
The search summary identifies that North Korea removed classical Marxism from its constitution, enforces a rigid social caste system (Songbun), and operates through informal market trading (jangmadang) alongside state control. Standard political science struggles to classify this, oscillating between terms like “Stalinist state,” “De facto monarchy,” or “totalitarian dictatorship”.
However, when viewed outside Western categories:
The Ruler as Patriarch: Juche is not dialectical materialism; it is an organic, ethno-nationalist ideology where the nation is conceptualized as a single extension of the family, with the supreme leader serving as the moral and filial patriarch.
Colonial Inheritance: The regime’s hyper-militarized mobilization (Songun) borrows as much from 1930s Japanese Imperial fascism and colonial-era control mechanisms as it does from Soviet governance.
Relational Hierarchy over Classlessness: Rather than pursuing Marx’s classless society, North Korea repurposed traditional Confucian relational hierarchies into a state-managed caste structure.
2. South Korea: Corporate Clan Capitalism & Bounded Liberalism
The search response labels South Korea an “advanced capitalist democracy” with welfare features like universal healthcare. But this surface label hides the unique cultural dynamics we discussed earlier regarding education and state power:
The Chaebol as Modern Clan Estates: South Korean capitalism was built on chaebols (massive family-owned conglomerates). These are not atomized, Lockean free-market enterprises; they function like modern industrial clan dynasties backed by state developmentalism.
Liberalism’s Hard Edge: As the search text notes, South Korea maintains the National Security Act, which criminalizes speech or organization favoring North Korea or communist ideology. This directly mirrors Stanley Fish’s argument: the liberal state presents itself as a neutral democracy, but it actively draws a hard line of exclusion to protect its own institutional framework.
The Broader Synthesis
In 1945, the US and the USSR drew a line across the peninsula and attempted to force a culturally unified, historically continuous population into two competing 20th-century European ideological containers: Western Liberal Capitalism and Soviet State Socialism.
Decades later, neither side cleanly fits the Western labels imposed upon them. Underneath the imported rhetoric of “Democracy” in the South and “Socialism” in the North, both societies adapted those foreign frameworks around deeply rooted Korean relational structures, family dynamics, and historical trauma.
When you look at how both states evolved, do you see the ongoing conflict between North and South as a clash of two foreign Western ideologies, or as two different expressions of the same underlying cultural response to colonial division?
Russell
When I was younger I perceived the former USSR as “State Capitalism”, and we are now talking about copies of copies
USA is a derivative of the British Empire which was where the origional thinking behind Capitalism formed
USSR brought in ideas from German Marx, but implemented them in a very unique way within Slavic culture/worldviews (yes, it also colonized other non-Slavic regions).
What happened in Korea seemed to be quite distant from the Western European origins of the ideologies imposed through colonialism on the partitioned state.
Gemini
Your “copies of copies” framework gets to the core of why standard political labels feel so unnatural when applied to the modern world, especially in East Asia.
When an ideology is uprooted from the specific historical conditions that created it and forced onto an entirely different civilizational bedrock, it doesn’t remain the same ideology—it mutates into something unrecognizable to its original authors.
The First Generation: European Theories & Their Initial Adaptations
The American Derivative: British Enlightenment thinkers (Locke, Smith) developed their ideas to counter European monarchical feudalism and mercantilism. When exported to North America, the US stripped away the traditional European landed aristocracy, but it codified Lockean property rights and Protestant individualism into a settler-colonial state framework designed for rapid territorial and industrial expansion.
The Soviet Mutation (”State Capitalism”): Karl Marx designed his theories as a critique of advanced, industrial Western European capitalism—specifically targeting Germany and Britain. When the Bolsheviks took power in a predominantly agrarian, non-Westernized Russian Empire, they had to adapt Marx’s text. Instead of achieving a worker-led, stateless society, the Soviet state simply replaced the Tsar and the private capitalists. By owning all industry, controlling wage labor, and extracting surplus value from workers, the Soviet state functioned as a single, massive, monopolistic corporate entity—which is precisely why many political theorists and left-critics characterized the USSR as State Capitalism.
The Second Generation: Korea as a “Copy of a Copy”
When the United States and the USSR partitioned Korea at the 38th parallel in 1945, they weren’t just imposing foreign ideologies; they were imposing second-hand, heavily mutated versions of Western European thought onto a ancient, non-Western society.
Korea was a society rooted in centuries of Neo-Confucian social structure, village-level relational ethics, and 35 years of Japanese colonial military administration. When forced to adopt these foreign models, both Koreas digested them through their own cultural lens:
North Korea’s Copy: The North took the Soviet “State Capitalism” model, but quickly found Soviet Marxist-Leninist materialism alien. Over the decades, the regime systematically purged classical Marxism from its constitution and replaced it with Juche. It stripped away European notions of class struggle and internationalism, replacing them with a hereditary, ethno-nationalist dynasty centered on filial piety, ancestral reverence, and military-first mobilization. It is a feudal, neo-Confucian family-state draped in the aesthetic lingering of 20th-century Soviet iconography.
South Korea’s Copy: The South accepted the American export of “Liberal Capitalism,” but it never adopted American-style laissez-faire individualism. Instead, the South Korean developmental state directed the economy by backing family-run industrial clans—the chaebols (Samsung, Hyundai, LG). Rather than a free market of atomized individuals, South Korean capitalism operates as a hyper-competitive, state-sanctioned corporate clan system bound together by intense social hierarchy and Confucian educational pressure.
The Breakdown of the Western Taxonomy
This is why attempting to analyze either Korea using pure Enlightenment terms—whether “Socialism,” “Capitalism,” or “Democracy”—feels like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
You are looking at a third-hand translation of an 18th-century European debate over feudalism, translated through 20th-century American and Soviet imperial statecraft, and finally grafted onto thousands of years of East Asian history. The resulting states are not implementations of Western philosophy; they are entirely new, hybrid entities born from the trauma of colonial division and Cold War proxy occupation.
Separate note: If you further dive into Japan’s history, and its defensive westernization during the Meiji Restoration, there is quite a bit more of regional worldview context where interpretations fail when taken out of context because of the real-world impacts within European Empire thinking around “universalism”. The Japanese Annexation of Korea (1910–1945) had a very specific context. The fact that South Korea and Japan are both currently seen as potential regional allies by the West exists within that specific context.