From OIA to OGA: What Has Actually Changed?
On January 1, 2026, SNU dissolved the Office of International Affairs (OIA) and replaced it with the Office of Global Affairs (OGA).
Recent Articles
Why Is Lawless State Authority Flourishing in Liberal Democracies?
The (Historical) Dots Connecting the British Empire, the United States, and Palestine/Israel As I sit down to write this piece, and as my attention inevitably drifts to the daily news with my usual procrastination kicking in, I encounter a report about a group of Israeli settlers in the West Bank savagely assaulting a Palestinian villager along with the western journalists who were interviewing her (with the authorities turning a blind eye, if not encouraging the settlers). In the U.S., controversy ensues over the Department of Homeland Security’s vastly expanded unlawful surveillance over journalists, activists, and unions. As alarming as all this is, unless you’ve been trapped in a cave for the last few years, you wouldn’t find any of this news particularly shocking. It’s just another day in the world we live in. How have matters come to this? Liberal and democratic principles, of course, have always been lofty ideals seldom matched by practice. Still, it’s hard not to feel that lately things have taken a turn for the worse, given the sheer impunity with which governments routinely trample upon people’s basic rights and liberties, and the utter inability of constitutional rules and democratic institutions to protect people from such unchecked state power. For many, especially troublesome is the fact that countries like the United States, rightly or wrongly touted as the beacon of modern liberal democracy, seem to be leading this dystopian plunge into a new era of naked authoritarianism. There’s plenty of blame to go around—from Donald Trump, his MAGA supporters, and the global rise of right-wing populism, to the collapse of the neoliberal global order and worldwide “democratic back-sliding.” While all such recent developments are indeed crucial for understanding the current rise of authoritarianism, many historians argue that the root of the problem goes way deeper. What we are witnessing may best be understood as the latest manifestation of a long-festering malaise rooted in the upheavals wrought by modern imperialism. To get to that historical understanding, first it would be well worth dwelling upon theory for a moment. Theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben have long pointed to the paradoxical growth of authoritarian rule in putatively liberal democratic states. The underlying cause for this phenomenon, they explain, is that modern states have both gained powerful tools of coercion and are increasingly eager to exercise that enhanced power, reaching state authority into an ever-broadening dimension of people’s daily lives. At the same time, authorities have faced intense public demand that the exercise of state power must be strictly bound by liberal constitutionalism and democratic accountability. The need to legitimize extralegal state practice in light of liberal democratic values, then, gave rise to a new type of authoritarianism which constantly resorts to claims of exception—that is, claims that in order to effectively deal with exceptional situations such as a national emergency, the state must be allowed to temporarily (but indefinitely) “suspend” constitutional and democratic principles and freely exercise unlimited powers. Hence, Agamben and others stress, the true nature of a modern state’s legal and political system is revealed less in how they operate during ‘normal’ times, than in what they do during those supposedly exceptional situations. Indeed, based on this understanding it can be said that any type of purported normalcy, including liberal democracy, is no more than a legal-political fiction carefully upheld by state authorities. In recent years, mindful of the limitations in Schmitt’s and Agamben’s analytical scope, numerous scholars have sought to expand and improve upon their insights. Many have duly criticized Schmitt and Agamben for limiting their attention to western, or ‘First World’ countries. Schmitt’s and Agamben’s Eurocentrism is not only problematic for overlooking important political and institutional developments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also for failing to take into account the deep historical ties that have interconnected different parts of the modern world. Authoritarianism, critics argue, seldom arose strictly within the confines of a single nation state. Colonial empires, in particular, have long served as a fertile ground upon which imperial governments can freely experiment with authoritarian statecraft before ‘bringing them back’ to the metropole. It is hardly surprising that authoritarian rule and claims of a ‘state of exception’ often went hand in hand in the context of colonial rule. Especially since the mid-nineteenth century, empires typically claimed that the purpose of imperial domination was to help civilize the colonized peoples—to rescue them from barbaric anarchy and despotism, by bringing them the gifts of constitutionalism, rule of law, and liberal democracy. Such lofty rhetoric, of course, was difficult to square with the on-the-ground reality of colonial rule, which unsurprisingly tended to hinge upon ever-intensifying oppressive violence. In seeking to square this circle, imperial authorities turned repeatedly to state-of-exception arguments. Perhaps the starkest example of such rhetorical maneuver was given by British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer in 1919, shortly after ordering his troop to fire machine guns at an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd in a large city square in Punjab, instantly killing hundreds of civilians in what would become known as the Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar) massacre. During a subsequent inquiry held in London, Dyer defiantly lectured metropolitan politicians and judges that in an exceptionally unruly place like Punjab, the authorities cannot and should not be restricted by ordinary law while endeavoring to produce a “moral effect” upon the populace. In order to help the colonial subjects mature into law-abiding subjects, that is, the colonial state needed to periodically strike terror in their primitive minds with exceptional violence. Dyer, in case you are wondering, was relieved from service following a lengthy and widely publicized hearing, but was immediately hailed as a national hero by many, even receiving a hefty public donation that let him enjoy a comfortable retirement. No one else in Britain’s liberal empire was held responsible for the wanton killing of hundreds of Indians. While the Amritsar massacre may have been a particularly egregious case, it was hardly an exceptional one. As numerous studies from the late legal scholar Nasser Hussain’s trailblazing monograph to historian Caroline Elkins’ magisterial recent survey lay bare, from the early nineteenth to mid twentieth century, similar cases of ‘exceptional’ state violence abounded throughout disparate corners of the British Empire. In almost all such cases, the same cycle of exploitative colonial rule, popular resistance, violent suppression, and disavowal of responsibility repeated itself. Underlying this recurrent pattern was the self-evident but uncomfortable truth that just like any other empire throughout history, the British Empire was built upon and thrived through violent, unhinged authoritarian rule. The problem was that British politicians, administrators, and the public found this distasteful truth unpalatable. They wanted to believe that theirs was an exceptionally liberal, benevolent, and civilized empire. This is where ‘state of exception’ arguments proved indispensable by providing a convenient fiction—the narrative that the empire’s lawless acts of violence were but temporary, exceptional measures taken only during exceptional situations. Of course, the frequent, routine recourse to those violent measures called for an explanation as to why ruling the empire especially yielded so many such exceptional situations. The imperialists’ favorite response, as exemplified in Dyer’s twisted reasoning, was to blame those on the receiving end of oppression: It was because the colonies were exceptionally unruly zones of violence, and because the colonial population had yet to graduate from primitive, lawless habits, not because imperial rule itself was unjust and oppressive, that extreme violence was ‘occasionally’ called for in governing the colonies. Thus, we see, with state-of-exception arguments providing the hinge, efforts to legitimize the liberal empire’s violent deeds tended both to draw upon and reinforce racial ideologies. Herein lies one of the most pernicious and lasting consequences of liberal imperialism. At first sight, the United States, with its strong liberal-democratic tradition, might seem to stand at the polar opposite of such authoritarian imperial practices. Look a bit closer (with the help of historians), though, and you’ll start having second thoughts. Within the confines of this essay, let us focus on just two aspects of the United States as a liberal but violent empire—one relating to space and the other to population. Ever since its inception, the territory of the United States has always been dotted with numerous anomalous zones in which the country’s ‘normal’ laws and liberal democratic system do not fully apply. While this may be a trait of many empires throughout history, the lumpiness of U.S. territorial rule has been especially pronounced mainly due to its origins as a settler empire. With land-hungry settlers often leading aggressive colonial expansion, precipitating messy, unpredictable regional conflicts not only with indigenous nations but also with land speculators, traders, and state officials, the political geography was bound to be constantly reshaped in irregular patterns from region to region. An early effort to confer some degree of uniformity and order to this process was the 1787 Northwest land ordinance. The ordinance’s neat model for carving up indigenous land into state-sized territories, then allowing territorial residents (assumed to be white settlers, of course) to apply for statehood once their population reaches a certain threshold, has proved remarkably successful (from the colonizers’ standpoint, at least) in creating a workable model of settler-imperial expansion. Still, the process frequently yielded fierce local struggles and at times even national strife, including the Civil War. Most important for our purpose, is the fact that territorial status was never simply a temporary step on the road to statehood, as has usually been presented. Most territories remained as such for at least a generation or two before finally attaining statehood. Some, such as Arizona, New Mexico, and Hawai’i, were kept as territories for more than half a century. Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory for more than a century, with the end nowhere in sight. It is no coincidence, of course, that statehood was withheld indefinitely especially from territories with substantial nonwhite populations. The colonial nature of the territorial system was made explicit in the early twentieth century, with the designation of certain parts as “unincorporated territories”—territories that although brought under U.S. rule, are not expected (usually due to their racial composition) to attain statehood anytime soon or perhaps ever. Generally speaking, during their crucial formative years, territories were often governed by executive and military authority in the guise of a governor and a small coterie of officials. In other words, they were zones in which America’s liberal democratic system of government need not apply. The U.S. territorial system, then, is a textbook case of a liberal empire hiding authoritarian rule by pretending that such practices are limited to exceptional spaces—or rather, spaces held in an indefinite state of exception. An equally glaring example of authoritarian practices hiding in plain sight within the United States’ liberal-constitutional system, is the so-called plenary power doctrine. Put simply, plenary power means the unqualified, absolute, and exclusive authority wielded by a polity’s sovereign—in this case the U.S. government. One might ask how this differs from the authority of an absolutist monarch or a dictator, to which I would answer that in fact, it isn’t all too different. But the people who created the concept wanted to make it look different. As the idea goes, the U.S. government’s plenary power is reserved strictly for the purpose of protecting the republic from grave internal or external threats. As paradoxical as it may seem, preserving a liberal democracy sometimes calls for allowing state authorities to override any and all laws, constitutional restrictions, and liberal-democratic principles. At this point one may already raise doubts, along with Schmitt and Agamben, about the viability of the scheme—because if it is the sovereign who gets to determine when the exercise of such unlimited power is called for and how long it should remain in effect (which is how the U.S. plenary power works), then how is this not arbitrary rule? And even if the power might be initially resorted to selectively and prudently, how can we rule out the possibility that one day an unprincipled leader (Yes, you, Donald Trump) might grab and abuse that power, using it as a linchpin for authoritarian rule? But theoretical caveats aside, historical experience has already amply demonstrated the dangers of the plenary power doctrine. It’s just that for a long time, it was mainly exercised against people whom mainstream society didn’t care about much. Although it was in the late nineteenth century that the doctrine was made official by the U.S. supreme court, the plenary power doctrine had already begun taking shape since the early nineteenth century, amidst the U.S. government’s dealings with indigenous nations. As historians nowadays never tire to emphasize, many indigenous nations stubbornly resisted colonial subjugation well into the nineteenth century, either evading or directly challenging U.S. authority. One of the reasons they could do that was thanks to the strategic alliances they built with multiple polities and groups, from traders, missionaries, and land speculators to state governments and agents of the British and Spanish Empires. Because indigenous nations adroitly positioned themselves within such dense networks of mutual reliance and obligation, it was not easy for the U.S. government to secure exclusive territorial control over indigenous lands. In an effort to realize this goal, the U.S., following the British Empire’s precedent, began signing treaties with many indigenous nations. With a view to preventing other European powers and Euro-American individuals from allying with indigenous nations and gaining access to their land, the U.S. government solemnly promised them perpetual protection and material support. These treaties were presented as legally binding obligations just as in relationships with European nations. Hence, when the U.S. government subsequently sought to renege on those promises (as it invariably did whenever the balance of power began tilting in its favor), it needed a legal language to rationalize this breach of trust. It wasn’t as simple as declaring indigenous people complete aliens outside of U.S. legal protection. That would open the door for land speculators, settlers, state governments, and rival empires to freely attack or befriend those indigenous nations and grab their land. The U.S. government wanted to maintain that they had sole lawful access to indigenous land, while simultaneously freeing itself from any legal restrictions in dealing with indigenous peoples. The solution was to define indigenous peoples as helpless ‘wards’ completely reliant on their ‘guardian,’ the U.S. government. Hence, the U.S. could claim exclusive jurisdiction over indigenous peoples and their lands, even while reserving the paternalistic right to ignore any legal obligations in dealing with them. Thus did the United States’ imperial need to unshackle its authority from legal restrictions in dealing with colonized populations, even while stressing that the U.S. was the sole lawful authority over its territory, lead to the legitimization of unlimited sovereign authority—the antecedent of plenary power. And just as with the British Empire, the American liberal empire’s reliance on state-of-exception arguments in justifying its lawless coercive actions drew upon and reinforced racial ideas. It was because the indigenous people were exceptionally childlike and helpless, not because the U.S. settler empire was exceptionally land- and power-hungry, that those people and their lands had to be placed under unlimited imperial authority. With this historical origin in mind, it wouldn’t be surprising to know that the next step of plenary power’s evolution took place in the late nineteenth century, in the context of restricting the immigration of people from China. Here, too, select demographic groups whose national origin and supposed racial traits rendered them suspect in the eyes of mainstream society were stripped of legal protection, even while firmly placed under lawful U.S. authority. In other words, the U.S. government could pretty much do anything it saw fit with those people, unbound by any legal or constitutional restrictions. And just as with indigenous people, although it was the U.S. government asserting unlimited, coercive imperial authority over them, the blame was put on the racialized immigrants: They refused to understand American language and culture and to abide by U.S. laws. Ignorant of and ignoring basic hygiene, they were a threat to national health. Uncannily capable of working and living in inhuman conditions, they undercut civilized American workers, depriving them of economic security. And despite negligent of civilized family life, or perhaps due to that negligence, they kept multiplying in numbers. They were a unique demographic threat the likes of which the civilized world had never encountered before, fully deserving the moniker “yellow peril.” The subsequent creation of the “illegal alien” category, this time mainly with Mexican workers as the target, built upon the same combination of liberal imperialism, racial ideology, and state-of-exception logic. The uncontrollable demographic invasion of these uncivilized, unhygienic, and crime-prone people was a major threat to the nation, calling for exceptional measures. Such reasoning helped justify the development of coercive policing and surveillance techniques, along with the vast expansion of oppressive state apparatuses licensed to override ‘normal’ legal and constitutional restrictions. Needless to say, the unhinged state violence currently perpetrated by U.S. ICE agents stands on the shoulders of this long history of nominally liberal, but in practice authoritarian, imperial governance. In one sense, you could call their actions unlawful and unconstitutional. But when you understand how plenary power has historically worked and against whom in the U.S., perhaps it is more apt to say that Trump and his minions are acting well within U.S. legal-political tradition. British and U.S. imperialism has touched, and indeed shaped, so many parts of the world we live in. But if there’s one place in the world where those violent legacies have converged in a most chilling fashion, that may well be Palestine-Israel. From the Balfour Declaration and British rule of Mandatory Palestine, to staunch U.S. support of Israel in post-WWII international society and intimate U.S.-Israeli military and security cooperation, to name just the highlights, it’s hardly a secret that British and U.S. imperialism have together played a direct hand in shaping the region’s modern history. But the historical connections are even more profound when we focus on the nexus of liberal-democratic rhetoric, imperial rule, and authoritarian state violence. Since declaring a state of emergency at the founding of the state in 1948, Israel has yet to terminate that status. What does it mean to maintain a permanent state of emergency? One might say that this has been necessary due to Israel’s unique security concerns, surrounded as it is by what may be deemed hostile forces. One may also question whether it makes any difference, if the state of emergency is effectively established as a regular feature of the state’s system anyway. But as the theorizations of Agamben and Hussain suggest to us, and as the histories of British and U.S. imperialism teach us, regardless of the intention or perceived need, once unchecked state power is granted license to override liberal legal restrictions and democratic checks, the system starts to show cracks through which authoritarianism can gradually seep in. Indeed, Israel’s initial emergency laws were inherited from similar laws that had been introduced by the British, for the purpose of imposing authoritarian rule over Palestinians (and later also Zionist settlers). Rather than gradually relaxing the grip of such laws, Israel has steadily added further layers to them. As a result, at all times and for a wide range of situations, state authorities including military leaders have a large pool of laws to draw upon in justifying their actions. This can include forcibly relocating Palestinian residents in the West Bank citing security concerns and while promising that it is but a temporary measure, then allowing Israeli settlers to take their homes. It can include having soldiers demolish a school in Gaza, shooting and killing a boy in the process, then declaring the death collateral damage—an unfortunate but unpunishable act during an emergency operation. Such cases are familiar to anyone who’s been following the news the last couple of years. Historians will tell you that albeit with less frequency and intensity, such has been the norm for decades. But still, granted such violent practices especially against Palestinians are given broad leeway under Israeli emergency laws, if this is effectively a permanent part of the legal system, what does it matter that these are designated as emergency laws? The answer lies in the usefulness of state-of-exception framings in liberal empires. As has been the case with the British and U.S. Empires, Israeli authorities, even hard right politicians in the Likud party, want to maintain a façade of liberal democracy, and of rule of law and constitutionalism. In the Israeli case, there are very important concrete gains from upholding that image. Although Trump’s administration might not even need such an excuse for backing Israel, most U.S. and European administrations would find it hard to justify supporting Israeli operations in the occupied territories if it openly pursued an authoritarian, racially oppressive, genocidal stance. So pretending that those oppressive measures are but exceptions sanctioned not by the state’s regular liberal-democratic laws but by emergency laws, does matter. Of course, anyone willing to peak beneath Israel’s liberal-democratic façade would quickly come across countless instances directly contradicting that image. Even before the current genocidal war on Gaza and the intensified settler invasion in the West Bank, numerous sociological, legal, and historical studies have brought to light multiple dimensions and layers of Israel’s extralegal state violence. In the context of this essay, it is worth noting the striking parallels with the United States, especially in the way state violence targets racialized populations and zones of exception. The almost unlimited power that Netanyahu’s administration and the military enjoys especially in dealing with Palestinians is abetted by open-ended emergency laws, much like how the plenary power doctrine gives the U.S. government legal cover in its extralegal oppression of indigenous peoples and racialized immigrants. The way in which Israel treats the occupied territories as outside of normal Israeli jurisdiction while simultaneously exercising expansive state power over the area and its population, from imposing an intrusive system of security check points and permits, to making the land unlivable by disrupting the supply of essential resources and infrastructure, and rendering the laboring population into a racialized proletariat with little if any legal protection, brings to mind U.S. rule over its unincorporated territories. I don’t know if there is a direct historical connection here, but it wouldn’t be far-fetched to surmise that these similarities stem from the two country’s shared origins as settler states, in which state violence has been particularly adept at targeting spatially and demographically demarcated zones of exception. So what can we do with this knowledge? While I firmly believe that collective awareness matters, I don’t have a clear answer as to how we might turn critical knowledge into a force of change. My hope is that the bright, passionate young people taking the time to ponder over pieces like this will soon be leading the way. Of course, anyone willing to peak beneath Israel’s liberal-democratic façade would quickly come across countless instances directly contradicting that image. Even before the current genocidal war on Gaza and the intensified settler invasion in the West Bank, numerous sociological, legal, and historical studies have brought to light multiple dimensions and layers of Israel’s extralegal state violence. In the context of this essay, it is worth noting the striking parallels with the United States, especially in the way state violence targets racialized populations and zones of exception. The almost unlimited power that Netanyahu’s administration and the military enjoys especially in dealing with Palestinians is abetted by open-ended emergency laws, much like how the plenary power doctrine gives the U.S. government legal cover in its extralegal oppression of indigenous peoples and racialized immigrants. The way in which Israel treats the occupied territories as outside of normal Israeli jurisdiction while simultaneously exercising expansive state power over the area and its population, from imposing an intrusive system of security check points and permits, to making the land unlivable by disrupting the supply of essential resources and infrastructure, and rendering the laboring population into a racialized proletariat with little if any legal protection, brings to mind U.S. rule over its unincorporated territories. I don’t know if there is a direct historical connection here, but it wouldn’t be far-fetched to surmise that these similarities stem from the two country’s shared origins as settler states, in which state violence has been particularly adept at targeting spatially and demographically demarcated zones of exception. So what can we do with this knowledge? While I firmly believe that collective awareness matters, I don’t have a clear answer as to how we might turn critical knowledge into a force of change. My hope is that the bright, passionate young people taking the time to ponder over pieces like this will soon be leading the way.
SNU's Next Great Challenge: Becoming a Truly Global University
As Seoul National University (SNU) celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2026, it is an appropriate moment not only to reflect on how far we have come but also to consider where we must go next. Founded in 1946, SNU has grown alongside modern Korea itself. The University’s relocation to the Gwanak campus in 1975 marked the beginning of its transformation into a comprehensive research university. Over the ensuing decades, SNU has become the nation’s leading institution of higher education, educating generations of leaders while advancing scholarship across virtually every academic discipline. Since the early 2000s, we have further strengthened our identity as a research-intensive university, pursuing excellence in both education and discovery. These achievements deserve recognition. Yet anniversaries are valuable not because they celebrate the past alone, but because they invite honest reflection about the future. The world in which SNU was built is no longer the world in which it must compete. Although our academic excellence remains unquestioned within Korea, many of the institutional structures that continue to shape the University were established nearly half a century ago. During that same period, higher education has become fundamentally global. Universities now compete not only for domestic talent but also for the world’s best students, scholars, and ideas. It is in this context that internationalization becomes more than an institutional objective. It becomes a defining challenge for SNU’s next chapter. SNU continues to attract Korea’s brightest students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our national reputation is unparalleled. Yet our international presence tells a different story. Compared with leading universities around the world—and even with several institutions within Seoul—the proportion of international students and faculty at SNU remains remarkably low. This reality is reflected in global assessments, where indicators related to internationalization consistently rank among the University’s weakest areas. The issue, however, extends well beyond rankings. Internationalization is ultimately about the quality of our academic community. A university becomes globally influential not simply by sending its graduates abroad or publishing internationally, but by creating a campus where people from different countries, cultures, and intellectual traditions learn, teach, and discover together every day. Diversity is not an accessory to academic excellence; it is increasingly one of its essential conditions. For many years, SNU’s extraordinary success in attracting domestic talent may have reduced the urgency to compete globally. We have built an exceptional community within Korea. Our next task is to build an equally exceptional community that includes the world. Encouragingly, meaningful steps are now underway. The recent strengthening of the University’s Office of Global Affairs reflects a growing institutional commitment to coordinated global engagement. Even more significant is the decision to establish the Division of Global Open Majors (tentative name), scheduled to welcome its first students in 2027. By admitting international students through an open-major system that allows them to explore multiple disciplines before choosing a field of study, the program represents not merely a new academic unit but a different philosophy of international education. Preparing for this initiative has revealed an important truth. SNU is still far from being fully equipped to recruit, educate, and support international students at the scale required of a global university. In many respects, we must build new systems, policies, and cultures from the ground up. Yet this realization should be viewed not as a weakness but as an opportunity to undertake genuine institutional transformation. Universities exist because there are students seeking knowledge. Everything else—faculty, staff, facilities, and governance—exists in service of that mission. If SNU succeeds in attracting a far more diverse international student body, many other dimensions of internationalization will follow naturally. International faculty will find a more vibrant academic community. Research collaborations will become broader and deeper. Korean students will develop global perspectives through everyday interactions with peers from around the world. No university can pursue every possible reform at once. Strategic leadership requires focus. Rather than dispersing our limited resources across numerous incremental initiatives, we should invest where lasting transformation is most likely to occur. Building a truly international student community is one such investment. It has the potential to reshape every aspect of the University over time. As SNU enters its ninth decade, our ambition should extend beyond remaining Korea’s leading university. We should aspire to become one of the world’s great universities—not only in research performance or global rankings, but in the diversity of our people, the openness of our culture, and the breadth of our intellectual community. That journey begins with a simple recognition: genuine internationalization is not a destination. It is the path by which SNU will define its future.
A Critical Eye at MBTI
I’ve been encountering a peculiar dilemma since I arrived as an exchange student in Korea. As a Korean-American, I look like I belong in this country—and that’s the root of this dilemma. Unlike other foreigners, I have no linguistic grace period, so when I speak for the first time, the gap between how I look and how I sound can make me seem less like someone navigating a second language and more like someone who has speech impediments. While I am partially generalizing my countless encounters with Koreans so far, it did come to a head when I drank with club members for the first time. MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is a popularized personality sorting system that categorizes people into 16 types based on four traits: introversion/extroversion, intuition/sensing, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. Despite originating in the U.S., it is globally known and, in particular, has become embedded in Korean social culture as a shorthand of sorts for understanding people you’ve just met. It has also made its way into dating culture and even job interviews. Inevitably, the question came up. When I said I was an ENFJ, a few people looked at me incredulously. “E” for extroverted? The label carries certain expectations: someone talkative, unguarded, quick to fill the silence. Generally speaking, I fit the bill. I love meeting new people, I’d rather be with others than alone, and I can talk a lot. What I was that evening, however, was sleep-deprived, guarded with my words, and mentally overworking to fit into this entirely new social atmosphere that felt super unfamiliar. I didn’t want to accidentally crack a joke Koreans would find disrespectful, but I wasn’t at all uncomfortable or shy with the others. My reservedness was unrelated to whether I was an E or an I. However, clearly that was not how it was interpreted. These students had known me for the length of one drink. Yet, a judgment had already been made about something I consider a core part of who I am. It got me thinking a lot about MBTI and Korea’s longer history of social categorization. Korea seems all about placing people into easy-to-identify boxes and labels “just for fun,” but could this have serious consequences? In addition, why do the systems for social categories keep getting simpler even as society gets more complex? Before I attempt to answer some of these questions, let us establish some context for Korea’s social categorization trends. To understand why Korea keeps reaching for social frameworks like the ones we see today, it helps to start far in the past. Starting from even before the Joseon dynasty, which was founded in 1392, Confucianism governed social philosophy. It was the backbone of everyday life and, unlike Western moral frameworks that centered on the self, was inherently collectivist. Every individual was perceived primarily as a part of a larger unit, whether that be family, class, or country. Social position and age were not just markers of status, but went so far as to reflect a cosmic and natural order. This worldview gave rise to saju and the use of the Chinese zodiac system. Saju is a fortune-telling system originating from ancient China that maps a person’s fate across four pillars: birth year, month, day, and hour. It provides thousands of unique combinations that are supposed to reveal everything from ideal career to future spouse. Even now, you can commonly see professional saju readers lining the streets of Seoul, some even being celebrity readers whose services cost a small fortune. The Chinese zodiac, which Korea also adopted, works similarly. Using the twelve-year animal cycle you could know someone’s sign and figure out what year they were born and from that, their personality quirks or future prospects. Together, saju and the zodiac share the same underlying logic: the self defined in relation to others, and a quick way to sort the room. Both are centered around not just your own destiny, but your place and interactions with society as a whole. If we fast-forward to the modern era, we can see that the impulse to categorize and the affinity for social order haven’t disappeared. This is exemplified by the popularity of blood types and MBTI. Blood type personality theory, which originated in Japan but became popular in Korea, assigned broad character traits to A, B, O, and AB types. Of course, the popularity of this theory has since been replaced by the MBTI rage. I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with any of this. If anything, it’s a fun way to get to know someone. But I think we should be more critical. Why did one offhand comment at that first dinner bother me as much as it did? Because when my clubmates said I didn’t seem extroverted, it didn’t just feel like an observation, but almost like a correction. I suddenly felt a pressure to perform based on my personality name tag rather than what felt right in the moment. Internalization can also lead to letting it become a permission slip. Introversion shouldn’t excuse you from showing up when you’re needed. Being a “T” shouldn’t mean a grieving friend needs to hear a logical breakdown of how their grandmother had a stroke. It’s possible for the label to stop describing who you are and start justifying who you’ve decided not to become just because of widespread social acknowledgement that you are a ZHBV. When you change the letters, it becomes nothing more than a silly characterization; and that’s how it should stay, if we are to encourage only the positives from trends like these. There is a broader risk here too that exists beyond the individual. When a society collectively buys into the idea that people can be sorted into fixed, inherent categories, it quietly sets a precedent that deviating from your type is somehow wrong rather than simply human. Foreigners often remark on how visually uniform Korean society can feel; something as small as the near-universal haircut among young men is a window into a culture that places value on fitting in. Personality frameworks reinforce that pressure, since being different from your label feels like a social error. It risks making people less willing to be surprising, contradictory, or openly themselves. A society is richer for its outliers, and these systems of categorization, when taken too seriously, can make outliers feel like mistakes. Does being extroverted mean you need to be loud around people you don’t like? When dealing with death, do you turn to someone who understands your situation regardless of MBTI or someone whose MBTI is feeling? When preparing for an interview as a sales representative, should you lie and say you’re an E? Of course we are all human and the answer to all those questions should be that we can be who we are without worry. Another rising trend is teto-egen, which sorts people into two types based on “gender energy”: teto (testosterone-type) for assertive and competitive, egen (estrogen-type) for warm and communal. Unlike every trend that came before it, teto-egen isn’t about compatibility or fate or even personality; it’s purely about labeling, and the label it reaches for is gender. Some might point to the egen-guy or teto-girl as proof that the system subverts norms, but the egen-guy is just as often a punchline as he is a personality type, and the fact that liking movies needs a special category says everything. The trend doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It borrows the cultural weight of Korea’s preexisting gender expectations and repackages them as something playful and low-stakes. If the risk with MBTI is that individuals stop growing, the risk with teto-egen is greater, and nudges gender itself back toward a binary at exactly the moment that binary was beginning to loosen. People should be aware of the origins of these trends and the inadvertent issues they could imply, as with all trends. Contrary to a collectivist society is an individualistic society. The U.S., where I’m from, exemplifies this. Personality traits are not labels but optional accessories. You take the quiz, laugh about it once or twice to someone, and move on because there is an underlying assumption that you can always redefine yourself. It’s not just acceptable but rather admirable in American culture to change. I love asking people’s MBTI but would never use it to predict their actions or give it any more significance than as a conversation starter. On the other hand, all these frameworks from saju to MBTI embody the very human need to be understood quickly and to understand others the same way. From a positive perspective, Korea, it seems, has been refining these cunning social shortcuts for centuries. My bet is that the next trend after this one is already forming in a KakaoTalk group chat somewhere, unbeknownst to its impending viral potential. A new icebreaker, a reason to laugh, a door into knowing someone; as long as we don’t let it be the last word on who someone is, there are real positives to these quirky systems. The most interesting parts of getting to know people are always the parts that don’t fit the box, like the fondness in seeing your initially quiet friend turn into the one who’s always the loudest in the room, or the relief in finding out your “T” friend actually has the best emotional advice for your situation because they went through the same thing the previous year. Maybe that’s the real gift these frameworks can give us: not an easily labeled map of who someone is, but rather a starting point from which we get to be surprised.
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