In places where both resources and energy are scarce, the struggle for survival grows far more brutal. Any small dispute gets amplified in people’s minds until it feels like a matter of life and death — or mutual destruction. The further down you go, the easier it is to sink into a pit of self-consumption and mutual consumption. For there is an invisible hand at work in the unseen realm, driving individuals to make life difficult for each other and drain themselves — all to maintain the balance of the overall order.
To understand this, let’s first take a bird’s-eye view from the macro level. Imagine an oasis in the middle of a desert, fed by a spring that sustains everyone living there. What do you think happens when the population grows beyond what the oasis can support? People start coming to blows over ordinary, trivial disputes — and things escalate until it becomes a fight to the death. It’s as if some invisible hand is stoking everyone’s emotions, egging them on to destroy each other, luring them to drag more people into the bloodshed through family ties and clan loyalties. Once an atmosphere of hatred takes hold, the original cause becomes irrelevant. What matters is the raw, primal hatred that drives two factions to fight to the last man. The result? The hatred deepens, the killing grinds on, the numbers dwindle, and everyone is utterly exhausted. Only then do voices of wisdom emerge, calling for reconciliation — “Stop this endless fighting, this cycle of vengeance, when will it ever end?” And then peace returns. Life on the oasis continues.
Anyone who has studied history will be struck by this realization: all of human history is the story of people living on an oasis. When the tension between people and land reaches a critical point, conflict erupts repeatedly, leading to sustained waves of killing — under whatever banner or justification. When the population is finally decimated and the pressure on the land fundamentally eased, recovery begins and a new order is established. The fall of dynasties was never really caused by corrupt or foolish rulers — it was caused by land consolidation, by the contradiction between people and land reaching an irreconcilable breaking point.
The greatest value of technological revolution is that it expands the size of the oasis. It doesn’t resolve the fundamental problem, but it eases the tension between people and land and pushes the stable, harmonious order further into the future. Technological revolution is like making water usage more efficient — the same Crescent Moon Spring (a lone desert oasis in the Gobi) can irrigate more land, gradually turning desert into oasis, able to sustain more people. From the very beginning, I stated in Structural Studies: improvements in tools can alleviate fundamental problems, but cannot resolve the core structural problem of living systems. Human society is not a flat plane. The highest ideal of human society is the pursuit of equality for all — but this can only remain an ideal, never a reality.
For the people on this oasis to exist as an ordered whole, they must establish internal order. Without it, they are nothing but a scattered, chaotic mass. Any group of scattered individuals cannot function as a unified whole, because internal chaos creates endless fractures and conflicts. This is the origin of the saying: without rules, nothing can take shape. These rules constitute the internal order — a framework that constrains individuals and channels their behavior into predictable, orderly patterns.
Once a community built by individuals establishes internal order, the behavior, ideas, and mindset of each individual will operate in predictable ways within that constrained, orderly track. It is like the atoms within a molecule, each bound by forces pulling on one another, forming a stable structure.
So why do those at the bottom love making things difficult for each other? People at the bottom do harbor resentment toward the wealthy and the powerful. But this resentment is not directed at those born with a silver spoon. In fact, if someone at the bottom personally knows a person born into privilege, that person’s ease and prosperity becomes an object of intense admiration — even a source of pride. They’ll feel superior just for knowing such a person. This reveals the truth: the resentment that people at the bottom feel toward wealth is not actually aimed at the truly privileged class. What they truly resent is someone from their own tier who, through effort and opportunity, has made a better life for themselves. The same logic applies to their resentment of power. They resent power in the abstract. But in real life, even having a distant relative who is a minor government official fills them with enormous pride. If the county magistrate says a few words to them in passing, they’ll be thrilled for days and bring it up to everyone they meet. Clearly, they don’t resent the concrete representatives of power — they actually crave any connection to them.
The resentment of those at the bottom is primarily directed at their own kind. At its core, this is mutual consumption. For those who fight desperately to climb upward, the greatest resistance often doesn’t come from external suppression — it comes from obstruction by their own family. Because family members who have lived long in scarcity are terrified that this person will break free from their shared class and go live a better life. The parents of a poor family are often the greatest obstacle to a capable child. Parents who have spent a lifetime in deprivation carry an endless accumulation of unmet desires. Unable to satisfy these themselves, they use the one person they can hold onto as a tool to fill their vanity and their needs. And precisely because of this, such parents want their children to succeed — but cannot accept a success that leaves them behind. If that happens, they develop a bitter, destructive resentment. There is a hostage mentality embedded in the psychological structure of people consumed by deep scarcity: they habitually treat those close to them as hostages. If the person they’ve ensnared refuses to meet their demands, they threaten to harm the hostage. And if the threat doesn’t work, they may develop the extreme urge to destroy what they cannot control.
In short, both mindset and behavior point in the same direction: self-consumption and mutual consumption. This consumption ensures that no one can break free from the constraints of their class. Why does the tier with the most people always remain at the bottom? Because there are so many forms of consumption — either self-directed or mutual. There are too many trip wires, and sooner or later one of them brings you down. Those who had the potential to escape this class trap are worn down by the relentless drain of family and peers, gradually fall into self-doubt, eventually make peace with their fate, begin to consume themselves — and then join the ranks of those making life difficult for anyone else who dares to try. The end result is a vast web: everyone harming me, and me harming everyone.
After examining the micro level, let’s shift back to the macro view. One of the favorite things that Korean chaebols love to do is fund films that attack the chaebols. Through mass-market films and TV dramas, the conglomerates are portrayed as irredeemable villains. You might find this puzzling — why would these people invest in productions specifically designed to smear themselves? First, such films satisfy the mass public’s inner desire to see justice upheld, which makes them a massively profitable industry. Once something becomes an industry, it’s a huge money-making enterprise. Second, through mass-market entertainment that “educates” the general public, people get to vent their emotions while simultaneously developing a sense of moral superiority out of thin air: the rich are corrupt and shameless, condemned by all decent society — whereas ordinary people are noble, kind-hearted, shining with the light of humanity! If most ordinary people think this way, won’t they simply accept the status quo in peace? And if most people accept the status quo, won’t no one bother to challenge the position of the chaebols?
People are typically fixed in their circumstances by two forces: one is the internal constraint of self-imposed beliefs, and the other is the external boundary set by insufficient energy. Consumerism creates the external constraint, while the entertainment industry creates the internal constraint. The two interact and compound on each other, ultimately locking people into an ever-deteriorating existence. This is that invisible hand in the unseen realm — guiding people toward mutual obstruction and self-consumption, and in doing so, achieving the stability of the overall order. What force do you think is driving all of this?