2019/12/12
Choi Sulli, South Korean K-Pop star and actress, committed suicide on October 14th, 2019 at the age 25. According to the police and her employer, SM Entertainment, she possibly commited suicide due to the unbearable maliciousness from the public. One month later after Sulli’s death, the online haters were interviewed by the Korean TV Show “Unanswered Questions,” they disappointed the whole nation through their “blatant shamelessness” about not realizing what terrible things they had done to Sulli (Koreaboo 2019). In these haters’ minds, Sulli’s excessive beauty is no longer beauty but a fault; celebrities, in their eyes, “don’t only receive love and attention…also have to endure malicious comments,” all that celebrities receive in return is “live their best lives by the materialistic wealth they have earned (Koreaboo 2019). It seems that consuming negative comments is a part of the occupation and the reason celebrities can acquire so much wealth.
But celebrities are human beings; the celebrities are as alive as the haters themselves. As a famous celebrity who started her career at the age of 11, Sulli had been dealing with all kinds of malicious comments from a very young age and throughout her career. The pressure of her facing public comments had led to a severe depression, which ultimately killed her. Considering her difficulties, how can the haters say “Sulli was a girl but I thought she had a stronger spirit than a man’s?” (Koreaboo 2019). Don’t the celebrities have the right to live as normal human beings? To the hater, what they said to Sulli was only “a joke,” but to Sulli, it had no difference than a disaster which influenced her attitudes towards everything (Koreaboo 2019). However, the haters defended that “I didn’t tell her to die. I could have cared less about her life.” (Koreaboo 2019). How could they be so cruel to a person that had already passed away?
When Sulli was alive, she had once tried to sue a hater who had posted comments with excessive maliciousness, but gave up after she found out that the person was the same age as her and was studying in a famous university; she didn’t want to destroy the bright future the young man may have (HOW SULLI HANDLED HER HATE COMMENT). Sulli chose to be lenient towards those haters who hurt her so deep. However, the haters weren’t equivalently lenient to Sulli. But, why am I saying “lenient”? Sulli didn’t do anything wrong that is needed to be treated leniently. Why do these members of the public consider as her doing something wrong? Only because Sulli is a famous celebrity who lives a life that these individuals are envious about?
It seems people can easily have maliciousness towards others. Where does the maliciousness come from? In my opinion, there are always some parts of other people that we cannot understand or don’t agree with, so a problem caused by the “conflict” between minds is born. According to Albert Einstein, “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” A person is usually confined in his own way of thinking patterns, determined by his experiences and the education he received, so each person has different and non-repeatable pattern. This means the difference in our thinking patterns or level of thinking may not be resolved within our original thinking patterns. Once a conflict exists with seemingly no solutions, then the maliciousness enters people’s minds. The things we cannot understand in our own thinking patterns can be easily included into the category of nonsense.
If we start to perceive other people in regards to their different thinking patterns, we may find the world consists of “irreconcilable” conflicts. People that stand on different sides are yelling at each other based on one-sided stories. Both groups live in the confinement of their sides of the story but ignore there might be another perspective of interpretation on the matter. The reality that exists in the other party’s life is too distant for people to imagine. But the other side, or many sides, of the story still exists and stands for a reasonable explanation under a specific confinement of thinking patterns.
However, it is not the many sides that are objectively causing the conflicts. It is people’s rejection to believe in the existence of the validity of other sides. They cannot understand how logic can be created by a certain mental confinement and work under such a limited thinking pattern, so they will never be able to understand why a “truth” that they deeply believe in can be interpreted reasonably in an “opposite” way; they can’t admit or even realize they are confined in certain possibilities of thinking patterns. For Sulli’s case, the haters have never experienced celebrities’ life, so they gave it an easy assumption. The haters are confined within their imagination constructed by the media reports of celebrities’ beauty and wealth. They refuse to think that the celebrities can encounter difficulties in their lives too.
Korean entertainment is a strange case. The massive industry of K-Pop is like a “factory churning out Kpop idol groups by the bulks every year.” (Chua). “After passing the auditions and successfully getting into an agency, one would sign a contract with the company and officially become a trainee,” who is usually in their teenager years (Chua). “However, there are hundreds of other trainees competing for a limited chance to make their debut.” (Chua). A great amount of pressure pushes them to take rigorous work that common people can rarely bare. But since they choose to join and work in the industry, the public and the company assumes the qualified trainees can and should bare all physical and mental hardships that may come up. The public and the industry subjectively include “bearing all difficulties” into the professional ethics of K-Pop idols—the efforts paid to overcome those difficulties are now a necessary cost that needs to be spent and a mandatory “responsibility” trainees should put on their shoulders in order to have their debut or become a successful idol. The requirements of becoming an idol that were once morally proper and corresponds to basic human rights are now forced by the massive industry to be raised too high to be considered normal, but they exist naturally in the society nowadays while people rarely realize how abnormal they have become. These difficulties are usually even harder to overcome for the celebrities since being a public figure, they have the responsibility to present the most positive values, which forced them to get rid of many personal emotions. But that is not to deprive the celebrities’ rights as human beings to be incapable with dealing with such difficulties, neither denying the rationality that celebrities who lack such capability cannot qualify their status. However, is it really people’s personal refusal towards enhancing the variety of perspectives or the society controlling what people can access and subjectively creating mental confinement according to certain purposes?
When walking across a societal event, which is pretty possible in our daily lives, people naturally start to interpret its meaning, judge the people involved, and consume the values the event is conveying from whatever sources they choose to look at, forming an one-sided story. It is always said that before we speak, we should gather as much information as possible, so that we can speak more objectively. But there’s always too much information to gather and sometimes the important ones are hidden so deep that people can hardly get access to. The media reporting the beauty and wealth of celebrities, who are invisibly confined to a stereotype so they can only show beauty and wealth to the public, or they are not worthy of their fame. This works the same for the public. Though most people can know the stereotype is not true in reality, some others may still be confined in the portrayed stereotype and posting maliciousness in ignorance.
According to Susan Sontag, as for art and artistic interpretation, “transparence is the highest, most liberating value today,” where transparence means “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” (1964). In this essay “Against Interpretation”, Sontag was addressing the problem of misinterpretation in regards to art. Similarly, when people are treating whatever events they walk across in lives, they need that transparence for interpretation. In fact, the social events can be seen as artworks as well: the artworks consist of human actions, or to say, some kinds of performing art. People tend to judge the events more based on news and what the people around them are saying—the existing one-sided stories—rather than explore more materials to form personalized opinions. In order to better understand and learn from artworks, Sontag is proposing that people’s interpretation “should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” (1964). The news at most times can only, from a limited side of view, show what the event is and how it happened, and present to the audience about the “underlying meanings” they should learn from the media’s intentional way of interpretation. People can hardly obtain information about “how it is what it is” and even a clear presentation of “that it is what it is.” (1964).
But think positively, although we may still have one-sided stories, it doesn’t bother us to have an open mind towards any conflicting ideas that possibly exist, seek ways to understand them, and absorb the true underlying meaning of it based on the reason why the event happened. The development process of our understanding towards the general nature of the matter from what it really is and how it becomes what it is helps us to exceed the limits of self confinement, since we are learning something we didn’t know before. Therefore, comprehending the matter with a more general view helps us to have on open mind and multiple perspectives. We may just keep in mind that we don’t always know the “truth” is truth and spend our whole lives seeking the confinement of ourselves, whatever it is subjectively created by society or objectively existing within ourselves, seeking ways to break through it, raise our level of thinking and solve the problems that we couldn’t solve before.
The loss and suffering we have in conflicts between minds might be an essential process as human are searching for the truth. According to Einstein again, “the world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.” In fact, as individuals are raising their levels of thinking, human collectively is solving more problems and helping the world to evolve. In this process, we are resolving more “irreconcilable” conflicts, and society may have less confinement as well the ability to uncover more hidden information or reveal a matter more comprehensively. As people become more transparent, the world may develop into a peaceful place where people can always understand each other respectfully without irreconcilable conflicts, making irreconcilable conflicts become reconcilable. And Sulli would always be respected as a capable idol chasing her dreams, living happily until she becomes an amiable old woman with gray hair.
WORKS CITED
Chua, Jessica. “The Extremes That Koreans Take to Become a Kpop Idol: Entertainment: Rojak
Daily.” Entertainment | Rojak Daily, 27 Jan. 2017, https://www.rojakdaily.com/entertain
ment/article/1728/the-extremes-that-koreans-take-to-become-a-kpop-idol.
“Einstein Enigmatic Quote.” Einstein Enigmatic Quote, 1 Jan. 1970, http://icarus-
falling.blogspot.com/2009/06/einstein-enigma.html.
“[Enter-Talk] HOW SULLI HANDLED HER HATE COMMENT.” [Enter-Talk] HOW SULLI
HANDLED HER HATE COMMENT ~, https://pann-choa.blogspot.com/2019/10/enter-
talk-how-sulli-handled-her-hate.html.
“Sulli’s Haters Reveal What They Think About Their Own Malicious Comments.” Koreaboo, 17
Nov. 2019, https://www.koreaboo.com/stories/sulli-haters-reveal-reasons-malicious-comments-unanswered-questions/.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” 1964.
Yuning "Anona" Yang 
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