Slaves to beliefs

One of the cover stories of the U.S. edition of Newsweek magazine last month was about U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. The weekly urged presidential candidates to learn from Lincoln, who was a master of compromise and bargain as well as one of the most quick-witted professional politicians in U.S. history. The article said America’s 16th president was an expert in the political game and sabotage, adding that his achievements were the results from his political stratagem. To get a constitutional amendment on the abolition of slavery, he bribed his political opponents with providing important posts in his administration and promised privileges to congressmen who owned slaves.

In a comment, another congressman said on this topic, “The greatest law of the 19th century was passed thanks to corruption supported by the most innocent man in the U.S.” Lincoln has since been depicted as an idealist distant from politics. In the movie "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," which was released in Korea in the summer, he fought slave owners with an ax in his hand. In the movie, slave owners and members of the Confederate Army were not humans but vampires with whom Lincoln could not compromise or bargain.

The vampires in the movie can feel emotions and pains like humans, which made certain scenes seem cruel, such as those being killed by Lincoln`s ax or the Union Army beating the bloodsucking fiends. Summer action movies need noble heroes as well as the indiscriminate killing of truly evil villains. In the movie, the former was Lincoln and the latter was the Confederate Army. Killing intelligent beings with his ax without hesitation, the president was mocked by vampires for being a “slave to beliefs.”

Korean politics has its own slaves to beliefs as the December presidential election fast approaches. In his candidate acceptance speech, a presidential candidate of an established party blasted another party as a “great evil” and urged the people to “expel (the party) from the Korean political scene.” Finding any will for dialogue or compromise by presidential candidates on the Internet is tough. Such candidates might consider rivals with different ideas enemies like the vampires in the movie that need to be killed with an ax. Presidential candidates need beliefs, but must be the masters of their beliefs, not slaves of their beliefs. Beliefs that prevent reflection and introspection are merely bigotry. Most tragedies in human history have stemmed from the wrong beliefs, not lack of beliefs.

Industry News Reporter Jang Kang-myeong (tesomiom@donga.com)