Imagine a room filled to bursting with images, sounds, and stories, like an endless stream.
And yet, when this stream is interrupted for a moment and the screen goes black, what remains?
Often only a diffuse feeling of emptiness, a silence that cries out for true fulfillment.
This psychosocial emptiness is the true product of the Western culture industry. It is no accident, but the result of a system that turns people into passive consumers of their own alienation.
Standing in opposition to this is a completely different principle: the Juche idea, which places the human being not as a consumer, but as the master and shaper of their own history at its center.
We will explore how the resulting understanding of culture does not distract but empowers, and what this reveals about two fundamentally different ways of thinking about society.
The Western entertainment industry works like a perfect machine of subtraction. It withdraws substance to create a vacuum that it must then fill itself. It separates us from action by replacing our own doing with the observation of spectacle.
Why cook for yourself when you can watch superstars cook?
Why cultivate a real community when you are"subscribed" to a fictional TV family?
It separates us from community by individualizing every experience.
The shared cinema auditorium became the solitary streaming account; the collective stadium feeling became the individual gaming marathon.
The"heroes" it celebrates are lone fighters whose triumph is won against the world, not with it. And finally, it separates us from meaning by reducing complex human needs, for belonging, dignity, meaningful activity, to the simple cycle of tension and release, cliffhanger and reward.
The result is a reciprocal veneration in an empty cycle.
We venerate fictional idols who can give us nothing back except the next episode, the next level, the next bonus, and we feel increasingly isolated in the process.
This system does not produce a rich culture, but a culture of exhaustion. It leaves us with the feeling of being merely spectators in a foreign narrative, while our own story fades.
The Juche idea, as developed by Kim Il Sung, fundamentally reverses this logic. Its core is not subtraction, but empowerment. Its heart is the principle of Chajusong, sovereignty and self-reliance.
Juche places the human being as a conscious, creative subject at the center, one who actively shapes their destiny and environment, not as an object to whom history simply happens. It is the philosophical negation of the passive consumer. This sovereignty unfolds not against, but through the collective, the masses of the people. The individual finds their full realization as part of the sovereign people, who master their destiny together.
Here lies the seed of a completely different sense of community. While the Western model creates a vacuum, the Juche idea is concerned with filling it with creative agency.
The feeling it strives for is not the dull numbing of entertainment, but the clear, strong feeling of self-efficacy and shared responsibility for a common future.
From this view of humanity stems a radically different understanding of art and culture. In the Juche teaching, they are not commodities, but a "spiritual weapon for the revolution and construction." They follow the principle of Seonghyangseong, partisanship. Art has a clear side: the side of the people and construction. Its task, therefore, is not to "entertain" or "alienate," but to educate, unite, and mobilize for empowerment. In place of fictional series heroes step the heroes of real life: the workers at the machines, the farmers in the fields and greenhouses, the soldiers at the border, the researchers in the laboratories, the pioneers at the forefront. A monumental painting showing smiling steelworkers, a symphonic work singing of the struggle for national liberation, or a novel describing the collective construction of a factory, all of this serves a purpose. It connects the individual emotionally with the great collective project of the nation. It transforms the abstract idea of sovereignty into a concrete, palpable image. Culture here becomes the mortar that holds the collective together, and the mirror that reflects back to it its own creative potential and dignity. The veneration is not for an unattainable star, but for one's own, united creative power.
In the end, two fundamentally different maps for human existence in the 21st century stand side by side. One shows a labyrinthine entertainment complex we can immerse ourselves in to forget who we are. Its endpoint is a technologically perfected, yet existentially impoverished individuality. It is an individuality that can no longer bear the silence in its self-chosen bubble and for which the natural language of interpersonal care has been lost, replaced by the hollow phrases and mimicked attitudes of its media idols.
The other map shows a common project, a field of collective agency, in which every human being is seen and strengthened as a conscious builder of a shared future. Its goal is not escape from reality, but its conscious, sovereign, and solidary shaping.
The choice between these paths is more than a political or cultural preference; it is existential. Is it about drowning out the inner emptiness with ever new, loud distractions? Or is it about filling the silence with the meaning, the certainty of agency, and the warm connectedness of a self-authored story?
The Juche idea, in its uncompromising concentration on the human as the master of their destiny, offers a clear answer to this question. It makes its essence not only intellectually graspable for the seeker, but, in its ideal, emotionally palpable as the call to no longer be a spectator, but a co-creator of shared reality.
By Brigitte Cornelia Novak
49 Years old
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