Last year, Korean thriller series Squid Game became Netflix’s most successful programme to date. A total of 1.65 billion hours were watched in its first four weeks; one billion more than the next most successful series, Bridgerton.
What makes Squid Game’s achievement so remarkable is that it breaks the usual rules for mainstream success. It is graphically violent and not, originally, in English. It was not until 2020 that a non-English language film won Best Picture at the Oscars. That was also a Korean production, Parasite.
Squid Game and Parasite not only share a common language, but also a theme. Both critique the relentless competition of Korean society, materialism, and its dehumanising effects. This is also one of the reasons why both were so well received globally.
Reflecting on its international success, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho explained that what seemed an idiosyncratically Korean story was relatable across the world. “Essentially,” he reflected, “we all live in the same country, called Capitalism”.
As Bong observed, critiques of Korean society resonate in other societies, because the forces shaping them have a shared origin. One particularly influential social theory in Korea has its roots in Victorian England. Victorian society was awash with such theories. Malthusianism, for instance, feared that overpopulation would create competition for resources. It argued that social welfare was misguided, as it would encourage poor people to have children without the means to support them, creating a cycle of overpopulation and famine.
Charles Darwin was influenced by this idea of a struggle for survival when he developed his theory of natural selection. But it was another social theorist, Herbert Spencer, who took Darwinian ideas and applied them to people and society.
It was Spencer who coined the phrase most often associated with evolution, and often mistakenly ascribed to Darwin himself – “survival of the fittest”. Having read Darwin’s work, Spencer began to apply a biological theory to society itself, a school of thought known as Social Darwinism.
He linked evolution with progress and used it to promote his political views. These would now be considered neoliberal, focusing on individual liberty, free trade, and a small “nightwatchman” state. “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly,” Spencer argued, “is to fill the world with fools”.
Spencer, though now largely forgotten, was one of the most widely read theorists of the 19th century, with more than a million copies of his works sold. The emerging field of sociology was heavily indebted to his ideas, which were influential from the United Kingdom to Japan.
They also reached Korea. The country was isolationist under its authoritarian monarchy, the Joseon dynasty. Modernising groups attempted unsuccessful revolutions in the 1880s, and instead turned their efforts to evolution. However, European texts were usually received in translation through Chinese and Japanese sources, and Spencer’s interpretation of Darwinian ideas was widespread before Darwin’s own.
Science and technology
Social Darwinism was typically used to explain the position of societal elites, the “fittest” who had survived societal competition to rise to the top, or to justify minimal social welfare spending. In Korea, however, activists such as Yun Chi-ho and Sin Chaeho used it to argue for a new national identity, one in which competition was key to strengthening a seemingly weak nation surrounded by powerful neighbours. Education, particularly in science and technology, was central to this process.
Education remains one of the most competitive aspects of Korean society, seen as key to social mobility, and supports a huge private tutoring industry. Korean students spend more time studying than those of any other nation, because of the intense pressure to earn of the limited places at a top university. But the pressure to succeed is often blamed for the country’s suicide rate, the highest in the OECD and three times higher than Ireland’s.
Parasite was a searing critique of a Seoul upper class that viewed itself as superior to its working class, at the top of the social hierarchy due to talent and hard work. Squid Game's premise is that 456 indebted players compete in a series of deadly games until the winner collects a prize equivalent to €34 million; a literal survival of the fittest. Both were unexpectedly successful. But their distillation of the particularly Korean interpretation of Social Darwinism, ideas which have been globally important, does help explain why they have been so well received.
- Dr Stuart Mathieson is a postdoctoral fellow working in Dublin City University school of history and geography