This interview with North Korean defector Yeonmi Park takes up a difficult question about human nature: does communism make people evil, or does it bring out the worst in people who are already trying to survive? Park’s answer draws on her own life in North Korea, where food was scarce, information was controlled, and neighbours could be rewarded for reporting on one another. In such a system, she argues, kindness itself becomes dangerous, and ordinary people learn to put survival, loyalty to the regime, and fear ahead of conscience.
Park does not claim that North Koreans are naturally cruel. Her point is that a system which punishes honesty and rewards betrayal changes how people behave, until cruelty begins to look normal. That, she suggests, is one of communism’s deepest harms: it does not only take away freedom and prosperity, it damages the trust and decency that hold a society together. Her testimony is a warning about what happens when a government tries to remake human nature by force.