The Ladders and their clowns

I’m almost always late to the latest trend of popular culture. Currently I just caught up with Sky Castle, a KDrama produced in 2018. I only hope that this KDrama is not a harbinger for our present or for our future.

Overall, Sky Castle tells the tale of competitiveness. As an Asian, I am certainly not unfamiliar with this theme. Satirically enough, one episode documents a to-be-disbanded book club that preaches Nietzsche’ Zarathustra. In the episode, “strength” prevails “weakness,” hence the latter being discarded and excluded. The Übermensche should be proud of the enemy because the enemy is the source of progress and inspiration. The book club hopes to use this book to encourage the high school kids to compete against each other.

My reaction is that it is simply shocking enough to have modeled upon a false imaginary.

Of course, watching this series during my convalescent period of an egregious cold couldn’t be the worst possible thing. After all, even dramatization of a disease is entertaining. Meanwhile, this series trigger some of the painful memories that I would rather not recall any more. That’s probably why I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want another person to experience similar wretchedness. I don’t want them to master the piano or the so-called “classical” music, or English, or maths, or SAT, TOEFL, GRE, IB. Or philosophy.

A couple of weeks ago, in Prof. Foster’s Xenophon class, we read that this dude’s father is obsessive with the son succeeding in climbing up the intellectual ladder. His father forces him to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey by mouth when he is still very young. I think, for people trapped in Sky Castle the TV and in Sky Castle the reality duplicates, such as me, climbing up the intellectual ladder is at times exciting, but most of the time exhausting and lonely.

Sky Castle also touched on a particularly sensitive spot, that the competitiveness causes not only minute mental injuries, but also suicides and deaths. I don’t even know if I should mention this: I am once more reminded of a high school classmate who committed suicide in the summer after graduation, right before we went to college. She was supposed to enroll in Berkeley. As preposterous as it is, most of us didn’t even know her struggle with depression until we heard her tragedy of suicide. More preposterous is that her death has been “moved on.” That education continues to be the altar of success. That path continues to be preached as a superstition.

I’ve tried to maintain the tone of my blogs. I urge myself to be at least encouraging most of the time. If not, allegorize the sadness and the “negativities” into satires or comedies. Yet at this point of the season, where the dreary winter befalls, workloads pile up, Halloween passed, it is probably okay to admit that, we are all haunted.

Ok, I shall shut up and speak no more, as my father back in China always warns me.

An ancient ritual. Photo taken in Chicago Field Museum.