Conformity and courage

• Published date: 25 February 2023
• Publication title: The Korea Times

For about five months now, two lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" have been going around my head: "If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too." The climax of the poem states that if you can indeed do this (and a dozen other things), then "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And ? which is more == you'll be a Man, my son!"

(I'm sure that by now some well-meaning censor has "corrected" the final line to "you'll be a [person], my [child]" in the same way as Roald Dahl's books are now being "fixed" but let's put this to one side for now.)

The reason I've been thinking about this poem is that last September a friend sent me a screenshot from Facebook, where an article I had written had garnered hundreds of likes and dozens of comments. I don't use social media and I didn't actually know that The Korea Times shared my pieces on Facebook, so I was genuinely surprised to see the reaction. Yes I know the numbers aren't that high in this internet age and I'm sure many of you dear readers have millions of Facebook friends and billions of Twitter followers, but for me it really was a shock to see that so many people had responded to something I had written.

And I'm disappointed by how I reacted. Because I liked the feeling of seeing that screenshot. I liked it that people seemed to agree with me and I liked it that people were paying attention to me. As soon as I got home I signed in (with permission) to someone else's Facebook account and started reading. Some commenters made fair points, others apparently misunderstood or didn't read the article, and a few were obviously trolls. It stoked my curiosity. A few moments later I looked around and realized that I had spent hours trawling through comments under my old articles.

I've always told myself that my goal writing for The Korea Times is to do some good: I want to write what I believe to be true, I want to advocate positive change, and I want to avoid stoking up anger or hatred, though I'm not sure I've always succeeded.

But as I read the comments, I found that my high-minded desires were completely obscured. I just cared too much about how people reacted. And I found that the worst thing ? worse than seeing people disagree with me (fair enough) or insult me (I can ignore them) ? was the sight of the odd article that had garnered no reaction at all: just a few likes, a few shares, no comments. I hate how I reacted because I don't want to seek the...