North Korean Policy Elites - Defense Technical Information Center

outside world than the ordinary workers, are faced with a serious contradiction. On the one hand,
their leader and his media say that North Korea is the best country in the world to live in; on the
other hand, they know that domestic conditions are bad because of their corrupt system, and that
conditions outside North Korea are much better. Do the elite live with this contradiction in their
minds, or do they somehow resolve it?
The theory of cognitive dissonance makes predictions about how people resolve
discrepancies between conflicting information. 106 The theory’s first principle is that when people
recognize discrepancies or dissonances between two or more of their beliefs, they experience a
cognitive discomfort that motivates them to reduce the dissonance. For example, the belief that
socialism is the most superior economic model is inconsistent with the perception of North
Korea’s abject poverty. Dissonance can be reduced in a variety of ways. One way is to avoid
thinking about the inconsistency. Many North Koreans are perhaps so accustomed to socialist
propaganda on the one hand and poverty on the other, that they do not notice the inconsistency.
Another dissonance reduction method is to seek out information that bolsters one of the beliefs,
or seek a higher principle that explains the inconsistency. The belief in the correctness of
socialism could be bolstered by the government’s claim that socialism can succeed only if
everyone wholeheartedly supports it, which they obviously do not. The conflict may also be
resolved by the belief that socialism in its early stages is bound to encounter many obstacles, but
will eventually prevail. The question is, have the elite reconciled themselves to their situation,
coming to believe in the superiority of socialism and the legitimacy of the Kim regime, or are
they living a lie? Dissonance theory predicts that people do all that they can to avoid living a lie.
The people of the former communist regimes in Eastern Europe faced a similar dilemma. As one
of his aides recounted, “Gorbachev, me, all of us, we were double-thinkers, we had to balance
truth and propaganda in our minds all the time.” 107 Others said the same. But dissonance theory
would predict that most people either found a way to resolve the inconsistencies, or ignored them,
as often seems to have been the case in Eastern Europe. Any communication directed at the
North Korean elite should take into account the possibility that they have either ignored this kind
of inconsistency, or they are searching for a way to resolve it.
A final issue worth examining is how people deal with the wealth of information coming
at them: in the case of North Koreans, a wealth of propaganda. Much of the early research on
communication and persuasion assumed that when people are presented with information, they
106 Thousands of dissonance studies have been conducted since Leon Festinger’s formal presentation of the theory in
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957.
107 Georgi Shalchnazarov, an aide to Gorbachev, quoted by David Remnick in Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the
Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 168. This issue is further discussed in Kongdan Oh and Ralph
C. Hassig, pp. 37-40.
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